By M. L. McCortney
The ship shudders as it lands. Kava bites back a sob, thinking only of his parents.
And how they’re gone.
Gone, before his eyes. Gone, leaving him alone in the windowless shuttlecraft, in the painful emptiness in his chest, in the galaxy. They weren’t supposed to be gone. Until not long after Kava’s seventh birthday, they’d promised. The revolt would work. They would all be together, and free.
Time doesn’t pass in the shuttle. Rusted handcuffs bind his wrists together. Dried tears are a crust on his cheeks. The ship shakes. Am I about to die? He barely ever saw a starship at all before now, locked away with his parents inside the sweltering labor camp on a world people called Gath. Or am I somewhere else now?
The shaking dies down, then ends with a final jolt. A hatch in the wall opens, the light outside blinding. One of the Ruttarians comes in. The same slaver, tall and horned and wrinkled, who dragged him from his parents’ bodies in the aftermath of their doomed revolt. The same one who stuffed him in the shuttlecraft. Kava flinches away from the foul smell of his alien sweat. The slaver grabs his chained wrist. The Ruttarian’s rough, red skin is the polar opposite of Kava’s pure blue. He pulls, and Kava doesn’t resist, even as they leave the shuttle for the blinding world outside.
Kava has no words to describe the sound he hears before his eyes adjust, the sound of everything. Mechanical busyness, but not the mines Kava knows: flying vehicles’ whirring engines, starships roaring as they come and go. Mountains of glass and steel rise all around, too tall to see the tops of them. Towers, skyscrapers. Are they why the Ruttarians force Kava’s people, the Vochki people, to mine worlds like Gath? To build worlds with such towers, such mountains of steel?
The Ruttarian suddenly stops, and Kava jerks back to attention. The ship lands on a dull metal platform where another Ruttarian meets them. Kava has no reason to watch anything but them: the Ruttarian from Gath will hand him over to the Ruttarian from the steel-world, and nothing will really change, except that Kava will be living alone. Without his parents, forever. At the fresh pain in his chest, a few new tears fall down his face.
So, he barely pays attention when the Ruttarians raise their guttural voices at each other, their language unintelligible. He only fidgets with his fingers as much as he can while cuffed. The bead bracelet with his name carved into it, all he has left of his parents save for the blood under his fingernails, is too far up his narrow wrist to reach. Its thread moves on his arm in the strong, warm wind. That wind brings a smell like burnt rubber with it, and from the thick air, he starts to sweat in his gray burlap rags.
Kava jumps as the steel-world Ruttarian shouts in the Gath Ruttarian’s face. The latter almost throws Kava at his counterpart before storming off.
The steel-world Ruttarian has red-orange skin and smoother hands. He takes off Kava’s cuffs, about to change them with new ones. For a second, when the Ruttarian is only holding Kava’s wrists and when there are no cuffs on him, Kava’s heart leaps.
Even if he learned it from bedtime stories, he still knows what “free” means. No machines, no cages, no shackles. No cuffs.
Kava twists his hand free from the Ruttarian’s grip and runs.
The Ruttarian shouts something. Kava runs as fast as he can, and the platform isn’t big. He gets to the edge just a second before the Ruttarian. Kava slides to a stop. The platform has no rails, just an edge painted with black and yellow stripes. The Ruttarian shouts again as he reaches him. Kava shrugs off the hand grabbing at his shoulder.
The motion sends him over the edge.
The world spins. Kava’s stomach churns. As high as the towers go above him, they go just as far below him, turning into a haze of gray smog and blinking lights.
He barely registers all of this before a blur bears down from the side.
Kava lands on something soft, but with enough force to knock the breath out of him and send an instant blossom of pain up his side. It’s a bench, but not like one he ever sat on, made of black leather in the back of an open-topped vehicle. The world sways slightly. The vehicle flies on its own. Kava is alone. Lights on the dashboard silently flash red.
What is this place?
If it knows Kava is there, the machine doesn’t care. Can machines care? It flies much slower in the mass of other vehicles, slowly going down.
Lying back on the soft seat, Kava stares at the sky. Between the towers, it’s gray and hazy, eventually turning into a blueish color not too different from his skin.
Is this what it looks like above the clouds?
And where’s the ground?
Kava watches as the vehicle goes down, down, down. The air gets more humid, the blue of the sky disappearing into a yellowish haze. The shining buildings widen, not needles anymore, until platforms stretch from their bases.
Still, those platforms aren’t the ground. The vehicle takes him through a wide slit in them, and a new world opens up.
The buildings here are bland, boxy shapes, geometric and concrete. More platforms cling to them, peppered with factories belching black smoke, all a blur that Kava flies past. Below, it’s worse. Choking smog, huge buildings, more concrete. Too many square windows to count, flickering, flickering. The huge buildings are like real mountains, holding up the steel sky over the shabbier city that stretches between them.
In looking around at all of it, Kava notices the black smoke coming out of the vehicle.
He doesn’t know what it means, so he looks around again. It’s like a valley: the mountains are the big, square buildings, and the lowlands are the smaller ones, topped with antennae blinking with lights and arranged dirtily, like cracked layers of slate. Staring into that distance, Kava’s hands absently clench a couple of straps flapping against the seat.
And he’s lucky he does—the vehicle’s engines die, and it falls.
The computer beeps frantically, and Kava holds on to the seat. His stomach twists. The ground rushes up. The car jolts. Kava hits his head on the door, and the world goes black.
***
Kava wakes up somewhere cold and damp, his back to rough concrete. Everything hurts, and stars dance when he moves his head. With a lurch of nausea, he sits up. In front of him, the vehicle sits in a rubble pile, the front smashed in and smoldering. Kava sniffles. He falls over the first time he tries to stand, and scrapes his knee. When he staggers back to his feet, blue blood drips down his shin.
He limps in a circle. Through the smog, he can barely see the platforms that hide this part of the steel-world from the sun. Light still trickles in, just like it did through Gath’s ash-clouds. The place smells like rot and sewage. The ground is swirling gray puddles on pocked concrete.
A spark from the engine startles him, and from a new vantage point, he sees something different: one of the dashboard compartments is open. There’s something in it. Struggling over a small mound of concrete, Kava reaches for it. His hands crinkle a plastic bag. A bag with something in it. Bread, a small square.
Random thoughts click together in Kava’s head, and a little more of the steel-world makes sense. People ride this vehicle to get between the towers. Someone left their food in it. It wasn’t working, and now it crashed. The bread feels softer than any Kava has ever eaten: more like the sponges the Ruttarians made him wash the machines with. Closing trembling fingers around it, he takes a bite out of the corner. It’s better than the bread on Gath, easier to eat.
He stops himself from eating more. It’s all I have. He doesn’t know the steel-world, but he’s sure there aren’t Ruttarians down here to feed him. His parents would probably think that’s a good thing. They’d want him to be “free” here.
But Kava just misses them. He’d rather be back on Gath with them than be here, “free,” without them. The emptiness in his chest stretches a little wider, and his eyes burn again.
Sealing the plastic bag tight and tucking it inside his rags, Kava rubs a few tears from his eyes, picks a direction, and starts walking.
He walks until his feet hurt. Dirty buildings now rise out of the rubble and garbage. The path between them is straight, the concrete cracked but less than before.
Kava stops dead in his tracks. Two boys block his way.
One is Vochki, with skin a little deeper blue than Kava’s. He’s taller, with dark, messy hair. The other is much weirder, so Kava stares. His skin is bright pink; his hair bright red. Kava doesn’t know what to call someone who looks like that. Both boys wear dark rags.
“Don’t recognize you,” the Vochki boy says. “You new here?”
Kava nods.
The pink boy smiles. “Ir ziit dykha aus.”
Kava’s never heard that language before, and it doesn’t sound monstrous like the Ruttarian language. Still, he can’t mistake the venom in the pink boy’s voice.
“You have food?” The Vochki boy asks.
Kava stares at him, hesitating for a second, then shakes his head quickly. “No food,” he whispers.
“Laegnr!” the pink boy shouts.
Both boys are on Kava before he can do anything. The Vochki boy punches him across the face, and Kava falls. Their hands rip at his clothes until they find the plastic bag. They tear it from him and make off into a back alley, their laughter fading away into the steel-world’s noise.
Now, with the side of his face throbbing, the rest of Kava’s pain comes back. The stars over his eyes, the ache in his legs, the pain up and down his side.
The street now empty, Kava lets out a whimper, which turns into a quiet sob.
***
On the steel-world, there’s no sun to set. The sky just darkens slowly as Kava wanders through the alleyways, avoiding other children as he goes. Some are younger than him, but most are older, all either Vochki or the aliens with pink or purple skin. By the time he finds a place where he can’t hear their chatter anymore, the sky is dark but yellowed from the lights. Most of them are from the buildings and the flying vehicles, glittering in the haze. It’s the end of a dark alleyway, stacked buildings on three sides. He shares the corner with a few rats and roaches. They scurry away from him as he sits against one of the concrete walls. The stacked buildings are a few stories tall here. Rusty fire escapes hold up lines drying out tattered clothes, swaying slightly in the wind.
Flicking a roach off his ankle, Kava hugs his knees to his chest and rotates his name-beads around his wrist. As the evening hours go by, Kava can’t sleep, too scared to trust the environment with his rest. He’s still tired, but his eyelids don’t even droop.
It’s a while before Kava notices the crying. His body aches too much to get up, but his eyes find it. There.
Hazy, dim light from above falls on a girl who leans on a fire escape’s railing. She looks his age, dressed in gray rags more tattered than Kava’s. Wavy black hair falls past her shoulders, and her eyes glow in the night like soft blue flashlights.
Kava stares at her. She stares back, wide-eyed. With a sigh, her sobbing stops. Am I supposed to wave at her? Before he can move his hand, her head jerks back to the right. She runs inside.
But…why?
Kava finds himself shakily standing. At the bottom of the fire escape, he’s just tall enough to pull the ladder down. He climbs up the fire escape just like that, each story feeling like a hundred to his legs. He stops before he gets to the last one. There, his eyes peer over the rusted floor plating, past a bucket of soapy water. The girl stands in the doorway to the inside.
Past her, Kava hears it: the all-too-familiar sound of hands striking flesh, of another child’s whimpers, and a man. His hands are open when he brings them down on someone hidden from Kava’s view by a ratty couch. His skin is slate gray like his military uniform, and his face looks carved from rock. The man stops mid-swing to march over to the doorway. The girl from outside takes a little step back. It doesn’t help. The gray man slaps her across the face, then grabs her by the hair and throws her back inside.
A noise escapes Kava’s lips. The gray man freezes again. He slowly turns his head, looking around—and back outside.
Kava doesn’t stay long enough to see more than the man’s profile. His hands are sweaty, and he barely keeps a grip on each rung of the fire escape as he hurries back to the ground. And he runs. He doesn’t look back for another two blocks, not until he finds another alley.
No footsteps follow him. He releases a shaky breath, then collapses against another concrete wall. He slides to the ground and squeezes his eyes shut.
A shriek makes him jump. A pained shriek, from two blocks over.
Kava knows all Vochki suffer. But even he, so used to sudden thoughts, faces only a void in his mind. He can only hear the girl’s cries, unsure if they’re happening again or if they’re just ghosts echoing in his head. Maybe she doesn’t have parents either. Nobody to care about her either…
The screams mix with his parents’, with his. He feels cold and heavy, as if the weight of the steel-world is trying to crush him flat. Kava covers his ears with his hands, pressing so hard that it hurts. The tears come soon after, and the world, already blurry through Kava’s half-closed eyes, goes dark..
***
The next morning, Kava startles awake to a Vochki girl standing over him. Her skin is close to Kava’s blue, and she looks around ten. He tries to scurry back, but he has nowhere to go, pressed up against the concrete wall behind him.
“You’re new here, aren’t you?” She asks in a soft voice. “Somewhere far away?”
Kava says nothing, not even nodding.
The girl sits down next to Kava, close enough to whisper in his ear but far enough away to leave a little gap between them. “Someone down here hurt you, didn’t they?”
Kava nods.
“I’m sorry.” She rests a hand on Kava’s shoulder. Her touch is warm through his burlap. “They hurt my little brother, too,” she whispers. “He didn’t make it.”
Kava looks her in her deep blue eyes for the first time.
“Why are you talking to me?” His voice is raspy, quieter than hers.
“You…you kind of look like him.”
She swallows.
“People call me Yurena here.”
“I’m Kava.”
In the back of his head, his mother chides him for not showing the manners to give his full name. He instantly feels bad, but Yurena doesn’t seem to care.
She squeezes his shoulder gently, then removes her hand to reach into the dirty black fabric snugly wrapped around her body. She pulls out a small, white stick of something about the length of Kava’s hand and a few fingers thick.
“Here, you look hungry.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s called a ration stick. I stole it from a Tatassan’s grocery bag.”
“What’s a Tatassan?”
“The people with pink or purple skin. They’re the ones who live in most of these houses.” Yurena splits the ration stick in half and offers one side to Kava.
“Here. Share?”
Kava hesitantly takes it from her fingers. He eats it in a few bites. The ration stick is bland, but it goes down easy, at least. Yurena eats the other half, a bit slower than he does.
“How’d you end up down here?” Yurena asks when she finishes.
“Th-there was a revolt at our camp.” Kava answers. “They killed m-my parents. They sent all the children away, but I escaped when the ship landed.”
Yurena finds Kava’s hand and weaves her fingers through his.
“I’m sorry.”
Silent for a while, she looks up at the sky longingly.
“Did you see the sky when you got here? I don’t think I ever saw what the real sky looks like.”
“It’s blue, like our skin. My parents told me once that the sky’s supposed to be blue. But where I was born, the sky was all ash and volcanoes and dragons.”
“What’s a dragon?”
“Th-they’re giant flying things with scales that shoot fire out of their mouths. They eat the Ruttarians when they stay outside too long.”
Yurena laughs, as sudden as her appearance.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It just kinda seems silly.”
She laughs again, a sound that Kava never heard much, so he can’t resist smiling a little.
Yurena stands and pulls Kava to his feet.
“Come on. If you want to survive down here, you’ll need help to get settled.”
“Settled?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, some kids move around once they get here, but the slums are really big. Kids might cross a hundred blocks, a thousand, or the whole planet, but no matter what, none of us are probably ever leaving this place.”
She tries to start walking, but Kava pulls on her hand and doesn’t move.
“Why not?”
“If we go too far up, they’ll catch us and send us back to work. Or worse.”
She sighs and comes closer to Kava.
“It’s hard to get used to, but this is your home now.”
Kava’s shoulders slump. Yurena pulls him into a hug, and he lets out a few tears against her rough rags. No one but his parents have ever hugged him before.
The thought splits his chest and draws out another sob. Yurena only holds him tighter.
***
As if he was really her brother, Yurena takes care of Kava as the weeks go by. He marks every day on the steel-world by etching tally marks into the same concrete wall Yurena found him against, a dark corner that turns out to be a good place to hide. Yurena teaches Kava how to know who has food and who doesn’t, how to pick pockets, and which of the kids they see often to avoid.
Veks, he learns, is the Vochki boy who beat him and took his food. Yurena says to avoid him and his gang: he takes younger kids off the street and sells them back to the slavers above for food. Kava’s throat tightens even at the thought.
One day, Yurena gives Kava a little box, hard on three sides and folding open to show words on paper. She calls it a “dictionary.” Kava’s parents taught him the letters of the Vochki language, but the dictionary, smuggled from a “free” world far away, teaches Kava the words. So, four months after he arrived on the steel-world, Kava rests in his familiar spot, thumbing through its dirty paper pages. There isn’t much else to do because they already pickpocketed and scavenged enough food for the night. It isn’t enough to keep Kava’s stomach from hurting, but Yurena insists that if they steal too much to hide in their clothes, they’ll get robbed. Kava keeps reading until Yurena comes back from the corner they use as a bathroom.
“Kava, come on.” Her voice is cheery even as the sky darkens. “There’s something I want to show you.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
She leads Kava by the hand down a few blocks, to another alley.
And as Kava turns into it, someone he’s supposed to be avoiding sneers back at him.
“Good choice, Yurena,” Veks says, bile behind his voice. “Took you time with that one, though. I told you two mouths would be too hard for you to feed alone. We get a good price for him, and there will be plenty of food to spare for you from my stash.”
Kava sucks in a breath, his heart feeling like it broke in half. He turns to Yurena, tears in his eyes, but no words will come out.
“I’m sorry, Kava,” she says, “but Veks is right. It’s too hard to get enough food for the both of us.” She backs away from him and shrugs
“You’re not really my brother, Kava, so I don’t have to take care of you like a sister. You’ll probably be less likely to starve in a camp than down here anyway.”
Yurena disappears around the corner just as the tears slide down Kava’s face.
“Come here,” Veks barks, grabbing Kava’s upper arms. The other boy is taller and stronger than him, , but even if he wasn’t, Kava wouldn’t resist. Half of his heart left the fight with his parents, and the other half left with Yurena. Only a deepening hole is left. Alone. Alone.
His tears turn the steel-world blurry, and pain turns his chest raw.
***
By the middle of the night, Kava runs out of his silent tears. Veks and a few other kids he bosses around have gone to sleep in their cramped basement, the only part of an old slum house still standing. They leave Kava tied up with dirty rope in a corner with the rats, too dark for him to see his own hands.
His heart still hurts. Yurena helped him, was kind to him, and betrayed him in a second. The dictionary she gave him is cold against his chest, compressed against his ribs by the fabric.
I wonder if Veks will take it, or if they’ll wait until the Ruttarians do.
Even through the pain, his heart still pounds, and his hands still shake—but not only from fear. From anger, too, burning. Yurena might’ve planned to give him up from the start, but maybe not. Either way, Veks was the same person since Kava first saw him. Thug, thief, greedy snake. Hoarding food in the basement.
Kava knows he hoards it. He can smell it. There’s probably a lot of it. More than even Veks needs, more than he gives out to the kids who follow him around like a father. He can feel it, almost, beyond the rot and sewage and choking concrete dust.
Something furry brushes his legs. There’s a glint of red eyes: a rat. Its wet nose brushes his foot, and the rat starts nibbling on his worn-out sandals. Kava kicks it away. It squeaks, but comes back soon enough.
Kava’s glad it does because he has an idea.
“Here, are you hungry?” Kava whispers at it. All of the other children are too far away for him to wake them, and Kava can’t tell if Yurena— or even Veks— is with them. Kava shifts until he’s lying on his side and holds out his hands to the rat.
Whiskers tickle his fingers. Kava guides it between his wrists. It starts biting at the rough fabric binding him, eating quickly. Kava can feel the rat’s ribs against his hands as it chews and chews. The rat bites through the last thread. His hands come free.
Kava shoves the rat away. He shuffles around to all fours. Light, just a little, comes in from the exit to the outside. Slowly, Kava crawls toward it. His racing heart is louder than the industrial traffic outside.
The moment Kava catches a glimpse outside, he scurries back into the deepest dark as fast as the rat did.
Veks isn’t sleeping. He’s standing guard outside.
Kava stifles a sigh and runs his fingers over his bracelet. From the darkness, he stares at the back of Veks’s head. If it wasn’t for Veks, Kava would have a clear shot at escaping. If it wasn’t for Veks, he wouldn’t have lost his little square of fresh bread. As his stare turns into a glare, he starts to forget that it was Yurena’s choice to hand him over, not Veks somehow behind it all, leaving her innocent. Yes. It’s all Veks’ fault. Veks and his stash of food that he uses to bend a dozen children to his will. Almost like the Ruttarians, except Veks is worse. He does it to his own people, just as vulnerable and forgotten and alone as him.
All because of his food stash.
A food stash that Kava can smell.
His parents once told him to never hurt other Vochki, for they were all suffering together. But Veks hurt him first. Longing stings in Kava’s chest, but he does it anyway: feeling through the dark and muddy crawlspace, Kava starts looking for Veks’s food.
He follows the smell, leading him on a squiggly line through the dark. One second it’s from his right, and the next it’s on his left, or behind him.
Or below him.
He tries to scrape away the mud. It makes a noise, a little splat. One of the children coughs, and Kava freezes.
Nothing happens, even as the seconds turn to minutes. Only then does Kava work up the courage to start digging again. He gets through another inch of mud, then another, his hands sticky and aching. Mud probably isn’t the only thing in this sludge, butKava doesn’t care: beneath it, he finds more than just concrete.
His hands find a latch, rough with rust. With a pull, it comes undone. Kava’s arms shake against the weight of a metal lid. It squeaks, but not loudly. Open all the way, it sticks upright. A metal chest, maybe a toolbox, not big enough for a kid to fit in but way too big to carry. Stray thoughts race— where did Veks find this? How’d he get it down here?— but he ignores them all.
Because the metal box is packed to the brim with food.
Plastic bags lie side-by-side with no room to spare. Shaking, Kava takes one out. It’s a pack of several, just small enough to fit in Kava’s rags. Conscious of their weight, their crinkling between his rags and his skin, he takes out another and another and stuffs them in everywhere his clothes will allow. When Kava’s rags can’t hold any more, two or three are left, one of which was on the top before, half-opened. Veks only had a few to begin with, but it was way more than Kava’s learned to dream of in the past four months.
He takes one of the packages and lays it next to a sleeping girl too short to be Yurena.
Kava doesn’t know if that was the stash Veks keeps for the kids, or the one he probably keeps for himself. But he knows Veks will feel it either way. A private stash revealed will turn the other kids against him. Or, with their main supply gone, the kids will start to wonder how Veks stays full.
Kava slinks back into the darkness. He’s more sluggish, since the ration packages inflate his body like one of the Ruttarians who eat more than their share.
It’s only a few minutes until he hears the crunch of plastic. A girl startles awake. Kava gets ready, being close to the crawl-way that leads to the outside but still hidden in a shadowy corner.
“Hey, look what I found!” the girl says. She sounds even younger than Kava.
A second later, everyone jostles awake. The basement, more like a crawlspace from Kava’s new perspective, fills with their voices.
“What?” moans a groggy voice.
“Shut up and go back to sleep,” someone else hisses.
Veks turns around from outside. “What’re you all up about?” At his voice, they all silence. Veks picks up a torch from the little fire he was tending outside. The other kids stand, most of their heads almost to the ceiling.
In the light of the fire, Kava can see the crumbs of a ration stick on Veks’s lips.
“Veks, I found something,” the littlest girl says, holding the package up. “I think it’s food.”
Now, everybody stares at it, even Veks, with an open mouth. Kava grins at the pure shock on the older boy’s face, but then remembers to hide his teeth in case they flash in the dark.
“No, it isn’t,” Veks says quickly.
“Yes, it is,” someone else says.
“And look,” says a third voice, “I think it came from this box over here.”
Veks sucks in a breath. Kava shakes all over. Please, do what I think. Please.
Veks does.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he sneers. “Let me see this ‘box’ of yours.”
Veks brings the torch with him, and with all the eyes trained on the older boy, Kava slips up through the long shadows and out onto the street.
Kava can’t resist looking back just before he bolts. The hideout is barely a crack in the concrete from the outside, but with Veks’ torch lighting up the deeper parts where the other kids sleep, Kava can see in. He catches the only pair of eyes not looking at Veks and the box. Yurena stares back at him blankly. As she moves to open her mouth, Kava feels like something inside him is screaming, dying, as it gets torn apart. He pushes it aside. Hugging the rations through his clothes, Kava turns around and runs.
***
The next few days are horrible. Kava cries every night, no companion but his dictionary. His parents are gone forever, and Yurena probably won’t come back either. Alone, alone, so far below.
But at least he has food.
He finds a place to hide it, up on the roof of a two-story building crowned with antennas. From there, with his legs hanging off of the fire escapes, he watches the streets every day. Veks’s gang disperses quickly. Kava never sees what happens to Yurena, but Veks starts to get thinner soon, walking alone. He takes three weeks to die.
By then, Kava’s food supply is barely any smaller.
Maybe, if I survive long enough on the food, things will get better. But even if that doesn’t happen, Kava knows that people like him, his parents, and maybe even Yurena will be safer without Veks. And for them, every few days, he leaves half his day’s food out on the street somewhere. My parents would’ve told me to do that, if they were here.
After a few weeks, he starts to notice some of the same kids hanging around each time. Some of the younger ones smile at him. Soon enough, he learns their names.
Yes, it might not last: Kava’s food will eventually run out, and he’ll face hunger again. But Yurena and Veks are wrong. No, two mouths are not one too many to feed. And, he dreams Yurena is wrong about one other thing: maybe he won’t be trapped on this steel-world forever.
M. L. McCortney is an author and undergraduate at the University of Rochester. Between novel- and novella-length works currently in progress, short fiction, poetry, and digital art, his creative work mainly orbits science fiction, science fantasy, and related subgenres. His short fiction, forthcoming from Penumbric and Bullet Points, appears in Altered Reality Magazine and has earned two honorable mentions from the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest.