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"If I'm gonna die, I'm not gonna die on my knees."
— You Me At Six, Win Some, Lose Some
INUSAGI WAS beautiful at night.
Zoya thought it was always beautiful, if she were honest, but the day's concession of power over the sky brought a bright, shining moon out, hanging low and fat over the city. The whole world seemed quieter then, when the only thing separating Zoya's outstretched fingers from the sky was her ability to reach up. When she was younger, she'd thought that stars were like the meilooruns harvested in the fields far outside of city limits; plump and ripe for the taking. Mai had quickly put that line of thought in the dirt, as she always did with Zoya's inevitable naïvety, but sometimes Zoya could swear that if she tried hard enough, she could pluck one from the inky blanket overhead and hold it in her hands.
The towering peak overlooking the main city had far too thin oxygen to live on, but the base had been claimed when the Empire had settled there a few years after Zoya was born. Inusagi hadn't quite pledged itself to the Empire yet—secretly, Zoya wondered if that meant they were still fighting—but a few years ago, they'd conceded and allowed the making of an Academy.
Her step-father, Lux, told her mother the plague had finally found them when he thought Zoya had gone to bed. She had always been quiet, though, so if she stilled her breathing enough, she could listen through the vent that carried into their bedroom.
"You can't say things like that, Lux. They're already suspicious ..." had come her mother's hushed, nervous voice, and Zoya had rolled over before she could hear anything else, heart racing in her chest.
Lux had been with them for a year now and Zoya had decided she liked him better than the men that sometimes visited their house late at night, who gave her odd smiles and had greedy hands. She didn't like the way they treated her mom—like she was something they were owed. Zoya was pretty sure her mom was their boss, not the other way around.
Since Lux had come, the visits had stopped. Zoya was relieved, and even Mai, who had taken one look at him and sniffed in disdain, looked a little happier that no one was bothering them anymore.
Her mother seemed happier, too, and not just in the superficial way Zoya had learned to differentiate from the real thing—she smiled openly, now, and didn't mind taking days off work since it wasn't solely her working for all of them anymore. Zoya was slowly earning her mom back, piece by piece.
The first time she'd met him had been during the spring, and now a full year had come and gone, bringing the green-bloomed sakoola trees Zoya had come to love back to life. The petals started out small, barely noticeable against the brown of the bark, until the change gradually became harder and harder to ignore. Once the trees were at full bloom in a few weeks, they'd be everywhere, and as the wind picked up more, Zoya's mother would have to seal the windows and door so as to keep them out in the garden where they belonged.
