The sky above the last city of Nekona was burning in fractured colors. It was not the clean fire of bombardment, but a sickly, beautiful death, violet fissures spiderwebbing through a bruised orange dusk, like a stained-glass window shattering in slow, reverent motion. It was the kind of sky that made you want to whisper, as if a loud sound might cause the whole fragile dome to collapse.
Far below, in an apartment that still smelled of the morning's bitterroot tea, the floor hummed with a ceaseless, low moan. It wasn't an earthquake. It was the planetary defense grid, screaming as it died. Sirens wailed in the streets, a sound so constant it had become another layer of silence.
"Zylos."
The voice was a calm island in the sonic storm. His father, Creon, knelt before him, his large, calloused hands moving with a surgeon's precision. He was buttoning a soft, grey travel jacket around the boy's narrow shoulders. The fabric was a special weave, light as a dandelion puff but rated for atmospheric re-entry. Creon took extra care with the tail-slit, ensuring the material wouldn't snag. A snag could mean friction. Friction could mean fire.
"Look at me, little shadow."
Golden, cat-bright eyes, too large for his small face, lifted. Zylos tried to mimic his father's calm, the set of the jaw, the steady breath and failed utterly. His velvety ears were pinned flat against the russet-brown fur of his skull. His small fingers were knotted so tightly in the weave of his mother's sleeve that the tips were white.
His mother, Lyra, didn't pull away. She bent and kissed the crown of his head, her gesture fierce rather than gentle, as if she could imprint the love there like a permanent seal against the cold to come. Her own tail lashed once, a whip-crack of suppressed emotion.
"You promised him you'd show him the river lights tomorrow," she said, her voice steady but raw around the edges, like worn silk.
Creon didn't look up from his task. He palmed the console of the sleek, ovular pod that dominated their terrace, making the star map above it shimmer into existence. It hung in the smoky air like a constellation of luminous dust motes. "I will," he said, his thumb tracing a hyperlane route. "Just... a different river."
Another distant crump rolled through the city's bones. It wasn't the sharp crack of explosives; it was a deeper, wronger sound, the kind that turned stomachs and made teeth ache. Across the jagged skyline, one of the last remaining defense towers stuttered, its energy shield flickering like a dying bulb, and went dark. A permanent dark.
Lyra crouched, bringing herself level with her son's terrified gaze. "You remember the game?" she asked softly, her voice weaving a spell against the noise. "The one where you hide like a little shadow until Mama calls?"
Zylos nodded, a quick, jerky motion. His breath hitched. "Until Mama calls."
"That's right." Her smile trembled but didn't break. It was a feat of immense will. "You're faster than the storms. Faster than the bad nights. My brave, silent boy."
Creon's thumb now hovered over the final confirmation glyph. The pod's interior warmed with a pale, sleep-blue bioluminescence. "Earth," he said, more to himself than to them, as if testing the weight of a new world on his tongue. "A quiet world. Blue and green. No war-engines in its sky. You'll like it, son. Fields to run. A big, soft sky."
"Come with," Zylos breathed. It wasn't a plea; it was a collapsing of all logic, all hope, into three syllables.
Creon's throat worked. He couldn't speak. Instead, he traded a look with Lyra. A lifetime lived in a single glance: their first apartment with its peeling paint, the ring warmed in his pocket on a windswept plain, the first tiny, miraculous kick beneath her hand, the first sound of Zylos's laughter in this very room. Then, moving as one, Creon scooped his son up and hugged him so tightly the boy's ribs creaked. He pressed his cheek to the soft hair, to the finely pointed ear. "Remember the sound of our voices," he murmured, the words vibrating through his chest into Zylos's small body. "They're the path home. Wherever you are, you follow that sound back."
Footfalls. Not the running of civilians. This was the dull, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of armored boots, a thunder you felt in your bones before you heard it. The sound of a methodical, floor-by-floor sweep. Metal rasped against metal in the corridor outside.
Lyra flinched, a full-body spasm she instantly controlled. She lifted Zylos's face and kissed him again: forehead, right cheek, left cheek. One-two-three. The old habit, unbroken since his first night in the world. "Be kind," she said, her breath a warm prayer against his skin. "Be brave. Take care of strangers." A tear finally escaped, tracing a hot path down her muzzle. "Take care of yourself."
Creon placed Zylos in the pod. It was molded to his small form. Little hands shot out, clinging to his father's wrists; little claws, still blunt with youth, pricked the skin without meaning to.
"Warm sky," the boy whispered. It was a phrase he'd invented at bedtime. It meant safety. It meant the sacred, breathing space between his parents' arms.
"Warm sky," Creon answered, his voice thick.
"Warm sky," Lyra echoed, the words braiding together into a final blessing.
Creon pressed the glyph.
The pod's shell sighed closed with a sound of perfect, airtight finality. Inside, the light deepened from blue to a soft, boundless aquamarine. Zylos's eyes fluttered, heavy with the sedative mist now filling the chamber. The pod hummed, a vibration that started in his teeth and smoothed itself into a profound, womb-like silence.
The apartment door exploded inward.
Splintered frame, shouting in a guttural, barking tongue, Inusan. A flare of white weapon-light. Creon and Lyra turned, not towards the door, but towards the terrace, their bodies forming one last, living wall between the invaders and their son.
The pod's gravitic drive engaged with a soundless push. It shot from the terrace, a pale pearl against the fractured sky.
On the terrace, now empty save for the two Nekonians standing back-to-back, there was only a wake of rushing air and a smear of fading heat on the permacrete where hope had been.
The pod threaded the ruined city like a needle through rotten cloth. It streaked through columns of black smoke, through the aurora of dying energy shields, and slipped the planet's crushing gravity well like a bead through a seam.
Inside, sedated and dreaming, Zylos dreamed of bells. Of running through tall, golden grass that parted for him like a benevolent sea. Of a woman's laugh somewhere ahead, and a man's voice reading stories about endless, star-lit rivers in a quiet, sun-dappled room.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡr5sJhF4yHQ
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