Wiping damp soil from my eyes, I asked in complete exasperation, “Madam Ki, will you please tell those hooligans to stop tossing the sacred dirt about?”
Madam Ki’s green, intelligent eyes darted to the window. My teacher of many years sighed at seeing her youngest students tearing up her stunning flowerbed and making the dirt sprinkle to the ground in a morbid imitation of falling snowflakes. “It’s Lav and Wapol. Again.”
“Indeed,” I grumbled, bending to shake my black locks free of soot.
Madam chuckled quietly, a devious gleam beginning to sparkle in her gaze. “Braita, I think I know the perfect punishment for them this time.”
I’m sure she did.
Absently, while keeping her gaze on the two louts, she snapped her fingers at the fallen debris now littered about my bare feet. “Clean that up while I tend to them.”
Swiftly, I pivoted to the side as her strong, lithe form brushed past me and out the front door of the one-room schoolhouse. I made not a peep, not about to interrupt her while she had that look in her eyes. When I had been a mere child, I had been on the receiving end of her ‘punishments’. I most definitely did not want to cross paths with her scheming mind again. I had learned my lesson, and learned it well.
That did not mean I was going to clean up the mess of dirt and flower petals on her tiling.
It was Lav and Wapol’s fault. They could clean it up.
Brushing off the last bit of grime from my pristine white sundress, I grabbed my calculations textbook from the cupboard at the back of the intimate room; it was what I had come back inside to grab initially after the church bells had indicated an end of the work and school day. Maneuvering quickly through the wooden school desks, I entered the code I had seen Madam enter on the halo-keypad many times, and slipped out the back door silently.
It was time to have a little fun.
Racing as fast as my feet would carry me, with the sweet smell of home filling my lungs on the salty breeze, I jumped over a moss-covered log and skidded to a stop on the Overcliff. The wind whipped hard on this outcropping of solid rock and sporadic green, silky grass overlooking our village, Plata, and the crystal blue ocean of the Scape. Catching my breath from my mile long run, my lungs heaving in great gulps of clean air, I saw the classmates of my age group, our senior year cluster. Breathlessly, I grinned and lifted my hand in a jaunty wave.
“Took you long enough, Braita,” Jax hollered over the breeze where he, Kiera, and Ola sat at the edge of the cliff. He lifted his, surely stolen, alcho-brew, toasting in my direction as I began a fast clip toward them. “You’ve got dirt all over your face.”
I instantly scowled and wiped at my face more thoroughly. “Lav and Wapol were up to their usual antics.” I quickly dumped my textbook on the ground and sat cross-legged next to Ola, turning my face to her. “Did I get it all?”
“Nope.” She lifted a perfectly manicured hand, and with her handkerchief, she brushed at my cheek with more force than I was completely comfortable with. She was probably doing more harm than good to my skin, but I allowed her to continue. “The spoiled five-year-olds are always a bother when they first enter school from their surrogate’s house.”
Kiera snorted softly, crinkling her nose. “They squirted my seat with ketchup yesterday.”
Jax squatted next to me and delicately pulled out a twig of thorns from my hair. “Madam’s flowerbed?” When I nodded, he chucked the bit over the edge of the cliff and laughed quietly. “I’m sure they’ll straighten up. They all do by the second quarter.”
As one, we nodded. Madam Ki was scary-frightening when she wanted to be.
Jax sat beside me, and then silently offered me a drink of his alcho-brew.
I scrunched my face in revulsion, tilting my head back and shaking it gently. That stuff was disgusting. Jax and Ola seemed to enjoy it, but Kiera was on my side. Nothing about it tasted appealing.
He shrugged and handed it across to Ola, who took a heavy swig before passing it back.
With the loving wind whipping around us while we sat on the sacred earth, our hair ruffling and catching on the next person’s shoulder, none of us said a word. We merely stared out past the Overcliff’s edge. Past the small homes of white earth, the intricately carved petite paths where the villagers walked, appearing tiny as ants from our advantageous height, and past the white, crescent moon-shaped sand beach, and even farther than the waves of the Scape.
We watched the blessed sun as it began its descent.
The sky was molten lava of pinks, oranges, and blues, a dance of delight to the eye. There was nary a cloud in the sky, our view clear of any obstruction. We stared at the beauty, which only the sun held as it started to disappear, as far as we could see on the Scape. The crystal blue waters turned to a dark indigo at the edge of our vision.
It was peace.
The peace our planet, Joyal, afforded us.
So close to the moon’s strong pull, it was also stunning when the moon would rise over Plata. The shimmer of the silver glow against the Scape, which we would ultimately see if we sat here long enough, was a vision to treasure.
This world, our home, had been founded three hundred years ago when Earth had been devastated by pollution and greed, wrecking the planet beyond repair. Joyal was now our peace of mind, our sacred and cherished family, and the reverence my soul adored. More than five centuries ago, the Humans, our people, had sent a first-class arc of diplomats, engineers, and scholars into the far reaches of space, away from Earth, away from destruction. Only a little more than a thousand survived The Travel until they found three planets that were habitable. Some say it had been their penance for shattering such beauty that Earth had once been.
I just thought it was pathetic. Pathetic that our people had been that blind.
Now, we lived in the solar system Kline.
Egyac was the second largest planet that had been habitable.
Triaz, the largest planet.
Then there was Joyal, our home. Our family to love.
Egyac had already been inhabited by the Kireg. They were a deeply psychic alien life form.
Triaz had already been inhabited by the Mian. They were the aliens to fear, the war societies.
Joyal was the smallest planet by far, but it had been empty. We had taken it as our own.
The one thing all three life forms had in common was our need for oxygen. Three different races of aliens brought together by the destruction of our original planets. All three knew the cost of a planet’s ruin — a race’s annihilation. So the Mian, Kireg, and Humans lived as we needed to.