LIVING WASTELAND

A NOVEL BY VANE VANDER

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This license is extended to both the original edition of this book from May 2018 and to this Second Edition, published February 2019.

ACT 1

1

5/15/2147

EPONINE

Tonight I discovered why the stars are always burning in rage high in the night sky- they’re like Mom’s little spybots, always ready to snitch on me whenever I break curfew. At least, that's what Alistair told me. I think he's just upset that I don't like going to his house at night. Too many dark corners, too many shady hallways.

Another thing to write down: I’ve got to fix the rope ladder to my balcony. Alistair accidentally broke it last night when he tried to climb up to my kitchen window like some kind of distorted scene from a Shakespeare play, but it doesn’t take a rousing speech to wake me up in the middle of the night- just a snap and a yelp.

He’s alright now. Just a bit of a shock, he told me. Not much trouble to climb up the tree outside my window and swing off one of the branches to the balcony instead to wake me up for our nightly excursions outside Heavestone. I know that taking a step outside your city might not be such a big deal- but it is to me.

You see, Heavestone is different from most other cities I’ve heard of.

It doesn’t actually exist.

Mom explained it to me when I was little like this: Heavestone is like a loop of time, the same damn summer day repeating itself over and over endlessly. I can move in and out of the borders as I please as long as I have the pendant my mother gave me. It’s a weird technicality I don’t really understand. And there’s a neighborhood right outside where I usually pass through the borders- I call it the “Land of Shadows”. Not to be edgy or anything, but because the first time I ever went through, fog was everywhere, and the cars on the nearby highway were making the wind sing lonely melodies that Mom didn't understand, only my little six-year-old self as I clung onto her hand.

And the name stuck, even though she doesn't venture out with me anymore, even though the songs have long since died down and the highway torn up and re-routed.

Sometimes people move here without giving a backstory- like Mr. Greenland, who came here six or seven years ago by himself with only a wad of cash. His hair was long and greasy and ragged and his clothes were in disrepair- they still are, really- but the people of Heavestone took him in all the same. Helped him build a house and find a job and everything. Most people have a grand story to tell of how they made it here, though, but he didn’t, and he still doesn’t.

Today I passed through the border with Alistair, my boyfriend of three years, and our mutual friend Ignis. My only two friends, really. (I’m not the most sociable of creatures.) There were a few kids milling about on the basketball court situated right next to where the border usually dumps us off. Their shadows stretched long in the street light over them, dancing as the kids continued with their game like nothing had happened, like we hadn’t just popped into existence. The streets were otherwise empty of people, and we walked for a few minutes before-

“Ow!”

Ignis rubbed her knee. “Damn black cars parked in the streets.” She glanced up at the two of us. “What’re you snickering about, Stairs? Did I say something funny?”

Alistair wiped his mouth, muffled giggles from behind his hand. He shook his head, and the three of us kept walking down the street.

We stopped at the local lake a few streets over to rest. It was more of a pond, really, a man-made hole about the size of three houses squished up against each other. The only life I’ve ever seen in it are ducks flitting there in the warmer months and kids braving the easily cracked ice in the colder months. Sometimes in September, until I memorize the bus schedule to avoid nosy residents walking home, I’ll catch the high school bus swerving to avoid hitting the damn ducks picking the exact wrong time to cross the road.

We flopped down on the grass, heads turned to the stars.

Man, there's more stars out tonight than ever.

I wish Heavestone had this many stars.

Thanks, eternal light pollution.

Alistair stretched his arms and yawned. “Hey, have any of you considered what you’re gonna do after we turn eighteen? I mean, I kinda wanna run away to a college and take up religious studies. Get to mess around with the underworld of demons and all that.”

“That requires documentation, dumbass.” Ignis elbowed him.

Alistair yelped- “Hey, watch it!”

“Besides,” she continued, ignoring him, “demons aren’t real. And no, don’t get started about your reincarnation theories. They’re all bunk.”

“But I was a demon in a past life! I specifically remember having big black feathered wings-”

Ignis rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, edgelord. And they don't talk about the underworld in religion classes in college. Certainly not mess with them. Just read religious texts for hours on end and analyze them. You want to spend the rest of your life reading musty old books?”

"That sounds more up your alley."

Ignis adjusted herself and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I prefer my books a little less... dry."

Alistair huffed. “Fine. What are you gonna do when you grow up?”

“For your information, I am going to get into politics and work to get refugee Miralayans equal protection under human rights laws. I don’t want to be trapped in Heavestone my entire life with only these little excursions to make up for it.” She looked to me, her large brown eyes reflecting the street light on the other side of the lake. “What are you going to do, Pony?”

“I, umm...” I wrung my hands. Think, Eponine, think! “I don’t really know. Finally build the garden I’ve been planning and live off the grid, I suppose.”

“Gah! You’re no fun. Stop squandering your computer skills and get a freelance job already like the rest of us.” Ignis pulled herself up and kicked Alistair’s shoulder to get him up as well. “Come on. We’re going to the dollar store.”

The dollar store in question was a short distance from the lake, no more than a mile on foot, sandwiched between a daycare and a dentist’s office. Underneath the welcome mat that the previous owners had left was an emergency key.

“Oh, ew, ew, ew!” Ignis hopped away as I lifted up the mat, dredging up inky black blots of dirt and a few spiders.

I retrieved the silver key, holding it out to her with a wicked grin on my face.

“You wanna do the honors?”

“Over my dead body!”

I slipped the key in and unlocked the door. It creaked open, and I nudged it a little farther, enough to let us all inside. No alarms sounded; we’d disabled them all a long time ago.

Kind of a shame how nobody ever bothered to buy this property after the dollar store went under. I mean, give it a nice cleaning, and it’s a good enough property for a small-town shop!

Not that I'd be able to do that, of course... permits and all that...

The shelves had been long since emptied, just wire racks standing in solitude, ghosts of former days bolted down to the ground to condemn them to rack purgatory. And what better place for purgatory than a rancid-smelling building with no lighting and probably something nasty lurking in the bathrooms?

“Alright-”

Ignis clamped a hand over his mouth and leaned in close.

“Whisper, dumbass. Getting arrested isn’t on my list of things to do today.”

She removed her hand. Alistair immediately wiped his mouth.

“Alright, demons, I know you’re there! Show yourselves!”

“Stairs,” I reminded him, “we’re here to look for the chamber hatch, remember?”

A half-hearted laugh escaped his mouth. His face faltered. “I… I knew that.”

I lit up the flashlight on my phone, patrolling the aisles with my eyes focused on the ground. Ignis and Alistair did the same, going in different directions, searching for any sort of incongruent tiles on the floor until-

“Hey!”

The both of us rushed over to Ignis, who was crouched down in the corner of the store. Her short fingernails struggled to gain purchase of a giant floor tile large enough to fit nine of its neighbors- just enough for a human body to comfortably climb down a trapdoor ladder.

“Don’t just stand there! Some help would be nice!”

I crouched down and added my hands to the mix, and within a few moments, we’d flung the tile aside. A tunnel faced us, iron handholds descending into darkness. Cool air wafted up to our faces.

“Do you want to go down first, or should I?” I offered.

“No way!” Ignis shook her head and backed off. “You go first. You look tastier.” She coughed. “That’s not an invitation for anything, by the way.”

I rolled my eyes and swung myself into the tunnel, one leg in first and then the other. The handholds were surprisingly dry and clean- I don’t know what I was expecting. Radioactive green goo? Poop from cave bats? Some acidic substance meant to dissolve me into a pile of bones?

My shoe scraped against concrete. I let go of the footholds and jumped down the extra foot until I was standing in a wide open room the size of a walk-in closet. There wasn’t anything in it other than a Miralayan-style sleeping pod, dimly glowing blue- occupied.

Who's sleeping down here?

And in a dollar store, of all places...

“It’s safe to come down,” I called up the tunnel, soon hearing the sounds of Ignis and Alistair bickering echo down as they descended. “I think.”

“You think?” Ignis dropped down beside me, taking in the room’s surroundings. Alistair came close after. “Huh. You think this was a movie set and they forgot to clean up?”

Alistair shook his head. “Nah. I would’ve remembered something like this in the trailers.”

“That reminds me-” I turned to Alistair. “You need to give me my hard drive back. You’ve been borrowing it for a month. I’ve got some new entries I need to archive.”

“Yeah?” Alistair shrugged. “I’m still borrowing it. Gotta watch everything! I’m making my way through the I’s right now.”

"Everything I'm adding's after the I's. You won't lose your place. It'll only take a few minutes."

"Remind me when we get home."

Code for "I'll forget, because you'll forget"...

I sighed and walked over to the sleeping pod. A pill-shaped pod, about large enough to contain a normal-size human body. The top was made of clear plastic. A considerable amount of condensation clung to the outside of the surface, little beads of moisture puckering up, but through it still betrayed the faint outline of a human body.

“Who do you suppose is inside?” I touched a hand to the plastic- and immediately withdrew it, the surface arctic. I wiped the water on my shorts. My pendant grew cold as I glanced through the little window my hand had left.

A girl about my age, serene and sleeping. Unkempt red hair, pallid skin, dark circles underneath her eyes. But her fingernails looked recently trimmed, and she was wearing a one-piece swimsuit her size as she floated in the soft light.

Somebody had to have been looking after this girl.

But how long had she been there?

Wait-

“Hey! There’s a Miralayan in here!”

Alistair and Ignis scrambled to my side, wiping their own windows and looking until all the condensation had cleared and the girl inside was exposed for all to see.

Alistair tapped the glass with one finger. “Hey! The Providence dot!”

“A female Providence?” Ignis leaned in closer. “Yeah, you’re right. What’s the female Providence doing here?”

My stomach lurched. “I, uh...”

“What’s wrong, Pony?” Alistair piped up.

“I...” I glanced toward the tunnel. “This all seems kinda suspicious, don’t you think? What’s the Providence doing outside of Miralay? Much less on Earth? And in a dollar store?”

“Maybe...” Ignis tapped her chin. “Maybe it’s just a drawn-on dot. Maybe she’s a homeless person trying to earn herself a one-way ticket to Mars.”

“Come on, Iggy!” Alistair slapped her back. Ignis glared at him. “You’re just upset because that means you’re not the Providence.”

Ignis took a few purposeful steps away from Alistair. “Well, it would be helpful to have those connections when I lobby for Miralayan citizenship on Earth.”

“Maybe it’s a trap,” I offered. “Maybe Alegria’s honeypotting us.”

“Funny,” Ignis countered. “I don’t feel dead yet.” She turned back to Alistair. “Snap some photos just in case we need to tell our parents what we were doing out so late. Maybe they know something about this… place.”

“I’m on it!”

Alistair whipped his phone out... and immediately started taking a boatload of selfies. Some with the pod in the background, most without, making poses he probably thought were hilarious.

Ignis rolled her eyes and turned to me. “What do you think Miralay’s doing without their next Providences? I thought their birthdays were in a few days. How’s Alegria gonna handle that?”

I shrugged. “Just elect someone else to fill the missing roles, I guess. Or violent revolution.”

Ignis giggled. “Yeah. That’d go down well with Alegria. Viva la revolución.” She paused. “You got any good stories about a revolution in that library of yours? I might want to do some research.”

“You’ll have to ask Stairs. He’s got my hard drive. Good luck getting it, though.”

2

5/16/2147

EPONINE

I cradled a mug of hot soup in my hands, curled up in a blanket on the couch in the living room upstairs. The trees swayed outside in the breeze, predictable movements only ever changed by a branch growing or dying. My laptop rested on my outstretched legs, feet propped up on the coffee table, reading everything and anything to keep my thoughts off the pounding in my head. Some president or another in the Land of Shadows had gotten into a feud with another world leader. A viral video of a baby laughing. Some zoo giraffe nonsense.

The screen blinked. A few more headlines flashed at the top. I hit enter, letting the next one load.

Alistair ran up to my steps and leaped through the front door without knocking. He kicked off his shoes and beelined to my side.

“Heard you were getting bored- wait, is that tree cancer?”

“No, those are burls on an old Chinese cypress tree.”

“Nah, that’s tree cancer.” He patted my shoulder. “Why didn’t you answer my texts?”

Texts?

“Maybe because I didn’t get any? And when are you going to return my hard drive?”

“That’s not important. What’s with the getup?”

“Huh?”

“You’re not sick, are you?” Alistair groaned, grabbing his forehead. “Crap! Me and Iggy were gonna go out later today and get the Pro- I mean, that girl from the dollar store and bring her back here-”

“Are you insane?”

I slammed my laptop shut and slid it onto the coffee table and put my mug down. My eyes flickered to the power light on the side- sometimes it didn’t suspend like I wanted it to.

The light died. I rubbed my eyes.

“Stairs! You don’t even know if she’s a real Miralayan or not! What if she leaks Heavestone’s location? You’ll bring the whole of Alegria upon us!”

Alistair shook his head. “You’re a real killjoy, you know that?” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, Mrs. Westal!”

“Coming!” I heard her yell from the kitchen. She swerved into view, her apron lopsided, a smudge of spaghetti sauce waving hello. Her eyes lit up upon seeing our guest. “Oh! Alistair! What do you need?”

He pulled out his phone, pulling up the pictures he’d taken last night. “So Pony and Iggy and I were exploring around the Land of Shadows last night...”

Her eyebrows twitched. She crossed her arms. “And?”

“And we may or may not have found the Providence.”

That’s my boyfriend. Quick and blunt to a fault. And in more ways than one.

“The… the Providence?”

Mom stepped towards him, taking his phone in his hands. He hovered over her, making sure she didn’t wander off into the more private of his photos.

And then… her entire face collapsed into either horror or recognition- I couldn’t tell which. Her hand flew up to her mouth. Her eyes went wide.

“Holy...” She handed Alistair his phone back. “Don’t go anywhere. I need to talk to Mr. Greenland about this.”

I coughed. “Wait, Mom, you know about this?”

“That’s none of your business, Eponine.” Mom hurried to the front door, apron and all, and started to put on her shoes. “And you two: don’t go back to wherever that place was. Go romp around somewhere else. Make sure you tell Ignis as well.”

She acted like it was top FBI material that merely talking about would trigger some special ops unit to instantly break down the doors and shoot everyone on sight.

And I suppose it is, in a way.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the political system of the world was coming apart at the seams and any former government agencies that might have had a semblance of a chance at escaping to the stars was too busy fighting off its own citizens, one of the richest technology companies at the time- Alegria- decided that they were going to take the excess profits from their wildly popular virtual reality implants and secretly start a colony on Mars to prevent humans from going extinct. Registration was limited to higher-level employees who had to sign waiver forms in triplicate promising that they wouldn’t disclose anything about the project to anybody, not even their families. Alegria requisitioned several defunct spaceships from the government military, refurbished them into working order, and outfitted them with their most recent invention, the sleeping pod, and its cousin, the stasis pod.

The first batch of people went up in 2009 to test the warp technology that would allow Alegria to cut what would normally be a three-month trip into only a couple of days. The people went to Mars with enough building materials and supplies to start a rudimentary tunnel system underneath the surface. Only the pilot returned to Earth, ready and eager to take more people up there. By the time 2012 rolled around, Miralay Colony had dug itself deep into the red dirt and sprung up as the only dot of life on an otherwise barren planet.

A living wasteland, if you will.

Miralay prospered under Alegria’s watchful eye, funded by the company’s ventures in virtual reality. The company placed two twenty-year-old leaders with iron fists to govern the burgeoning colony and preserve law and order when pure distance meant Alegria couldn’t communicate with them without braving countless dropped connections. And when their shedding time came, they’d know which boy and girl would take up their positions by a random mutation- a red dot on their forehead. If any sort of revolution happened, it would be up to the Providences to stop it before anybody got hurt or anything got damaged- not that a revolution would have spread, since there were cameras everywhere and the Providences could know anything and everything happening from watching them.

That’s why my parents left. That’s what they told me, anyways. There was a practice they called mind shedding, where a forty-year-old and a seventeen-year-old would step into a machine and have a multitude of tubes hooked up to both of their heads. The young person would be the only one to leave alive, albeit extremely woozy to the point where they’d get a few days off to get used to their new identity before they took up their progenitor’s place in the colony workforce.

I’ll let you connect the dots.

It was mandatory, and it was complete. Miralayans were empty vessels until that magical birthday where they donned the mind of someone who had been passed down over and over for more than a hundred years. Then another magical birthday rolled around, and their life was snuffed out like a cheap birthday candle. It happened to everyone, from the lowest of garbage workers to the Providences themselves. People got to live longer on Earth, someone always complained, and they were always met with the argument that Miralayans didn’t have to worry about developing dementia or any of the cancers that old people were afflicted with. Their lives would be filled with purpose, unmarred by senility.

Not everybody contented themselves with that answer.

My parents escaped. Bribed a cargo ship pilot to smuggle themselves and infant me into a trio of unused stasis pods and then to sneak us to Limberstein, the city closest to Heavestone in the Land of Shadows. From there, it was a hop, skip, and then a jump into Heavestone and perpetual safety.

Heavestone is for other Miralayans like us, everyone smuggled or otherwise illegally entering this planet.

Alegria can’t find “stolen property” if it never exists.

“Guess I’m stuck here until your mom comes back, Pony.” Alistair shrugged. “You wanna show me any more of that tree cancer?”

"Do you want to give me back my hard drive?

Alistair stared at me, tight-lipped.

"Fine, fine. But I want it back. Eventually."

He nodded his head. "Eventually."

I pulled over my laptop and opened it again. The terminal had closed- I opened it back up again and booted the feed script, finding as many things about trees as possible, enough to shield us from even the most determined search party from Alegria.

3

5/17/2147

EPONINE

Run, Eponine, run! Stretch your wings and bound past that apple tree, past those buildings, past that trap! You can’t let your father catch up to you, because then he’ll pull off your wings and bake you into a nice Miralayan pie!

Mmm, twin hearts! Absolutely delectable!

You’re not getting me today!

We’ll see about that-

“Gah!”

My eyes flew open. I jolted upright, expecting there to be a knife at my throat- but all there was were my blankets strewn all around me and the familiar weight of my pendant still dangling. I steadied my breath. My father was long since dead, and although I’d fantasized as a child about someone kidnapping me and giving me wings, I didn’t have them.

Maybe that was for the best. I'm already illegal. I didn’t need yet another convoluted identity poured on top of that.

A scratching at the window. I froze, hesitant, before I lifted up my window blinds a bit to peek through.

I didn’t know what to expect.

Maybe there was a thief ready to shoot me and steal all my belongings?

Maybe an operative from Alegria had finally found Heavestone and was preparing to haul every single one of us back up there to be tried and executed for leaving the planet without permission.

I would have hoped that the warning systems we had in place would have caught any intruders, Miralayan or otherwise, before they managed to do any damage.

But it was the girl.

The Miralayan girl from the pod.

Her red hair fell softly down her shoulders. She was wearing a ragged navy blue sweatshirt and a pair of jeans with a rip down the side, exposing white threads and flushed skin. She was crouched down beside my window, lightly tapping on it with her knuckles.

She looked like someone from one of my favorite romance novels come to life.

I brushed aside the blinds and opened the window a crack, just enough for her to hear me.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

Her eyes lit up, studying my face. Her voice was light and soft like a child’s as she finally spoke.

“Oh my god. It’s another Miralayan. You can see me?”

My eyebrows wrinkled. “...Yeah? A-am I not supposed to, or-”

“And there isn’t anything weird floating above my head?”

I sputtered. “Listen, sleeping pod girl. It’s-” I checked my watch- “midnight. I need to sleep. I’ve got big things happening today, and I suspect you do too, so just tell me what you want.”

I spotted the blue teardrop pendant hanging from her neck.

An exact replica of mine.

My eyes narrowed.

“I’ll give you a minute to explain yourself.”

“I, uhh...” She wrung her hands. “So all those conspiracy theories I read about this place and Miralay being real were true.” She wobbled for a second, planting a hand on the ground to regain her balance. “Can you please let me in? It’s kinda super cold out here.”

It was warm from what I felt, the first pangs of summer, but I sighed and relented, opening the window further. She crawled through and bounced onto my bed, rolling onto the ground and landing with a thunk. Her delicate hands brushed out the wrinkles in her sweatshirt as she sat up.

I closed my window, locked it again, and flicked on the bedside lamp to get a better look at her- she immediately winced and covered her eyes from the sudden light. Still just as pale as she’d been two days ago, but a vitality had returned to her skin.

Like an embalmed corpse, saline pumped into its veins to keep it looking fresh until the end of the funeral.

“Who are you?” I whispered, the questions coming out faster than I could verbalize them. “What’s your name? Why are you here at my house? Who put you-”

The girl covered her ears and whimpered. I didn’t blame her. All that time spent in the sleeping pod must nor have made for much stimuli.

I waited a few minutes for her to respond, and then, at long last, she moved her hands back to her eyes and opened them a crack to peer at me.

“My name?” she squeaked. “I… I don’t really have a name. Not, like, a human name. I have a few dozen screennames since I’m not allowed to recycle any across sites, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

“Screennames?”

“Or usernames. Or handles. Or nicknames-”

I waved my hand. “No, I know what screennames are. I mean, do they even remotely resemble a name?”

She managed a lopsided smile, nervous. “I would show you, but they’re all in my head.” She cringed, one of her hands flying to the back of her neck, massaging the skin. “What’s your hotspot password?”

So she had a brain-machine interface. Proof right there that she was one of the Providences, since only they were born with them on Miralay. Normal Miralayan citizens aren't allowed to have any kind of personal technology. Their jobs occasionally assign them devices to borrow instead.

At least, that's what Mom always told me.

“I’m not telling you. How can I trust you not to accidentally tell Alegria where we are?”

“Because...” She closed her eyes and scrunched her face.

Accessing some kind of control panel?

“Someone blocked all of Alegria’s domains in the computer in my head-" So a browser, then. "-and I don’t know what the administrator password is to disable the firewall. Something long and convoluted, I think. I’ve never been able to crack it. And it's not just websites- the whole package manager is blocked as well, and any outgoing shells, or anything I know of to circumvent it.”

She opened her eyes again, the crack between her fingers a little wider now.

Deep brown eyes.

“Please? I just want to tell the Administrator that I’m out now. I promise I won’t tell him anything about where I am.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I still can’t trust you. You’ll have to wait until morning when the adults can deal with you. Now good night.”

I turned off the lamp and threw my sheets back over me, facing her just in case she decided to try to pull a nasty trick.

“Fine. If you insist. But I don't know why you'd trust me with yourself, then.”

She closed her eyes and curled up on the floor, tucking her head in her arms. She looked so serene, so peaceful…

Or maybe it was all an act and she’d connected to some neighbor’s unsecured network and we were all about to be invaded.

“My favorite username is Living Wasteland,” she whispered. “You can call me that, I guess. Someone suggested it to me in a message a few years ago, begging me to look ‘outside the matrix’. They sent me another message this morning after so much silence. It had the coordinates to this house, so I guess... you must be important somehow.”

Mom gave me a giant speech about chastity when I was fifteen, going full-out on the birds and bees to try to scare me into celibacy. I didn’t think she would be real happy to just walk in when morning came and find a girl on my floor, even if there wasn’t any sign of… activity. In a way, I think she was almost relieved when I went steady with Alistair.

At the very least, it was something I chose.

Better than what I'd have ever gotten on Miralay.

4

5/17/2147

EPONINE

“Eponine!”

I jolted upright to find my room empty. Living Wasteland or whatever bullshit name she’d given me last night had no doubt wandered off, ready to go betray all of us to Alegria and get us shipped off to Miralay and killed-

“Eponine! Come upstairs! We need to talk!”

“Just a minute, Mom!” I yelled back. I slid out of bed and scrambled to make myself presentable enough to appease the hygiene police. I gave my hair a few preliminary strokes with my comb, slid on a random pair of shorts and a plain-color t-shirt- I don’t like wearing shirts with pictures or logos or anything on them- and stumbled upstairs into the living room to find Living Wasteland, my mom, and…

Mr. Greenland?

What's he doing here? He never comes by. At least, not that I remember.

And Mom's not interested in remarrying... Not that she'd marry him. Even if he's improved his hygiene.

He approached me and extended his hand, probably expecting me to shake it. I didn’t, instead opting to shake my head in confusion and turn to Mom. Mr. Greenland grimaced behind my back, probably thinking I couldn’t see him.

“Why’d you call me?”

Mom gestured at Living Wasteland, who was seated at the end of the couch, her face downturned as she fidgeted in her seat and interlaced her fingers over and over again.

“We need to talk.”

I absolutely hate those four words. “We need to talk.” To be honest, I wish people would just spit out whatever their issue was rather than beating around the bush and getting me all stressed. Do people do it on purpose? Is it some sort of primal weapon passed down over the ages? Get the other side full of fear so whatever self-defense they might have would suffer under nerves?

It’s awful, and I hate it, and I wish it would stop.

“I haven’t done anything!” I protested.

“You’re not in trouble… for now.” Mom, stern, turned to Mr. Greenland. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”

He turned to Living Wasteland. “Come here, child.”

Living Wasteland looked his way and crossed her arms. “I’m not a child. Address me properly or not at all.”

Mr. Greenland winced. “You certainly didn’t need a drill officer to pound Miralayan arrogance into you.”

“And you didn’t need the internet to think you had the right to command everyone else’s lives,” she immediately shot back.

Mr. Greenland scoffed, thrown off-guard. “My own daughter-”

Mom sighed. “Eponine, you’re the Providence.”

The room fell quiet. Both of our guests, on the edge of bickering, fell silent and slowly turned to face me. The silence was so thick, so oppressive, that it was like we were bread smothered with our own personal brand of Miralayan peanut butter.

Which doesn’t make sense, because Miralay doesn’t have peanut butter.

“I…”

Is she serious?

She can't be- I must have misheard.

She must have been talking to Living Wasteland-

No she said my name. I know I heard that right.

“I beg your pardon?” I managed to squeak out.

“Eponine.” Mom put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re the Providence.”

I took a seat on the edge of the couch, shocked for a moment- and then I burst out in laughter, massaging my forehead.

“April Fool’s Day is a bit late, don’t you think? I don’t have a Providence dot- I’m not royal material- I’m not-”

“Eponine. I’m serious.”

I sobered immediately. I saw Living Wasteland feel her own forehead, about to discover that she was what I wasn’t, what I couldn’t possibly be.

But I was almost seventeen, and my birthday was the same as both of the current Providences on Miralay, and although we’d escaped from Miralay when I was an infant, we didn’t have any photos of me until I was three and a half…

Oh.

Oh no.

“No,” I whispered, my breath quickening. I clutched the armrest of the couch- my head began to feel light- maybe all my blood would drain out and I’d be as pale as the moon. My hand returned to my forehead, fingertips searching the area between my eyebrows and up a bit. “Where’s my dot?”

“We had the dot surgically removed. Claimed it was a cyst, and that’s what the results showed. I know I was irresponsible entrusting my infant son to a black market surgeon, but... those were the only ones we could find. It was the safest option at the time- the Miralayan personality scan said you were going to be adventurous, and removing your dot was the only way we could give you a chance at blending in with humans.”

Living Wasteland snapped out of her reverie, stood up, and glared at Mr. Greenland. “I’m your daughter? And yet-” she stood up, her hands balled into fists- “you locked me away-”

Mr. Greenland closed his eyes. In that very moment, he genuinely looked like he wanted to die, like he was already halfway to becoming a corpse.

“Yes. That was the best way I could think to keep you safe and away from Alegria. With your mother dead, I didn’t think I was capable of giving you the childhood you deserved, so I stole a sleeping pod and reprogrammed your brain-machine interface to protect you from Alegria and let you run free on the internet to find your own way in the world.”

“Listen, Father.” She approached him, brushing past the coffee table and getting into his face. “As long as I can remember, I’ve been frequenting this conspiracy theory image… forum. They have an entire board dedicated to Miralay. It’s flooded every single day. There are people suffering up there, Dad. Illegitimate children executed for the sins of their parents, genetic experimentation done on legitimate children for fun, Providences withholding resources from citizens whenever there’s dissent... And if I’m Providence… That means I can change it! I can change things! But of course you thought it best to keep me stranded as a semi-permanent resident of the internet. Were you going to keep me in there forever? Rotting away until I was senile and then upload my brain to continue my purgatory-”

“Are you really so naive?” he yelled. “Your mother sacrificed herself to ensure that you didn’t have to live life as a slave to Miralay. That you could live as long as your body could handle, that you could breathe without fearing that you were being toyed with for some company’s sick research.” He took a few steps back. “You can either choose to stay sheltered here in Heavestone, or you can go back in the sleeping pod.”

Living Wasteland balled her fists. “I’m not going back in that damn thing.”

“So you’re choosing freedom?”

Liv shook her head. “Being trapped here in the Invisible City isn’t freedom.” She pushed past him and threw open the front door. “I’m not spending my life as a spectator. I’ll see you in the stars where I can do something with my life. Where I belong.”

And then she jumped outside and slammed the door shut and took off running.

Mr. Greenland swore underneath his breath. “Sorry, Mrs. Westal. They said she was gonna be an idealistic one. I’ll be back later.”

And then he flew through the front door too, chasing after his daughter, yelling expletives and threatening to reprimand her when he caught her.

I excused myself from the scene and wandered into the kitchen. I opened the pantry, looking for a cereal to shove down my throat- but I found I wasn’t hungry anymore.

Too many words to stomach.

5

5/17/2147

LIV

For a small and self-contained city like Heavestone, there were too many buildings. Too many streets. Too many things for me to accidentally bump into as I learned how to not be a featureless ghost doing everything at the speed of light- or at the speed of the processors embedded in my brain.

Same thing.

I was a corporeal girl. Someone with a body, an actual body, not a low-polygon three-dimensional rendering in a virtual reality world, able to move freely but void of feeling. Someone with the sense of touch, experiencing for the first time the caress of the sun on my face, the gentle tickle of the summer breeze, every hair on my exposed skin raising in a goosebump.

I covered my eyes and turned away from the sun, hanging high in the morning sky. It looked so pretty from the internet, the stylized last vestiges of a sunrise decorating a million desktop screens. But having my eyes licked to a crisp and losing the precious vision I had just gained wasn’t on my list of things to do that day.

Or ever.

I lowered my hands. 925 Lucia Lane, the house tag said. Their front yard had a miniature windmill, blowing in an imaginary breeze beside a concrete lake. My skin bristled at the thought of feeling a breeze. Anything that makes me feel cold, metallic, robotic…

I never want to go back in that sleeping pod again. I’ll do anything to stay out of that damned pod!

I continued walking. A lot more people should have been going to work; more children should have been playing outside- just more activity in general. But the streets remained desolate as I turned the corner. Maybe everyone was sleeping in? I suppose, if most of the people are doing freelance work, then they could sleep in…

Would I murder someone to stay out of there?

If they were violently threatening to shove me back in there and killing them was the only way to keep my liberty… then I suppose.

The first real decision of my life.

It didn’t feel nearly as sweet as I had expected it to.

Wait a minute. I turned around, checking the street signs. I have no idea where Father lives. Where I should have grown up.

Why do I care? Father will be there. He’ll yell at me for taking off so suddenly and giving everyone a scare.

I stopped in my tracks, feeling the back of my neck prickle- and a squirrel fell out of a nearby tree. Someone’s dog started barking. A gnome in someone’s front yard garden turned on and started waving its mechanical hand, almost like it was beckoning me to come closer.

I turned around instead and started backtracing my steps. Who even likes gnomes, anyways? They’re disturbing as hell, with their beady eyes and frozen grins.

Things that look like people and can shatter and break are not things I wanted to be around my first day on Earth. A dismembered eye, no matter the source, is a sign of bad luck on Miralay.

And I am nothing if not a Miralayan.

Not just a Miralayan- a Providence!

I stopped and closed my eyes for a moment, imagining that I was in the underground depths of Miralay, standing in the wide public square. An emblem upon my forehead, denoting me as one of two Providences-with-a-capital-P of the colony, the two that the people of Miralay look to for guidance and reassurance. The two that oversee everything in the colony and make sure that it runs smoothly.

Even as I stood there, the Providences on Miralay were aging and decrepit and living out their final three days. Even if I were to somehow sneak out of Heavestone and contact Alegria and get them to believe me, they wouldn’t be able to transport me up in time for there to be a smooth transition.

I needed to move, and quickly. Every moment that I procrastinated was another moment in which Miralay grew more and more restless and Alegria became more and more inclined to either break their traditions and have someone without the dot take up the role of leader or hire hitmen to violently find the Providences.

Neither solution was really much of a solution. And they couldn’t just claim that we were dead- if a Providence died before they could get their memories, then a new one would be born almost immediately to make up for it. Someone else would have to rule in their place until they came of age. And as long as Eponine and I were missing and alive, there wouldn’t be any new Providences born.

Never had the rule been invoked before, because none of the Providences had ever shirked their duty.

And, no matter how hard I might have struggled, I couldn’t escape mine.

Someone shouted a name in the distance, a curling looping name. Serlis!

A potential friend, maybe?

Maybe someone I could take back with me to Miralay, someone to accompany me as I learned the ropes of being alive and only having one life to live instead of millions that I could put on and take off at any time like a set of virtual clothes. I couldn’t be Petrie Tanakayova or Engles Alegria or Seliph Avaroe or any of the personas I’d donned anymore.

I had to be Living Wasteland, Providence of Miralay, and I had to be it soon, or else Miralay would start falling apart and countless innocent people would suffer and any enjoyment I would have had in the real world would be sucked away because I could have done something to stop it and I didn’t.

Maybe… Maybe I should bring Eponine along as well when I break for Miralay.

No, just leave him here. One Providence is better than none, and he’s not leader material.

That’s what the memories are for!

I snapped out of my daze. Someone had planted a flowerbed in their front yard close to the street. I knelt down and buried my head in the delicate blossoms, petals tickling my cheeks, begging for a giggle, which I gladly gave them. They wafted off the scent of fresh clothes and a mother’s embrace.

A mother.

I don’t have a mother-

“Serlis! There you are!”

Father!

His arm gruffly circled my chest and hoisted me up to my feet before he grabbed my arm with a death grip and started dragging me down the street.

“I’ve been looking all over for you!" he barked. "Do you know the scare you’ve given us? I’d thought you’d left Heavestone! Hell, you could have been halfway to Miralay by now! What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I… I still want to go to Miralay.”

“Still as stubborn as ever. Just like your mother.”

He turned the corner and led us to a worn-down yellow house, paint peeling, grass fading. He fumbled with the keychain on his belt, still refusing to let go of me until we’d stumbled into the living room.

There was barely any furniture, just a ratty old couch and a rickety chair. Father’s voice was far away as he gestured to the bedroom hallway.

“The guest room’s across from mine. Until I can get an escort or a tracking tag or something to keep tabs on you, I want you to stay put in this house.”

I took a step into the hallway and peeked into what should have been my room had I grown up there.

It felt nothing like home. Home was an oversize sleeping quarters on Miralay adorned with heavy-duty fabrics and sturdy yet fashionable dresses, and all that was in the room before me was a bed with stained white linen sheets and faded and peeling wallpaper. Something reeked of cheap perfume and broken promises.

At least, what I would imagine broken promises to smell like. Kind of like rotting orange peels.

I muttered an equally distant thanks and tiptoed inside my room, pulling the door closed before Father could start a tirade about how I was being “naive” again. I collapsed onto the bed, burying my head in the one lone pillow Father had bothered to spare.

This is a funny way of decorating a prison cell.

6

5/17/2147

EPONINE

The library was farther than we’d ever gone before in the Land of Shadows without one of our parent’s help. Straight smack in the middle of the city of Limberstein, a steel tower with a metal sculpture of a bundle of blood cells tied together outside the front doors. If Living Wasteland or Serlis or whatever was going to sell me out to Alegria, then they’d have a hell of a time trying to kidnap us in there without arousing anybody’s suspicion.

There are three rules I had to follow when I went out into the Land of Shadows, no matter what I was planning on doing or how long I would be gone.

The first was that I had to have a phone on me at all times. A pretty standard rule- in fact, it’s kinda stupid to waste an entire rule on it.

The second rule was that I had to pay for everything with cash. Anything else, like a credit card, is too easily tracked and requires an actual identity, a bank account, and a valid address. I didn’t have any of those things, nor would I ever get them.

The third rule, I broke that day.

In the back of the library on the first floor was an alcove sectioned off by the young adult section, which was full of books with cliché things like angsty vampires and overdone rebellions. In the alcove was a row of couches, all with absurdly high backs facing away from the main area so all one could see when nestled in there were the glass panels stretching up to the ceiling. Some fast food restaurant was visible across the street, so if one was bored of tracing one character’s arduous journey of finding their long-lost love across layers of time, they could simply glance up from the pages and snicker at the eternal backup in the drive-through.

Ice cream machine broke!

Understandable; have a great day.

It should have been paradise. A stack of books were at my feet, taken from random sections of the library- a manual on how to fake one’s own death, a romance anthology (don’t laugh), and an instruction booklet on how to make gay ice cream. In my lap, splayed open, was a book on conspiracy theories. Alistair sat on the couch next to me, his head resting on my shoulder as he fought a losing battle against dozing off, and Ignis was still wandering about the building searching for everything she could find about civilizations on Mars.

“Hey, Stairs-”

His eyes fluttered open. He jerked his head up, his “demonpedia” slipping out of his hands onto the floor.

“Yeah?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

He picked his book up, smoothing out the wrinkled pages, and sat up straight. His eyes drooped, still drowsy. “I’m all ears.”

“Umm...” I closed my book, dropping my voice down to a whisper. “Promise you won’t laugh at me.”

His eyebrows wrinkled. “Why would I do that?”

“Good. Because...” I took a deep breath. “I’m the Providence.”

Radio silence. Everyone else in the library continued to bustle about, though.

Alistair was shocked silent for a few moments, his mouth hanging wide open, and then he turned his head and cleared his throat. “Stars, Pony. How long’ve you known?”

“Since this morning.”

“Wait, are you serious?” Ignis rushed into view, plopping her seven thick books down on a pile on the floor before taking a seat on the other side of me. “Pony, this is great!”

I winced. “No, it’s not! Because then that Providence girl is going to drag me up to Miralay and then-”

“Wait, the Providence girl is in Heavestone?” they both asked at the same time. Their eyes met. “Jinx! Double jinx! No, triple-”

“Stop.”

I placed a hand on both of their shoulders, getting them to shut up. I explained the events of that morning to them, from midnight when she’d wormed her way into my house to her explosive exit.

“So you are the Providence,” Alistair whispered, a finger on his chin as he thought. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

I winced. “Please don’t hate me.”

“Isn’t your birthday on the 20th?” Ignis pointed out. “Y’know, I wonder if it would be possible for… no...” She shook her head. “That would require official permission from Alegria, and we sure as hell aren’t getting that.”

“What?”

“I was contemplating sneaking up to Miralay so I could experience it firsthand and maybe bring back evidence for when I start my campaign. Getting up there would be the easiest part, especially since you’re the Providence, Pony, and you’ll be valuable to them… but I don’t see how we would get back down to Earth. Especially you, Pony...”

“It would be a life sentence,” I added. “Not to mention a complete disappointment to our parents. And potentially getting Heavestone exposed.”

“I’ll have to do more research to see if there’s a way I could hack into Alegria’s systems and get surveillance footage that way instead. You’ll help me, won’t you?” Ignis’s eyes narrowed. “And why do you love Heavestone so much, Pony? It’s kinda boring just seeing the same weather over and over again. I want to experience rain and snow and tornadoes. I want to live in a bustling city and a country landscape and see the world and all the different people in it. Why don’t you?”

I pulled my legs in close to me. “...I just don’t like surprises all that much.”

“You’re such a shut-in.” Alistair rolled his eyes and pulled his hefty book back into his lap. “Should I start calling you Boo?”

I elbowed him. He oofed and then cackled. Ignis groaned and took her stack of books and moved to the other side of the alcove, leaning up against the large windows. I tried to immerse myself back into my book, but 9/11 truther stories just weren’t capable of rivaling the conundrum of Miralay.

I don’t want to go back to Miralay. I don’t want to go back to Miralay. I don’t want to go back to Miralay.

I want to stay right here in Heavestone. I know it’s kinda boring, but at least I know that these are my decisions, not those of some cracked and possibly corrupted soul messing with my brain. Maybe… Maybe if I had been assigned a different memory line on Miralay, like an accountant or a chemist or, hell, even a furnace cleaner, then I wouldn’t feel so panicky about Living Wasteland sneaking off to give herself up to Alegria’s mercy.

Does Miralay even have furnaces?

Alegria won’t be satisfied with only one Providence. They’ll want the other. Living Wasteland’s going to try to drag me along as well, isn’t she? I don’t want to be responsible for Heavestone getting exposed and getting everyone inside killed!

I don’t want to be the Providence. I don’t want to be the Providence. I don’t want to be the Providence.

I’ll do whatever I have to in order to not have to be the Providence.

Well, I won’t kill Living Wasteland. Not unless she attacks me first.

That’s where I draw the line.

7

5/18/2147

EPONINE

Whatever sickness I had a few days prior flared up again, rendering me unable to do anything outside of laying around my room all day and making the occasional visit to the bathroom to empty out all my insides. Leaning over the toilet, it was like my stomach was turning itself inside out- like it thought that I’d magically be teleported to Miralay on my seventeenth birthday and it wanted no part in any of it.

My only refuge was my computer and my bookcase. Shelves upon shelves overflowing with books I’d been hoarding since I was seven- everything “childish” relegated to the bottom shelf where Alistair or Ignis wouldn’t bother to look behind the craft supplies and then mock me for them, the second shelf for half-made crafts with their manuals that I’d get around to finishing some day, and everything else a grab bag of fiction and half-empty journals. The worst of the romance novels went to the absolute top of the bookshelf, because even though I might get lonely sometimes and need to find comfort in the embrace of a faceless red-haired girl, not everybody needed to see the gaudy covers.

A red-haired girl…

Snap out of it, Eponine. You don’t love Living Wasteland. She’d turn you over to a system that would enslave you and force you to enslave hundreds more. It’s just intrigue.

It’s just intrigue.

It’s just intrigue…

A knocking at my window. If I could have jumped out of my own skin, I would have- but instead I picked myself up off the floor, told my aching stomach to shut up for a few moments, and opened the blinds to find that one accursed red-haired girl crouching down and knocking on my window. She was wearing the same clothes as the last time she showed up at my window, but this time, something... different glinted in her eyes.

I opened the window a crack. “Screw off, Providence girl. I’m sick.”

“Call me Liv,” she whispered, ignoring me. “I like it better.”

“Fine, Liv. I have a cold. An Earthen cold. I’m not exactly in the best shape to be dragged off to Miralay and have my cognitive integrity violated. What do you want?”

Liv winced. She shook off the backpack that she’d brought and opened it up, revealing several day’s worth of prepackaged and processed food.

“Father told me that you were into romance novels and romanticizing things. You and I could run away to Miralay together, never look back-”

“I said-”

Liv’s face hardened. “Why are you so intent on shirking your duty, Eponine? What’s keeping you down here on Earth? The people of Miralay need you. They need someone to lead them, and they’ve already pledged their loyalties to the Providences- to you and me. Maybe it’s okay for your friends and their families to be selfish and come down here to Earth, to Heavestone- Miralay can always give their memory lines to someone else. But it doesn’t- it can’t work that way for the Providences.”

“Why not?” I yelled back. “Earth is so vibrant here compared to Mars. I would rather see blood on my scuffed knees after a long day of exploring than the reddish dirt of Mars after a day of being pampered. Miralay doesn’t have wide-open skies or- or skin-roasting bonfires or deafening waterfalls or-” I wheezed- “whispering forests as far as the eye can see! Miralay won’t give me the freedom to choose my own job or decide where I want to live or even let me keep my mind unadulterated and free of foreign influence.”

She pulled her backpack zipper shut. “I highly doubt you’ve ever seen all of those things you’ve mentioned.”

“Does it matter? I at least want the choice! And you would just spit on your mom’s grave for a misplaced sense of duty? And your dad-”

A flash of light, and then a stinging from my cheek- she’d slapped me!

She’d actually slapped me!

“My mother died so I could have a choice about what I wanted to do with my life. My father tried to violate my right to make that choice. And I’m choosing to go back to Miralay and do something with my life. Unlike you.”

“I’m sorry for wanting a quiet life spent helping the people I love?”

“Then you and I aren’t so different after all. Come with me, Eponine. You and I are irrevocably linked, both to each other and to Miralay. We’re destined for greatness.”

“Oh!” I threw my head back and cackled- and earned another violent cough ripping through my throat. “So you have the audacity to prattle on about free will and then try to force me to come with you!”

“The choice isn’t yours to make.” She turned away from me and looked to the sky. “Staying here hidden away in Heavestone isn’t going to make any sort of change in the world. You’re better than this, Eponine. You are capable of so much more than staying locked away and subsistence farming your whole life.”

"And we're both capable of hard manual labor in some undocumented place, but I don't see you volunteering for anything.

Liv grimaced for a second. “Anyways, it’ll be hard at first. But you’ve got potential. I’d hate to see it squandered.”

“Get out of my yard before I squander your potential.”

Liv looked back to me. Her eyes were cold and full of fire at the same time. She slipped on her backpack again.

“As you wish. I hope you’ll change your mind, though. It’ll save Miralay a lot of pain.”

“Go to hell. You'd fit better there.”

I slammed the window shut as she left, locking it again and yanking my blinds down as far as they would go. I dropped down to the floor, hovering over where the faint imprint of Liv’s body was from a few nights ago was still visible on the carpet. I ruffled the carpet strands until I couldn’t see the contour of her slim body anymore, replaced with random zig-zags that were light-years more impersonal. Then I went back to my bookshelf, pulled out a book at random, and absorbed myself in an anarchic world loosely strung across planets.

Liv was everywhere I looked. I chose another book. Nothing but Liv everywhere, permeating every character, every scene with her self-righteousness and blind devotion.

It was a mistake for me and my friends to discover that pod. We should never have explored that building in the first place. We could have discovered countless other things that would have made for a better story. Asbestos- what the hell does asbestos look like, anyways?- a spider nest, a beehive, a pack of rodents living in the walls with sharp overgrown teeth.

All that trouble disarming it and searching it for hidden places, and for what?

A pain in the ass that threatened to sentence me to a virtual death penalty.

I’m not king material. I’m not the Providence- I can’t be.

I won’t be.

8

5/19/2147

LIV

My father’s room remained quiet as I slipped out of my bed. The rest of the house was a cacophony of noise peculiar to three in the morning- electronics quietly humming as they executed their jobs, the ventilation system shimmering like fairies running through it, the vents growling. A blessing, really. The walls were thin, every noise audible everywhere in the house. Even though nobody would be able to hear any voices trapped inside of my head, my own speech was still very much in the realm of reality.

I closed my eyes. A blank canvas to see my brain-machine interface over. One of the neighbors had left their network unsecured, but I could only get a signal on that side of the room, and even then, it was so weak as to be almost nonexistent. My typing still moved at the speed of light, but there was a sense of disconnection between me and everything- I could feel my sweaty hands on my knees, my legs crossed, my ears itching every now and then. Purgatory, light edition.

Dammit! All of Alegria’s websites are still blocked!

Wait… Liv, you’re such an idiot. Nothing’s stopping you from using a proxy.

Why haven’t I thought about that until now?

Because it didn’t matter until now!

It turned out that lots and lots of the usual proxy services were blocked too- it took me fifteen minutes to find one that worked, and even then, it was so slow as to be almost unbearable. But at long last, even though half of the page was broken since the proxy blocked all the scripts, I finally gazed upon Alegria’s website.

Alegria’s home page was too professional for comfort. What I assumed to have been a carousel showing off their latest headsets. A blank box where there should have been a video depicting someone swinging their arms and various other body parts and having fun in an artificial world. Price tags were everywhere.

Not a single mention of Miralay anywhere. It was as if their ventures in space had never happened, weren’t going on right now as I sat there all alone in the darkness.

Right at the bottom of the page was the address of their headquarters. Right in the middle of Minneapolis, a towering steel structure with a beautiful view of a football stadium from the office windows.

I signed off the unbearably slow proxy and hopped onto the first maps website I could think of. It pinpointed me at the middle of a massive park complex in Limberstein, right between a soccer and a baseball field. According to the directions it gave me, if I got on the lightrail on one of the all-night routes, the trip would be an hour and forty-five minutes between Limberstein’s loading station and wherever the lightrail would dump me in Minneapolis. Not too bad of a walk between the station and the building I wanted.

It would be easy to slip out of Heavestone without anybody noticing me. Father wouldn’t file a missing child report with the police, because that would leave a paper trail, and it wasn’t like he had any legal names or photos of me to use.

It would be slightly harder to turn what little cryptocurrency I had managed to accrue into cash, assuming the lightrail even still accepted cash instead of a credit card.

The hardest part would be getting anyone from Alegria to believe me. But Miralayans have two hearts, one for backup. Surely they could just listen to my disjointed pulse to prove my lineage? Surely the Providence dot and my brain-machine interface would be proof enough?

No, the hardest part would be getting Eponine to come with me. I didn’t have the physical strength to pull him out of his room in the middle of the night, let alone carry him all that way without him waking up, let alone do it without anybody noticing.

I’m going to have to do this Providence thing alone, aren’t I?

I shook my head and bit my lip. My eyes stung. I closed out of the connection and opened my eyes and slid out of bed. The sun still hadn’t come up yet, not yet painting the black canvas of the sky with its arrays of yellows and reds and purples.

Damn it! I kicked the wall- the wall rattled but otherwise stayed the same. Father still didn’t stir. Damn it! Damn it all to hell!

Fine, Eponine. You want to play the coward? You go ahead and do that. Be forgotten by time while I go on to do great things.

I don’t need your help! I’ll save Miralay single-handed!

But the Providences are betrothed to each other, aren’t they? Eponine and I- Miralayan tradition dictates we have to-

I’ll find someone else. No doubt there’ll be at least one attractive person who would jump at the chance to bed the Providence. I’ll continue the legacy. And when Eponine dies, another male Providence will be born, and it’ll be like none of his mess ever happened.

I should leave tonight. Nap through the day and pass into my birthday on my way to my real life.

My breath shuddered. I brushed aside my bedroom window curtains and opened my window, looking out into the vast beyond. So many pinpricks of light, millions and billions, far too many for me to possibly count in my lifetime.

I reached out through the window, my fingers having no chance of brushing the ebony of space but still trying anyways.

One of those was Mars.

One of those was Miralay.

One of those was my home and would be my home forevermore.

Take care of yourself for now, my people. I’ll be there soon.

9

5/19/2147

EPONINE

There was an old and rickety house in Limberstein situated at the edge of the neighborhood, front yard long since converted into someone else’s experiment into growing corn. Long stalks shot up from everywhere there should have been grass, yellow heads staring at me and Alistair as we sneaked inside. Nobody had lived in it for at least as long as Heavestone had existed, and for good reason too, because it was utterly unfit for habitation- the hardwood floor was rotting and shriveling up beneath our feet, most of the windows had been smashed out by severe weather and previous squatters, and one wrong step would lead to stumbling upon a family of rats trying to eke out an existence.

Something had blown a huge hole in the house’s roof, jagged roof tiles permanently bent up to reach to the sky like the lips of a screaming mouth frozen forever. A good blanket of snow, and the scene would be perfectly set for illustrating the definition of “desolation”.

We called it the “Chiyo House”. It took its name from a girl from one of the books sitting in my room, a girl who’d lived in a house as rickety as this one but in its own state of disrepair. But we didn’t have our own sea in the Land of Shadows, unlike that girl, so we had to make do with the pond on the other side of the street.

The rain outside made it worthwhile. Natural white noise to calm the panicking in my mind as I typed away on my laptop, commanding a seedbox on a server thousands upon thousands of miles away to start archiving more movies that I thought Alistair might like.

“So you’re telling me that she’s actually gonna try to go to Miralay?” Alistair asked as we settled in one of the upstairs rooms, protected from whatever lay in the floor by a tarp I’d found in the back of my garage. We’d cleaned the room out a few weeks before, sweeping away animal scat, but the floor still wasn’t completely trustworthy. The tarp over the window in that room had a tendency to leak, so if we wanted to wait out the rain, we’d have to move to a new room soon.

I nodded my head, watching the server logs scroll up my screen. A slow-traffic day. Five hours and fourteen seconds remaining in that particular transfer.

“Damn, that’s unfortunate.” Alistair yawned, stretching his arms up to the ceiling and then letting them drop again. “There’s so few people in Heavestone our age. I could’ve really used another friend, y’know?” He paused. “You’re kinda quiet, Pony. Something wrong?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Hey, don’t lie to me. Did that Providence girl do something to you?” Alistair tensed, balling his fists. “You just say the word and I’ll go and beat-”

I placed a hand on Alistair’s shoulder. “Please don’t do that.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Nobody gets to threaten my boyfriend. Now tell me what’s wrong so I can do something to fix it.”

“Well...” I detached my session and closed my laptop. The server would do fine without me for a few minutes. “We had a fight yesterday. She’s got it in her mind that she’d be better off on Miralay and that, if I’m not spending every waking moment slaving away for an oppressive system, I’m ‘not doing anything with my life’.” I shook my head and opened my laptop again and signed back into the server. “She’s not gonna get anywhere with her dad constantly watching over her like a hawk. I’m not all that worried.”

“Doesn’t she have that computer thing in her brain, though?”

“Alegria’s not gonna spend any resources chasing an unsubstantiated rumor of a hidden city. They’ll have- wait...”

If we’d still been on Miralay, we’d be going through the ceremonies and becoming the Providences tomorrow. What’s Miralay gonna do without their Providences? Go into total anarchy-

Stop! I’m not Liv! Miralay’s not harassing any of us in Heavestone! I don’t care! It’s not my problem!

But won’t Alegria want their Providences back? And where did we get the pendants from, anyways? How does Heavestone’s border work? What’s keeping Alegria from blowing our cover?

Dammit, Mom, why didn’t you tell me any of these things already?

The image of Liv lying down on my bedroom floor flashed into my head. “She said all of Alegria’s websites were blocked and she didn’t know the password to get around them.”

“But then again, maybe she could have asked someone from that conspiracy theory forum thing to get her the address. Nothing’s stopping them, I’d imagine.”

“She might have been lying. Or she might have been telling half of the truth, and Alegria’s websites really are blocked, but she knows how to use a VPN or some other kind of proxy. But if it’s a hosts file block, then that would be harder to circumvent, and Alegria doesn’t run a hidden service-”

“Pony, don’t you think you’re overthinking this a little?”

I shook my head. The logs continued to scroll up my screen. “Never underestimate the willpower of a person desperate to circumvent filtering.” My phone rung then. I pulled it out of my pocket- an unrecognized number. I swiped to answer it. “Hello?”

“Eponine.”

Liv.

Alistair must have noticed the color drain from my face, because he pushed himself up and leaned closer to me. “Who is it?”

“It’s Living Wasteland,” I whispered to him. I put the phone back near my ear. The floor creaked beneath me. “Yeah, that would be my name...”

“I’m giving you one last chance. Run away to Miralay with me before too much chaos over our absences spills over.”

“You can kiss my ass, Liv.” I hung up before she could respond and turned my phone to silent and shoved it in my pocket. I turned back to Alistair, who was staring at me, a whimsical look on his face. “No, Stairs, I’m not cheating on you.”

“I didn’t think you were!” He dissolved into a laugh, slapping my back. “But I’d imagine she’d be in good shape after being in that sleeping pod for so long. Kinda hard to gorge when a computer’s overseeing everything, eh? But I wouldn’t cheat on you, Pony, not even in my wildest fantasies. I think I like you a lot better than some psycho internet girl.”

10

5/19/2147

LIV

You can kiss my ass, Liv.

I threw the final shirt into the suitcase I’d found in the closet at the end of the hallway. The suitcase was half-full, anyways- all that I’d ever owned was on the internet, and I’d be able to take that anywhere-

Wait!

Miralay doesn’t have access to the Earthen internet... I should say goodbye to all my friends on the fediverse first-

I shook my head. No time to waste. Saving Miralayan lives are worth a few severed connections.

The suitcase only held old clothes that my father had bothered to throw to me, bunched up and shoved in around the tin can that held a hundred stolen dollars. I covered the zipper with my finger as I zipped it shut, muffling the noise so that Father wouldn’t hear it and get suspicious.

A clock was pinned to the edge of my vision. Ten o’clock, it read. I’d have plenty of time.

I picked up my suitcase and took one last look around my room. I’d only been in it for a day. Just as impersonal as when I’d stepped in it, just as void of life.

Goodbye, Father. I hope my absence won’t bring too much pain to Heavestone. It’s not like any of them really wanted me here anyways.

Or ever cared.

And, just like that, I departed from his life just as suddenly as I’d fallen into it.

No more sleeping pods for me.

No more hiding.

My pendant grew cold as I stepped out of Heavestone's borders and onto the empty streets of Limberstein. A lone street lamp welcomed me, its sickly yellow light cast across the damp asphalt. Everything smelled earthy and cleansed.

It must have been raining.

I glanced at the houses I passed by as I pulled my suitcase along behind me.

Flowers blooming in pots behind windows.

Dogs sleeping and occasionally stirring to bark at me.

The occasional child staying up until midnight to watch cartoons.

All of the people- all of the inhabitants knowing their own place in the world, having jobs to go to and families to welcome them home and a government that acknowledged their existences.

The government knows about Miralay, right?

No, there’s no way they could know without going up there themselves. Sneaking around in Alegria’s operating documents would be illegal without a warrant, and besides, the first Miralayans did give consent, so it's technically not illegal for them to be up there.

But someone had to have spilled to the forums…

I came to the end of the sidewalk and waited for a large red truck with some poorly-made rap music blaring out of it to zoom by before I crossed the street. A playground and a police station on opposite sides of the street marked the edge of the residential zone; past there were small local stores in the near distance before branching out into big franchises, towering over the other buildings with blinding neon lights.

The next intersection had lightrail tracks.

I broke into a run, my suitcase clattering behind me as it bounced around on its wheels. The station was within sight; my ticket to Alegria was within sight; my birthday- my freedom-

A beep from my interface. 10:30.

The train will be here soon.

I stumbled onto the platform, stopping by a light tower. My breath heaved. The four other people at the station stared at me in confusion for a few seconds before they turned back to their hushed conversations.

I gathered myself up and went over to the ticket machine, a knot in my stomach forming- and then it dissipated when I saw the cash insert slot. I paid two dollars for a one-way ticket, a single blue and white slip of paper with the time and date printed on it, and took my place among the other riders with it in my hands.

Crickets chirped in the distance. Across from the platform was a sign affixed to the chain-link fence, neon yellow, emblazoned with reflective black letters.

The tracks are electrified. Please do not touch them. Stay behind the yellow line at all times until the train comes to a complete stop.

Please turn down the volume on your mobile device near the platform so you can hear your surroundings.

Running or horseplay on the platform is dangerous- especially while a train is in motion or approaching the station…

The rules went on and on and on. A light breeze picked up, ruffling my hair. The sky showed off its black and blue and purple bruises- and then a flash of light at the corner of my vision as the lightrail train approached. It slowed down and blew its horn before it slowed to a halt at the station. Hordes of people poured out the doors, following the designated paths to keep from trampling over anyone. Once the majority of them had dissipated into the parking lot, the few of us who wanted to get on stepped into the train.

I immediately climbed the stairs to get to the top section of seats. A few people were there, all concentrated at the back. I took the window seat closest to the stairway, which was also right next to the bathroom, and slid my suitcase underneath my seat.

A few minutes of delay, and then the train was off, sliding effortlessly backwards from where it had come from.

It must have been the endcap of the route.

I slipped my ticket into my pocket and tucked my hair into my jacket before I put my hood up. Just on the off chance that Father would be stupid enough to put in a missing child report.

He wouldn’t have any recent photos of me. Only a description to be recognized by.

No. Father doesn’t love me that much.

I leaned up against the window and watched as Limberstein slid away from view.

Countless streets I didn’t know the names of.

Houses gradually shutting off their lights and falling asleep as the sun tucked its weary head under the blanket of the horizon.

A baby somewhere on the train began to wail, just barely soothed by the desperate cooing of its parents.

At every stop, the train operator announced the stop’s name and time, and a few people got on and off on the downstairs section.

Nobody came upstairs to bother me.

Slowly by slowly, the suburbs faded into the tangled mess of the highway system, only adulterated by the tracks of the lightrail at every single stoplight. By and by, I eventually saw the towering buildings of Minneapolis, skyscrapers crowned with corporate logos and names I knew all too well.

Alegria was in there somewhere.

11

5/20/2147

EPONINE

The wind blew Vey’s hair into her face, and she desperately swiped it away just in time to avoid splattering herself all over the barrier wall marking the edge of the programmed area. She spat out a few locks of hair and glanced up. A considerably older woman floated serenely a few feet away, her magic charged and at the ready to launch.

The other player stared blankly at Vey, a sweet smile on her face, that feature the only thing not hidden by her hood. Her voice echoed above the wind as Vey stared back. “Bey, Bey, Bey...”

“Wrong witch.” Vey floated up, focused on escape, but the other player mirrored her every move. “Aren’t you going to attack?”

“Vey, Vey, Vey...”

I closed my book and put it back on the ever-growing pile of unfinished books and glanced at the clock on my nightstand. I’d had trouble sleeping, and so I’d read the hours away, and now it was five in the morning.

I rubbed my eyes, groggy and sore from staring at the pages for so long, and slipped my phone in my pocket just in case and went upstairs.

There was a crowd of people in my front yard, all arguing with each other, Mr. Greenland in the center of the chaos. I hesitated before I pulled on my shoes and ran outside- and as soon as I’d stepped on the welcome mat, all eyes turned to me.

“Eponine!” Mom rushed over and trapped me in a bear hug. “You’re okay. None of this was your fault. None of it-”

I tore myself away from her. The people continued to stare. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

“What’s going on?”

“Serlis is missing.” She glanced around- at Mr. Greenland and everybody else, visibly distraught even though none of them, I guessed, had even bothered to go see Liv the short time she had been here. Mr. Greenland approached us, but Mom held up a hand, holding him back. “I don’t want you going outside Heavestone until we find her, okay?”

“On the contrary...” Mr. Greenland stepped closer, despite anything Mom would tell him. I could have smelled his ratty unwashed beard from a mile away, but all we had were a few feet to separate us. “Eponine, I need you to do what you do best. Find my daughter.”

“What?” Mom slapped him across the face- the twenty or so people who’d shown up at my house gasped, watching with gossiping eyes. “Are you insane? One child of Miralay out on the loose- one Providence- and you want to put the other one at risk?”

“It’s his fault she was out of her sleeping chamber,” Mr. Greenland spat, his eyes shifting to me. Blood rushed to my face. “He tripped the security measures I put to keep her safe in case she were discovered. The computer was set to wake her up and tell her to come to Heavestone if someone had been in her chamber.”

“Well, maybe you should have secured the building hiding her better! Or maybe done more to make her feel safe and useful when she was here? Or, better yet, have actually raised her here so she wouldn’t have been so resentful and run off at the first chance-”

“Stop!” I put myself in between them, just as Mom was preparing to hit Mr. Greenland again. My cheeks started to burn. “Stop- stop hitting each other. Stop yelling. That’s not gonna do anything. This isn’t my fault or Mom’s fault, and I’m not going to say anything about whether it’s Mr. Greenland’s fault.” He humphed. “Li- Serlis is gone. Did she take anything with her when she left?”

“Some of my money’s missing,” Mr. Greenland said. “And my good traveling suitcase. The one with the lock on it.”

My jaw tightened. I averted my eyes.

Mom put a hand on my shoulder. “Eponine, please don’t listen to him. Please don’t go chasing off after Serlis.”

This is all my fault. Just like he said. Alistair and Ignis and I disabled all his security stuff.

“You’ve got to pay penance, Eponine. You’ve put Heavestone in danger with your foolish exploring. There’s plenty of unexplored space in Heavestone. Haven’t you tried pushing the boundaries of this loop of time? Couldn’t you have done that instead-”

Mom elbowed him. “Shut up, you maggoty old man! You’re making my son cry!”

If Heavestone gets exposed because of this… I can’t… I couldn’t-

“Who are you calling maggoty? You- I-” Mr. Greenland stuttered. “At least my daughter’s a real-”

Mom clobbered him in the face. I felt my throat loosen and tighten at the same time as I just barely managed to squeak out.

“Okay! Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll go find Serlis!” I covered my sore eyes with my hands as the crowd began to murmur. My breath grew strained. “I just… I’m so scared… I don’t want to be the Providence...”

“Then don’t,” Mom said. “Stay here. That’s an order.”

I wiped my eyes and tried to be strong in the face of Mr. Greenland’s wicked grin and Mom’s cold stare.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I love you and Heavestone very, very much. That’s why I- I’ve got to go get Serlis. Even if she doesn’t want to be brought back...”

“Good,” Mr. Greenland grunted. “You’re not welcome back in Heavestone until you bring my daughter back. I’ll make your life a living hell for the rest of your days for what you’ve done if you don’t leave now.”

I couldn’t take it anymore.

Mr. Greenland’s crooked teeth.

Mom being too distraught to function.

My neighbors and their neighbors and their neighbors looking at me like I were an apostate in the middle of a devout cult.

With nothing more than my phone in my pocket and the pajamas on my back and the shreds of a plan forming in my head, I took off running for Heavestone’s borders.

Liv needed to be brought back to Heavestone for all of our safety, against her will if need be.

Away from everything I had ever known into the unknown.

But where would Liv have gone?

The only place she would have gone. Straight to Alegria’s headquarters in Minneapolis.

I have no money! How am I going to-

Wait… didn’t I put ten dollars into my phone case in case of emergency?

I ignored everybody’s yells for me to come back and jumped through the border, my chest pounding, expecting to be immediately surrounded and detained by the police. No such thing happened, of course. In the far distance, I heard the blare of a lightrail train’s horn as it approached the end of its route at Limberstein’s stop, where it would reverse course and head straight for the major cities.

I’m coming, Liv!

12

5/20/2147

LIV

At least a decade and a half to plan and prepare and figure out how exactly homeless people managed to survive the night in a city rife with pickpocketing and crime, and the best I could do was shack up in a phone booth and count the hours until Alegria opened in a pitiful attempt to lull myself to sleep. But eventually six in the morning came around, and Alegria’s front lobby turned on its lights and unlocked its front doors.

It’s a miracle I wasn’t mugged, I thought as I picked myself up off the grimy phone booth floor. I checked my suitcase to ensure nothing had been stolen- nothing had; the lock was still intact- and then walked across the street and slipped through the front doors and approached the lady at the front desk.

“Good morning!” She yawned and wiped the condensation off her glasses. She eyed my suitcase. “Are you lost? I believe the hotel is on 92nd Street.”

I shook my head. “I’m not lost. I was wondering if there was anybody I could speak to about Miralay. I’ve got… important information.”

“Right...” The woman wrinkled her eyebrows, eyeing me suspiciously. “I don’t believe we have any products under the codename Miralay. And aren’t you a little too young to be representing one of our partners?”

I leaned closer to her. “Please, can you just send me to one of your higher-ups? They’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Her face hardened. “I’ll give you ten seconds to get out of my lobby.”

A flash in the corner of my vision. Open network detected. Little green letters started forming all about like something out of a low-budget action movie.

“Your name is Avery Jenson,” I said, reading the letters. “You have two children, both in elementary school. You’re desperately trying to pay off your college debt-”

“I’m calling the police-”

The phone rang. The letters disappeared. She sneered at me and then picked up the receiver.

“Yes?” A mumbling on the other line. Her eyes widened. “Y-Yes, Mr. Tanakayova. Right away.”

She slammed down the receiver. Her eyes were cold as steel as she pointed to the elevator on the right.

“Second floor, room 286. Get out of my sight.”

I smiled. “Thank you very much.”

I headed for the stairs instead and pulled my suitcase up with me. It bumped into every single step, rattling the tin can inside, which had no doubt slipped to the bottom of the suitcase. Once I’d reached the top of the flight of the stairs, I glanced around- room 286 was right in front of me.

Petrie Tanakayova, the nameplate read.

I used to use that name.

I stepped up to it and knocked the door ever so gently.

“Come inside,” someone said, voice silky. “This better be good if someone’s here already! And we’ve just opened… A pity I didn’t get to-”

I opened the door, and then he turned around, and I was eye-to-eye with him, standing just a few feet away.

A nightmare inducer.

He’d groomed his black hair long to his jawline on one side and cut short on the other, perfectly trimmed, waiting like a rattlesnake in the grass with all the warning signs in the world. Only the slightest bit of a tangle. The rest of his ashy skin looked just as dry and clean as if he’d just dried himself off after a shower. A faint X-shaped scar near the bottom of his left cheek. He looked at least three years older than I was.

I didn’t need all the air conditioning in the room to find a reason to shiver.

“Shut the door behind you, love.”

I did as I was told.

His eyes caught the dot on my forehead, between my eyes and up a little, and then widened like he’d been threatened. And then he advanced, pulling at my shirt, trying to slip his hand-

I slapped him away. “Wha- I won’t stand for rape-”

He shrunk away from me, stepping back. “My apologies. I got ahead of myself. I… I have to confirm the number of hearts you have.”

Of course. Miralayans have two hearts, each slightly smaller than their human counterparts, one for backup. Always beating in tandem with each other.

He looked back up at me. “Please forgive me. But I have to feel the center of your chest. I promise I won’t do anything… lewd.”

I hesitated for a moment and then nodded. He stepped back to me and gingerly slid his hand up my shirt, first feeling the center of my chest and then two inches to the right, cringing when he got a little too close.

He retracted his hand after a few moments, stealing a squirt of hand sanitizer from his desk. He furiously scrubbed it into his hands. His gaze was focused away from me, ashamed of what he’d had to do.

“Why are you here, Miralayan?”

I closed the office door behind me. “I’m the Providence.”

He stopped rubbing his hands together, his eyes far away. A sort of drawling accent came out. “Say that again.”

“I’m the Providence!”

“Am I dreaming? Say it again!”

“I’m Living Wasteland and my father calls me Serlis and I’ve got a dot on my forehead and I was kept in a sleeping pod for as long as I can remember until a few days ago and my mom died so I could escape and-” I gasped for breath, disturbed by the wicked grin growing on Petrie’s face- “I need to get back to Miralay!”

“Do you love Miralay?”

“Yes!” I yelled. “That’s why I need someone to get me up there, because my coronation ceremony was supposed to be today and I don’t want anything to fall apart because I could have done something and I didn’t.” I paused. “I don’t want to hide anymore, Mr. Tanakayova.”

“Please, love, call me Petrie.” He haughtily waved a hand and scampered back to his desk, where he took a seat and put his feet up. “You look so much like your mother, don’t you know, darling? Hmm...” He put a finger on his chin, pondering something. “My Providence. It will be an honor to take you home on behalf of my liege Miss Rouge.”

Home.

Miralay.

It sounds so simple when he puts it that way. Like I’d just be moving to another state instead of a whole different planet.

“You’re one lucky duck, aren’t you? We have a supply ship ready for takeoff today at noon. Such a pity we can’t use sleeping chambers when we go through warp holes, or otherwise- how much Miralayan education have you had, darling?”

I shook my head. “Not much, I’d admit. Everything I know about it is from an imageboard.”

“The one with the obnoxious banner advertising adult toys to weeaboos?”

I nodded.

Petrie groaned. “We’ve been trying to get that one taken down for years. But free speech laws are always getting in the way of stopping slander and libel… Maybe one of these days they’ll leak classified documents and we’ll be able to hit them for that.” He paused. “Contrary to whatever trash they’ve been feeding you, Miralay is not some sort of hellhole. Everyone there is content in their lives and supports the system and is happy. Except… for the fact that you and the other Providence aren’t there. You know where he is, right?”

My jaw twitched.

To reveal Eponine or not?

Not?

Not.

I shook my head-

And then Petrie got another call.

He kept his feet on his desk as he picked it up with one slender hand. “Hellooo, my beautiful?” His formerly perfectly smooth forehead wrinkled as the woman on the other end spoke. “Yes, send him up right away. Maybe my guest will be able to identify him.”

Eponine?

Seriously, Liv, who else would it be?

I stood there, frozen, my heart thundering in my ears as someone pounded up the steps. I didn’t look behind me as whoever it was flung the door wide open-

“Liv!” Eponine grabbed my hands, turning me around and tugging me towards the door. “What are you doing! We’ve got to go!”

I yanked my hands away. “What are you doing here? You said you didn’t want to be-”

“Liv! Please! Your father… I…” Eponine stammered, our words colliding and tangling. “Are you crazy? Just giving yourself up to Alegria like that? What about your mother? Don’t you want to live free?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter what I want. The people of Miralay need me. Their happiness is more important than my own.” My eyes narrowed. “And it just so happens that seeing my people happy will bring me joy as well. Father doesn’t love me. Nobody at home loves me. Maybe you should ask yourself why you think your own guilt somehow trumps the needs of thousands of people.”

“Because when you receive your memories, they might look through your own and find out where home is, and then the lives of everyone I know’ll be in danger!”

I pointed to the door. “Go home, Eponine! Miralay doesn’t need you endangering it!”

“Aww, is your little lover boy here to play the hero?” Petrie stepped towards the both of us. Eponine’s eyes went wide in fear, and he backed up a bit, stumbling into the hallway. “Say, you kinda look like the other lost Providence. I think I’ll send you off to Miralay too.”

“No! I’m not going to be your Providence or her Providence or anybody else’s!” He continued to back up, Petrie’s glare pushing him farther and farther back. “I hate Miralay. It’s a repressive totalitarian place and I won’t be complicit in any part of it. Just give me Liv and we’ll be-”

Eponine’s foot slid off the top step, and he stumbled, falling head-over-heels down the stairway. His head knocked against the handrail, the clang echoing. Petrie followed him down the steps until he was at the landing halfway between the ground floor and the second, and then he slid his arms under the limp and bleeding boy and carried him back up to his office with only a few pitiful and dazed swings of the arms to impede him.

Petrie laid Eponine down on the floor in front of his desk and asked me to close the door, which I did. He glanced at the clock on his desk. Six-thirty in the morning.

“I’ve found them,” he whispered to himself, feeling Eponine’s chest for the two hearts of a Miralayan. “The missing Providences of Miralay. Won’t Miss Rouge be so proud of me?”

“Go to hell,” Eponine spat, coughing, his breath weak. “My home… They’ll come looking for me. Mr. Greenland doesn’t have any clout...” His eyes slid to me as Petrie pulled out a miniature first-aid kit from his desk and started tending to his bruises. “We could have been friends, Liv. We could have pretended Miralay didn’t have any hold over us. I could have shown you...”

“Chill! You’re being kinda overdramatic, don’t you think?” I crouched down next to him, his eyes bloody murder. “You’re not being sentenced to death, idiot. You’re going to help me bring happiness to thousands of people.” I paused. “And happy birthday to you too.”

He cringed, hissing when Petrie touched one of his sore spots.

“Eponine.”

“Shut up, Liv. I don’t want to hear any more of-”

“I promise I’ll do everything in my power to keep anyone from hurting your precious home.”

“What if you can’t do anything about it, Liv?”

I paused. “Then maybe they should stop complaining about obscurity and start standing up for themselves.”

13

5/20/2147

EPONINE

The absolute worst case scenario has happened, and I could have prevented it by having not left Heavestone so hastily, by not having walked into that confrontation between Mom and Mr. Greenland. Heavestone’s gonna get exposed and everyone I know is gonna die and if that’s going to happen, at least I want to have been able to fight at Alistair’s side with Ignis and everybody else.

Which would I have preferred? To be shipped off to Miralay against my will and agonize over not knowing how my friends are doing, or be shipped off as a prisoner of war after a long and arduous siege, knowing that everyone I loved was dead and that I’d failed?

It doesn’t matter. This can’t be the worst thing in the universe a person could suffer, right? I could be in a work camp, slaving away in a sweaty mine with only scraps to eat and no modern amenities of any sort. Or I could be a sex slave, tortured and cut apart for another’s sick pleasure. Or I could be dead, never to know another’s caress again, never to know the full rapture of unrestrained love, never to-

If I had to choose between death and being the Providence, which one would I pick?

Which would bring Alistair more comfort, not only in this life but in whatever might lay beyond?

But then the- the stalking? Skulking? Shedding? A word I encountered in a book I loved when I was fourteen, one where a billionaire was emptying out other people’s organs so he could bring elderly rich people back to young and healthy bodies-

Shucking. Shucking is the word I’m looking for. I’m a shellfish and I’m about to have all my insides shucked out and spilled onto the floor and drained and have fluff from six other souls stuffed into the empty space in my skin so they can be young and alive again.

And the Miralayans see this as normal. As desirable!

And when Liv and I are eventually forced to marry each other at twenty as the example of a perfect Miralayan couple and have children at the age of twenty-two, our zygotes will be shipped away to the central facility like everyone else’s and they’ll be able to see if the child is the Providence at birth and mark them for collection on their seventeenth birthday.

That is, assuming they’ve found a way to cheat infertility.

I’ll have to touch Liv’s body. Have to caress her, have to pretend that I feel anything but utter revulsion at the sight of her, at what she represents, at the reminder that one accidental discovery in the basement of a dilapidated dollar store led to my downfall.

What if one of our children is one of the next Providences? Will I have to look a son or daughter in the eye, a child with part of my face and part of Liv’s, and comfort them as they watch me die before their eyes? As they are yoked with my burdens and former dreams and grievances and all those of the Providences who came before me?

Will the last thing I see before I die be the image of my child writhing in pain in whatever chamber they use for the memory transfer? And what of Heavestone? Can the Providences even do anything about Heavestone? Or would it be seen as treason to even acknowledge that there are Miralayans who don’t consent to being governed by such draconian laws?

Memory shedding doesn’t even make any sense anymore with modern technology. If they can ship off two adolescents and the crew of a supply ship to Mars in a matter of days, then they can import skilled workers too!

Why’s Miralay got to be so secret, anyways? It doesn’t make much sense unless they know they’re doing something illegal.

I… I’ll find a way to fight back. I have to. Someone had to have made Heavestone. Someone had to have passed the word of it around. There’s got to be rebels, budding revolutionaries, something on Miralay.

Maybe the population isn’t so single-minded as Liv thinks it is.

14

5/20/2147

LIV

Petrie’s door beeped precisely at eleven in the morning. He snapped his fingers, triggering the door to open, allowing two building security guards in bulletproof vests to step inside and gaze at me and Eponine through their sunglasses.

“Ah, it’s you two again.” Petrie stood up behind his desk, where he’d been resting. “I want you to take these two up to the loading dock. The people there have already been briefed on what the situation is. And-” he pointed to Eponine, who sneered- “keep an eye on this one. His escape would mean a huge loss for Alegria’s investors.”

“Hey- wait-”

One of the security guards gruffly yanked Eponine’s arm, forcing him up off the floor and into a pair of handcuffs. He winced, his face flushing, ready to scream until the security guard forced his chin up and shoved a gag into his mouth.

The other one came over to me, but I slapped his hand away as he reached for me.

“I can walk myself up there.”

“It’s standard protocol, ma’am,” the guard grunted.

I brushed past him and walked out the door. “I’m not a common prisoner. I’m the Providence, and I expect to be treated as such. Now lead the way to the loading dock.”

***

The sky was dark and cloudy, visible from every glass window as we made our way up the stairs, Eponine jerking his bruised body every which way to try to get free of the guards. It didn’t work, just made our already slow ascent up to the roof even more time-consuming and arduous.

But at long last we made it, and the guards shoved Eponine towards the crew, who were loading the last of the boxes into a hatch on the side of a hulking mass of metal and machinery. It was a slightly older model of spaceship, produced twenty years ago but still in good condition. Its dark gray and black tones mixed and blended with the somber sky, camouflage against the normal citizenry below flickering in and out.

One of the crew members turned around, her arms crossed. Her long green hair flowed around her in two high pigtails, reaching down to her waist. The patch on her gray-blue uniform above her right breast where her pilot medallions would have been was completely empty, revealing her rookie status.

She looked about our age.

She eyed the two of us and cocked her head. “Well, well, well. What do we have here?” Her eyebrows shot up. “The Providences! How...”

“Sully!” one of her crew members yelled, gesturing to the open spaceship hatch. “Don’t just stand there. Lead them inside!”

“Right! Follow me!”

She stepped towards the open hatch. The security guards pushed Eponine forward despite his protesting. I slipped through the spacious hatch of my own accord, hearing their thundering footsteps behind me a few seconds later as Eponine finally spat out his gag and began screaming and scraping his feet against the floor.

Five doors, all made out of thick layered steel, swung open so I could see inside.

To my left, the front cockpit for the pilots in case of an emergency where autopilot couldn’t be used.

To my right, the storage cabin to my right where the crew members were loading up boxes, almost jam-packed full.

And three rooms full of nothing but sleeping pods in between.

Everything was overly clean. Nothing was left to the imagination.

My gaze flickered among the three doors. Nobody had said which one I should pick.

Can I go in any of them?

Sully popped out of the door directly across from me, her perpetual scowl on her face. “Are you two coming or not?”

“Alright, alright.”

Prick.

I followed Sully into the room. Several of the sleeping pods were propped open and ready already. But there was a fundamental difference between what I grew up in and these- icy mists overflowed from them, pooling on the floor before wafting away into nothing.

The walls of the spacecraft whooshed, the ventilation system drinking in air, preparing for space travel. More heavy footsteps somewhere else in the spacecraft. Someone laughed, a hearty guttural sound, and then another of Eponine’s screams.

The room began to spin. There were no windows, no way for me to reorient myself with Earth-

I will never see Earth again.

I took a deep breath and kneeled on the ground and closed my eyes. Sully sighed, probably from frustration, but she let me sit there for a few moments as the dizziness passed.

You chose this fate for yourself. You knew full well that you were trading away Earth’s riches for a life of servitude when you left Heavestone.

“Are you almost done? Because we’re done loading, and everybody’s waiting on you to go into your pod first so they can load themselves in afterwards.” She sighed. “Stupid Providences…”

I opened my eyes and yanked myself up. “Is everyone on Miralay as rude as you?”

Sully scoffed. “I’m not with Miralay. I’m a pilot for Alegria-”

“Let go of me, you whore-faced crocodile!”

Eponine!

He stumbled into the room. A security guard’s arms wrapped around his chest, grunting as he tried to pull Eponine back into the third stasis room. The boy locked eyes with me, baring his teeth.

This wasn’t the soft boy whose room I’d tumbled into my first day of being alive, who welcomed me in despite knowing full well what I was.

This was a feral animal loose from his cage, out of his element.

It’s not my fault. He shouldn’t have chased me here.

“Liv,” he snarled, struggling to get free. I took a few steps backwards, feeling the backs of my legs bump into the chilly edge of the stasis pod’s shell. “Don’t think this changes anything. I’m going to bring you back home one way or another. Even if it- it kills me.”

The security guard jerked him into the other room, earning a final yelp. Shouting and scuffling ensued, but it eventually died down as I heard a snap and a click.

“That was… pathetic,” Sully commented. She turned around, facing away from me. “Now you gotta strip and slide into the stasis pod.”

“...Why?”

“So you freeze properly!”

“Alright, alright.”

I slipped off my sweatshirt and pants and let them drop to the ground. I glanced around, making sure that nobody could see me, and then quickly slid off my underwear before I took a deep breath and tumbled into the pod.

What is this, Antarctica?

I closed the lid and settled onto the soft body pad, which molded perfectly to my body. Little blue particles flaked through the air, settling onto my skin, adhering, forming a kind of second skin that covered my whole body except for my hands and head.

I watched through the glass lid of the stasis pod as other crew members filtered into the room. I glanced away as they started to strip, instead focusing on the soft lights pulsating slowly in my pod. Blue and green alternating, just like they had been when I’d woken up.

“Are you ready to sleep now?” a computer voice asked, coming at me from all sides of the pod. I suppose “Are you ready to be frozen like a human popsicle?” would have been seen more as a threat.

“Yeah, I guess,” I whispered.

“Please lay back and close your eyes.”

I let my neck go limp and my head sink into the cushion right below it. A fierce winter breeze blew over me- the goosebumps on my limbs resisted at first, but then eventually the world let itself out the door like it was repulsed by me and didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.

I can’t blame it.

Darkness enveloped me. My limbs slowly went out of contact like they were friends I’d moved away from. My interface pinged at me- no signal.

No signal.

No signal.

Just like that, I’d been packed away like another piece of cargo, ready to slip through space and time just to make a trip in a day.

I want it to be over already. To be breathing in the recycled air and meeting the people I’ll be helping and to have other people’s wisdom and lives make up for the void in my own.

I want to see the kind of person I’ll become. The kind of person Eponine will become. I want to be loved and adored and respected.

Maybe the people of Miralay will respect me more because I chose to come back to them.

I want a lot of things.

I want Eponine to be happy.

I want to be happy.

I want the people of Miralay to be happy.

I want...

ACT 2

15

5/22/2147

LIV

My chest cracked open like a wine cellar on a special occasion, wood creaking and whining as it separated from its ancient binds. I was an icicle freshly severed from its roof, fallen to the frozen hard ground, shattered into a million pieces all screaming out for some recognition in the land of the living.

I’d already come back from death once. I didn’t want to repeat it, but I had to, I had to, I had to-

“Serlis!”

I couldn’t move my limbs. A flashing light behind the relative safety of my eyelids. I tried to squeeze away the light- out of sight, out of mind, right?

Nothing was in my mind.

“Serlis! Answer me!”

Searing hot coals touched my skin, burnt a hole straight through me like I were foam sliced open by a knife heated with a blowtorch. Split right in two.

Maybe I could send half of me back to Miralay with Eponine to appease my father and keep half of me here to take care of the Miralayans-

A sob escaped my lips, a pitiful sound. My eyes cracked open, and everything was foggy, worsened further by the tears threatening to freeze my gaze in place. A faint feminine shape above me- that Miss Rouge Petrie mentioned? Some other person?

An angel?

Maybe it’s my dead mom, and I’m at my funeral in a casket, and she’s weeping for me instead of the other way around, the way it should have been.

Stop that, Liv. Stay alive!

Hands, more than one person, gripped my stiff sides and lifted me out of the stasis pod, muttering all the while. They positioned my stiff body on a heated table, or maybe it was a bed without a sheets- I couldn’t feel anything beyond the constant frost. Someone called my name over and over and over. It didn’t do anything to abate the slow roasting seeping into my legs.

“Looks like hypothermia and slight tissue damage from the stasis pod caused by an incomplete thawing before revival. Her current mental state is to be expected. Serlis should fully recover by the time Eponine is out of surgery.”

Surgery?

I’m on Miralay!

I was too out of it to figure out the time or the difference between Earth’s gravity and the artificial gravity on Miralay, and my hearts were sluggish, but they stepped up a few beats then- I was on Miralay, and I was going to be given all the care I’d ever need.

Nobody would ever shove me into a sleeping pod to rot in obscurity ever again.

The lights above me changed. I was an artisan glass ornament, polished in the fire, fragile, immobile. But I could open my eyes- I was a newborn puppy seeing for the first time. Just the stone of the ceiling and the lights, passing above me too fast to comprehend.

I think- I think I’m leaving the spaceship? People are escorting me out, surrounding me on all sides.

I can’t be seen. Not like this. It’ll lower morale.

“Serlis...” The voice came from behind me, deep and unrecognizable. “My Providence.”

“S… Say it again,” I managed to croak out, my tongue immediately going back to its rigid state once the words left my mouth.

“My Providence? My Providence.”

My breathing quickened. At that rate, my chest would melt and turn into liquid and float the other discombobulated pieces of me away.

I didn’t care.

I’m the Providence. I’m his Providence. I’m everybody’s Providence.

“Our gift from our sister planet. Our loving mother and caretaker. I am so glad to have you and Eponine back on Miralay. Everyone here is. This is where you belong. This is where you will always belong.”

I had a purpose, and it filled me with a fire inside- but my limbs still hurt and my skin was still glass, so I could only manage a faint smile. My hearts had left my chest, escaping the weak atmosphere beyond Miralay’s underground complex of tunnels, and swelled up to the size of the planet, painting it more and more red with each disjointed heartbeat. Breathing life into the planet with each and every breath in my cracked open chest.

Damn, I really am out of it. Maybe it’s best that I go into the medical ward and defrost.

Defrost… Am I a Thanksgiving turkey, ready to be roasted and served on a silver platter? I mean, if the spacecraft was a freezer, and now I’m being carried off somewhere to defrost and be prepared to be stuffed with someone else’s substance…

But it’s for the good of Miralay, and I’ll still ultimately be me afterwards…

...Right?

16

5/22/2147

LIV

The pungent scent of lemon cleaner stung my nose as I sat inside my little partition in the medical ward. A single mattress with clean sheets and a pillow and a little sensor taped onto my right shoulder to monitor the oxygen in my blood and my heart rate and other vitals to make sure that my body wasn’t about to self-destruct from the stresses of interplanetary travel. Sheets hung from the ceiling in lieu of walls, just thin enough that I could see the faint shadow outline of the beds surrounding me. All of them were empty.

I sat cross-legged with my eyes closed, my sheets bunched up at the end of my mattress. My interface had automatically connected to Miralay’s network, but my access was restricted to a small portion of Miralay’s network resources, none of the internet that I’d enjoyed back on Earth accessible. Surely connecting to Earth’s resources wasn’t impossible- Miralay had to have some way to contact Alegria- but barely anything was accessible to me without the clearance I’d get when I’d become the Providence.

It wasn’t like the little I had access to was worth much with my lack of knowledge, anyways. A few announcements here and there, written in slang I’d never learned. Something red kept flickering in the corner of my vision- Unauthenticated; restricted mode active.

A hand brushed aside one of the sheets. My eyes fluttered open. A boy stepped into my partition, eyeing me with dead eyes. I glanced up at him- and my spine instantly froze.

He was tall and modestly built and would otherwise have been cute, but his demeanor was so… cold. If people had multiple masks for each of their emotions, the person standing before me wore a stone-faced one he got from a garage sale some years ago and nothing else.

“H-Hello?” I stuttered. “Who are you? Is it time-”

He shook his head and then knelt down on one knee. The golden badge affixed to his right shoulder tinkled.

“My Providence. My name is Mirt Tasselhound. I have trained my whole life to be your retainer, your closest confidante, your right-hand man. It is an honor to finally be able to fulfill my vows.”

“But I’m not the Providence yet!”

“It doesn’t matter. You will receive your memories and be coronated on Wednesday.” He sat down at the foot of my bed, his black uniform wrinkling. “You haven’t received any formal Miralayan education, I presume?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t gone to school a single day of my life. I mean, there was a school simulator I used to play on, but I didn’t learn much other than how to discretely blow up the building and break up internet relationships.”

Mirt groaned. “Your subordinates are going to have a field day over that one.”

Something in my neck twitched. “Why are you here… Mirt?”

Mirt pulled a slim black device from his pocket and fiddled with it for a few seconds. “I’ve given you permission to access the security cameras through your brain-machine interface. Check to make sure that it works before I have to leave and start preparing for Wednesday.”

“Fine...”

I closed my eyes again. A new menu appeared, unfolding itself instantly. There were hundreds of security cameras available for me to snoop around, all sortable by sector, purpose, resolution, latency.

So many options!

I might as well start with the basics.

How about this very room?

There were three cameras I could peer through, all of them designed to see though the curtains separating each person in the ward from each other, rendering the fabric as translucent gray shimmers.

It must have been a slow day for the medical crew- only six people were visible, including myself and Mirt.

Three people I presumed to be doctors from their white uniforms.

And a boy several partitions to my right with bandages over his eyes bearing soft little pinpricks of red stains and an IV in his right arm and a quarter-size bald spot on the back of his head where the hair had been shaved away to make for an incision site.

Gauze taped to the space in between his eyes and up a little.

Eponine?

But I thought it would only be-

I opened my eyes. Mirt was still there, staring at me intently, a single lock of black hair partially obscuring one of his eyes.

“Mirt?”

“Yes, my Providence?”

“What happened to Eponine?”

“Cosmetic surgery to restore his Providence dot and an attempted emulation of a Providence’s brain-machine interface since his had atrophied and withered away thanks to his… mutilation as a child. It won’t be as functional or natural to use as yours, but...” He grimaced. “We need to keep up appearances. Having a cripple as the Providence isn’t going to help stabilize Miralay.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Is there something wrong?”

“The people have been growing… restless thanks to your absence. They will have high expectations of you, my Providence. It will be up to you to ensure their happiness and well-being and prevent an uprising from forming.”

I closed my eyes again, returning to the camera feed. Eponine was too still to be lucid- I could just barely see the faint up-and-down of his chest as he slumbered on, still hopped up on the buckets of sedatives they must have used to keep him tranquil. He’d probably wake up confused and scared and very much like I was when I’d crawled out of the sleeping pod and tasted life. A directionless larvae from the egg.

I went back to the list of cameras. There were a few classrooms, but class had been canceled that day, and so none of the cameras were online. The memory shedding lobby was empty, and a plastic sign in the far right corner proclaimed that no recording or camera devices were allowed in the actual shedding chamber. A black curtain swayed gently from the breathing of the ventilation, probably covering up the entrance to the shedding chamber.

I guess I’ll find out in a few days.

I changed the scene. A sector pathway, countless pristine doors marking off residential quarters with numbers in the triple digits. Sector Three. All of the doors were closed. It was the same in Sectors Four and Five and Two and the other three.

There wasn’t a throne room. There was a meeting room with a long table and slightly more adorned chairs at one end for the Providences- one with a swirling red and orange back, and another a mirror reflection of its mate but in blue and green.

The half-sister planets.

“What’s the ceremony going to be like, Mirt?”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. There hasn’t been one in my lifetime.”

“Is anybody going to help me when I’m Providence? Or am I going to have to do everything alone?”

“There are seven officials that answer to you, one for each sector. Since you’re… forgive my bluntness, my Providence, but since you’re rather uneducated, these officials will attempt to be as autonomous as possible but gradually cede power back to you. They will take care of the petty day-to-day affairs of managing five thousand people, but ultimately Alegria’s laws for Miralay say you can always intervene.”

I can always intervene.

But there are set rules somewhere, I’m sure. Like, I can’t just have anybody murdered on a whim, could I? Executed for treason?

Could I be executed for treason if I did something that the officials didn’t like? Do they even have that authority? And what about Eponine? Will he be given a grace period to shape up his behavior, or is he going to be jailed at first offense?

I don’t… I don’t know anything trustworthy about Miralay. About the Providence’s duties, about what memory shedding entails, about the culture I’ll have to mold myself into.

About myself.

But I have all the stories I read during my purgatory- of birth permits and mistakes, of kids illicitly born to parents without a birth permit who had to hide their pregnancies for nine months and then were busted when they tried to smuggle the babies off to Earth or abandoned in a forgotten corner somewhere and mistakenly shipped off to Earth. Of people who refused to give up their memories to shedding and were forcibly strapped down and gagged, of people who refused to receive someone else’s memories and station in life and resisted to the point of suicide.

How many of those stories are true?

I opened my eyes.

“Mirt?”

“Yes, my Providence?”

“Can you make me a promise?”

“What is it?”

“That once I become the Providence, that you’ll help me to do what’s best for Miralay. And that you’ll support me. Even if it means that I have to commit treason to make things better.”

Mirt’s eyebrows went up slightly, but he closed his eyes and drew an X over his heart. “As long as it’s for Miralay’s benefit, you have my unwavering loyalty.”

My throat choked up. I couldn’t force any other words out, so I softly whispered, “Thank you.”

I patted the top of his head- the corner of his lips twitched; he tolerated it, but just barely, because he stood up again right after I retreated my hand. I closed my eyes and switched to a different feed- the loading bay in Miralay, positioned countless miles above our heads at that very moment. Just small enough for a few ships like the one I came in to dock; nothing hulking huge- but then again, it wasn’t like there were dozens of alien civilizations we would have needed to cater to. Just shipments from Earth to Miralay and back again.

I wish Eponine could have been a pilot instead of the Providence. That would have been incredibly more helpful.

But then… I’d have to learn to work around someone who might not be as loyal to Miralay as me. Who might be too loyal and value his position over the people.

I’ll do my best.

17

5/23/2147

LIV

“Liv, I... I...”

“I love you too, Eponine.”

“No! I can't be in love with you! I have Alistair- my boyfriend-”

“Alistair? I don't know who that is. But we're both teenagers. We're both figuring out our sexualities.”

“I'm not-”

“It's okay to outgrow your previous feelings for someone. And besides, since we're the Providences... Eventually we're going to have to marry and start a family. I guess it'll be easier if we both love-”

“My Providence.”

I jolted awake, startled. Mirt was standing in the partition opening.

“Good. You’re awake. I need to show you something important.”

“What is it?”

Mirt frowned. “Classified information. You need to see it first-hand.”

I shivered, but I slid off my bed anyway, ruffling the sheets as I did so. One of Mirt’s fingers flew to his lips, shushing me. I pulled on the slippers someone had left beside my bed the previous night as a welcome present and followed him out of the partition, out of the room-

A dizzying array of hallways met me, opening from every direction possible.

Mirt put a hand on my shoulder to stop my swaying. My hospital gown crinkled under his fingers. Everything was dizzying, my body far lighter than it should have been even with the artificial gravity, the planet spinning at a different velocity and threatening to throw me off.

“Before every voyage back to Earth,” Mirt said as he guided me down the rightmost corridor, “Alegria’s supply ship pilots have to spend a day in a gym set up in a specialized room chambered off from the rest of Miralay. They strengthen their muscles and reacclimate themselves to Earth’s gravity.” His grip on my shoulder increased. We took a left turn, which led to a spiral staircase I couldn’t see the bottom of. “Miralayans are not meant to live on Earth. Their… biological functions have deviated too far in the mere century and a half since we split to survive for extended periods outside Mars.”

I wanted to tell him about Heavestone just to prove him wrong. Hidden-away Heavestone, suburban angels and soccer moms alike living in peace, removed from the world around it except for when working their undocumented jobs or getting supplies to supplement their gardens.

Cash money for a trash existence.

I wanted to tell him about the people I ran away from, the people Eponine loved so much. They hadn’t gone through that muscle-building regime, and they'd turned out happy.

Happy in spite of leaving Miralay?

Or because of it?

Parents do what they think is best for their children. My parents and Eponine’s left to keep us from being Providences. Whatever the risks, they thought that bringing us to Earth would have been better than staying here.

I was living proof that Mirt was wrong.

But I wasn’t about to tell him that to his face.

We reached the end of the spiral staircase. I didn’t feel dizzy anymore- at least, not until I looked up and saw how far we’d walked in my reverie.

Mirt nudged me away from the staircase and through a double set of doors. The lights shifted from fluorescent white to a dim red.

I instinctively took a deep breath. There were countless racks in front of me, outfitted with tanks spinning slowly like a rotisserie met an aquarium the size of two adults laid out end-to-end. Mirt nudged me closer, close enough that I could just barely make out my reflection in the glass. Inside each tank were a myriad of tiny little grapes, all tethered to a mucus-like branch stretched out from one end of the tank to the other. They swayed gently like a lazy ocean current was unsure whether or not it wanted to blow over them.

Maybe they’re fish eggs?

“Is this how Miralay grows food?” I glanced at Mirt, who was hovering behind me. “This is… inefficient. How do you deal with the lack of air? How do they get nutrients? How-”

Mirt shook his head. “Look again.”

I took a second look, leaning close enough to the glass that my breath left fog. The grapes were translucent, each housing a little white streak inside, some blobbier than others.

“I don’t get it. What am I supposed to be looking at?”

Mirt took my shoulder and directed me to the next rack. I took a look- the white things were more swollen but still unrecognizable.

Grape cancer?

Some new kind of food that only grew on Miralay?

I peered at Mirt, waiting for some kind of explanation, but he gave none, just stared back. He pointed to the next rack, and I moved to gawk at that one instead. And the next rack, and the one after that, the grapes progressively more and more misshapen until I was looking at sacs the size of my thumb and there were too many coincidental lumps inside each one to be anything else.

I was staring at an unborn Miralayan child in gestation.

My lip curled. My stomach churned. Repulsed, and yet unable to look away.

Mirt cleared his throat. “You and Eponine were never in these. The Providences always stay in their own mother’s wombs. They can detect a Providence as early as a month after conception. That’s when all the other babies are taken and placed here to grow.”

I shivered. “But why-”

“Thanks to this system, parents can work without having to worry about their child being injured in a workplace accident or dying thanks to a maternal illness or a miscarriage. Every child gets the nutrients they need. Every child gets an equal footing in life, and they get assigned a memory line at birth, and they spend their formative years learning how to live up to it, and then they receive their memories and work until they die and pass off their lives to someone else. That’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it will always be.”

I slipped to my knees. The racks continued to rotate above my head, taunting me with future generations. All the articles I found in my two-week obsession with birth as a twelve-year-old resurfaced, gasping for air. Babies bond better with their mothers if they have a natural birth, they all screamed as they splashed around.

How can you bond with a mother who your assigned memories say isn’t your mother?

How can you bond with a mother when the very concept brings up six or seven people who gave birth to people who were just your vessels?

Which one is the real mother? The long-dead one who gave birth to the first person? Or the one who contributed an egg and nothing else?

How are you supposed to tell?

“My Providence, are you alright?”

Tears streamed down my face. I crumpled on the ground, curling up, dissolving into the ugliest of sobs, unfit for a Providence.

I could have had that connection! I was the only one who could have had that connection, of all the unborn children here! And... And you had to go and die, Mother!

And what have I done to honor your death? Spat on your grave!

Dead Miralayans didn’t have graves. Dead Miralayans were harvested for implantable organs after their memories were shed and then were cremated in special chambers that contributed to the electricity supply. Miralayans helped the colony to the very end.

It shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Miralay didn’t have the resources to deal with severe birth defects or prenatal conditions, and scheduling pregnancies would have been all but impossible. It was the most efficient way to ensure that babies kept churning out exactly on time. The most efficient way to stabilize the population at five thousand. It was nothing the boards hadn’t speculated about already, but…

But…

I hadn’t expected it to be true.

“My Providence, I understand your distress. But this is the way Miralay has been from the beginning. Time has proven this to be the best way. Natural birth is inefficient and dangerous for most Miralayan lifestyles. The lack of a bond helps otherwise emotionally brittle children who haven’t yet received their memories to move past the shedding of their parents. Miralayans don’t have time to cry. They have to act.”

I have to act.

Get up, Liv. There is no reason this should bother you so much.

I stumbled to my feet, steadying myself on one of the support beams of the rack next to me.

“Please forgive me, Mirt. I… I shouldn’t have had such an outburst. I’m tired. I need some time to process all… this.”

“Of course, my Providence. But please remember, it is healthy to express your emotions once in a while.”

Isn't that ironic, coming from you.

He led me back to my partition, fielding off the occasional curious person who passed by. Mirt left right away, and I curled up on the bed and closed my eyes like one of the fetuses growing in the darkness.

18

5/24/2147

LIV

I sat on a stool in the memory shedding chamber and patiently waited for the soon-to-be-dead and decrepit Providence to make her way down. By the time she stumbled into the chamber, her skin had deepened to a dark red, wrinkles over every inch of exposed skin.

A living facsimile of Mars.

Mirt helped her regain her balance and plop herself onto a stool, where she gave me an awkward smile, several teeth missing.

“Good morning, young Providence.”

“Good morning,” I mumbled back, averting my eyes. She looked like someone’s grandma abandoned in a senior home for several years with only old TV shows to accompany her. Or maybe a cooty old witch straight out of a Halloween book.

Stars above, I won’t look like that when I’m ready for shedding, will I?

I shuddered. Mirt went to the back of the chamber and opened a panel and retrieved two packets of sterile white circular bandages with minute circuitry exposed.

Nodes.

The woman, knowing what was about to happen, held out her arms and let Mirt begin sticking them in seemingly random places on her body.

My chest constricted.

Where is Eponine right now? Did he already get his memories? Is he being swarmed by makeup artists and dressers trying to mold him into some illusion of royalty?

An image popped into my head- Eponine swarmed by makeup brushes, desperately batting them away. I let myself giggle before I shook my head and focused on the people beside me- the former Providence had at least five nodes on each of her limbs, Mirt working quickly and methodically. Peel, stick. Peel, stick. Peel stick. One of the nodes covered her Providence dot. Another one hugged her collarbone.

Mirt left her and came over to me. He ripped open a new packet of nodes and took one out.

“Hold still. This shouldn’t hurt.”

Mirt brushed his fingers over my right forearm. The node made a little jolt when it came into contact with my skin- I twitched. Little butterfly kisses all over my body, each one followed by a little shock.

Maybe I’m actually a robot and I’m about to be electrocuted to death?

Mirt pulled away from me and turned to the both of us. “Leave your stools when you are ready. The doors will open automatically.”

He bowed to both of us and then left. The curtains fluttered behind him.

The elderly Providence cleared her throat. “Serlis? That’s your name, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, my eyes still focused somewhere other than her sagging face.

“Why did you come back after all this time? Your parents sacrificed so much.”

My throat was glued shut, but it was the weak glue from an envelope licked shut with a dry tongue, and it came apart with little resistance.

“I... wanted to fix Miralay.”

“You can’t fix something that was never whole to begin with. Unless you know something I don’t?”

“I- I heard-”

The woman scrunched her face, becoming nothing but a nose for a few seconds before she peered at me with big black eyes. “Serlis. Look at me.”

“I...”

“Please, my child.”

“I’m not your child-”

“I know. Your mother was a good friend of mine.”

My breath caught in my throat. “You- You’re not serious.”

She grinned and continued. “She was so excited when she learned that she was pregnant with you. Not so excited to learn that you carried the Providence mutation, though. She was a part of an uprising when you were an infant, rallying for the abolishing of the Providence inheritance line and for leadership roles to be elected instead of hereditary.”

I snorted. “And where would that have led? Soon, people would want to have different jobs. They would want to breed as they chose and throw the population into overdrive. And then Miralay would suffer through famine and asphyxiation. Both things I aim to prevent.” I stood up. “I want to be the best Providence there ever was.”

The woman’s face fell. “Serlis-”

I held a hand out. “Don’t. I’m not my mother, and I’m not human. I’m Miralayan, and so is everybody else here.” I let my hand drop. “When I step out of this room with my memories and take on the uniform and title, five thousand people will be dependent on me for their food, for their livelihoods, for their lives. I’ll listen to the people, alright. But I spent fifteen years of my life trawling through history, and I’ll be damned if I let that chaos replicate here when we’ve got so much more at stake.”

“You- You spit on your own mother’s grave!”

My eyes flared. “I don’t see how letting people get killed due to a neglectful government desecrates her grave in the slightest. She struggled for Miralay's death- I fight for its life. Now give me your memories and let’s get this over with.”

The witch closed her eyes, and then she whispered, “The space between where you were born. Where the sound of shattering will rend the air forevermore. Go there sometime. You’ll know when.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have time for this.”

The woman stood up, and two body-sized metal panels slid out of the walls behind us. Two alcoves, each with what looked like a repurposed electric chair.

She took her seat. I took mine. My heart thumped louder than my footsteps, trying to drill its way out of my chest. My head felt light.

The ventilation system must be malfunctioning here. Or maybe it’s on purpose to induce confusion and make the memory transfer easier?

I have to get that fixed. That’s my job. I’m the Providence.

I’m the Providence.

I’m the Providence!

The straps on the chairs came to life and snaked around and bound down my legs and arms and my chest, presumably so I wouldn’t thrash around when the memories came. The metal panels slid shut, thrusting me and the witch into our own separate darknesses.

A whirring sound from above. A plastic helmet of sorts descended and encapsulated my head. Solid foam grew from the neck hole, securing it in place on my neck. A shock on my elbow- a jolt on my chest- a whooshing sound in the helmet- and then I was a puppet, a marionette tugged around on invisible strings, wearing faces that weren’t my own, acting out moments of my life- no, of somebody else’s life.

A birthday party of a six-year-old girl, blowing out simulated candles and pretending that the fire was anything but a tiny flickering lightbulb requisitioned for that very occasion. Barely any presents to be had, but there was a scarf, a black-and-gold scarf that the third Providence adored until her memory shedding day and passed down to her own non-Providence daughter.

A stroll on the surface of Mars in two helmets and skin-tight suits to protect from the thin atmosphere. Hand-in-hand, the fifth Providences head-over-heels in love with each other. A shooting star falling into orbit, an asteroid in denial, smashing into the ground on the far horizon and leaving a green streak of dust behind it in the sky.

A liaison in the lowest levels of Miralay, down by the embryo chambers and water purifiers and hydroponic farms. The second Providence having an affair with one of the common citizens, passion fueled by knowledge of their encounter being illicit. A barely-there kiss on the neck, a caress of the cheek, empty promises of the future slipping in between them.

I was me again. Images of Miralay’s many corridors and sectors flooded across my vision, six different movie screens all playing and shouting for attention at the same time, all at double speed, triple, quadruple, one hundred times faster over and over and over again. Another birthday. A forced, loveless romance. A plague. A premature death of a friend, a child, a parent.

Heartlessly signing away several dissidents to death row without a thought, cornering the victims down to when they were alone and cutting them out of history as cleanly as if their memory lines had never existed.

Adult pleasures forced. Childish pleasures ripped away. Speeches. Nights spent strained to make a difficult decision, confused over which option would bring about the greatest good for the colony of Miralay.

“My Providence!”

There were always dissidents. There would always be dissidents, people unhappy with the cards they were dealt in life, seeking to destroy the memory servers or the Providences or some combination of the two, always managing to endanger their fellow Miralayans instead. The Providences always saved their people from disaster, promising that they’d work twice as hard next time to ensure that another espionage never happened again.

They always ended up forgetting their promises.

“My Providence!”

The faces and voices were always changing.

“My Providence!”

But Miralay never did.

“My Providence!”

The world sharply fell away from me- and my breath rattled as the foam slid away and Mirt yanked off the helmet. My throat burned. The rest of my body was jelly, pliable, limp as Mirt ripped off the spent nodes and loosened the straps. The light- it seared my retinas like a thousand grills, like I’d died and gone to a fictional barbecue heaven.

The Providence across the room was slumped over in her chair, her eyes sunken and vacant.

Dead.

Mirt helped me into a wheelchair. My limbs did nothing to resist him as he wheeled me out of the room and down a special ramp towards whatever preparation room I was headed to next. I was undergoing a temporary condition, he explained. Intense exhaustion happened to everybody that received memories. I’d be okay by the time I’d be presented to the public.

My head lolled backwards, caught by the headrest. My eyes slid shut, finding comfort in the dirty red of the back of my eyelids.

I had my memories.

I had the complete and hopefully unadulterated record of everything every Providence up to then had ever done, had ever experienced. I knew the corridors we traveled through like the back of my hand.

But I was still Serlis.

I was still Living Wasteland.

I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or not.

19

5/24/2147

LIV

I could hear the dull roar of the Miralayans gathering in the public square through the walls of the dressing room. Two stylists hovered around me like moths to a flame.

“You’ve got to put it in braids like the second!”

The other tugged on my hair as she tightened the braid her fingers were tangled in. I bit back a yelp.

“No, you’ve got to curl it into ringlets and let her hair fall gently off her shoulders like the fourth in her youth. I can imagine her now… So regal. So gently flowing…”

“We don’t have time to get the hot curlers working! We’ve got to get her out there in five minutes!”

The door flew open. Mirt stepped in, just managing to keep his arms around a bulky metallic box. He set it down on the ground beside my stool with a thump, almost tripping over one of the stylists. She crouched down and flipped the lid open, contents outside of my peripheral vision, and then started hooting. The hair-messer retreated from me and went over to join in the gawking.

A half-made braid, quickly unraveling, flopped over my shoulder as I turned to them.

“What are you-”

Mirt ducked out of the room. The two stylists stood up in unison. Draped over their arms was a simple blue cape. Spilling out of the box was what looked like the top half of a faded plain white dress and a green frilled vest.

A few memories surfaced. The cape catching on a chair’s edge and knocking over an official during a meeting. The dress’s skirt whooshing out as a more heavy-footed Providence whirled around with a dance partner underneath a starry night projected onto the ceiling. A few tears made here and there and promptly mended before the public could notice. Simple and perfect and yet far more extravagant than the plain blue workclothes of the Miralayan civilians.

I didn’t wait for them to command me as I stood up and stretched my arms out. The stylists encircled me again, and I allowed them to strip me down to my underwear and slide the clothes onto me. Although the dress wasn’t itchy, it certainly wasn’t soft, and the same could be said about the vest. The cape came on with two golden clasps, snapping into place. A little silver tassel hung next to one of the clips. It was all a little too big for my relatively petite frame, and the stylists noticed, because the hair-messer clucked her tongue and promptly got her fingers tangled in my hair again.

The other stylist checked her watch. “Two minutes left!”

The hair-messer pulled away. “I can’t do anything in two minutes!”

“That’s not my fault!”

The hair-messer undid my half-done braid and gave my hair one last stroke- and then, as a last-minute thought, reached into her pocket and pulled out a jeweled crescent moon barrette and pinned it into my hair.

My eyebrows wrinkled, confused. “The moon?”

“The moon reflects light to Earth during the night,” she explained. “We are in an awfully dark night right now, my Providence. And you will be the bright moon to light our way home safe.”

She turned me to face her partner. “Do you think she’s presentable? I heard the other team had a doozy of a time trying to get him into his uniform.”

Stars above, Eponine, what did you do?

“She looks alright,” the other stylist said, patting my shoulder. “Not stunning, but certainly not the ugliest Providence we’ve ever had.”

“Well, if you’d bothered to use any makeup-”

I closed my eyes and tried to pull up memories of the other Providences looking in mirrors for comparison- but all their faces were blank, a black void.

It’s not hard to compete with nothing.

Mirt entered the room again- and immediately froze in the doorway, his eyes fixated on me. The words “my Providence” just barely escaped his mouth in a squeak. He reached out, and I gave him my hand, and he led me out of the styling room and helped me slip backstage without making a single sound.

The lights were dim. A curved and rumpled and sectioned black curtain hanging from the wide ceiling separated us from the gaze of five thousand Miralayans.

“Mirt?” I whispered. “Will anyone from Earth be watching?”

Mirt leaned in close, close enough that I could smell the mint in his breath. “Only the few employees at Alegria with knowledge of Miralay, and there will be quite a lag on the video stream. The farther away Mars is from Earth, the longer it’ll take to establish a secure connection to Earth’s internet, let alone transmit all that data without losing a single bit.” Mirt paused. “Don’t bother trying to contact home. All internet usage is monitored by the officials.”

A quite disheveled person- a retainer, seeing as both she and Mirt had the same golden badge on their right shoulders- stumbled over to us. She bent over, panting.

“My stars, Mirt, tell me that her Providence hasn’t been such an uncultured devil as- as-”

Mirt pulled away from me, his face stony. “What’s the issue, Noi?”

Noi slapped her tangled and sweaty hair out of her eyes. “We’ve had to have two guards accompany us at all times ‘cause he keeps trying to run off somewhere- I don’t know why, because all guards are still on active duty even though it’s the coronation day and the loading dock’s completely empty. He keeps blathering on about how he never consented to be Providence and how much he hates Miralay.” Noi paused. “You think we can have him incarcerated and interred for counseling without the people getting upset, or are we gonna have to go the erasure route?”

Erasure route?

Eponine… please don’t do this; please stay sane-

Mirt shook his head. “The people will go along with anything as long as we get at least one Providence on the throne.” He turned to me. “Are you ready?”

“I want you to promise me one thing first.”

Mirt closed his eyes in lieu of a sigh. “Yes, my Providence?”

“Promise me that you won’t hurt Eponine.”

Mirt stayed silent for a few seconds, and then he shook his head. “We can’t promise anything. Now come with me. We’ve wasted enough time.”

Mirt grabbed my shoulder with a gruff and firm grip and, without saying a single word, thrust aside the opening in the black curtain. We stepped forward into the public eye. The lights were blinding- I covered my eyes before someone adjusted them to a tolerable level.

The crowd stood up, silent, every single eye on me.

Mirt left me at center stage and cleared his throat before he stepped forward.

“Welcome, my fellow Miralayans,” his voice boomed. “My name is Mirt Talen, and today I am taking up the role of Retainer of our seventh Providence, Serlis Greenland.”

Mirt looked over his shoulder and gestured for me to stand at his left. I did, and with every step closer I took, the applause grew louder and louder until I could have sworn that Mars had thunderstorms roiling miles above us on the surface.

Mirt waved his hand, cutting off the applause. One person in the back of the audience prostrated themselves. Someone whooped.

The black curtains fluttered again, and a girl with long black hair done up in two buns stepped out and took up her position at Mirt’s right side. The audience went absolutely bananas until she held up a slender hand, freezing them in place instantly.

“My people,” she spoke. “It has been my honor to serve you as second-in-command of Miralay for the past two years, serving as a supplement to the infinite wisdom of our now-late Providences. It is my pleasure to bind our next leaders in...” She glanced around her and then leaned in close to Mirt’s ear, whispering, “Where the hell is Eponine?”

“I don’t know, Amelia,” Mirt retorted, also whispering. “He’s not my problem.”

Amelia groaned and then turned back to the audience. “It seems his Providence is having a bit of difficulty getting here. In the meantime, I will commence the endowment ceremony and hope that he bothers to show up for his people.”

Amelia went to the center of the stage and tapped her foot three times. She turned to face the audience and closed her eyes. Mirt guided me to the side of the stage as a circle filled with a forest of twisting and turning lines lit up under Amelia’s feet. Seven glowing red tendrils of light shot out of the borders, twisting and turning around her, tugging at her hair and unraveling her buns and swaying her loose hair every which way as they dove and twisted in the air.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Mirt.

Mirt ignored me, his eyes fixated on Amelia. She held her arms out straight in front of her, and one of the tendrils lazily floated over to her palms. It wrapped itself once around both of her wrists and then traveled over to me, where it wrapped itself around my right wrist and tugged me forward towards Amelia.

“Serlis Greenland,” a voice boomed from all directions. “Do you accept your duty to defend Miralay from destructive forces, to cultivate all life within it, and to ensure the life, liberty, and happiness of all its inhabitants?”

Liberty? That seems like an odd thing for such a rigid regime to be asking me to uphold.

“I- I do,” I stuttered.

“You are now hereby bound to the autocontrol system of Miralay,” the voice said. “If you fail in your duties and it fails due to outside interference, you shall fall as well.”

But what if Eponine thinks bringing me home entails destroying Miralay in the process?

I can’t leave here, and apparently he can’t go back home…

The tendrils shrunk away from me. “I sense your partner nearby. I shall bind him as well...”

The black curtains fluttered again. The other retainer, Noi, appeared-

“No! You can’t make me be the Providence!”

A murmur rushed through the crowd. Noi dragged a boy clad in red and orange tones onto the stage. A shrill noise escaped his mouth as he feebly pounded away at his retainer’s hands, trying to kick her away, but all in vain.

“Eponine, come on,” Noi hissed. “You have to do this. It’s part of becoming Providence.”

Eponine dug his fingernails into Noi’s wrist. She yelped and let go of him- and he caught sight of Amelia standing still, the tendrils still floating around her.

Gods, he's going to-

"Amelia!" I yelled, rushing over as Eponine lunged for her-

He collided with her. Amelia yelped, and the two of them tumbled down to the ground. The circle on the ground immediately faded away, the tendrils shrinking and fizzling out. He pushed himself off of her and stood up, facing the crowd.

Everyone in the audience watched me bolt over to Eponine.

Everyone in the audience watched him clobber me in the face, watched me collide face-first with the floor, caught completely off-guard.

My head turned into one giant beating heart, spikes of pain ebbing and flowing with every single thump, thump, thump. Something was broken. I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding. I couldn’t see anything because I was shades of red all over just like Eponine’s clothes.

I was the Earth he couldn’t go back to, and he was the Mars I gave up a sheltered and peaceful life to save.

“You!” he yelled to the audience. “All of you! I was happy on Earth! Our parents risked their lives hoping that we’d never have to be standing on this stage, that we’d never have to be forced into this inverted slavery! Her mother died so that she’d have the chance to live sixty, seventy, maybe even eighty years free! You killed her! Doesn’t that make you feel something?”

The audience began to murmur again.

“She wants to be your Providence. She believes that there’s something fixable in the whole lot of you, in this blasted goddamn colony. If she wants to throw her life away chasing a fantasy, then let her. But I refuse to be shoehorned into a role I never wanted.” He paused. “I’m not the Providence. I never had a dot. This-” I assumed he was pointing to his forehead- “This is fake. Your cabal of tyrants you call a government forced the surgeons to implant this. Your real Providence is still running out there, still at large.”

Wouldn’t the memory-shedding machine have refused to give him the memories if he hadn’t actually been the Providence?

“You have two options, people of Miralay. Either you kill me right here and now and deal with the chaos of only having one Providence, or I will disappear and do everything possible to destroy any systems preventing me from attaining liberty. I will either live free in a system of my own choosing on Earth or I will die trying.”

A scuffling. I pulled myself up as Eponine gave me one final goodbye kick in the ribs and disappeared backstage. Nobody that I could see went after him. The guards would get him eventually, I thought.

But the crowd was stirring.

Mirt rushed over to my side. Amelia got up and brushed her clothes out and turned to the audience.

“Do not be alarmed. We have a second-in-command- me- for emergencies such as these. Miralay will continue operating as normal, and Eponine Westal will be apprehended before the day is out. Please go back to your living quarters and await further instruction.”

Mirt scooped me up in his arms and carried me backstage, where at least three guards had gathered to escort me to my private quarters. There was… a child’s wagon of some sort, reinforced to comfortably ferry around an adult-sized person.

“I’m not a baby!” I protested. “I’m fine… I mean, I feel sore, but I can still walk-” I twisted my way out of Mirt’s arms. My legs were shaky, but I could still stand.

“My Providence.” The first of the guards bowed. “This is a serious security concern. Eponine seems to have… vanished. Right into thin air. He could be anywhere. We’re about to call a state of emergency and a lockdown. We don’t have time to risk you losing your balance at a critical moment.”

I sighed and got into the wagon and buckled myself in so that I wouldn’t fall out. Mirt talked to one of the guards for a few seconds in highly guarded whispers, and then the three guards armed with bulletproof vests and long-range stun guns took off, the first one pulling me behind her and the other two flanking me.

The corridors flashed by too quickly for comfort, and at every turn, I thought I saw Eponine- but it was all a sham, and I arrived safely in my private quarters, a king-size bed welcoming me with clean sheets and my open arms.

20

5/24/2147

EPONINE

Liv… Liv… Liv…

That ceremony’s got to be a big load of crap. If the autocontrol system were shut down and destroyed, how could it kill Liv as well? Is it dependent… no, because if it worked just as well without her, then there would be no need to require her.

Is it the other way around, or-

And what about me? Am I bound to it as well? Because I didn’t accept the oath. Or could the autocontrol system kill me anyways? And what kind of vulnerability is that? Yes, let’s give outside attackers and potential rogues the ability to remotely kill the leaders of a remote colony.

Complete and utter genius.

Don’t the other Miralayans have interfaces as well?

“Wake up already! I’m sick of hovering over you. I didn’t join the Sons of Eponine or whatever just to be dabbing washcloths on people’s foreheads all day.”

I opened my eyes. A dim room met me, several electric candle lights flickering on top of filing cabinets. I was on a mattress on the concrete floor. There was a girl kneeling beside me, her thin eyebrows drawn sharply together, long green hair drawn into two pigtails and pinned back so they wouldn’t tickle me.

The girl from Alegria’s spaceship?

What was her name again?

I sat up, rubbing my head. The Providence dot implanted there only a few days ago was still sore.

“Sully?”

“Oh, good, you remember me.” She rolled her eyes and stood up. “I’ve got responsibilities to take care of. I’ll let Madame Oberus deal with you.”

Sully left the room, humphing as she shut the door and locked it from the outside. I stayed and waited, rubbing my limbs to try to restore some semblance of circulation. The ventilation system was much more audible here than in all the other parts of Miralay I’d been dragged around- air rushed through the walls at breakneck speed, a contained hurricane bringing life instead of destroying it.

I’d been intercepted by shadows in one of the corridors somewhere on my way to the bottom-most level that Miralay’s staircase could take me to. The memory servers had to have been somewhere around there, I’d rationalized, and so I’d gone to blow them up as a distraction and a middle-finger of sorts to Liv.

I’d given up on trying to save her from her own destruction. Escaping with my own life would be difficult enough.

But I had a pendant, and that made me valuable to whoever had tackled me down in an empty hallway and saved me from the Miralayan guards right on my tail.

An old coot of a hunchbacked woman, about sixty or seventy, unlocked the door and waddled inside. A kid who could have been Liv’s sibling took up his position in the doorway, eyeing me with dead glass eyes overshadowed by his hat.

The woman coughed, bringing my attention back to her. She wore a purple scarf wrapped around her sagging neck and a patchwork jacket covering up her stretched and faded Miralayan plainclothes. Greasy black hair tumbled down her shoulders. Her nose was far too big for the rest of her face. A purple bandanna was tied over her head, covering her forehead.

Funny. I didn’t know Miralay had fortune tellers.

“So you’re the new Providence,” the Madame crooned, taking a seat on top of one of the filing cabinets, moving the flickering candle to the floor. The shadows cast an ominous shadow on her face. “It feels like forever since I last witnessed a ceremony that explosive. The little rant at the end was quite the touch.” She frowned, voice changing like a reprimanding grandma. “You were being serious, weren’t you?”

“Is this some sort of test?”

Yeah, because she’s going to answer that honestly.

She shook her head. “I could ask you the same thing. You could have planned your little outburst as a means to get our trust, and we could all be in danger right now. But the security feeds show a different story-”

“Where am I?” I interrupted, standing up. “I know this is some sort of a rebel establishment. I’ve read so many books- this can’t be anything else. What do you want from me? Why am I still alive?”

“Eponine...” The Madame sighed, standing up on her two feet, strained from the extra weight on her bones. “There’s no need to be so confrontative. We’re within a loop of time. Neither Serlis nor Amelia nor any other Miralayan authority will ever be able to get in here by their own power. Now listen to me…

“The Providences have tremendous power over Miralay, but ultimately all they do is influence the autocontrol system. Alegria programmed it to handle assigning memory lines, monitoring the colony’s supplies and the children in gestation, and controlling the climate. Thankfully, at least for the citizens it recognizes… the judgment of the Providences hasn’t gone against what the autocontrol system had already deemed right.

“The Providences are unnecessary if a computer system is going to command all of our lives anyways. It doesn’t feel right for Alegria to go to all the trouble of programming a ‘benevolent’ overlord and then give a few Miralayans control over others and trap us here with no option of moving somewhere else to escape any potential tyranny.

“And tyranny both of those systems are, because in their eyes, illegitimate children are a threat. Any kind of anomaly that could threaten the sanctity of their precious memory lines is a threat. So we’ve been waiting out here, squirreling away rations to survive and training the stronger of us to take down the Providences and helping the weaker of us and any others who don’t want to put up with such a broken system to escape to Heavestone.”

I perked up. “You know about Heavestone?”

“We founded it. We created the loop of time.”

“How does that work, anyways?”

The Madame smirked and tapped her chin. “That’s a story for later.” I slumped in disappointment. “But anyways, we’ve failed every time we’ve tried to take out the Providences. The autocontrol system always intervenes and then strengthens its defenses. And then the poor kids who just wanted freedom go into the prisons to rot away or have their memories wiped and are put back into the system. And everybody else is forced to live a half-life, forced to choose between bodily integrity and purpose.”

Is she trying to guilt-trip me?

If only I had Ignis here to help me navigate all this political mumbo-jumbo…

“But what do you want?”

I paused for a moment, thinking carefully so she wouldn’t send me off to be executed or whatever the punishment would have been.

“I want to go back to Heavestone. But I can’t go back without Liv- I mean, Serlis. Her father… I was kicked out. I won’t be let back in without her.”

“I see.” The Madame closed her eyes. “You know your death would be incredibly valuable to us-”

Shock ran though my veins. “I’m not-”

“-since it would weaken the other Providence, not only emotionally, but tactically as well. But your parents were my comrades and two of my closest friends, and I would never be able to live with myself if I were to kill their son, even if it would bring about Miralay’s demise all the quicker.”

I’m not the Providence. Liv couldn’t give less of a damn about me. Her damns have hit rock-bottom.

“So… what do you want me to do?”

“Eponine, look into my eyes.” She waited until she had me ensnared in a stare. “The rumors say your partner is grossly inexperienced, correct?”

“...She’s not my partner. But yes.”

“We’re going to strike Miralay where it hurts while they’re still scrambling to accommodate for her ignorance. You are going to help us kidnap Serlis and take down the memory server. And in exchange, we’ll hook you up with a ride back to Heavestone with your pretty friend.”

“Are you serious?”

The Madame reached up to her bandanna and lifted it up a few centimeters, revealing a prominent Providence dot. “Cross my heart.”

How does she have a dot? Memory shedding kills people, and I have all of my memories, and none of the female Providences escaped…

Maybe Alegria makes clones? But no, she doesn’t look like any of the people I remember… But then again, she’s super old, so of course she wouldn’t resemble anyone.

“How can I trust you?”

She winked. “Because we both want to see a free Miralay-”

“Are you done?” Sully appeared and pushed aside the guard, who gave her a snide look, and poked her head into the room. She was just as scowly as when she’d left. “Apparently I’ve got to show you to the sleeping area now. We saved a bottom bunk just for you, your Providenceness.”

I followed Sully to the end of the hallway and into the room on the right. There were seven bunk beds on each side of the long room. Only a couple of them were occupied at that moment, and the few vacant ones were messy and unmade- with the exception of the one at the way back of the room, which didn’t have any sheets to begin with. Everyone already in the room turned their eyes to me, instantly on edge, a sentiment I returned.

“Go on.” Sully nudged me forward. “Take it. Go to sleep. You’ll need all the energy you can get when we go patrolling in the morning.”

I whirled around. “I haven’t eaten or-”

“Tough luck, buddy. Next feeding’s tomorrow at eight AM sharp. Maybe you should set an alarm in that fancy interface of yours.”

Hell, I don’t even know how to turn it on. Not that I’ve had time to figure it out.

Sully turned aboutface and left, pleased with herself for what she probably thought was a snappy response. I turned back to the bunk beds, eyeing the people still staring at me. A black-haired girl not unlike Amelia snickered, cross-legged in her bunk.

Everyone had a Providence dot.

21

5/25/2147

LIV

Koki kicked up, his robes fluttering, catching Cyrus’s jaw with his foot. Cyrus stumbled back, and Charlie pulled Vey forward until she was at the base of the porch stairs.

From this close, she could see a swirling in Charlie’s eyes- like a green ghost, a spirit, the flowing out food dye made when it was dripped into pure water.

“Vey.” Charlie’s voice now had a metallic ring to it, like a robot on the edge of the uncanny valley was replicating her. “Come back to Alegria with us.”

“And if I don’t?”

Koki joined them. Cyrus curled up on the ground in pain, clutching his crotch and whimpering. Koki tapped Charlie’s shoulder, and they both pulled out their guns, pointing them at Vey. “You’ve been a good little double spy. But your usefulness is coming to an end, especially here- such a black hole. Come back to Alegria. We won’t let you go to waste-”

“Are you okay?”

I jolted awake. My head pounded. Mirt hovered over me, whispering my name over and over as he checked my pulse. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Amelia eyeing me from right outside the doorway, two guards stationed outside the entrance to my sleeping quarters.

“What...”

“What are you doing, sleeping in the corner this late in the day?” He pulled me up to my feet and brushed out the major wrinkles in my uniform. My head swam, slightly dizzy. I placed a hand on the bookcase to my left to keep my balance. “It’s almost noon!”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then my interface popped up, a little digital clock in the corner. 11:49 AM. I’d missed the breakfast shift, and my topsy-turvy stomach was punishing me for it.

“We’ll give you a few minutes to make yourself presentable,” Mirt said. He swiped the hairbrush from the vanity and handed it to me. “Amelia wishes to speak to you.”

Mirt left the room and shut the door behind him, dissolving into a whispered conversation with Amelia. I went to the vanity and took a long look at myself in the mirror- I was a disheveled mess, hair tangled and flattened to one side, sticking to my face like a fly on a sucker. The hairbrush had been cleaned of all the previous Providences’ hair, which was fortunate, because I didn’t have time to worry about cleaning it out or checking for any nasty bugs before dragging it through my own hair.

I think that’s good enough, I thought a few minutes later, my hair back to falling normally down my shoulders. A slight wave; nowhere near what it had been the previous day, but hopefully good enough for Amelia.

Good enough for Miralay.

Am… Am I ready to be Providence?

Dammit! This is like drafting a kid to be president of the USA or something…

Five million people versus five thousand? Nowhere alike.

I don’t have the experience to make snap decisions! And the memories don’t have any precedents for operating alone…

I’m not alone, though. I have Amelia and Mirt and the seven officials.

I’ll be okay. I’ll manage.

I turned around and faced the rest of my quarters. It all felt too big for just one person. A king-size bed pushed up against the wall, taking up a good quarter of the room. The far wall had a half-empty wall-to-wall shelf, mostly littered with miscellaneous books that couldn’t fit on the narrow bookshelf next to the vanity.

I went to the door and opened it up. Amelia glanced over to me, and she apologized to Mirt before stepping inside the room.

“I’m sorry for missing breakfast,” I said. “I had a difficult time sleeping last night, and I thought that if I slept by the air vent that maybe the noise would-”

Amelia waved her hand. “It’s fine. We would have ordered you to stay in your quarters anyways if you’d woken up on time. I told Mirt to go and grab your noontime ration from the distribution center.” She paused, and then she knelt down and bowed her head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t bind Eponine in time, my Providence. Maybe if I’d been quicker-”

“What are you doing? You don’t have to do that in my room.”

A prisoner knelt down in front of the Providences, who stood at the center of a tribunal. “Please! I’m innocent! I have a wife and two voracious children! I was only trying to provide for them since the rations weren’t enough-”

“Forgive me, my Providence. But it is Miralayan custom to do so when apologizing.”

“Well, then… I command you to stand up and face me like an equal.”

Amelia sighed, and then she stood up, her shoulders rigid. It felt awkward having someone two years my senior treat me like I was more worthy of respect.

It felt… wrong.

“What do you wish to do today, my Providence?”

“I want to be useful. Help me get started.” I started pacing back and forth between the bed and the bookcase. “What are the public’s complaints? What security cameras should I monitor the most?”

“Public complaints are the job of the officials-”

“I want to monitor them. To make sure that the problems are being taken care of. Can you set up a tool to monitor that? None of the widgets or tools yesterday’s ceremony gave me let me do that, and I’m not the most proficient coder.”

“Yes, my Providence. I will see to it right away.”

“What about the security cameras?”

Amelia paused a few moments to think, her finger on her chin, her eyes averted elsewhere. “I suppose, if you wanted to be the first to know if a crime were to occur- which you know it rarely does- I would pin all sector bathrooms to a page in your interface. Most crimes happen there since the populace thinks that there aren’t any cameras. I would also monitor the three airlocks- the one in the loading dock’s entryway tunnel, the one at the emergency exit, and the one at the biowaste disposal. I highly doubt you’ll have the time or the patience to monitor them all the time. That’s a job best left to the security team.”

“What’s the situation with Eponine?”

“He is… still missing. His interface has him listed as online, but the geolocation points to Sector Eight, which isn’t operational anymore.”

“Sector Eight is closing due to the unforeseen and tragic infrastructural failure yesterday. Several of our fellow Miralayans were buried in the rocks of Mars due to a flaw in the overarching skeleton of several hallways. Any and all survivors will be reassigned by their official to one of the other seven sectors. You may have to temporarily share a residence with another family until this is all sorted out. Thank you for your patience.”

The female Providence turned away from the microphone as the broadcasting screen fell silent, the echoes of her voice still reverberating throughout the immediately hallways. She wrapped her arms around the other Providence and wept into his shoulder, wept for Miralay’s citizens, wept for her own uncertain future.

“We will concentrate our searches there, but I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to find him in a timely manner. In the meantime, I’d suggest that, if you wish to go anywhere, you request guards to accompany you.”

“Understandable.” I exhaled. “Is there anything else I should do?”

“Release a statement to the public reaffirming your loyalty to Miralay and then stay safe in here as much as possible. I promise it will go a long way in quelling their fears of a revolution.”

“Thank you, Amelia. You are dismissed.”

Amelia bowed, and then she turned aboutface and left the room, closing the door behind her. I could hear her footsteps echo down the hallway as she left. I sat down on my bed, lying down after a moment’s hesitation. My eyes drifted to the elaborate quilt beneath me. Lots of little diamonds in various hues of blues and greens and purples all rushing into a single point on breakneck speed on a creamy and faded white background. Kind of like one of those expanding and collapsing balls I would always see in a school counselor’s office on TV shows. Or maybe it was a flower?

It looks more like a flower. The kind that someone brutally eviscerates when trying to decide if someone loves them or not instead of just bucking up the courage and asking them themselves!

I don’t love Eponine, and I’m sure as hell that he doesn’t love me. Even if he hadn’t disappeared, we’d never be able to work together. The old Providences either fell in love at first sight or feigned chemistry until they forgot that they were pretending.

I couldn’t lie to myself like that. We’d go insane in each other’s presence, always stepping on each other’s capes and tripping up the other and never getting anything done. And when the time to have children would come… I’m glad the Providences’ children are wet-nursed and cared for by other people. I could never multitask other people’s lives like that. And… I could never lay down with that boy.

Although I’ll have to get with someone eventually if he’s never found…

That’s a problem for another day. I closed my eyes and pulled up my interface. Now I’ve got to figure out how to set up the security camera page.

22

5/26/2147

EPONINE

“You think he’ll wake up soon?”

“I sure hope so. These ration packets aren’t gonna last us forever, and hiding out here to watch someone sleep all the time’s getting kinda boring-”

“Hey!”

“I mean, nothing’s ever boring with you, my dear! I meant to say monotonous. Humans weren’t meant to be holed up in such a tiny room all the time.”

Feeling rushed back to my limbs. I opened my eyes a crack- Sully was standing over me, her characteristic scowl on her face, overshadowed by some guy with a scar running down his right cheek, half-hidden by long sandy hair. We were in what looked like a walk-in closet, empty coat hangers dangling several meters above where I was curled up.

“Welcome back to the world of the living,” the guy said with a vaguely Irish accent- or maybe it was some flavor of Scandinavian. I couldn’t tell. “You’ve been sleeping for a day and a half." He winked. "Bet ya feel nice and rested now.”

I sat up- the back of my head pounded like I’d hit it hard on something. I didn’t remember collapsing or anything of the sort-

Wait. A day and a half?

Did… Did the thing with the rebels and the Madame not happen?

Dammit, that was a dream?!

“Something wrong, kid?” He shook his head and laughed. “Who am I kidding? Of course something’s wrong! You’re god-knows-where with a sore head and an entire planet after ya!”

“Where am I?”

“Cha-ching! The million dollar question! And the answer is… Nowhere! Officially speaking, we’re in Sector Eight, which collapsed during the fourth Providences. But bada-bing, bada-boom-” he slipped his pendant from out underneath his shirt- “there was a loop of time! So Sulls and I sneaked in and made it our own little hideaway. Nothing more romantic than spending countless sleepless nights together among the ghosts and bones of dead Miralayans!”

This guy is absolutely insufferable.

I think I kinda like him. He reminds me of-

Alistair…

I can’t lose my focus. I need to get back to Heavestone, with or without Liv. Mr. Greenland can kiss my ass.

Alistair, are we still a… thing? Are you still waiting for me?

Please wait for me.

“Don’t call me that,” Sully said, slugging him in the shoulder.

“I was only doing it in jest, my love.” The boy turned back to me, concern suddenly overcasting his features. “Something wrong? You look kinda sad all of a sudden. Hivemind getting to ya?”

“I’m not- I don’t have a hivemind.” I stood up and brushed my wrinked clothes out- just then noticing that my Providence uniform was missing. I was clad in a plain stained T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, a rip down the right side and hastily repaired with jagged and uneven stitches. My eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“I’m Victory Evry, and this is my girlfriend, Sully Tanakayova. And you are Eponine Westal, right?” He paused for a moment as I struggled to speak. “Come on, you can tell me!”

Sully crossed her arms. “We’re wasting our time. You need to go out and get our laptop charged so we can run through the simulator again. I’ll stay behind and watch him.”

“What? But I was making friends-”

“We don’t need to be wasting our time with Miralayans. We need to get the job done and get out of here.”

“Fine.”

Victory slumped. He slid on the backpack sitting by the doorway and waved a dismal goodbye before stepping out the closet door, shutting it behind him.

Sully sighed and rolled her eyes. “So I suppose you have a bunch of questions. Miralayans always do. Ask, ask, ask. I suppose the concept of figuring things out themselves is foreign to them-”

“You know what, never mind. I won’t even bother if you’re going to act like that.”

“Good riddance.”

I turned away from her and sat down again, closing my eyes- a jump ran through my body as a tablet-like interface spread out against the darkness of my closed eyelids. A little clock in the corner of my vision read that it was about noon. Several widgets had been preloaded and were displaying Miralayan news, written both in English and a swirling script foreign to my tongue that I could never hope to decipher. Our return to Miralay, my betrayal, praise to Liv for taking interest in the well-being of Miralayans instead of prioritizing incarcerating and executing me.

Liv’s pledge of never-ending allegiance and loyalty to Miralay.

I shivered. What if this is just an elaborate prank and I’m actually in jail?

That’s obviously wrong. I’d be in full-on manacles and chains in solitary confinement. And they’d probably cut off all connection to my interface.

Or, more likely, I’d be dead already.

“Y’know, I was kinda expecting you to be a bit more… I dunno, lively?” Sully said. “Rambunctious? Wild? Go on, shout about how much you hate Miralay and threaten to kill me if I don’t let you go back to Heavestone right away.”

I opened my eyes and whirled around. “How do you know about Heavestone?”

Sully shrugged. “I have a job at Alegria piloting a supply ship. Let’s just say… it gets brought up a lot at parties when the other employees are drunk.” She started studying her fingernails, perfectly polished without a single chip. “High demand, and low turnouts, so even though I’ve only been doing it for a few months, I’m on full ride. As long as I meet my quota of cargo carried per trip per month, I got my own schedule, no questions asked.”

Her ship has a weight limit, doesn’t it? If I stowed away like my parents did, would that cause a malfunction in the ship? Would I get airlocked to ensure there was enough fuel to make it back to Earth?

Would I rather die in the vast expanse of space, floating forever, or live a half-life here on Miralay?

“Could… Could you bring me back to Heavestone?”

She didn’t look up from her nails. “How much can you pay?”

“All my money’s in Heavestone. It’s not much. Twenty dollars or so-”

Sully guffawed. “Risk my job for only twenty bucks? Nah. At that rate, I don’t care what Miralay does to you. Hell, I’m only doing this because you have ransom potential. And Miralayans are a dime a dozen. Unmotivated little twats who need a computer system to babysit them.”

A twinge of annoyance struck in me. “You said something about a simulation earlier? I have some computer skills. Maybe there’s a way I could help in whatever you’re planning? Some way I could make the risk up to you?”

Sully looked my way, half of her attention still on her nails. “You got any experience in server systems?”

I perked up. “Yes! I mean, I was training myself to be able to handle them in the off chance that I could get a freelance job administrating them and maybe pull in some money for the garden complex I was planning in Heavestone-”

She waved her hand. “Yeah, yeah. I didn’t ask to hear your life story. You would know how to securely wipe one, right? So the data would be unrecoverable?”

My eyebrows wrinkled. “What are you planning?”

“God, are you really so daft- We’re gonna wipe the memory server, okay?”

“You’re crazy if you think-”

“That’ll cause absolute chaos in Miralay. Chaos means that resources will get wasted trying to restore law and order. Waste means a deficit, which means...” She set her hand down and gave me all her attention. The corners of her mouth quirked up. “I get to make more trips. Which means more money for me and Victory.”

Her reasoning checks out, I guess…

“And you think you’re just gonna be able to waltz in there and wipe everything?”

“Well, no. We have a plan and everything. Or had, because now you’ve dropped into our lives and thrown everything into disarray. But no Miralayan’s ever gotten in the way of my plans, idiotic as you all are or not.”

“Hey!”

“Hey, what? You got yourself into this situation. It’s not my fault you’re here. And now you’re gonna play by my rules so you can get yourself out of this web you’ve tangled yourself in.”

My eyes lit up. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, sure. I always keep my promises. But don’t expect me to shake on it or anything. Circumstances might change, especially with that red-haired bitch in power.”

“Liv?”

“...What?”

“Sorry. I meant Serlis. Liv is a name she gave herself. It’s supposed to be short for ‘Living Wasteland’.”

It took Sully a moment to think, but then she burst into laughter, her face alight. “Of course- of course she would give herself such a Mary Sue name! I mean...” She wiped her eyes. “A living wasteland. An emotionless robot. Amelia might as well have shucked her and replaced her with an android.”

I shuddered.

She raised an eyebrow. “What? Did I say something wrong?”

“Please… please don’t say the S word again.”

“What? Shucked?”

I winced and sucked in a sharp breath.

“Alright, alright. Wimpy Miralayans...”

Sully stood up and pulled over a cardboard box. She threw open the lid and tossed a white packet to me- I caught it in my hands. Pulled pork and beans, the label said. I ripped the top open- it looked like a cow crap that someone had compressed into a flat patty and stored for ten years in a barn.

Absolutely appetizing.

I pinched my nose shut with one hand and took a bite of the mush, trying and failing not to gag. Sully giggled- an honest-to-god giggle, not out of malice or anything.

“If this is what the light at the end of the tunnel smells like,” I choked, “I’m not so sure I want to be saved.”

“Oh, shut up and eat your ration.” She tipped the box just enough that I could see at least fifty more rations, all packaged up and stacked nicely and organized by what food they attempted and failed to emulate. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“I can’t wait,” I groaned.

She set the box back down on the ground and closed her eyes. “Victory should be back in an hour or so. We’ll run through the simulation then. I’m gonna doze off. Don’t start any revolutions while I’m sleeping, okay?”

“O… Okay.”

I finished the ration and glanced around the room, looking for somewhere to stash the wrapper. In the corner of the closet, hanging up, was a trash bag full of other wrappers like it. I opened it up- and the smell of a middle school boy’s lockerroom blasted into my face. I threw the wrapper in and closed the bag again and heaved for air.

I had some semblance of a plan.

I had a reason to look forward to the days ahead.

23

5/26/2147

EPONINE

Victory came bursting into the room half an hour later with a half-open backpack.

“Hey! I’m back! I miss anything?”

“Eponine’s gonna help us wipe the server in exchange for a ride back to Heavestone.”

“Sweet!”

He swooped down beside me and whipped open his laptop, dark and clunky and rugged all the same. His fingers moved at the speed of light as he typed in his password- long enough that it went off the screen.

“Damn,” I whispered.

“What?” He eyed me suspiciously. “Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who uses passwords like ‘dogs14’!”

“No, my passwords are plenty long! And complex too! Just…” I stuttered for a moment, struggling for words. “How do you remember all that?”

Victory cackled. “I’m not telling ya! But ya can gawk at this instead.”

He pulled up the simulation screen- really just a discombobulated collection of polygons on a drawing program overlaid on a crude map of Miralay. The eight sectors branched out like spikes on a star, arms twisting and turning as the space accommodated for the people without breaking any natural features of Mars. The eighth sector was crossed out in red squiggly lines, our little loop of time near the entrance the only part that had been left alone. The center of the colony was a stack of large circular areas reaching from the loading dock all the way down to the lowest level, sectioned off and divided into rooms for various purposes- the public square, living spaces for the officials and their families, the medical ward where my brain had been practically taken apart and put back together again to install the interface. A spiral staircase cut through the middle of the stack, winding all the way down to the bottom floor. Marked in yellow on the ground floor next to the “gestation station” was the memory server.

To the side of the “simulation” was a text box, detailing the population of Miralay. Seven officials, one for each sector of Miralay. Counting their spouses and two children sanctioned each, that equaled twenty-eight people. Then there were the two Providences- me and Liv- and both of our retainers and Amelia. One hundred and fifty security guards- their specialties weren’t listed. Remaining were the six hundred and eighty-eight people per sector.

There’s one person missing.

“Cool, right?” Victory swiped the right side of the screen as Sully crawled her way over. Victory set one of the previously hidden layers to visible- a mess of blue lines appeared on the map. “So here’s the plan. You listening, Pony- hey, you okay?”

“Please...” I shuddered. “Don’t call me that.”

Victory’s eyebrows wrinkled as he gave me a weird look, but he shrugged a moment later and turned back to the laptop. “Okay, so here’s the new plan. I came up with it while I was charging this hunkajunk. Tomorrow, I’m gonna hack into the part of the autocontrol system that schedules memory shedding and put myself in as one of the kids that’s getting some sort of administration job. Anything that gets me full access to the memory server. Then, the next day, I’ll give myself up to the system and get my memories and a job and start work immediately.”

Sully sniffled.

“Hey, you okay?”

“I… I’m fine. Just- gah! Something’s in the air. I’ve got an eyelash in my eye. What? Me? I’m not crying.” A halfhearted laugh escaped her mouth. “I don’t cry. I have a heart made of s- stone.”

“Hey, I’ll be okay. I’ll still be me! Just with some new knowledge. And someone else’s demons… But I’m strong, Sully. I’ll deal with it. Anything for you.” He patted Sully’s shoulder and turned back to the laptop. “I’ll work that day. You two will stay safe in here. Monday the 29th, I’ll send the signal to Po-” I hissed- “I mean, Eponine. At that point, you two will come down here. Sully, you’ll tell your crew to start preparing for departure. The server room will be empty when you get there. Eponine’ll do his erasing magic, and then we’ll get the hell out of there and go back to Earth, Eponine will get to see his family again- assuming that they’re still there and not out looking for you- and we’ll start raking in the windfall!” He threw his hands in the air. “A win-win-win situation for all three of us!”

“What if the system doesn’t recognize you as one of the citizens?” I said. “I mean, I’d assume that there would be identity verification of some sort, whether through fingerprints or an iris scan or, hell, even genetic testing. I wouldn’t be surprised after I bailed on them if they did anything.”

“Why? Are you not the real Providence?” Victory asked.

“That… That’s a touchy subject.”

“Well, either you are, or you aren’t. There isn’t a gray area.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t about to argue with the only people capable of getting me out of Miralay.

Victory thought to himself for a few minutes. “I guess I’d just hack my way out of it. I don’t really know. I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to take your place or anything. It can’t be that hard for one kid to slip through the cracks.”

24

5/26/2147

EPONINE

I woke up in a room of ash and fog. No walls, and just barely a floor- an ethereal substance beneath my feet, squishy like it could give way at any moment and suck me in. My Providence clothes floated on my light frame as I stumbled around, trying to get back on my feet.

“Eponine!”

I stumbled towards the noise, the only thing concrete in a liquid world. It echoed, although there was nothing for it to echo off of.

“Eponine!”

None of this is real. This is all just a dream.

I blew away the fog- and there was Liv floating in the air with purpose, her arms crossed. Her uniform, dress and all, gleamed with the fact that she was wearing it willingly. Her eyes were colder than they’d ever been, like Miralay had shucked her before stuffing their memories in.

An empty shell to play puppet with.

“Living Wasteland...”

Just a dream. A meeting in the space between.

“Eponine?” Her eyes softened. She floated towards me, and then suddenly- I was ensnared in her arms, her head digging for a space in the crook of my neck. “Eponine! It’s you! I’ve found you!”

“You’re a lie. You’re not real! Just a figment of my imagination.”

“I am whatever the hell I want to be.” She tore away from me, her eyes digging into my own, excavating me and stealing every single shattered bone to be found. “Is this the space between?”

I dug my fingers into my arm, relishing in the sharp pinch of my nails.

“I’m asleep. This is all a dream.”

“No, this is...” She put a white-gloved finger on her chin, thinking. “Cyberspace. It’s got to be. Formed from our collective memories. Private and impenetrable.” She paused. “Please, Eponine… Please just know that you can come home to us. Please… We’ll forgive your sins. The people will forgive you for your outburst. Just submit, and everything will be like it should have been.”

“Was it worth it, Liv?”

“I… beg your pardon?”

“Coming here to Miralay? Almost completely ruining my life so you could ‘improve’ things? Well? Were they improved?”

“The people are a lot happier now than they were the previous rule. I’ve managed to solve some minor problems.”

She waved her hand in front of her. A transparent screen of sorts appeared between us, showing the same image, Liv just barely visible on the other side. On the screen showed Miralayan civilians reaching out to Liv in a line as she greeted them, blessing babies, overseeing technicians and plumbers and electricians fixing up degraded and downtrodden parts of the sectors.

Everywhere she went, at least three guards were present, guarding her from an imagined threat with hyped-up expectations and my face affixed to it.

“In all fairness, I’ve only been Providence for...” She checked the time. “Two days. It’s almost midnight now.”

“You seem to be doing just fine without me.”

She huffed. “Is it hard work being a traitor?”

I cocked my head, trying not to let her blatantly bait my anger.

“What?”

“I said...” She cleared her throat. The image disappeared. “You look tired. Do you sleep well at night hidden away in rubble, knowing that you’ve shirked your duty as Providence? You had the opportunity to make it into the history records, to shape your life into something, and you threw it away just so you could go back to hiding in your timeless hellhole!”

I bit my lip.

I can’t show any signs of wavering.

I can’t reveal my actual location.

“You could force me to be God, and I’d still want to leave it all behind and go back to Heavestone if I hadn’t chosen to receive all that power. A choice over whether or not to be Providence is all I ever wanted, Liv. A simple goddamn choice, and you still didn’t think me worthy of even that.”

“For your information, you chose to go chasing-”

“Only because I was scared of your father. I would never have gone otherwise.” My eyes narrowed. “If you had asked me if I wanted to go to Miralay and I hadn’t had any friends or obligations in the world, I might have said yes. I might have let my childhood of science fiction books and curiosity get the better of me and let you drag me hundreds of thousands of miles away from home to play pretend for the rest of our shortened lives. But I have friends, Liv. I have commitments I have to keep and people I have to disappoint and reunite with, with or without you.” I paused. “I’m not the Providence.”

“You keep saying that, but I know you are. You act like the other Providences did-”

“Because I have their memories!”

Dammit! I wasn’t supposed to outburst like that!

I tried to mimic what she had done, pulling up several memories, surrounding us like a protective shield.

A little girl with tiny pigtails toddling along on the floor, riding a tricycle, playing in the streets of Heavestone.

Liv’s anger melted right off her face. “I didn’t know you had a sister. But where are you in all of this?”

More memories popped up without a single word from me. I kept my eyes focused on her. A girl with the same pigtails, slightly older, eating ice cream on the front step. A ninth birthday party. A homeschool science project. Going to the bookstore outside of Heavestone as a present, books going straight to the unsorted bookcase to be sorted and read later. Longer and longer hair until-

Eleventh birthday. The girl’s face was quite pale. Her hair was considerably shorter, a fashionable pixie cut reaching only to her ears. The decorations were all various shades of blue. There was something different in her eyes than from the other pictures… an unbridled happiness, shining out of her grin, one crack away from colliding into her mother full-on and hugging her and thanking her over and over and over again.

“It’s impossible for both of us to be the Providence,” I said, letting the memories slowly circle around us. Liv was lost in them, eyes widening more and more as the pieces came together. “There’s only supposed to be one boy and one girl. And I wasn't born as fully either.”

“The system…?” Liv whispered.

I waved my hand, shushing her. I took hold of the bottom of my shirt and lifted it up. Four-year-old crescent moon scars.

“Stop calling me the Providence. He’s out there somewhere. It isn’t me.”

25

5/27/2147

EPONINE

The taste of blueberries lingered on my tongue long after I’d consumed my morning ration and welcomed Victory back from the land of the living, another day’s charge into the laptop. He’d just managed to escape from the clutches of one of the patrols, who my interface told me were patrolling Sector Eight an inordinate amount.

“So, let’s get cracking on today’s business, shall we?”

Victory cracked his knuckles and slid the laptop on top of his crossed legs. Sully and I squished onto either side of him, forming a sandwich.

A nice and toasty traitor sandwich.

Victory didn’t say a single word as he worked. He didn’t need to use his mouth, though- his face strained every time he hit a roadblock, whether it was an incorrect password or an exploit to get around rate limiting or an incorrect command that caused the entire laptop to shut down in a fit. His fingers trembled when he became anxious, like there were little ants crawling all over the keyboard and myrmecophobia was kicking in and he was in a delicate dance to not accidentally squish any of the tiny creatures and get the discombobulated pieces of their corpses stuck in his keyboard keys or underneath his fingernails. My fingers involuntarily twitched as well every time he made a typo, like I was in some high-level college class about to fail a computer science exam.

Although, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what kind of final test a computer science major would take in college. The option to go to any of the places even remotely close to Heavestone had never really been on my table despite the countless identity-based scholarships I’d no doubt have been able to scoop up.

“Sully, get me one of the water bottles, please,” he gasped after triggering a cross-site script, bypassing a particularly tricky authentication screen.

Sully got up and retrieved one, which he took a long swig from, spilling a few droplets onto his legs. He wiped his mouth and capped the bottle before setting it aside.

“From here, it should be smooth sailing into the database we need-”

The screen dimmed suddenly, a notification popping up at the bottom right corner.

Low battery (15% remaining). Please plug into charging port as soon as possible. The device will shut down at 10%.

“No, no, no!” Victory pulled on his hair. “If I lose connection now, the system will probably patch the exploit I used, and then I won’t be able to do anything!” He looked to me. “You got the memories. You know anywhere safe I can charge this and still work?”

I closed my eyes, searching my memories.

Nothing.

I shook my head.

“Dammit… Wait, don’t you have an interface?”

“...Yeah?”

“But is it compatible?” he muttered to himself. “Hey, Eponine. Press the control key.”

“The what? My interface doesn’t-”

“Just imagine you’re pressing a control key!”

I stood up. I closed my eyes again and tapped one of my fingers against my legs- the widget screen faded away. A list of programs popped up.

“Anything happen?”

“Yeah. Terminal, right?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna give you a complicated list of commands to push, okay? And you gotta tell me any errors you come across.”

I nodded.

Not so different from the server work I did at home, right?

Right?

“Damn, this is gonna be hard without a screen,” he whispered, and then he turned back to the laptop. 13% remaining. “You ready?”

I nodded.

Victory started chanting out a long series of commands to push, all complete with complicated and verbose modifiers- the first thing he did, at least from what I could tell, was a wireless session transfer, temporarily transferring the bare minimum of his laptop's session onto my interface. My screen changed drastically- instead of a red background with a stylistic wave in lighter shades behind everything, it was… For the sake of innocence, I’m not going to describe the amount of sin that was compressed into that one damn background.

But it was a lot.

“You’re really into catgirls, aren’t you?”

I opened an eye to see Victory blushing like a madman on drugs had decided to cosplay as the devil.

“Just keep typing.”

Sully’s face twisted into an awkward combination of confusion and sickened curiosity, but she stayed beside Victory as he continued to feed me instructions. Key transfers, file transactions, setting up command aliases.

“Uh, Victory? I think we’ve got an error.”

He cursed under his breath and closed the laptop. It was pretty much dead for any and all purposes at that point. “Read it to me.”

“Certificate error?” My nose scrunched as I thought. “Miralay uses self-signed certificates. Where did you put the ones you just ripped?”

“In the documents folder.”

I checked the documents folder. “It’s completely empty.” I checked the menu, hoping that maybe they’d all been set to hidden and hidden files were turned off- but the folder was still empty, and there was nothing in the recycling bin.

“Do a global search for ‘serf’.”

I did so, waiting the five minutes it took for the search to dig up every nook and cranny of Victory’s file system and search for the missing certificates.

Nothing.

I shook my head.

“Damn it!” He hit his fist on the ground and then hunched over, thinking. “Can you do the last few commands again? But omit the connection verification flags.”

“But then anybody’ll be able to snoop in on what you’re doing!”

“One little transaction out of hundreds. Not a big deal. And besides, if I get caught, I’ll just fight my way out. Miralayans’ bones are so fragile compared to humans, and I’m sure their memories don’t have a precedent for a human threat!”

“It would be just like any other threat.”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “You got those commands done?”

“Yeah… Damn. I wish you could see all these plaintext folder names- hoo boy…” I cackled. “I don’t think Alegria knows what encryption is.”

“You find the documents with the memory schedules?”

“Just a moment...” Two hundred and thirteen files popped up in front of me, all named by their intended use date. “Twenty-ninth, right?”

“Yeah.”

I opened it up. A text editor popped up. “Well, isn’t that nice. All the XML is nicely formatted for me… You know the ID of the kid you want to become?”

Victory fed me two long strings of numbers- the first one I searched for, the second one I injected in its place. Victory Evry effectively became Yenfay Toldeo, a soon-to-be-seventeen boy with a history of childhood asthma and a borderline obsession with ceiling tiles. Not that there were many on Miralay- asbestos had no business being in an enclosed colony.

“Now shut down the terminal and run like hell.”

“…Excuse me?”

Victory coughed. “I meant log off. Delete cache and exit session.”

I did as he said. My dashboard came up. Several unread messages floated to the center of my vision.

Liv?

Eponine, I don’t know if you can read this wherever you’ve managed to disappear to. But I had a dream last night with some… sensitive information in it that I don’t want to repeat here. Actually, I’m not quite sure if it was a dream or not. If it wasn’t a dream, then do whatever you did to meet me again. We need to talk.

26

5/28/2147

EPONINE

I came into existence in the middle of an Earthen airport. Busy travelers with heads buried in their phones rushed all around me, heading to nonexistent destinations. To my right was a baggage pickup, people crowding around and taking bags that probably weren’t theirs. I sat on a bench with a few other people, all of them distracted, their suitcases in front of their legs.

They probably wouldn’t even notice if someone stole their luggage-

“There you are!” a voice from behind said, startling my heart into jumping into my throat.

I whirled around on the bench to find Liv standing a few feet away. She waved, a delicate gesture.

“You fraud.”

“Oh, so you’re just now realizing that?”

Liv frowned, her eyes a display of dismay. “Or maybe I’m the fraud… Or an unwitting accomplice. But I’ve been considering-”

“Just spit it out already!”

She locked eyes with me, pissed. “I’ve been doing some independent research into our genealogies. It turns out you were right about… you know.”

An image popped up of a family tree, starting with her- Serlis- and branching up three generations back, ending with great-grandparents whose existence had probably been washed away into the gray blandness of the memory server.

The server…

How many people would be forgotten when I wiped that? Completely blanked from history?

“You had the opportunity to make it into the history records, to shape your life into something, and you threw it away just so you could go back to hiding in your timeless hellhole!”

Server logs are forever. But the contents of that server?… Not necessarily.

“Hey, are you listening?”

I shook my head. “No, I really wasn’t.”

Liv sighed. “Anyways… I spent a lot of time last night looking at everything, reading about all that my ancestors did and who got their memories. I want to meet those people and maybe learn some of my own past. Maybe I’ll find out why my dad’s such an asshole, eh?” She feigned a smile and then pointed to her father. “It looks like there’s been some promiscuity in the family.”

She tapped on her father and then on another button, spreading out his own family tree. He wasn’t at the complete bottom, though- his next generation was on the row underneath him.

Serlis Greenland, daughter of Evri and Talla Greenland.

Eponine Westal, daughter of Evri Greenland and Mary Westal.

“This is obviously fake,” I blurted. “How… How would Mom have gone around getting knocked up? Wouldn’t the autocontrol system have picked up on that and sent someone to reprimand her? Wouldn’t that have made… Oh… Oh, no...”

I cringed and shrunk away from her at the same time she reached her arm out and tried to pull me closer.

“Don’t touch me!”

“I… I wanted to apologize to you for putting you through all this. A Providence should never cause unjustified suffering to others, and I’ve put you through untold mental stress because of an assertion that turned out to be false.” She looked away in shame. “My personal feelings towards you don’t matter in this case. I messed up, and I was wrong, and I'm sorry.”

“I...” I shuddered. "My own half-sister..."

“Eponine...” A tear trailed down her cheek, but her voice remained strong, not quivering even a little. “I’m so glad you didn’t take the vow to bind yourself to the autocontrol system. I’m going to send you home to Heavestone-” I almost interrupted her, but she held out a hand. “I’ll write a letter to Father, and if he doesn’t let you back into Heavestone… I’ll send Amelia herself to straighten him out.”

“Are you serious?”

She placed her right hand on her heart. She looked regal, strong, like she’d matured ten years since I’d last seen her and become the spitting image of the ideal Providence.

“I swear on my life that I will do everything in my power to right this wrong. And I will do everything in my power to keep your Heavestone safe.” She pulled the family tree back up again- it had timed out and hidden itself. “Anyways, I have cousins right around my age. One of them-” she pointed to Yenfay Toldeo- “he’s going to become one of the system administrators today at noon. He’ll work in the memory servers, specifically...”

Yenfay? Where have I heard that name before?

Victory!

“Is there something wrong?” Her eyes widened. “You’re going to do something to the memory servers, aren’t you? Because, if you do...” She paused. “I won’t hesitate to sentence you to death. Hell, I’ll even execute you myself! If you become a criminal, I won’t give you special treatment just because you discovered me in that sleeping pod. It could have been someone else. Anyone else.”

Crap! What am I gonna do now? Liv might be lying- this might all be a trap to get me within her grasp so she can execute me anyways. I can’t trust her.

I mean, I can’t exactly trust Sully either. But she and Victory must trust me, because they let me help them with the hacking-

Because they had no other option.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t make any promises.”

“Then I can’t promise your safety. I’m going to send guards to-” Her words were drowned out by the intercom of the airport, blaring in our ears like we’d been pressed right up against it. She scowled and spoke again when it had passed. “I’m sending guards to all the servers. I’m not taking any chances with you, Eponine. You’re a danger to Miralay and everyone on it. Turn yourself in without doing anything, and I’ll send you home. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”

Liv didn’t bother to wait for a response. She turned away and headed down the airport terminal. The farther away she got, the more transparent her body became until she simply shimmered out of existence. I stood there, watching the people of the airport pass by me like I didn’t exist, like I’d never existed.

And I suppose, in the eyes of Earth, I’d never existed after all.

I clenched my fists.

I won’t let my story end here on Miralay. I’ve got to make it home no matter what. For Ignis, for Alistair, for Mom, still waiting, still hoping, still yearning.

The colors of the airport swirled around me, fading into an amalgamation of a mess and then into gray. The gray slid off the world like wet paint put on a wall in excess, and then-

“Hey, wake up, bucko! Aren’t you gonna say goodbye?”

Sully lightly kicked me in the ribs. I wheezed.

“It’s just for one day,” Victory countered. He put his hands on Sully’s shoulders and pulled her close as I opened my eyes and returned to the real world.

And, of course, I was lucky to pick the exact moment they snogged.

I rolled over and covered my eyes.

Sully snickered and pulled away from Victory.

“What? You afraid of a little kiss?”

9:07 AM, my clock read.

“Uh, Victory?”

“Uh, yeah?” he said, half playful mocking.

“Uh, I just checked the Miralayan news,” I lied. I uncovered my eyes. “And there’s gonna be a ton of guards in the memory server area. You might want to be careful.”

Sully cursed under her breath. Victory scratched his back and then released a soft moan of pleasure.

“Yeah, I’ll be careful. Hella careful.” He turned to Sully. “I’ll see you on the other side, okay?”

“Promise me that you’ll be okay, you dunderhead. You promised to show me that… secret place on Earth, remember?”

“I’ll be okay. I promise.”

Victory gave Sully a peck on the cheek and then disappeared through the closet door. Sully touched a few fingers to where his lips had brushed against, her breathing raw and ragged, her eyes fixed on the door.

“I’m not crying,” she whispered. “I’m not crying. I don’t cry. I never cry.”

27

5/28/2147

LIV

I yawned and kept my eyes fixed on the tapestry hanging on the wall as Amelia slipped past the guards and walked in. The stunner hanging from her belt clattered against the back of the chair as she took a seat and sat down across from me.

“My Providence?” She cleared her throat. “You summoned me?”

I locked eyes with her. “I did. And I’d like to be called Liv.”

Amelia coughed. “I beg your pardon?”

“Liv. As in, Living Wasteland. It was what I went by most often when I was in the sleeping pod. It reminds me of this planet, and I like it a great deal more than constantly being reminded of my title. I feel it would bring me closer to the people instead of creating an artificial barrier between me and them.”

“Alright… Liv. I’ll see that everyone gets informed of the name change.”

“Thank you, Amelia.” I crossed my arms, one hand squeezing the other’s forearm. One of my bracelets, the one with all the little golden charms that had belonged to the fifth Providence, tinkled. “I need you to do something. I wanted to tell you firsthand instead of entrusting my communications to the server. I’m worried it might have been compromised somehow.”

“What’s plaguing, you, m- Liv?”

“...The previous Providence- before she shed her memories to me, she mentioned a ‘space between’. Something about glass shattering. And the last few nights, I’ve had dreams where I meet Eponine. I talk with him. We argue like we were face-to-face. And he- or, at least, the dream him- has given me a few… disturbing revelations.”

“Explain.”

She’s taking me seriously?

“To start, I don’t believe Eponine is the legitimate Providence-”

“Liv!” Amelia suddenly stood up, anger flaring and then suddenly abating just as quickly as it had come. “Liv, I think you need to dial it back a bit-”

“No, listen!” I winced. “I don’t believe he was born male-”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But-”

Amelia shook her head. “We’ve confirmed both with the mental imprint and the genetic record taken at birth that he is, in fact, the Providence, ceremony or not.”

“But why would Miralay have an intersex Providence? Half-siblings, at that? Miralay needs many things, but incest isn't one of them."

It doesn't matter. I wouldn't have been able to bed him anyway.

Amelia sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, m- Liv. I don’t know. That’s just the nature of mutations. We’ve just been incredibly fortunate that they’ve been of opposite sexes and genetically unrelated until now. But in any case, dreams aren’t the most reliable sources of information. What Miralay needs right now, per your own standards, are decisions fueled by facts and rational thinking, not fantasies. I would like to politely remind you that the entirety of Miralay’s records are available for you to peruse through your interface at your leisure.”

“Yes, I’ll have to do that.”

I clenched my fists under the table where Amelia wouldn’t see them. She slowly sat back down, desperately trying to regain her composure.

“Amelia, I want extra guards surrounding the memory server and the autocontrol server housing. And I want Eponine to know, wherever he is, that if he stands down now and doesn’t cause any more harm to Miralay, I’ll peaceably send him back home-”

“Liv!” The flames flickered in Amelia’s eyes again. I cringed. “He openly threatened to destroy Miralayan property and possibly kill people if they were preventing him from deserting the planet! And you want to just give him what he wants?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I intend to do. Miralay would be better off with only one Providence-” I put a hand on my chest- “me- that’s fully loyal to the planet and have to break traditions and seek out a man to give me two children than maybe having two Providences that can’t even stand in the same room together, much less reproduce or run an entire goddamn planet, and have the people always fearing for their lives and livelihoods!” I threw my arms up in the air. “Unless you have a better solution? And don’t say executing him, because...” My arms dropped back down, my voice giving way. “Because...”

“Because what? It would accomplish everything you just laid out without the risk of him coming back to bite us in the ass, whether it be some kind of invading force hellbent on retribution or divulging Miralayan secrets to the Earthen public or- or- setting a precedent!” Her left arm jolted out, almost slamming right into the chair next to her. “Liv, you don’t want to set a precedent for criminals. Because that’s what Eponine is when it comes down to it. A criminal. You don’t want them thinking that they can desert Miralay and shirk their duties by threatening to commit a deadly crime and get a free ride to Earth. Executing Eponine will teach the people that any threat of violence against their fellow Miralayans will bring down upon them the full force of the law.”

I shuddered. “But-”

“Liv, you’re putting emotions and childish fantasies over reason again. Look at the facts. We know that Eponine is willing to commit violence or destroy property if it means that he can escape Miralay. We also only have one Providence willing to fulfill their duties. A rebellious Providence in power would be disastrous for Miralay. The only other alternative would be to wipe his mind and re-transfer his memories. Would you rather that happen?”

My chest shuddered- I had a sudden flighty vision of tacking Amelia. Of strangling her until her brown eyes faded. Of finding Eponine, wherever he was, and smuggling ourselves onto the supply ship that was still unloading, still docked until Monday.

But instead of being so foolish, I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, balling and relaxing my fists over and over again in time with my breathing.

I bit back tears and sighed. “Fine. I trust your judgment. Do what you feel is best.”

“Alright, Liv. Although I will carry out your orders to bolster the defenses around the memory servers and autocontrol system.” She stood up and bowed. “I’ll leave you to your research, then. If you need anything else, message me.”

She turned and left. I closed my eyes and pulled up my interface, flicking to the last page on the right. A little bookcase, carefully curated titles from Earth.

The Ground Underneath. A Shatter Down The Hall. The Lilyborn. In Case Of Emergency…

A Modern Woman. How To Become Invisible. Computer Systems for Dummies.

All books Eponine would have loved. Oh, what I wouldn’t have given for him to be in that room right then, curled up in the corner, engrossed in a book, two steps away from sleep.

Or for me to maybe have stayed and have sneaked into his room instead, forgetting about Miralay and shrinking my world down until I was as large as the planet I now stood on in comparison. Digging up clovers choking trees and uncovering dirt-covered pinecones- nature’s craps- and working to restore some semblance of a nice-looking treeline. Learning to love the greens and browns and blues underneath me instead of the ones I wore-

Idiot! I slammed a fist on the table. Your people’s lives are worth more than your own personal happiness, than your own fleeting fantasies.

This is the life I am destined to live.

This is the system I chose, and I will die perpetuating it.

28

5/29/2147

EPONINE

“So today’s the day,” Sully said as she pulled her backpack closer to her. “You ready, kid?”

I shrugged. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Cool. I just told my crew to start preparing to take off. They should be ready by the time we need to leave.” She zipped open her backpack and handed me a tangled ball of what looked like flesh-colored string. “You’ll need this.”

“What is-”

She took out a ball of her own and touched it to her nose. The strings separated from the mass, twisting around her face and somehow melting into her skin like hot candle wax until I was looking at someone with a softer jawline, a bulging nose, and a strong lower lip. In other words, the complete opposite of the Sully I remembered.

“What?” She cocked her head. “You thought you could just waltz into the server area with god-knows-how-many cameras and not be immediately apprehended?”

“No- I just- I have no idea what the hell just happened. It’s temporary, right? It didn’t actually-”

“What? Afraid you’ll lose your looks, pretty boy? Of course it’s temporary.” She tossed her hair, an air of superiority glowing around her like I was an idiot and she was so intellectually superior.

Like I was just another stupid Miralayan that she hated.

“It’ll just peel off like a bad face mask in a few hours, that’s all.”

“I’ll use it. Just… give me a moment.”

I took a deep breath and touched it to my face. The strings slid out like some kind of freaky pasta alien and caressed my whole face, sizzling when the strings came into my skin like I was boiling alive- but Sully strode over and clenched my hand in hers, keeping the ball tight against my face until it was over.

I didn’t dare look at anything reflective.

“Also...” She reached deep into her backpack and dug out a pair of Miralayan plainclothes- a sky-blue shirt and the pants to match. Part of my red cape poked out from her backpack- she quickly shoved it back in. “You’ll have to wear these if you don’t want to immediately be flagged by the system. I could probably get away with my normal clothes since I have an outworker’s permit.”

Sully looked away while I stripped down to my underwear and slid on the plainclothes. I folded my clothes into a relative ball and handed them to her; she shoved them into her backpack and zipped it up and swung it onto her shoulders.

She stepped towards the closet door and flung it open, greeting the illusion of an empty hallway created by the loop of time. The same scene that had replayed on repeat for who-knows-how-long, just the same as it had been when the loop had been created.

I caught her shoulder just before she put her foot through. “I’ve got one worry, though.”

Sully sighed, dramatic, throwing her whole body into the act. “What is it?”

“Do you think… Would it be possible for the autocontrol system to somehow turn me into a living microphone of sorts? Have made me a mole this whole time? And what about Victory-”

You know for a fact that the memory shedding process doesn’t scan the recipient’s brain. Only when they themselves shed do their memories go into the system.

What if they were modified before I got them?

“Honestly, kid, you think I haven’t considered all of that already? Anyways, it doesn’t matter. Soon enough, we’ll be at your home, and Miralay won’t be able to harass you without risking incurring punishment from Alegria or the police or whatever.”

She turned back to the door, and I stopped her again. “Can you please stop calling me ‘kid’?”

“Fine… kid.”

She winked. I bristled, and then we jumped through the door together- and were immediately met with rubble wedged perfectly in the shape of a low-ceilinged cavern.

Sully took my hand in the darkness and led me into a narrow tunnel, low enough that we had to bend over just to crawl through. She took off her backpack and pushed it in front of her, making the crawl slow and strenuous.

The rocks thundered above us. My head began to swim.

Wasn’t there some sort of collapse here? Wouldn’t that have broken the ventilation systems?

Am I breathing Martian air right now?

Wouldn’t I be dead from the lack of oxygen?

Maybe Alegria’s been terraforming Mars. I wouldn’t know. They certainly didn’t tell the Providences anything if they were.

I stopped halfway through the tunnel of rubble to catch my breath. Sully continued going a few more feet, and then she stopped as well, rolling onto her back and struggling to lift her head to be able to scowl at me.

Her breathing left a mist in the cool air. I felt goosebumps rise on my skin.

“You feeling alright? Because we can’t stay here forever. Someone’s bound to notice your location changing soon. Even if it doesn’t match up with facial recognition data...”

“Yeah, I just...” I wheezed. “Give me a moment.”

“Sorry, no can do. Come on. We’ve got a planet to mess up.”

Sully rolled back onto her stomach and continued to push herself and her backpack through. I stayed where I was for a few more seconds before I shook my head and kept pushing on.

She’d only gotten a few feet ahead in that little time, anyways- the tunnel was rapidly beginning to narrow further until rocks dug into my body at all sides. I could have sworn that my forehead was bleeding.

And then- freedom. Sully shoved the backpack out in front of her, and then we were greeted with the light at the end of the tunnel, blinding and yellow and not at all pure like the heaven I shouldn’t have expected. Sully and I popped out of the tunnel and rolled a few feet, stretching out our limbs, enjoying the recycled air for all it was worth.

I sat up- but then my head swam, forcing me to lie down again and catch my breath some more. I pulled up the map in my interface. We were inside a jantior’s closet in one of the bathrooms in Sector Five, close to the entrance to the sector, a short jaunt away from the spiraling staircase that would take us down to Victory and to our destiny.

Either that, or our death.

“So,” I whispered, my cheeks flushing, “what do you think we-”

“Don’t try it.” She held up a clenched fist. “Especially since I can see your fake face. And it ain’t no field of daisies.”

“Okay, okay, okay…”

We tumbled out of the closet. Above me was an outlet.

That must have been where Ali- I mean, Victory charged the laptop every day.

“Sheesh. I was just joking...”

Sully rolled her eyes. “Ha ha ha. Comedic genius of the century.”

We headed out the door and began walking- walking, not running, because running would have made us look suspicious. Miralay didn’t have any hair dye, and none of the jobs required hauling equipment in a backpack, and so a girl whirling past everyone with a heavy backpack and green hair swishing behind her would have caught everyone’s attention.

If I hadn’t caught theirs first.

But surprisingly, there wasn’t anyone in the halls. Nobody disturbed us as we headed down the staircase, winding down and down and down for what seemed to be forever. Although the stairs were made out of some kind of exotic metal I didn’t know the name of, our footsteps didn’t echo.

“Why’ve you got the backpack with you?” I whispered.

“Because, when we have to bolt, I don’t want to have to worry about heading back to retrieve it and potentially losing it because of some stupid guards in my way or a lockdown blocking it off or someone stealing it-”

“Couldn’t you have put it in your ship?”

Sully glared at me over her shoulder. “Yeah, because that wouldn’t be suspicious. ‘Hey, guys, I’m dropping off all my stuff and I’m practically ready to go- but I’ve got to make a super duper secret trip first!’” She sneered and continued walking. “I don’t want to arouse suspicion with my employers. I don’t want to lose my job. Hence the facial things. I couldn’t care-”

“Less about me, yeah, yeah. I get it. You hate Miralayans. You think I’m a brazen idiot. You’ve hammered that point home very, very clearly. A+ on your college dissertation. Not all of us are equipped for extraterrestrial travel and can handle the stresses of a very real threat of death hanging over our heads every day and can so easily dish out hate like you can! I’m not a leader. I’m not a revolutionary. I just want to go home and enjoy the simple things in life and contribute in the few ways I can.”

“Shut up.”

“Is that the best you got?”

“I mean, I could just leave you here to be executed for conspiring to commit treason. Would that be better?”

A hot angry tear slipped down my artificial cheek, but I bit my words back and stayed silent as we continued to descend.

Eventually, we made it to the bottom of the staircase. The doors to the server maintenance room had already been unlocked and were hanging wide open.

Why aren’t the fingerprint scanners on? They’re all dead.

Did someone turn them off?

It couldn’t have been Victory. Nobody would have been able to just disable them like that. It’s got to be a technical difficulty.

We pushed through the doors. Victory, his sandy hair done up in a ponytail, was right near the entrance, tending to one of the water recycling tubes encased in a few heavy layers of plastic that cooled down the whole server. Hearing our footsteps, he turned our way- his eyebrows wrinkled, not recognizing us for a moment until Sully dug a hand through her green hair.

“Oh!” He patted the tube, watching the water within sploosh, and gestured to us. “Follow me. There are so many guards around here…” He glanced around, keeping his voice to a whisper. “We’ll have to take the back way. Stay quiet.”

Victory reached into one of the pockets in his gray plainclothes and pulled out a keychain. He unlocked the door to our right, padding it with his foot so it wouldn’t squeak when he opened it. He ushered us into a pitch-black hallway, only lit up with red flickering lights near our feet, and gestured for us to start following him.

This can’t be good. This can’t be good.

This isn’t Victory- this is an impostor- we’re about to be killed-

“Honestly, Sulls, the new face is quite the upgrade. Maybe you could keep using it after we’re done here?”

“Shut up.”

Victory oofed- Sully must have pushed him hard.

“Sorry. Just… it’s so somber here encased in the servers. There’s barely anyone to talk to who isn’t a guard, and they aren’t the most talkative. Hell, some shifts, I was the only worker there. And these memories… aren’t exactly the best of friends to keep me company. I mean, yeah, I’ve got enough knowledge of the command line and how the server works that I could probably… you know. But every time I try to work up the muster to do it myself, all these visions of whoever was further up my memory line trying to kill themselves in the airlock pop up, and I have to stop. But, hey-” he tapped his belt, and something clanged in the darkness- “I got a stunner now! So I can roast Eponine when he decides to come in here and mess something up. I ain’t letting that traitor go out free!”

“Uh-”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “Shush. There are wiretaps everywhere in here, I’m sure.”

After a few more minutes of walking in silence, we reached the door. Victory unlocked it with the second of his keys and threw it open- the light in the new corridor was dim, only a few steps up from the hallway’s relative darkness. Sully tucked her hair into her shirt as a second thought.

A screen stood in front of us on the other side, the terminal locked. A fingerprint scanner primed and at the ready.

Victory slipped his hand inside his pocket, fumbling around for a bit before pulling it back out again- his thumb was covered in what looked like a transparent sleeve, bumps and rumps of a different fingerprint overlaying his own.

He touched it to the scanner.

It lit up green, and a keyboard slid out.

Victory pulled out a pair of transparent plastic gloves and handed them to me.

“Do your magic. Quickly.”

29

5/29/2147

EPONINE

My hands trembled as I approached the keyboard. The keys were white with black letters, all rushing into each other like they’d come loose from the keyboard and were swirling around in a whirlpool. The screen was completely black with the exception of all its white letters, burning into the back of my eyesight, blurring with its blocky monochrome simplicity. Like something I’d have encountered back when I was six, back when all Mom could afford was an old computer from the turn of the millennium with a floppy disk drive and a network card that could barely handle the high-speed connections of those hazy days and a browser that would force you to reboot the entire damn computer if it couldn’t connect to a specific game’s server because it launched in fullscreen and Mom had forbidden me from touching the escape key and I hadn’t known anything else.

You know, I never did figure out what that game with the mice and the pipes was called…

Maybe I should do a five-pass wipe. My fingers started to move, obeying the delicate dance that I hoped would buy my freedom. I pulled up a text editor and started writing a tiny little script.

First time through, only replace a few kilobytes here and there at random, enough to mess up most of the files without raising suspicion.

Second time though, increase the rate of corruption, but also knock out the shadow backups…

Third time though, start erasing whole sectors and leaving only zeroes in their wake.

Also remotely disable any location tracking my interface has.

Actually- I skipped to the beginning of the file for a moment- do that first.

Fourth time though, start hitting the file structure hard. Partition randomly. Fragment completely.

A drop of sweat rolled down my cheek as the first pass began. I continued typing.

God, I hate destroying perfectly good hardware. I hate destruction. But…

Fifth time though, replace everything with randomly generated digits and start a random seek test to hopefully scratch out and bust the weaker of the drives.

What if medical files are kept here too? I don’t want to be responsible for someone’s death. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death.

I hope those are kept somewhere separate. I hope Miralay knows how to compartmentalize, even if the Providences can still get their sticky fingers in everything.

It’s not my job to keep Miralay away from the consequences of its own stupidity.

I stepped away from the keyboard. The screen went black, just as I’d told it to, and the keyboard slid back into the wall.

“We should go.”

Sully turned to Victory. “You need to say bye to anyone first? Get your sentimental kicks out?”

Victory snorted. He shook his head. “I’m good-”

“Stop right where you are!”

Three guards poured into the corridor. My eyes flew wide open- my hearts kicked up- they pointed their stunners right at the three of us.

I froze in place until Sully took my hand- and I electrified, heading into the hallway from which we’d come- but a few more guards appeared from that direction as well, their stunners aimed right at us.

Victory shook his head. “What’s the matter here? I can’t take anyone on a tour just ‘cause I’m new, huh?”

The three guards who’d shown up first parted. A slim woman in a retainer’s uniform appeared, the golden badge affixed on her shoulder marking her as such pristine. The skin under her eyes was dark and baggy- from a lack of sleep, I assumed.

Noi? That’s what her name was, right?

She locked eyes with me for a few full seconds, and then her gaze trailed off, searching all over my body. Her fragile lips parted, her voice just barely audible.

“I… was certain Eponine was here. This boy looks nothing like him. He must be masking his location somehow.” She waved to the guards. “Go back to patrol.”

“Whew.” Victory wiped his forehead as the guards left. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, ma’am-”

Noi’s eyes locked onto Victory. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Yenfay Toldeo is, would you? He’s supposed to be in your shift. He clocked in about ten minutes ago. I can’t find him anywhere.”

Victory waved, showing off a toothy grin. “That would be me, ma’am-”

Noi scoffed. “I might be stupid and sleep-deprived, but I’m not that stupid. I know what my own brother looks like. Do you know where he is, or-”

Her eyes caught on his nametag. She whipped her stunner out of his holder on her belt and pointed it at him.

“You’re human. I can tell from the glint in your eyes. You have five seconds to tell me where the hell you put my brother.”

“I, uh-”

“One.”

“I’m not human-”

“Two.”

“I can explain-”

“Three.”

Victory put his hands up.

“Four-”

Sully kicked the hallway door open and yanked the two of us in. Noi shot her stunner a moment too late, the prongs clattering on the ground. Sully kicked the door shut, and we started running, our feet pounding on the ground without a single thought for the wiretaps.

Noi kicked the door open as well, always a few steps behind us, fumbling with her stunner to try to get it ready for its next shock.

The other door at the end of the hallway opened. Four guards poured in, their stunners out and at the ready. We halted. Noi activated the emergency lights on her stunner, staying a few feet behind where Sully and Victory and I were quickly being cornered by guards.

“What do we do?” I whispered to Sully.

Sully closed her eyes right before the hallway went completely pitch black. Even the red lights turned off. Noi turned off her stunner and exited out the other door of the hallway near the terminal I’d used.

Trapped.

“Eponine Westal,” one of the guards intoned in a slow and deep voice, “stand down and surrender and we’ll give you a dignified death.”

“Kiss my ass.”

Sully tapped my hand with two fingers and then bolted for where Noi had gone. Victory followed her, and I jumped-

Electricity sizzled down my spine, down my bones, down every single strand of muscle I had. For a few seconds, I was the only source of light in the galaxy.

I stiffened and then crumpled to the ground like a marionette doll with all the strings cut, useless and limp. My shriek- or what I assumed to be it, since everything was staticky and rumbling- echoed down the hallway. Two guards gruffly took hold of my wrists and forced me up, but my feet refused to work, making me slump down with every yank of theirs.

Someone yelled at me to stand up. Their voice was so tinny, so far away… I struggled for a moment, weak and hating every moment of it, and then a pinprick in my neck-

30

5/30/2147

LIV

“I’m here to see Eponine.”

The guard standing watch at the entrance to the jail cells squinted at me. His eyes flickered all over my body, distant in nonrecognition- and then they flew wide open.

“Ah! My Providence! Come to get a few last angry words in before everything goes public?”

I nodded, wary.

Mirt should have told him exactly why I was coming down here already.

And the guard- he was starting to grow a wispy white beard, something I would have expected of an eighty-year-old wizard, not someone in his thirties rapidly approaching his shedding time. His face held a multitude of wrinkles- so many that I could have gotten lost in them, like a maze forevermore.

He stepped aside. I dashed down the hallway- only a few hours remained until the official execution process would begin. So many things raced through my head- would I beg him to submit to memory erasure, the only other alternative to the death penalty Amelia would approve of? Would I press him for some kind of apology until he was a sniveling mess on the floor?

Third cell on the right. Third cell on the right. Third-

Noi suddenly appeared in front of me.

“Oh!”

I halted in my tracks, just in time to keep from bumping into her.

She whirled around, one hand to her eye, dabbing at the sore spots underneath with a tissue.

“Oh… It’s you. My Providence.” Her voice was quiet and distant. She yawned. “Why are you here? You should be preparing for the proceedings.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“That’s rather unfortunate. Say… Tell him I hate him for ruining my life, alright? I… I can’t get up the nerves to do so.”

“Alright. I’ll try to remember.”

She shot me a half-hearted smile and then moved aside, letting me unlock the door and enter the cell. I stepped inside and locked the door behind me and slipped the key inside my bra, confident that Eponine at least wouldn’t stoop so low as molestation.

The space was dank and foul-smelling, its last cleaning being when a wannabe assassin had tried to murder the third Providences with a butter knife and had been promptly executed via airlock to slowly suffocate on Mars’ thin atmosphere. His skeleton was probably still lying somewhere, desolate and alone. The cell felt the same way- in the corner nearest the cell door, the toilet murmured. The sink, long since blackened by rust, dripped steadily to count off the seconds.

Such a waste.

At the far end of the cell was a cot with a thin mattress and a single sheet. No pillow. I squatted down- underneath the cot was Eponine, bound up in a stained straitjacket, curled up, and facing away from me. His hair was matted and greasy. His skin was pallid.

“Eponine?” I whispered.

No response.

“Eponine, I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

No response.

“If you’re trying to avoid death, you’re not going to do it by ignoring me.”

No response.

I shook his shoulder, thinking that maybe he was asleep. He didn’t do anything. I rolled him onto his back- his head lolled, and his eyes stayed shut.

“Hey, wake up.” I shook his shoulder. “Wake up- god damn it, Eponine, I need to talk, we need to talk-”

He groaned. His eyes cracked open just a hair, enough for him to see me.

“Liv...”

I snapped. “What could possibly drive you to do this? You- You’ve hurt my people! I should rough you up. But you’re in a pathetic enough state. All those nights you left me alone, and I imagined you at my side, the most perfect rulers in the world…”

“Liv...” his voice croaked. “I- I need-” He coughed. Blood spattered on his lips, dripping down to the fabric binding him like a little kid’s paint splatters. “I need… I want...”

“Answer the question!”

His lips moved without sound, but he found his voice after another cough. “I want the girl from Heavestone back. I miss her. I miss her so much.”

I scowled. “This is who I was meant to be. Not my father’s puppet.”

“But Alegria’s instead...”

His eyes slid to the side. My heart fluttered, hoping that he was dead, that I wouldn’t have to deal with him ever again- but his breath continued to shudder along like a dysfunctional air vent in the middle of winter. Like he was in winter himself, facing a chokingly cold and strong wind without a scarf for protection.

He cringed, his eyes going wide. One of the veins in his neck twitched.

“Oh, Liv...”

My voice clipped him off. “Stop this act. Cut the theatrics. Tell me your motives.”

“...There’s so much more on Earth I wanted to see. And a girl offered me a ride home if I would help her with a crime. I made a deal, and now I’m the one paying for it.” His eyes slid back to me. “I would have done anything-”

“Anything?”

He grunted. “I wouldn’t have murdered anybody.”

“You murdered the memories of thousands upon thousands of people. You murdered our heritage, Eponine. Part of our culture. That’s heinous enough for me to sentence you to the same death.”

“What about the officials? Don’t they get a say-”

“We don’t do trials here on Miralay. You should know that better than anyone else here.”

It was always tradition for the male Providence to sentence traitors to death.

I thought it would have been fun to watch the hope go out of Eponine’s eyes from the moment I’d first heard of his crimes. To watch as the weight of what he’d done crush him from above.

But my heart was as frozen as it had been when I’d shot through the stars on my way here.

“Liv… Tell my mom that I love her. And tell Alistair and Ignis too. That if I can’t be with them in body…” A tear rolled down his cheek. “That I’ll always be there with them in spirit, no matter if there’s some sort of afterlife or not. And when I’m dead, I want my ashes sent to Earth so they can be spread across the planet I loved so much.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do any of those things. I can’t abandon my responsibility to the people to fulfill the last wishes of a murderer.”

His face crumpled. He closed his eyes and rolled onto his stomach, quickly dissolving into sobbing. His tears mixed carelessly with the grime of the floor.

“Please, Liv- please-”

“I can’t.”

“I’m begging you, please-”

“You only have yourself to blame. You’ve been a thorn in my side ever since we got here.”

He sniffed, desperately trying to pull his composure back together. “Go to hell.”

“Believe me, I’m already halfway there thanks to you.”

I turned aboutface and left, re-locking the door behind me. Noi stared at me with bug eyes as I left the jail.

31

5/30/2147

LIV

The people chattered as they took their seats in the public square, all eyes on the stage, their faces either as solemn as a gravestone or as animated as a druggie in the middle of a psychedelic trip. Nobody under the age of seventeen was allowed into the area- guards blocked all the entrances, screening people and disallowing anyone who was too young so that their young minds wouldn’t be burdened with any trauma from watching someone die in front of their eyes. Some of those who made it through the barricade of flesh had a certain bloodlust in their eyes, like they’d been craving for an execution, for something to break up the monotony of their daily lives.

On the stage was a long table, the same one from the meeting room. Some menial workers had brought out the swirling blue and green chair from the meeting room and put it at the center of the tribunal. Other people- Mirt, Noi, the officials, and other people I’d never seen in my week of service- took their seats as well.

And the main attraction. Eponine, hanging from a high bar in chains shackled on his wrists. His eyes, dead and distant. Naked with only a decommissioned washrag tied around his waist for modesty. The faded scars on his chest were in full view- they’d been real, not just a product of my imagination. His head sagged, although he was wide awake- I’d personally ordered the jailers to force-feed him an energy drink shot so he couldn't doze the end of his life away. The public humiliation he had inflicted upon the public reflected back on him at full force.

Am I okay? Is the stress getting to me?

I checked my hair in Noi’s pocket mirror for the fourth time that morning. I felt like a harried mess inside, but outside, I was just as radiant as everyone had told me I had been during my ceremony… only a week prior?

Do I need to see a therapist?

Yeah, probably. At least, if not now, then afterwards.

I’ll have to talk to Mirt later. Or Amelia.

Definitely Mirt.

I slipped the mirror into my pocket and held my hand up to quiet the public. The roaring immediately ceased. I stood up. The retainers and the officials snapped to attention.

“People of Miralay, it has been a great honor to serve you this past week. Learning of your lifestyle and culture, of your grievances, of the ins-and-outs of life here. I am fully committed to seeing our colony remain healthy and strong in the hopes that one day more colonies will spring up on other planets.

“Here before you stands- or hangs, I should say-” I paused, giving the crowd a moment to chuckle- “someone who would gravely injure our colony. Someone who would be perfectly happy to see everything we have achieved suffer and wither and die away.”

I gave the crowd a moment to boo. I slipped out away from the tables and approached Eponine, coming around to face him at the edge of the stage, my back to the crowd. His wrists were red and sore and on the edge of bleeding from the immense pressure on them.

“You irreparably damaged the memory server. Eleven people so far have not received their memories thanks to you.”

The boos only got louder. The boy hanging in front of me winced. A tear ran down his cheek, but he otherwise stayed silent, not daring to open his eyes and face the thousands of people he had hurt with his existence.

“Eponine Westal, you stand convicted of conspiring to incite violence, obstruction of justice, unlawful access of a government computer system, assistance in identity fraud, and destruction of government property. You are hereby sentenced to death. Would you prefer hanging, dismemberment, or electrocution?”

“Dismemberment?” He raised his head, a tired sort of confusion passing over his face. “Wha-”

“Dismemberment it is!” Amelia said, springing up from her chair, her eyes alight, her face manic. She snapped her fingers- two workers in black plainclothes stepped out from behind the curtain, holding various instruments of cutting flesh- a tweezers, a scalpel, a tray for catching blood. Nothing to stop the pain, nothing for cleaning, nothing-

The world swooned under my feet. I crouched down, my hands on the floor to steady myself. More workers came out, all of them approaching Eponine, who was kicking his feet wildly, almost kicking someone square in the jaw. My breath began to quicken. Mirt slipped out from the watchful tribunal and swooped over to me.

“You don’t have to be here to watch this,” he whispered as the workers began to lower Eponine a bit, still not enough for his feet to touch the ground. “Do you need to step out?”

I nodded, embarrassed that there wasn’t even any gore yet and yet I was still finding a way to panic. “Yes, please.”

Mirt helped me to my feet and guided us to the side of the stage. We slipped through the curtains and into the backstage area. Several more workers were chatting softly to themselves, probably gossiping. One of them glanced over to me, and then both of them giggled. Mirt flipped them off- the first show of emotion I’d ever seen from him.

I slipped to my knees.

Mirt crouched down beside me. “I know this is hard for you.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

“I’ll make you suffer every last iota of pain you’ve inflicted upon this colony!” Amelia screeched from the stage, followed by a shriek from Eponine.

I cringed. “What’s gotten into Amelia? I’ve never seen her so… unhinged...”

“I… I don’t know, my Providence.” He shook his head and then slipped an arm behind my shoulders, giving me support as he helped me down onto the floor. My chest ached. “I was in isolation while we were growing up. We never had any contact until you arrived.”

“Isolation?”

“Did I stutter?”

“No, I mean… why that? Didn’t you have-”

Of course he had parents, you idiot.

Mirt sighed as a shriek came from the stage and then a collective cackle from the audience. “My parents conceived me relatively late. I was only three when they both shed their memories.”

And then he would have gone to the orphan center to be raised by the autocontrol system…

Did anything happen to the Rouges?…

I pulled up the crime database. A homepage I wished I hadn’t yet become intimately familiar with.

Rouge… Rouge…

Two Rouges executed in their cells via dismemberment for trying to access the memory server. False accusations, since they were later discovered to have been hindering the attack... But too late.

Amelia's parents…

I sat up. “I don’t feel safe while she’s acting like this. Please take me back to my private quarters.”

“As you wish, my Providence-”

The sound of metal creaking and bending rended the air.

The pop-pop-bang of bullets.

Our attention tore to the stage- Mirt flung aside the curtains, exposing the unglorious vision of a crumpled Eponine sailing through the air, his chains broken, blood spattering everywhere from places I couldn’t make out in the gore. A black figure sailed through the air after him, reaching out for him with inky midnight hands.

“Holy...” Mirt rushed over to me and pulled me away from the open rift. “We need to go now.”

“My people-”

"They'll be fine!"

"You don't know that!" I stomped my foot. "That's a gun, Mirt! They have no way of protecting themselves-"

More pops echoed from behind the curtain. The rustle of chains, Eponine's chains.

"What good's being the Providence if I don't protect my people?" I whispered.

I threw aside the curtains.

So many... So many dead...

Another black-clad figure landed right in the middle of the stage. He looked up. Our eyes met for a brief second.

"You!" I yelled. "You dare harm my people? They've done you no wrong!"

The figure reached for the gun on his belt. Mirt scooped me up in an instant and flew through the backstage doors.

Other guards had had the same idea, apparently, because we were soon flanked by seven other people in bulletproof vests, all of us running for our lives.

Stars above, I knew there would be trouble here, but...

What kind of friends did Eponine have? How could he have-

That supply ship. It got delayed by a day for reasons unknown. They’ve got something to do with it, I’m sure.

What are we going to tell Alegria?

Oh, please let the officials get there soon...

ACT 3

People of Miralay, I regret to inform you that it appears that Eponine Westal has been forcibly removed from custody and has escaped to Earth with the help of Earthen assistants. Our suspicions point to someone stationed on the supply mission that left earlier today as that was the only conduit through which Eponine could have escaped. We are doing our best to work with Alegria to track down the people responsible for this so that they can be brought to justice.

In addition, a grave mass of our fellow Miralayans were wounded or killed in the ambush during what was supposed to be Eponine's execution. I have no words to express my sorrow for the loss of all the valuables lives, the lovers, the workers who we lost thanks to the hubris of the man you spent your lives waiting for, not to mention the memory lines now irrevocably fractured. Rest assured, we will find Eponine and give him the death he deserves. You will get your justice and your closure.

No doubt by now, you have learned that Eponine conspired with outside Earthen forces to erase and partially destroy the memory server. All memories shed and received require the server in order to verify the authenticity of all memories and to patch over errors created due to psychological stressors. Alegria has several backups dating back as recent as a month, although it will take several weeks in order for a full safety and security sweep of the crew to complete before the backups will be sent to us. The law of ages has temporarily been suspended in order to accommodate for this. Select individuals whose memory lines were in a separate server for maintenance have already been notified of their exception and should plan on reporting to the memory shedding area on their assigned dates as normal.

If you have any questions, please direct them to your sector official. It would be fruitless to issue you a good evening, Miralay, but please take the time to breathe. Please take the time to cherish the life you have, and the people around you.

I love you.

32

6/1/2147

EPONINE

Every… Everything is so bright here…

Did I die? Am I in heaven? That’s kinda suspicious… How did I get in heaven without believing in a god? Because no god would have allowed any of this to happen...

Heaven is supposed to erase all your flaws, right? Make you perfect?

I can’t feel my body… I can’t tell what they’ve touched and what they’ve left the way I wanted it.

Oh, there’s my heartbeat. Thump, thump, thump. I can feel them both beating, one after the other, just like it’s always been. So I must not be in heaven.

Unless this god accepts Miralayans?

Hey, look, there’s other people here as well… Or their voices, at least.

“Did you see the way Sully jumped from those rafters? Hell, I wish I was fit enough to do that! And with all that blood flying in the air...”

“Yeah, I’d have puked, probably. Just being in this room is enough to give me the squicks… Avery did a damn good job with the prosthetic fingers and wiring them so seamlessly into his interface, don’t you think? Pity skin grafts haven’t been figured out yet.”

“Guess it’ll save him money on nail polish!”

A cabal of girly giggles. I’m not in heaven. And… I’m a cyborg now as well?

Yet another identity to weave into myself.

“Hey, I think he’s waking up. You should put him down again before he gains lucidity. I don’t want him trying to get up and tearing something out of his flesh on accident. I’m not in the mood to write one more goddamn incident report to Alegria.”

“...Me? I think you want Adelaide. She’s the one with all the medical credentials!”

“Fine. Just go! Quickly!”

The light’s going away… And there’s a girl above me. A beautiful girl with bouncy brown hair. I’ve seen her before, haven’t I? Somewhere… I can’t remember…

“Hey, you! You look hella tired. We’re about halfway to Earth right now. Don’t worry about those bone-in pizzas. They’re always trying to start crap with the rest of the crew.”

My mouth… Why isn’t it working? I want to talk to her, to know what’s going on…

There’s a tube going down my throat. That’s nasty. I don’t think there was that much damage to my body.

“I’m going to put ya back to sleep, okay? Your body isn’t ready to be awake yet. We got a few more days until we’ll be back on Earth. Sleep well until then, ya hear?”

O… Okay. Sleep is nice...

33

6/4/2147

EPONINE

I spent a great deal of my childhood fascinated with outer space, with the stars and planets seemingly forever out of my reach. I spent countless hours staring at pictures of Earth, training myself for a kind of sonderful loneliness, a self-inflicted alienation from a planet I would be shackled to for the rest of my life and yet never really a member of. But then Mom took away all my space books and told me to go outside and play with Alistair and Ignis and to stop digging myself into a premature depression over factors outside of my control.

It worked, kinda.

But the planet in front of me was far more blue, far more vast than any printed picture could ever hope to convey. Scattered pinpricks of light on the dark side, little pockets of humanity afflicted with their own day-in-day-out troubles. None of them my own loop of time, forever silenced in the grand choir of screaming that was planet Earth.

“Eponine?”

A dark-skinned girl with big bouncy curls approached me, dressed in a gray-blue uniform like the one I’d seen Sully wear the first time we’d met. I turned to her, away from the large curved glass of the viewing port. Earth stood at my back, white and blue and terrifyingly huge.

My eyebrows wrinkled. “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you remember me from Thursday? The girl who-”

“Thursday?” I shook my head. “Sorry, I don't. I just woke up a few minutes ago.” I averted my eyes. “I thought I’d see Earth again before we touch down this afternoon.”

“So… You don’t remember waking up in the medical bay Thursday?”

“...No.”

I cradled my right fist to my chest, left thumb running over the metallic joints. Three fingers stolen by Amelia, ripped away from the knuckles in systematic fashion like she were disjointing a fried chicken wing for dinner. Pinky, ring, middle, replaced by surgeons unknown, pitch black nonreflective metal unfeeling but otherwise just as functional as their lost biological counterparts.

“Oh, yeah, those.” She perked up. “You like them? I printed them out just for you. Picked the material too. Thought it would look badass.” She winked. “Tell some war stories to your children when you grow up?”

“Uh, about that...”

“Oh, yeah, right.” She released a flustered laugh and scratched her back. “God, I’m bad at this socializing thing. I’m Adelaide. I was gonna be a medical worker on Miralay, but then I thought I’d be better off on Earth, ya know?” She shrugged. “I guess I’m coming down to Heavestone with you. Though I don’t really have any other choices at this point. Parents were dead, and friends all got so absorbed in their jobs that they had no time to socialize...”

I’m going home to Heavestone!

Alistair… I’ll be home soon!

“You keep drifting off a lot, you know that?” She cringed suddenly. “Shit. I didn’t mean it like- uh, I think I’ll be going now before I say anything else wrong.”

I reached out to her. “No, wait-”

She burst through the nearest doors, which led to the eating area, and disappeared from view. I didn’t follow her, just stayed put and blushed as I turned back to the viewing port, just as tall as I was. A satellite was passing by closer to the planet, its indicator lights blinking, its solar panels glittering in the weak reflected sun.

The loudspeaker roared to life down the hall. “We will be entering Earth’s atmosphere shortly. Please report to your assigned stations within the next fifteen minutes.”

I tore myself away from the viewing port. Sully burst out of the door from where Adelaide had disappeared and took my left hand.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. She pulled me down the hallway and took the closest left, leading straight into a room with all the bunk beds, almost resembling the room from the dream with the rebels.

I yanked my hand away from her and sat on the closest bed. “Sully?”

She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Yeah?”

My breath caught in my throat for a moment, refusing to let any of my words out until I coughed.

“...What exactly happened?”

She crossed her arms. “Really? You’re about to go back to your damn home and that’s all you can think about?”

“Hey- I almost died. I think I have a right to know how my life could’ve ended.”

“That’s not really something we should be discussing here. The more we squabble here, the more we’ve got to scrub from the security footage later before we turn it in to Alegria. You’ve left me a helluva job back on Miralay, so I kept my promise. And I always keep my promises.”

“Can you at least tell me what happened to my body?”

She sighed. “I knew it would come to this. Listen, that girl you just scared off-”

“I didn’t-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, her name’s Adelaide. Another escapee on her way to Heavestone. Knew her way around Miralayan biology, so I let her take the reins in keeping you alive and all that fun stuff.”

“That still doesn’t answer-”

“Wait a moment, will you? I’m getting there! Anyways, we had to go full out on you. We had to resuscitate you twice since you kept going into shock. Took measurements from your left hand and tried to replicate everything on the right using a 3D printer we were about to decommission and replace. You can thank Addy for everything.”

The loudspeaker echoed in the hallway again, the same message with an updated timeframe. Ten minutes.

Sully left, and I picked a bunk to lie down in, studying the wood frame above my head. My hands rested on my chest, fingers intertwining and releasing. Fingertips still studying the foreign mirrors, molded perfectly right down to the weird crook in my left pinky and the nervous-wreck-esque length pretend fingernails.

It could have been worse. I could be missing an entire hand. Or both. Or Amelia could have completely ripped my arms out. Or she could have started with my eyes-

I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut and opened my interface. A mini panic bolted down my spine- everything was blank and default like a fresh install. No traces of Miralay anywhere on it, just a standard widget-ridden front screen like someone had taken a tablet and tried to make it a computer.

I opened my eyes again. Nobody was in the room. I rolled off the bed and sneaked out, padding the door with my foot as to not make a sound, and returned to the viewing port. The ship was slowly descending further and further into Earth’s atmosphere- my legs grew weak, the image of us all crisping up in the fall like burnt chips burning in my brain.

I sunk to the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees before burying my head in them.

Come on, Eponine. Deep breaths. Everybody knows what they’re doing. You’re going to land safely. You’re going to see Alistair and Mom and Ignis again before the day is out.

What am I gonna do about Mr. Greenland, though?

I- I’ll fight him off if he threatens me. I’m not afraid of him. He can risk his own damn skin if he wants his daughter back.

Now get up, Eponine. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Come back down to Earth.

I stood up and braced myself on the handrail. The clouds were coming closer to us now, the blue of the oceans glittering as they greeted us, as they beckoned us forward. North America was coming closer, vast and wider than any computer screen could have possibly attempted to convey. There were no borders, no natural perimeters separating the state I called home from any other state or country or arbitrary divide humans had carved across the landscape.

Earth was a planet that housed four billion people on its seven continents and the islands interspersed among them in wide oceans. It hadn’t been one big catastrophe that had halved the world population so long ago but a series of choices people had made in all sorts of fear- cluster in big cities in the hope of increased community survival, instead making themselves larger targets for governmental and paramilitary raids. Have less and less children, thinking that that alone would stop the oceans from rising, would stop the temperature from climbing. Hoard information in larger and fewer places, regretting everything when their data centers went up in flames.

Maybe Alegria had foreseen that all of that would happen. Maybe the Providences gladly traded in half of their estimated lifespan and their freedom in order to be secure in the knowledge that, no matter how many icebergs melted and islands went underwater forever, they’d live through it all. Miralay certainly had the capacity to be self-sustainable, and the capability- but then what would Alegria play with in their free time? They’d have to be accountable to the corrupt governments of the time, and that wasn’t worth the potential big bucks from the fretting survivalists looking to avoid the apocalypse that they’d have ended up with.

I shook my head. The sky faded from glittery black and white and yellow to blue. Blue and green streaks flickered all around us, signals of some sort of cloaking technology to protect from the government and to simply appear invisible to everybody else. A lone airplane passed under us, blissfully unaware of our existence.

Vertigo. The world swayed underneath me. I focused my eyes on the horizon, reminding myself like a desperate trapeze artist not to look down, not to look down, not to look down-

Buildings began to be distinguishable. The inky void of space fully disappeared behind us, and the blue sky enveloped us- enveloped me forevermore, never to let me go again if I could help it. I could just barely pick out the lightrail line that had whisked me away on this unfortunate trip, the fast-food places not too far away, and…

The empty field of Heavestone.

The lights changed- green wisps of smoke enveloped us like a simulated fog, the curtain before the big reveal- all of the buildings I had grown up around, had grown up in. Old Man Jenkins on the edge of town, Alistair’s and Ignis’ house not too far from my own. The tiny playground someone had set up in their backyard with a swingset and a castle treehouse and a whirl-around. Gardens scattered all over.

My lungs seized up. I was home. I was home.

I was finally home.

The spacecraft’s stabilizers kicked in, slowing our descent. I braced myself against the balcony. We landed with a thud, rattling in my bones. The entire ship trembled for a moment, and then all went quiet for a few seconds before the crew’s voices started echoing down the halls again.

I couldn’t help myself as I leaped away from the viewing port and dashed down towards the loading dock, my bare feet pounding on the cold metal ground, echoing like water drops in an abandoned cave. The loading dock whooshed open, letting in clean Earthen air-

The words fell out of my throat. The blue sky greeted me with fluffy white hands waving from above. The inhabitants of Heavestone started pouring out of their houses, started rushing towards us.

I stumbled over the loading dock and rolled out the entry hatch and landed in the grass. Green and red and brown as far as the eye could see, all mine for all of time. I couldn’t help it- I rolled around, relishing in the earthy scent, not caring if the tissue-thin hospital gown Adelaide must have put me in tore and exposed my underwear.

“Pony!”

A heavy body thumped to the ground beside me- I rolled over and got a face full of Alistair, his sandy hair askew everywhere. His eyes, his mouth, his neck. His blue meeting my green and making a world’s difference. We rolled into each other, mixing like paint, the world revolving around us around and around until we grew tired and dizzy and flopped to a stop several meters away.

“Oh my god, you’re home, you’re home, you’re home...”

Alistair’s left hand met my right as we lay on our backs and watched the clouds go by- and then he stiffened, confused. He rolled on his side, facing me, his face drawn as he studied the metallic fingers, curling them over and over in his own hands.

His eyes met mine again, but this time with a tinge of… rage? Angry that someone would dare to hurt his boyfriend? Protection, perhaps, his heckles raised?

“What happened?”

The image of Amelia’s manic face as she severed a tendon without a single qualm flashed before my eyes- and then I cringed, pulling my hand back and cradling it to my chest.

“It’s not something I want to talk about right now.”

He shook his head. “Who did this to you?”

“A… Amelia Rouge. And Liv.” I sucked in a pained breath. “I said-”

“What's going on here?”

Both of our heads turned to Adelaide, standing above us. Alistair rolled to his feet, towering a full foot above her- which made no sense, seeing as the reduced gravity of Mars should have made Adelaide taller.

He eyed her up and down. “We're busy having a moment here! Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Adelaide!” She waved in his face, unaware of his pissed-off expression. He blinked and took a step back. She glanced all around. “So this is Heavestone, huh?”

“...Yeah, it is. Look-”

“Huh. I was expecting something a little more... advanced. Like, underground bunkers and people wearing tinfoil hats? And weird satellite phones and hermits planning revolutions. But damn, your air smells good!” She took a long sniff. “Hmmm... I could get used to this. As long as you don't put me to hard physical labor. I was gonna be a medical worker on Miralay, buuuut... You know.”

Alistair crossed his arms. “I’m kinda busy right now, okay? You could go talk to-” he pointed somewhere towards the houses- “any of those people. I’m sure they’d love to show a new person the ropes to living here.”

“Okay!” She scampered off.

Alistair wiped his forehead. “Phew. Sorry about that. It’s been hard to get into the mood to be myself when you’ve been gone.” He reached out a hand to me and helped me to my feet. A faint flicker of a smile shined on his face, only inches away from my own. “Now let’s get you home.”

Alistair helped me over to the street, where people were beginning to pool. Several people beelined for me- but Alistair shooed them off like a bodyguard with a celebrity- or a guardian angel instead of the demons he adored- parting the crowd with one arm and guarding me with the other, keeping me close to his chest until I was at the front door and then inside.

“Who-”

Mom stumbled out of the kitchen, her apron askew, her eyes red and sore. She stared at the two of us for a full moment, her eyes empty, and the recognized me. The loveliest, widest smile on her face, and then she dropped her wooden spoon- thankfully otherwise clean- and enveloped me in a bear hug.

“My son! My son, oh my god, you’re home, you’re safe, you’re here with me and everything is going to be right in the world again.”

She glanced up at Alistair, who was barring the front door shut with his elbow. Masses of neighbors pressed up against the front living room window, trying to get a peek at me.

She let go of me and took my shoulders in her arms, staring me in the face. Her hair was stringy and unwashed, but her skin had a sudden glow to it.

“Welcome home, Eponine. I love you so much; don’t you ever forget that. Please don’t ever run off like that ever again. You are always welcome here in Heavestone, no matter what that old crank says.”

34

6/4/2147

EPONINE

After the crowd had dissipated from my house and the presents and wishes of well-wishers had come to rest on the kitchen table, I slipped out of my room where I’d been hiding- just like old times- into the backyard and stepped gingerly into Mom’s garden. The tomato vines were wild and rampant with little buds of cherry tomatoes beginning to blossom. Zucchinis displayed their glossy dark green skin in all their glory. Pumpkins sneaking out of the garden began to find purchase on the ground.

“It’s been a while, Pony. Glad to see you’re still ambitious.”

I turned around. Ignis stood beside me, her arms crossed- but her eyes weren’t stern at all.

I hid my right hand behind my back, hoping she hadn’t seen it. “Yeah…” I felt my cheeks burning. “Listen, I’m really not in the mood to have this conversation right now.”

“That’s a shame. Because I was going to ask you to help me, you know, with all your experience-” I stiffened, and she cringed. “Alright, alright! You need space to... recover. I won’t bother you right now.”

My cheeks began to burn. I straightened myself out and stepped out of the garden and sat down on the grass, tending to one of the vines insistent on escaping no matter how many times I trimmed it.

She turned to go- my right hand shot out, catching her shirt. She halted in her steps but didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry, Iggy,” I whispered. “What exactly do you need?”

She stayed turned away from me as she took a deep breath. “I need you to help me design and maintain a website for my campaign when I start next year. I won’t waste a moment from the day I turn eighteen. I’m gonna blow Alegria’s whole cover!” She threw her hands into the air. “And I’d find any information you want to give me invaluable, but I understand you literally just got back today, so I won’t pressure you. For now.”

“...Thanks, I guess?” I dropped my hand. “I’ll consider it.”

“Thanks, Pony. I really appreciate it. I’ve already gotten that Sully girl from the spacecraft to agree to an interview as long as I keep her under an alias, and I’ll probably hit up that Adelaide girl if I can find where she ran off to-”

She turned around- her eyes immediately fixed on my right hand. I hid it back behind my back, but she dropped down to crouch beside me, her eyebrows wrinkled.

“What was that?”

I broke out in a blush. “N-nothing-”

“Pony, please don’t lie to me.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not angry. I just want to see.”

“Alright…”

I showed her my right hand. She took it in her own hands, studying the three fingers with intent eyes.

“Quality workmanship… I’ve never seen such functional prosthetics. And the movement appears to be seamlessly tied into your nervous system.” She looked up at me. “Pony? What happened? Who did this to you?”

“L- Liv.”

My tongue quivered. I shut my mouth tightly, scared that one more word would unleash the emotional floodgates and end up in me being a snivelling sobbing mess on the ground.

Ignis’ stare went distant. She dropped the hand and stood up again, pacing back and forth beside the garden, her hand on her chin as she thought hard.

“Mr. Greenland went missing two days ago. Finally broke and shouted some drivel about you being a failure and took off. Good riddance. I hope they reunite in hell for causing you so much pain.” A pause. “I hope you tell me someday exactly what happened so I can help you get some justice. Or at least closure. Whatever you need.”

She glanced up- Alistair was at the edge of my yard, trying to get around my mom to see me, always blocked by her.

Ignis giggled. “Looks like you have a date, pretty boy.”

I waved at Alistair and stepped out of the garden. He caught my eye and pushed past my mom and made his way over to me. He immediately tackled me to the ground, the both of collapsing beside the garden, ground firm and unyielding. Ignis snorted before she collapsed as well, joining us in a sort of lopsided six-pointed star, eyes to the unyielding and infinite sky.

No birthrights, no computer system dictating who I could and couldn’t associate with, no responsibilities that I hadn’t imposed upon myself.

Pure ecstasy.

“Hey, Pony-” Alistair tapped my hand and pointed to a long tubular cloud- “you know what it is.”

“What-” Ignis’ nose wrinkled, and she rolled her eyes. “Boys. You awful, crude boys.”

“I’m not awful,” Alistair countered. “I’m fabulous.”

“Fabulously disgusting.”

“And what does that make me?” I piped in.

“Even more of a mess,” Ignis replied.

"Say, Stairs..." I tapped the back of his hand. "Are you going to give my hard drive back anytime soon?"

"I'm working through the... P's," he just barely managed to get out.

And the three of us burst into laughter, a unity of friends.

And despite the dot on my forehead that would never go away and the feeling in those fingers that would never return and the memories that I could only repress at best, I was free to be whoever I wanted to be, whether that be a revolutionary or someone's right-hand man as they changed the world or even just a hideaway in a nonexistent neighborhood.

Nobody would ever make that decision for me ever again. And no matter whether or not Ignis succeeded with her campaign, I didn't need a government of any kind dictating how I should exist. Nobody got to call those kind of shots but me.

And if I was wrong, I would worry about that when I was eighteen years old.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VANE VANDER is most definitely a memetic mess. She spends her days contemplating the reason for the excruciating pain of existence, the right amount of deep-frying to make the perfect meme, and whether spaghetti is, in fact, a gender. Sometimes she can be found writing middle-school-emo-tier poetry at mayvaneday.art.

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