Martin Blackwood

Martin wakes with a start and a quiet huff, not sure why. It's a little like waking up from a nightmare, only he doesn't remember what he'd been dreaming about at all — not even a sense of it. Instead, he's flooded by wakeful things: the feel of the sheets, crisp and wrong, like new, fresh sheets and not the ones with little stars on that he's had since he was practically a baby. The bed itself, much too big, the ceiling, the walls, the whole room, different, unfamiliar. Light coming in from the wrong window in the wrong place. And there's someone else here, with him, in the bed. A boy, his age, that he's never seen before.

All this happens very quickly, so quick that it isn't like he notices each of these little things independently, it's more like they flood him all at once, overwhelming and scary. The moment he realizes there's a boy beside him he sits bolt upright and flails back, kicking the sheets away with a little shriek.