Lace Ravine

Chapter 3: Lace Goes Home - pt. 3

Stifling her nerves, Lace pushed open the rusty door- three times her height- and stepped within.

This part of the sub-sector was very familiar to her. After all, she lived only a short walk from this eastern gate. However it was not what she expected. Buildings still stood, houses and stores, all frozen in time with Earthan design. This was where the humans had always lived. Yet now, there was nothing living there at all.

The few windows that weren't previously boarded up in her youth had followed suit. Clotheslines had fallen, the small patches of grass that had once been treasured lawns, were left to die. There were no more feral Earth animals, the descendants of pets smuggled here hundreds of years ago, and perhaps the most tragic of all: there was no resilient music and laughter, so characteristic of the human race, filling the air.

Suddenly, Lace felt the heat of frustration. She wasn't excited to return home, but maybe she was excited to be around humans again. Thinking back, she couldn't remember the last time she met another full-blooded human. Before this moment, she hadn't understood just how much she missed being with her own people, who talked like her, shared the same experiences, and didn't believe they were superior simply because their ancestors came from planets with more than one moon.

Kicking up gravel with a scowl distorting her face, Lace started walking. She didn't have a particular destination, she just needed to find people, somewhere to get food that wasn't dehydrated slop, and stay for a night, but she didn't know where to look. So she made her angry march down empty path after empty path, not really paying attention to her trail, until she was standing in front of a house she knew very well.

Lace's childhood home was crooked, sloping to the left. It was one story, with an attic too structurally unsound to go in. Each window was boarded, with the door copying the look. There was a deck out front, a quarter painted and a quarter filled with holes, more shingles on the ground than the roof, and twisted gutters that leaked every time it rained.

"This place is a dump." Lace remarked to the ghosts of her past. In a brief flicker of nostalgia, she smirked. "I guess some things never change." Her smile faded as she gazed around. This neighborhood was always bursting with vitality, now the feeble whisper of the breeze was all that made a home here. What happened?

Then, in listening to her past, Lace heard something in the present: voices, far off to the west. She cast one last glance upon the place that made her, then ran to the source.

At the edge of her neighborhood, was another wall. This one was short, not official, made of sheets of metal and wire. Beyond it, Lace heard people. There wasn't laughter or music, but there were people.

She scrambled looking for an entrance, but found none. Grumbling to herself, she moved back into the deserted village and gathered crates that were used for anything and everything there, and stacked them by the wall. Annoyance mounting, she climbed up, and hopped over.

Lace landed in the dirt on the edge of a shanty town. There weren't real buildings there, just tents and clumsily made shacks. She was far enough from the nearest group of people that no one had seen her appearance, and as she made her way toward the dirtied crowd, she noticed that the population seemed to consist entirely of half-breeds.

She smelled traditional foods from other planets, heard ancient languages, and saw countless other interstellar influences that would never have existed in this sub-sector when last she was here. Confused and still a little pissed off, she strode over to a man who seemed to be mostly Kyre, with a dash of human.