Went to the coffee shop to write the next chapter of Gravitation. An hour, three cups of coffee and a French Crueller later, I had this. Go figure.
Evenings on Mindoir were still the same. Almost two years had passed, there were almost no familiar faces, she was miles from the town where she grew up, but the evenings were the same. Strangers, now, walked the streets, returning from office jobs and the farms. They strolled, laughing, as if their friends and neighbors hadn't been whisked off to who knew where. As if they hadn't been brutally murdered in front of them. Maybe most of these were transplants. Maybe they hadn't been here when the sky had rained blood and the stench of fresh bodies had filled the air with sweet musk.
It made Lillith, wonder, sometimes, why death smelled sweet. The smell of rot was particular, there was nothing quite like it, but it wasn't the sour smell of old garbage, or the heavy sticky smell of manure. When flesh burned it smelled good. When a body bled out, it wasn't pleasant, it didn't smell like cotton candy or freshly baking cookies. It smelled wrong. But it also smelled sweet, like an overripe orange, perhaps. Not just like that, but the same sort of smell. Like something was off, but you couldn't place it.
She often wondered, while she sat at the top of the prefab housing where she and her sister now lived, if she would smell sweet when she died. She wondered if different people smelled differently when they began to decompose. Did those that lived an honorable life, a good life, smell better than murderers and rapists? Did petty thieves smell worse than rambunctious children? The woman they lived with, a very old friend of her mother's, called her morbid. Tried to lock her away when she had such thoughts, when she voiced them. She'd lock her in the basement for saying she wished she'd been able to save her mother. She'd beat her with a long, bent cane if she said she'd wandered past the mortuary on the way to school. She wouldn't feed her if she did a school essay on the events of two years before.
Lillith did these things on purpose. At first, she'd kept it to herself. It was simple self-preservation. But as she began to behave, the tiny, quirky things her sister would do brought down the wrath of their keeper. As long as Lillith continued to misbehave, Clara was safe. As long as Clara was safe, Lillith didn't dwell on how badly she had failed her family.
She stood, swinging back away from the edge. It wouldn't kill her if she fell. She wondered if she'd feel anything. It was rare, anymore, that she felt anything but empty. It was a good feeling. People didn't expect things from empty people. The empty were left to their own devices. The empty were not noticed when they left. The empty were just window dressing, always there but never considered. She liked being like that, liked watching but not being watched.
More than anything though, she liked being on the move. Stagnation began to wear on her quickly. She'd lain under the corpse of one of her closest friends for hours. She'd been locked in a hospital room for weeks. When they'd returned to Mindoir she'd been forbidden from walking as far as the corner store by herself. She'd been told to stay in her room. To behave. To not wander.
She picked fights with the kids at school. She and Clara were bussed twenty-four miles into the capital every day for school. Children from all the surrounding towns were brought there. All told, Mindoir now had less than three hundred children on its surface. Twenty of them were less than two years old, just less than two hundred were of school age. Families no longer moved here. Young couples moved in, maybe they had a baby, but no one brought their children to live here. Children came to Mindoir to die. That was usually what the fights were about. They were, all of them at the school, survivors of the attack. Some had been hidden in closets. Some in basements. Some, like her, under the bodies of loved ones. She and here sister were the only two from the town she'd grown up in, a town that had once had nearly three hundred children just by itself.
She'd see them, and she'd see Jack. His father's gun in his hands. His body, falling towards her. They hadn't fought. They hadn't tried to save their families, their friends. They had hidden, scared and alone. The younger ones she could forgive. Like Clara, they had no business trying to take on the monsters that had done this to their home, but many were her age. Jack's. If Jack had lived.
Whenever she came home with another detention slip and a black eye, she'd be locked in her room, and told to grow up. To stop blaming everyone else.
And she tried. She bottled it all in as best she could. She knew she was weak. She knew she was guilty. And she knew there was only one way to make up for what she had done. Hadn't done. Make up for what she should have done.
There was a banging behind her, a clang of boots on the ladder. She turned, spotting Clara pulling herself up over the edge of the building. She'd grown a little in the last two years. Her hair was shorter, no longer tied in braids that Lillith would have spent hours weaving. Her face was gaunt, hollow, but not in the good way that Lillith felt. It was the hollowness of feeling. She felt too much, even though Lillith did everything she could to protect her. She crawled along the roof and sat, legs dangling over the edge beside where Lillith stood. Lillith sat back down. Her sister hated heights, had since she was small.
"She calling me for dinner?"
"Not yet. I got this today." Clara handed over a heavy parchment envelope. Lillith hadn't seen paper like this before. It felt strange in her hands; they didn't often use paper, and this was very different from anything they ever had. It was rough, thick. It was a dirty ivory color, and embossed. She opened it, careful not to let it tear.
Miss Clara Shepard, the paper read
It is our pleasure inform you that out of the many applicants, you have been chosen to attend The Livingston Institute of Art and Design as one of our scholarship students. Classes begin on April 17th for our next term. Please be at the school no later than April 10th so that you can be assigned housing and classes. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Leonard Paltzi
Lillith read it over a second time, then looked at her little sister.
"I'm going to join the Alliance," she said, handing the paper back. She saw her sister's face fall, an emotion her couldn't place crossing her eyes briefly, so she added, "I can't stay here anymore."
"Oh," Clara whispered, the letter crumpling in her first, "I just thought, this is what mom wanted for me."
"I know. And I'll take you before I enlist." It's what their mother would have wanted, but Lillith tried not to think about that. She tried not to think her parents at all. Her father's bruised and broken body, lying in halves on the street. Her mother, alive and looking at her one moment, gone an instant later.
"What about Virginia?" Virginia was Lillith's only friend. She'd lost a leg during the attack, when she'd tried to drag her baby brother from the hands of the monsters. The batarians had left her for dead, certain she'd bleed out. Clara was the only person who knew that what they had went beyond just a simple friendship. They'd become lovers almost by accident, both just trying gain some semblance of normalcy in a world neither could comprehend. Clara didn't know about the others though. The young man from the candy store. He was four years her senior. The guy who ran the hardware store. He had been her first, just weeks after they're returned to Mindoir. Virginia was the only one that made her feel anything, when everything was over. The only person on this rock that she'd miss. But not enough to stay. What they had wasn't the sort of thing you stayed for. Not when you were seventeen.
"What about her? She's got a life here."
"You'll just leave her like that? Does she know?" Clara was always full of such righteous anger. It burned within her. Lillith just hoped it would protect her when she finally got away from this planet.
"'Course she doesn't know. She'll know when I stop showing up. We should get back, for dinner."
"Why are you so cold, Lilly? Why don't you ever talk to Dr. V? You can sit in on our vid call when he checks in again, if you wan. He's really helped me, Lilly. I think he could help you too."
"I don't need help. And I really wish you wouldn't talk to him. Shrinks are bad news."
"He just wants to help," Clara muttered, pulling herself to her feet, careful not to look over the edge. Lillith helped her up, stood between her and the edge as they made their way to the ladder. She also wished that Clara would just call up to her, rather than trying to climb up here. She hated it when Clara was uncomfortable.
They walked the rest of the way to the tiny prefab where they lived in silence. It was best not to be too loud when you approached. Lillith wondered if the constant fear of going home was something that would fade when she finally got away from here. She wondered if her life would ever be normal again. She doubted it, but didn't care. She'd been trained like one of Pavlov's dogs, and even if she got away entirely, she'd salivate every time she heard that bell. Every time she approached this dirty little building.
She ran a hand through some of the grime on the side of the house and rubbed it into her clothes and on her face. She pushed some of it through her hair. The black contrasted sharply with her short red hair, and made it clump uncomfortably.
"Why do you always do this? If you haven't actually been in a fight, you make it look like you've been rolling around in the dirt. It just gets you in trouble."
Lillith shrugged, using the puddle under the water spigot to catch her reflection. The truth was, coming home a filthy mess, though it made her stomach churn, and took all her willpower not to throw up, kept all the attention from her little sister. Clara rarely did anything that would normally get anyone in trouble, but if Lillith didn't go over the top, than all the negative attention in the house was turned to her little sister.
Fights at school, unwanted opinions, and a little bit of mud. It might cost her dinner, and get her stuck in her room, or down in the dank basement the prefab had been built over, but it was worth it to never see a single bruise on her sister's pale face.
April was only a month away, if her galactic calendar was still correct. Just a few more weeks and she'd never have to do this again. Clara would be safe, far from here.
And she'd be with the Alliance.
She could still remember the soldier that had removed the bodies from her. That had looked into her eyes, and with such tremendous joy had shouted that she was alive. She'd never forget his face. Never forget the warmth she'd felt as she was removed from the place where everything had gone wrong. He'd listened, believed her, when she'd said her sister was alive. They'd gone to look for her. The Alliance had saved Clara, and she owed them everything because of it.
She hadn't even closed the door when the shouting started.
Just a few more weeks.