The girl sucked the blood off her fingertip, where the kite had cut. The house rumbled all around. Abu and abi had sickles in their hands, hovering by the door. In living room uma cradled umi, wrapped in a muslin blanket.

     Overhead the roar of rotors washed over frequently. Searchlights pierced through the holes in the walls.

     Knocks at the door. Abu clutched the sickle tighter.

     “Don’t fight them,” uma pleaded.

     Abi moved to unhook the lock, but then a thud and the door came flying.

     Soldiers in black boots and black uniforms and black masks rushed in. Slammed abi against the wall, abu against the ground. With their rifles they jabbed uma to the ground too. Umi began to cry.

“You were told to leave by last week!” The man in charge, distinguished by a single white stripe on his helmet, shouted.

     “But we have nowhere to…”

     He grabbed her by her robe and dragged her towards the door, dropping the baby to roll on the ground until she faced down into the sand. Abu shouted “no!” and tried to fight for his wife and a gun went off. Abi cried “uma!” as they prayed her fingers off the doorframe then they killed him too.

     The girl chased uma outside. Suddenly the air was very hot. Fire, fire was everywhere. In the bushes, within houses, across the whole town. From every house, soldiers forced men and women and children out towards the town square, where a convoy of unmarked military trucks waited. The men they pushed to the roadside and shot. The women they tossed into the back of the trucks. Overhead, helicopters chopped up the night sky, their rotors drowning out the screams and shots and goodbyes.

     The girl tried to reach uma’s outstretched hands. Uma screamed her name.

     “Isma!”

     The man pushed uma against the metal back of the truck. She fought him. Clawed at his face, his kevlar uniform, reached for his gun. In the tussle she teared his collar and a necklace snapped. A blue flower-shaped jewel hit the sand ground.

     The girl ran for her mother. Someone kicked her into a ditch of bodies. 

     When she climbed back up, uma was gone.

     Isma woke up cold, her blanket kicked to the bottom of her sleeping pod. She climbed up, wrapped herself in a thermo-suit, and went up deck.

     The sun was just rising. The Dova cruiser sliced through the sea shimmering blue and orange. In the air, moisture and spray mixed with a salty ocean breeze. Isma took a deep breath and tried to empty her mind. Fear coursed through her. She wanted to hit something, anything.

     But she promised.

     She strolled to the bow of the ship. Fast approaching, a blond blotch on the coastline, was the human city of Bale. Home. It seemed like yesterday when she had felt the heat in the air and the thrashing of helicopters in her ear. The gunshots. The screams. She shuddered.

     Sixteen years.

     She was still unsure if it was the right decision. For years now she had the nightmares under control, but now they were coming back. It was her body going on high alert, she knew. The blue skies, the air imbued with oxygen — it was all so familiar that it was hard to feel the present apart from the past.

     But she promised makka-Goli that she would return home. She promised at her bedside that she would do something with her life. Show them who you are, to repay her years of taking care of her and the other surviving orphans.

     Don’t squander the blessing of living, makka had said. There is so much to be seen and felt.

     So here she was, back on Earth and hurling towards the coast of the last city she wanted to be near, clothed in a uniform she still felt like an imposter in. She was not a Peacekeeper. The Peacekeepers had studied their whole lives for this. They had mastered every discipline from civil engineering to medicine to political theory and burnt with ideas and found their calling in coming back and creating a new world. Isma knew little about Bale, much less her calling. She didn’t belong, and they made sure she felt it.

     Around the cruiser, through a thin ocean fog, monoliths rumbled in the waters. They were six stories tall, a smooth, darkened silver surface breaking waves and periodically expunging charcoal smoke out of a ring of rotating vents. At their tips red beacons blinked, forming a propagating net of dots that ebbed and flowed with the ocean mesh.

     They were drills, she knew. Taonium drills. Some two dozens of them stabbed into the waters around the city, piercing through tides, coral reefs, and Earth’s crust to a rare deposit of radioactive element called Taonium underneath. She had learned in school that Taonium was the most powerful element in the universe. It was all anyone ever talked about on Domain.

     What happens when Taonium runs out?

     Will we go to war?

     The ship’s fog horn blew. Isma felt the sound rush over her head, tightening the air around her. Somewhere, an automatic turret on one of the drills fired two shots. Clack clack. A fishing boat that drifted too close fled.

     “Nightmares again?”

     Isma turned to find the inquirer by the deck entryway. She had curly brown hair that rested just below the shoulders and a face that, despite possessing grand ranges, never strayed far from kind. It was half an hour away from mustering and already she was decked in gear. It was as if the Peacekeeper uniform had been designed on a her mannequin replica. She wore it slightly zipped down, revealing a pendant that she was never seen without containing a picture no one had ever seen. In the time it took Isma to respond, she had surveyed the coast and checked her watch.

     “Leader Noura. Yes, nightmares. The same ones.”

     Noura laughed. “Please, just Noura. I know that you don’t have much regard for ranks, and we go back far too long.”

     It was true. Noura was there in the beginning, first in the desert then makka-Goli’s home. She could talk, and every night she would occupy the dinner table with summaries and analysis of the books she had been reading while Suri and Isma sulked into their plates. Even after Noura left to join the Peacekeepers, makka-Goli spoke of her often. Her rise in the ranks with meteoric. With her piercing intellect and bold ideas, Noura became Policy Leader — one of the force’s top five — in just two years. It was not until six months ago, at makka’s funeral, that Isma saw her again.

     “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to check in on you,” she said now with those eyes of hers that brimmed with genuineness. “We are updating plans constantly as we get closer and new intelligence comes in. But Rahim tells me you’ve adjusted to the transport unit well.”

     “Yes. It’s been nice to have…tasks.”

     “It’s nice to finally be moving,” Noura came up to the railings besides her. “I’m sorry if people are…narrow-minded. I think it’ll all be different once we land. Once we begin the revolution. And the nightmares, I’ve been having them too. Every time I can’t tell them apart from reality. But when I wake up — and you always wake up — I try to focus on the now. Isn’t this so beautiful?”

     She gestured out to the sight before them. The cruiser had just sailed past a rocky ridge, and now the curtains on the ancient city of Bale lifted. It was a magnificent metropolis, on the edge of an expansive bay blue as crystals, sixteen lush hills of olive trees and tanned walls rising from the water. There was not a patch of unused land here. Ever inch had been passed and reshaped between empires over centuries. Each hill was the emblem of a new expansion, and though the city was now scrambled by endless rows of tenements, here and there one could make out ancient relics sticking out between the forrest of concrete apartments.

     There was the remnants of the parthenon that presided over the first hill, white marble columns chipped away by time looming over the golden beaches that traced the bay. There were the red slanted-roof villas that circumscribed the crest of hills, where once upon a time nobles sampled wine and watched mock naval battles in the bay. There were gold-domed temples and minarets with turquoise tips, most still in use, that focused and spread the sun’s rays onto those who turned to them for prayer.  Though one could pick out more modern establishments now — glass condos, multi-story department stores, colorful neon signs, even highways — the city still exuded that hue of sand, rocks, sculptures, and timelessness, as if over its cycles of building, burning, and rebuilding, it had been distilled to its purest composition, where the architecture came to resemble the people that built them, who in turn resembled the earth from whence they first came.

     Noura took in the familiar minarets and olive trees with delight.

     “Isn’t it just so…invigorating?” She beamed. “To think that once upon a time our ancestors ruled all of this?”

     But Isma did not feel invigorated. As the initial rush of newness subsided, she found her mind rushing back in time. Memories locked deep inside all coming back now. The dusty cobblestone streets, the tented rooftops on which she used to run, the fortress upon the highest hill against which one could always determine the bearing of the wind.

     There were the fountains into which the clothes of the deceased were tossed. There were the back alleys in which the men who took away uma continued to hide. The city seemed to magnify, the whole panorama distorting like a sphere held at the wrong angle and her ears pounding and the sphere enclosed her and she stood before the bloody fountain.

     They watched her from the shadows, waiting to strike.

     The air, it was dense just like the morning after…

     She grasped to plug the many holes flooding in her brain. Turn away. Focus on the darkness. The churning gears. The persistent snaps. Dissolve into the nothingness…

     “Isma…Isma.” Noura called.

     She floated off her feet and towards the dark that glistened like galaxies. Her body touched the membrane and it took her in with the gentlest of suction. There was nothing on the other side. Her heart quietened.

     She opened her eyes.

     Ocean and sunrise. Noura took her hand and the intrusion of the city again did not give her panic.

     “Sorry…” Isma said.

     “Not at all,” said Noura. “Let it be.”

     They looked at the inhabitants moving between buildings, listened to the morning prayer echo across the heights.

     “It’s a new chapter, a chance to move on,” said Noura. “I know makka-Goli is proud of us.”

Isma nodded. Somewhere near her chest, the vial she carried with the last bits of makka-Goli’s ashes seemed to warm.

     Show them who you are, she affirmed.

     The cape before them was giving away now, and on the other side, there was no beaches, no tenements. The last of the civilian buildings halted at a perimeter not far beyond where the neck of the cape met the horizontal waterfront. Then, a barren stretch of dirt littered with craters, a ditch, and two layers of barbed-wire fencing. Steel walls fortified with towers and turrets marked entrance into a new area. Here, turrets tracked them as they passed, metal structures of hard edges and winding pipes blinked with light arrays. Clouds of orange smoke cloaked the whole facility in apocalyptic fervor. The only thing that shone through was the insignia of Domain, a red iris resembling a sun in full eclipse.

     The Concession. They had arrived.

     “Incoming,” alarms suddenly began to blare on deck, “Incoming…”

     The cruiser’s large sheets of armor began to slide into place. Through the shrinking gaps, Isma could gleam explosions and the faint clutter of gunfire.

     Noura let go of her hand.

     New beginnings.