Aestus, Book 1: The City

Bismillah

Secondarily, to those who are brave, and true, and stand up for what is right.

Chapter 1

Preface

15 years ago

Jossey scrambled up the side of the condenser pod and sat under the desert sky, looking up at the glitter of stars.

She winced at the squeak of Tark's shoes on the sleek metal curve of the pod. This one was older, maybe a century or more, but still in good condition. "Ship-shape," Father would say, though the phrase meant nothing to her. It was one of those strange things grown-ups said.

The steel pod gleamed in the starlight. She hoped the Onlar wouldn't see two figures sitting here.

Tark plunked down beside her, floppy hair shoved out of his face. "You scared now?" he hissed.

"Shut up." She was, but she didn't dare show it. Tark was thirteen and didn't let her forget that she was only ten. She pretended to be nonchalant, but strained to hear over the soft whooshing of the condenser motors.

She wasn't quite sure she believed the Onlar existed, always half-wondered if those were stories made up to keep children obedient, like the monster under the bed, but if Father caught them...

But the stars.

They seemed to move, to shimmer, in the burning air above the horizon. Even at midnight it was hot, like the slow glowing of an oven that has been left open to cool. The land was punctuated by rock spires and deep canyons that Tark said the Onlar used to hide during the daytime.

Above her rose a massive arc of stardust and shining distant regions, seeming to twist its way across the July sky. She reached out her hand as if to touch it.

Father used to jokingly say that the atmosphere hadn't exactly turned to Venusian fumes after the years of extreme heat began. (She didn't know what Venusian meant, but it sounded bad.) Instead, it seemed to have expanded in the heat, an enormous bubble wobbling and making the stars appear to shimmer and dance, glittering orange and pale shades of pink, melting into the horizon.

Tark glanced over his shoulder at the deep hole in the side of one of the spires. The glint of machinery shone there in the starlight. The elevator. The pair had snuck out upside using it, the result of hours of Tark exploring the City's abandoned upper tunnels with his friends. It was a crankshaft model from the old days, nearly rusted beyond repair, and just unsealed enough for a group of boys to be able to break in.

Of course, none but Tark had been brave enough to risk a trip in such a rattling bucket up to the surface, or, really, anywhere. None but Gavin, his best friend.

And his little sister.

She looked up again, searching for the moon, and slid to the left. Tark gripped her arm. "Careful." She glanced down and saw, beneath her dangling feet, the edge. It was a twenty-five-foot fall. She shivered and scooted closer to her older brother.

* * *

They were up there because Jossey had asked to see the moon.

She'd seen it in videos, of course. She'd also seen paintings her father had done, from memory, of the surface when it hadn't been quite so hot. There was one of a sunset. There was even one of a tree, a tiny scrublike thing Father had seen once as a boy, rising out of the sandy ground.

From time to time he would talk about it in wonder, the insistence of life on survival aboveground. The pictures lined the interior of their small living chamber, next to the portrait of the rose Mother had given him on their wedding day. (None of them had ever seen a rose. It was a symbol of Mother's family.)

But Jossey had never seen anything other than the daylight sky, and that only when Father let her tag along on Engineering trips up to the surface, telling her that she needed to pay attention to the machinery and to leave the landscape to Patrol.

She had seen something white in the sky on that trip, and Father had explained to her that that was the moon, and it was often out at night, and she had stared because it looked like a little planet, floating up there in the blue. She had asked if it was cool up there, and Father had said he didn't know.

So she had asked to see the moon. And Tark, who never said no to his little sister, and who explored the scariest tunnels, even the ones the guards didn't want to go into, shrugged and said, "Okay."

Now they were sitting on top of a condenser pod, the sweet-smelling night air drifting past them. Tark's eyes were bright, almost silver, under a mop of blond hair.

"There it is," he whispered. He pointed a skinny arm across the canyons, across the darklands to the east. The moon floated low on the horizon, a few days past full, looking faded as time carved a shadow into its yellow face.

Jossey stared at it, amazed. It was like an entire world was there in the air before them.

It was so beautiful that Jossey forgot all about the Onlar, forgot about Father, forgot even that Tark was holding her wrist so she wouldn't slide off the pod. She was brought back to reality when his hand tightened over her arm.

She started to complain, but he hushed her, gray eyes enormous in the faint light as he stared past her.

Then she turned to look and she wasn't sure which of them was screaming.

* * *

Patrol found her the next day, draped across the base of the machine under the burning summer sun, nearly dead from dehydration. She had a massive bleeding cut across her eye and her femur had partly splintered on impact with the machine. Surgeons later told her it was a wonder she had survived.

For weeks, while she recovered in the hospital, Jossey screamed about green eyes, but otherwise refused to talk about what she had seen.

And despite their best search efforts, Tark was gone.

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Copyright © 2020 by S. Z. Attwell

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-7354790-0-2 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN 978-1-7354790-1-9 (MOBI)

ISBN 978-1-7354790-9-5 (EPUB)

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, living or dead, are not intended by the author. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Characters are products of the author's imagination.

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First Edition: August 2020