Lili
finds herself watching each airship leave the realm through the vast
wall of glass. It dwarfs her in comparison—it reaches to the roof and is
only separated by the occasional metal pillar. The airships taxi out of
the landing area slowly before disappearing into a metal tube. She
knows what’s waiting for her on the other side.
“You want some?” he asks. Who is he kidding—there’s only room for one straw in the jar’s lid. Lili declines as politely as possible. Then she feels bad, so she takes a sip anyway. The florets go up through the straw, and she finds that they are sweet to chew. She wonders if it's the flowers that are naturally sweet or if they’ve been made that way, soaked and dusted with sugar and left underneath the sun to dry.
“It’s good, right?” Avett smiles at her.
“Yeah.” She stares at her own drink. “It’s good.”
They stand around for a bit. Another sleek airship makes its way through the area.
Avett won’t stop staring at her lips. He’s looking at them like they’re a piece of art, but not of the noninteractive kind; the way he’s looking at her reminds Lili of the sculpture she’d found in the corner of an old art museum once, where candy had spilled over in rivulets in the corner to form the collective mass of seventy-nine kilograms. She’d later learned that it represented the late artist’s weight at his healthiest.
He’s looking at her lips like he knows he should take a piece but can’t bring himself to disrupt its idyllic perfection.
“Passengers on the inter-realm flight 108 bound for Earth, please make your way towards gate ten. This is your final call…”
Lili stands on the edge of the world. In front of her is the smooth whiteness of the inter-realm airship. Behind her: the blue carpeted waiting area, where families are hugging each other and saying goodbye. There’s a kid holding the hands of his parents. He could be starting his own business in a sanctuary on Earth. He could be enlisted.
It could go either way. Lili hopes he’s not enlisted.
With her luggage in hand, she takes a step away from the carpet, away from the families. Avett stays where he is. The puffer jacket he’s wearing looks like it might swallow him up if he’s not careful.
“Wait.” He steps forward. Kisses her on the cheek. Then he goes, “We’ll keep in touch, right?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes don’t leave Avett’s for a second. “Of course.”
He takes a step back. He’s looking at Lili—or, more specifically, what she’s wearing. The deep, green colours of her full melee specialist gear. He’d said it again earlier: “You look really good in that.” She’d grinned ear to ear and agreed.
People move past in her lines. They exist at the corners of her eyes for only a second before disappearing into the airship. She’s about to join them.
Avett says, “You’ll really keep in touch, right?”
“Of course.”
Then she turns and hands over her passport and ID to the stewardess. She flicks through the plastic-thick pages of the document, lets the papers slap against each other before she stamps down on an empty page in the middle.
By the time Lili’s boarded the inter-realm ship and greeted the other stewardesses in the entryway, she has already realised her mistake. The connections between people are so quickly snapped that she wants nothing to do with them. They’re vulnerable. And vulnerability, she’s decided, has no place for a Human on Earth.
She looks back at Avett. He’s so small. She can hardly spot him out from the crowd.
“Keep in touch?” he yells.
Lili doesn’t know. She’s looking at nothing, at no one in particular.
Her nod is slow and ingenuine, as still as a mask made of plaster, but it comes out all the same. She can't see his eyes from where she is, but she tries her hardest to meet them anyway. The doors slide shut, the engines breathe to life, and the conductor’s voice comes over the intercom, instructing everyone to sit and enjoy the flight.
She chooses the window seat. The sky looks like it’s on fire. And for the first time in twenty-four years, she feels like she’s about to cry.
epilogue