Roys didn’t relent. “Come inside. I am not paid enough to babysit you.”
“Then do what I said and shoo. I’ll be fine. I’m getting a little further away from you, that’s all.” I yanked harder to no avail.
One tug and Roys had me pivoting into his firm chest. An arm fell around my waist, trapping me against him where his eyes reflected the sky. There were more stars than I could count, all captured perfectly by him.
“Does it look like this on Earth?” The question slipped out. Mentally, I blamed it on the booze, ignoring how I had so little.
He didn’t want to talk about Earth. That had been made abundantly clear, but I had questions. He was the only one who could answer, and I wanted to think about anything else. Somewhere far, far away with nothing and no one I ever knew, a strange place to outrun a past that found me light years away. I ran most of my life, and the current events told me I would run until the end of my days.
Such somber thoughts wouldn’t put me at ease, wouldn’t help me sleep, but a tale of Earth, a world my people came from but never knew, might.
Brows furrowed, Roys wet his lips and spoke carefully. “If you’re on something—”
“What makes you think I am?”
“You’re acting strange.”
“Haven’t I always been?”
“Annoying and unbelievably horny, but not this level of strange.”
I pursed my lips. “I’ll have to work on that.”
“Ethin.”
That name made my teeth grind; Madlyn calling it, screaming and holding out her hand. I could see her, could hear her, and there wasn’t enough space between us. Her and me. Me and Roys. For a second, Madlyn wasn’t on my mind, but he went and ruined it. Always ruined it.
“How can you call me annoying when you can’t get a damn name right? It’s Lucky, for fuck’s sake.” I shoved against his chest. He didn’t let go and I was moments away from forgetting how to breathe. “You need to stop. I need… I don’t want to hear that fucking name.” My lungs forgot to function. I heaved for oxygen that wouldn’t come. “It’s… you’re so… I was better for a moment, and you—”
“You can’t see the stars on Earth,” he interrupted.
My struggles ceased, so surprised by his admission that my anger bled away. I lay against him as he looked up, enraptured by the expanse of space. I was too, the first time I saw anything outside of the Colony. There were no portholes, nothing to view the world beyond our barren rock. The first time I had a moment to look outside, I could not dare explain what I felt. Words were too fickle to express beauty expanding into eternity. My eyes searched and searched, wondering how so much could exist, how we could exist among it all, and how sad it was that I would never dream of seeing the edge of every world.
“There’s cloud cover, deserts where homes once were, an ocean threatening to devour, and the humans who ruined it all,” Roys whispered like he had seen each of those deserts and crossed those turbulent oceans.
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
“Because it’s a shithole of festering disease, the worst kind; greed. Anyone with half a sense would know anywhere is better.”
I thought of the Colony, of rust and grime and death. Of bodies on street corners, miners crushed under rocks, synthetics that passed from my hands to dead ones. “I don’t know about that. They say Earth is for the richest of the galaxy, where they live in ivory towers.”
“Yes, the rich do, but the cost of those towers was everything and everyone that ever made the planet any good.” His hands strayed tomy back, eyes remaining skyward, darkened by the deep creases in his expression. “We called them High Risers, the rich who live in those ivory towers.”
“I’m taking it you didn’t live in those towers then.”
“Would I be here if I did? The May family began the construction of those towers centuries ago.”
“Like Ambassador May?”
Roys offered a surprised smile that made his eyes thin into crescent moons. “I’m surprised you know the name of any ambassador.”
I pinched the back of his neck. “I guarded his ship when he was attending one of the Intergalactic Court’s soirees, so don’t ask me to name any other. I know, like, two more.”
Roys’ chuckle rumbled between our chests. “I don’t know many of them either. I don’t care because they’re horrendous pieces of shit bent on destroying everything they deem lesser, which is practically everyone. People like them built towers to hide what they perceived as filth. We didn’t even see the cloud cover through their streets. We lived in the shadow, below where they could pretend they didn’t thrive over our bones.”
Not so dissimilar from the Colony, where the rich preached of profits and new job openings without mentioning the lives lost, how no profit could ever bring those lives back, and sometimes not even their bodies home. I wasn’t sure I liked that we had something in common, although I shouldn’t be too surprised. Most people had similar sob stories.
"That sucks, living like that, being treated like that. It's rough. You shouldn't have had to live like that. No one should."
