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Description
In the desolate quiet after everyone had gone, there was little left to do in New Berlin. For the first long while, Alice stood in the walkways that stretched like brittle glass bones between the airlocks and the city. She stood watching the night sky, ignoring the sting of glass in her eye until the blood dripping down her cheek dried. Mars's sky was dusty, a dull purple-red with ice clouds floating by. Even had she been uninjured, she couldn't have seen any stars through the haze.

When morning came, she gathered the glittering bronze pieces of her damaged helmet from the airlock where she'd left them. It had seemed too soon before then, as though somehow to step back inside that place would summon the shuttle back to her, and undo all her hard work to see the launch through. Alice knew, distantly, that she needed to treat her aching eye, needed to extract the glass from her skin and probably lie down for a very long time. There would be no doctor waiting in the city hospital if she visited there, no nurse to guide her along her way, and letting the wound fester risked infection. She knew she needed to act, but instead she lingered by the airlock for shuttle twenty one and cradled the shards in the palms of both hands, reliving those last moments, memorizing the faces of the people she'd sent back to Earth.

The shards eventually began to itch her palms, even through her gloves, and she carried them with her as she turned away from the spaceport toward the city. One shuttle still stood, abandoned and useless without its fueltanks, keeping silent vigil to the west. Alice smiled to it as she passed and told it, "Good work, friend."

One small consolation was that New Berlin had been built to last. The colony spread a hundred kilometers or more over Mars's pale red face, most of it under glass domes for now, with plans to eventually remove them once the planetwide terraforming initiative had been underway. There were thousands of houses and hundreds of shops standing abandoned before her as she stepped from the coiling walkway. The hospital, located at the center of the colony, seemed an impossible distance to travel, at least in her current condition. Alice stepped down off of the bridge between defunct spaceport and city and decided instead to search the nearest houses for emergency supplies, hoping that some might have been left behind.

Following the roads out of habit, rather than necessity, she excavated houses as she came upon them, one by one. From time to time, there was rattling overhead as the air filtration unit went through its daily routine. She found herself going completely still each time, holding her breath in the hope that some human sound would follow. After an hour or two, she began to accept that she was alone, after all. The sounds became a comforting background, and she worked with the tirelessness of desperation.

An abandoned yellow house near the schoolyards caught her attention as she was beginning to grow dizzy, and inside she finally found what she'd been looking for. Someone had left behind a standard-issue first aid kit in the ground floor restroom, replete with gauze and antibacterial ointment. No tweezers, to her dismay, but now that she could see herself in the mirror, she decided she could pluck out the glass by herself. Dropping the bronze shards into the sink to free up her hands, Alice gripped the sink in an effort to stay calm.

Her hand shook at first. When she pinched the big, glass shard of what once had been her helmet and started to work it free, it grew steadier. It might have been possible to save the eye, she thought, if she knew anything about medicine, or could ask someone else who did. As it was, she was grateful that the shard had never wedged deeper into the socket, never splintered. When it was done, the sink was spattered with her blood and she felt light-headed, but better. Reassured, she applied gauze and disinfectant where she could, taping the gauze in place to her aching cheek and eye before she wiped herself down, cleaning away all of the blood she'd spilled.

There was reserve food left behind in the kitchen, and she drank a liter of water straight from the tap to go with it, downing painkillers somewhere along the way to settle her stomach. Her headache persisted even after she was full, throbbing and spinning. Dazed, perhaps still a little in shock from her self-surgery, Alice gave in to the desire to sit down, commandeering the bathtub in the restroom and passing out comfortably with her uninjured cheek pressed to the wall.

She woke to find that it was still light out. She felt achingly stiff, but better, too. Despite the daylight streaming down, the yellow house was outside of the climate-controlled part of the colony, and Alice's cheeks and nose were red with cold when she glanced in the mirror on her way out of the restroom. It was lucky, she told herself, that she'd donned her battle uniform during the evacuation. Civilian clothes were no good at protecting against unregulated weather, and even if it had been temperate right that second, eventually the power generators were going to fail with no one to maintenance them. Alice had never really thought about it much, but Starlight Ranger gear was designed to shield from any element, to last a lifetime. She didn't relish the thought of spending her last days shivering in miserable cold, so she stayed in-uniform, and was grateful for the small comfort it brought, shattered helm and all.

She raided the yellow house's stores of food a second time and returned to the spaceport. Twelve fingers of light had reached up to Earth the day before, each one a ship she'd packed full with civilians herself. They had clawed through the sky, flared and flown until they were beyond sight, safely breaking from Mars's orbit and out into the cold depths of space, beyond where she could see them. Waiting in the spaceport, she watched for more signs of survivors, from other colonies, from halfway across the world. Nothing flew that day, but night came and, in the direction of Romera colony, she saw twelve more shuttles take flight. By next mid-day thirty two more had been sent up one-by-one, probably from the Arabian Sea. Their smoke trails flared out like fat, smoky palm trees, gray-brown against the white-pale of the ice clouds and the dusty scarlet of the sky. She prowled in the spaceport like a stubborn dog, going back and forth to the city and raiding empty houses for food, water, shelter, and more medical supplies as she changed her bandages and waited for the scabs to turn to scars. She would return to the spaceport every few hours to watch, just in case, for more survivors escaping Mars's icy grip. Pacing restlessly, Alice waited, watching the sky flare blue at every sunrise and sunset, trying to make out stars through the dust and clouds.

She thought about Earth often. After five days, the launches happened only in twos and threes. After a fortnight, there were no more.

New Berlin's crops were left solely to her. Once she remembered that she'd had a farm, she dutifully tended to it and began wandering around to find other fields and do the same. There were several in her district, and while some were growing plants with which she was unfamiliar, diagrams had been etched into the metal doors leading to each farming plot. She took them under her wing one by one, cycling through the plots in her daily journey to and from the spaceport. In the spaceport, the weather was unregulated and just a little cold. In the farms, she could fantasize the heat that blanketed her was from the sun. More and more, Alice spent her time there, instead.

She made herself red with the dust as she patrolled the crops and dug furrows for new seeds with her bare hands, fantasizing that back on Earth, somewhere, someone would see the green when they were looking up. It was a sad sort of dream: the sort that led her to wonder if anyone would remember that they had stood here, once. That they had dared.

When the plants flowered, some were just as always, and some seemed to have been made strange by their transplanting from Earth to Mars. Plants that she knew she had not planted began to spring up as the days stretched into weeks and months, and vines sprawled over the glass high above, finding purchase even though it seemed impossible. With the vines came bell-shaped blue flowers, unfamiliar to her but pretty, nonetheless. She talked to them when they spread to her own farm and nestled and nuzzled them affectionately whenever she passed them by. The stalks of her corn were orange when they sprouted from the ground. The strawberries she'd planted first fruited already brown and dead in color, but tasted perfect when she risked one.

"It must be," Alice told the flowers, after puzzling it over until her head had started to ache again, "the soil that makes you grow so differently."

They would answer sometimes, those flowers, whispering with a cold, sharp wind. She could almost believe she heard tinkling laughter from their fluted petals. With nothing else to keep her company, she talked to them often, trudging from farm to farm to farm. She tried to water them on a cycle that kept her active for most of the day. She sang to them and told them stories, and lamented about how dry the air had become. The weather controls included a rain machine that affected humidity, but it had no such convenient instructions upon it as had the farming plots she found. She struggled with them for weeks before it came to her, one morning, as she was watching the blue sun rise. Racing back to the control room, she played with the weather algorithm until she understood it in and out, and dialed the humidity up to eighty percent.

Saplings filled out handsomely in the muggy springlike weather she'd created, sucking in the humidity and putting out bushels of delicate new leaves. Vines unfurled, crawling towards the distant glass dome of the colony ceiling. Giddy at the sudden change in the air, the way the humidity carried the smell of moist soil and greenery up and down all the colony walkways, Alice let the steam blast freely into her farm until it was completely fogged over.

She found that even after a few moments of not seeing it, she began quickly to miss the sky. Since she could walk and the plants could not, she left the humidity controls turned high and instead rushed back, every hour or so, to the glass-and-titanium walkways leading off to the empty airlocks. Day was orange and night was purple-black, and always there were clouds, dust, blocking her view of the stars. Stars were what she missed most of all, on Mars. Even the bright little dot of Earth seemed dim, most nights.

Pressing on, Alice kept her schedule rigorous, running back and forth from the airlocks to her farm. She kept working until she collapsed from exhaustion, and then would lay flat on her back until the dizziness cleared and she could begin her work anew. One of the stranger things about New Berlin was the length of the day, here. A day on Mars was not so much longer than a day on Earth, but the forty minutes at the end meant she was sleeping at midday and waking at midnight as often as not, though she tried to rise and set with the sun. Someone had told her, once, that that was how farmers lived. If she was anything, she supposed she was still a farmer, here.

Very rarely, she wondered how long she had left to live. If she, too, had contracted Peregrine's evidently fatal disease, and that was why she could not sleep, no matter how long she lay waiting.

Other infected persons had not been reported in New Berlin beyond the sixty fatalities that had spurred the exodus, but she'd read the report when it was first published. Peregrine had thoroughly studied her own illness, unaware that it was mirrored in so many others trying to make a living around the colony, and had her sister document her symptoms. Initially she had suffered from sleeplessness, then hallucinations to the point of dementia. After four months, Peregrine had lost her fine motor control, shortly progressed into catatonia, and died: the first of sixty to die that week. Alice had originally meant to keep track of how long she had left, guessing that the illness took between three and six months to reach fatality, but the days and nights played tricks on her. If she was infected, she suspected the answer was 'not very'.

It seemed sad to be the last person left on Mars, but no one had wanted to risk the possibility of infection after the colony-wide declaration that Peregrine's syndrome was not yet proven to be contagious. Still, Alice thought the noises she heard some days must mean that others had stayed behind through the evacuation, despite her efforts to get everyone on-board the shuttles before their departure. If there were others, she never saw them: her farm was on the outskirts of the city and near to the dismally empty shuttle docks, so she was unsurprised that no one would want to visit. Even she found the sad reminder tiring, from time to time. Still, she wondered if they would come forward someday, at least, to ask her if she could do something about the steam, or to thank her for it, depending on whether they liked fog or not.

Little signs beyond the occasional sounds gave her hope that she was not alone. Sometimes flowers would be crushed, as if by someone else's feet sneaking through her garden. It seemed to her, too, that someone must have been stealing from her apple tree, for the fruit kept sprouting bite-marks, white against their smooth red skin. Alice enjoyed running through the colony register and trying to guess who had stayed behind, how they were avoiding her efforts to catch them. She wondered in sing-song to her blue flowers why her mystery thief, or thieves, only took bites out of the apples instead of stealing the whole fruit. They had no answer but to laugh.

The days blurred by, each less distinct than the last. Mars's strangeness seemed to get worse the longer she went without sleeping. Her mysterious blue flowers kept spreading everywhere, following her out into the tunnels that led to the airlocks and back up towards the vacant city. One evening, she discovered the power generator by following the warm air back to its source and huddled near it, grateful of the near-unbearable temperature. Since it was doing only its most basic duties in keeping the colony moderately warm and electrically powered, the generator was in excellent condition. She spent a few days examining and learning it, until she was hot from the sweat still leftover on her skin and confident she knew how the generator worked.

To no one in particular, Alice said: "April showers, May flowers. That's how it goes, right?"

Confident that the generator could handle the needed energy output without so much as a flicker in the lights, Alice returned to her farm. She walked with a spring in her step, trailing her fingers through bushels of blue flowers that had sprouted along the walkway. Using the humidity controls, she programmed in a slow, circular gust of wind and a wealth of hot mist to be released after the speed had picked up. Her first three efforts left the leaves of her flourishing garden sparkling with dew and no more. On the fourth, she succeeded.

Alice crowed as her dome began to grow darker with the tiny cloud she'd created, gray against the yellow-white clouds of Mars's real sky. When the rainstorms began in earnest, she smiled, sitting in her plot with her knees drawn to her chin, watching her young plants' leaves shivering under the light drizzle. Distant bells seemed to glimmer whenever she turned her head, a triumphant chorus that sang and cheered at her victory over New Berlin. For a while, Alice simply closed her eyes, savoring the sensation of the raindrops upon her skin until she was soaked through.

Alice.

Day and night blurred together as she sat there, but she found herself unwilling to move. It seemed pleasant, feeling the rain fall every now and then along her pre-programmed algorithm. She sat and watched her farm begin to blossom, vines unfurling and crawling across the upper panes of the biodome until the light was filtered through with green and the plot had started to get wild with unchecked growth. The storm program she'd set was always followed by gentle winds to clear the steam on the dome's glass ceiling away again, so if she moved her eye she could still see the sky from her seat, and drink in the distant red blob of the sun. It grew warmer, the humidity clinging to her skin even when the rain temporarily subsided.

The cloudy orange sky smiled down on her farm as it transformed itself into a jungle, and the wildness began to spread past its confines and up into the vein-like streets of New Berlin. Somewhere else, she supposed someone must have released the bio-samples of Earth animals from their stasis cells, for butterflies began to explore the verdant paradise of their new home, and some brushed lightly past her face, wondrous and flickering with iridescent patterns in the green filtered sunlight. Mice scampered through the spreading vines, and above them all, a red wolf paced, nosing the floor as it tracked some particular, elusive and delicious scent, hunting. It ignored her completely as it passed. Just as well, she thought. She couldn't bear to move, she was too tired.

Alice.

There, again, a voice. A voice, like a drop of water sliding down a pane of glass, was calling her name.

Alice.

It was an old voice, dark with pain but eminently familiar. She had the most curious sensation of someone reaching for her, and before she had fully decided to do so, Alice realized she was reaching back, curious to know where she'd heard the voice from, before.

The world suddenly snapped into focus beneath her: here was the floor, a viscous, dreamy floor, and here were her hands making ripples in it. For a moment she couldn't breathe. Her farm, gone! The air was bitter cold and sharp, and the only thing she smelled was the tinny scent of magically recycled atmosphere. She didn't remember laying down, but her face was pressed into the glassy chill of the floor, and when she pushed herself up her body ached as if she had slept in a strange position the night before. This was not Mars. This was not Mars!

Alice bit her lip until her eye stopped stinging, and clambered to her feet, shell-shocked and speechless. Gone, all of it gone, just as Earth and the stars had been forever gone, behind the Martian, dusty sky. She wavered where she stood, trying to steady herself against the keen sense of loss she felt for her blue flowers, her brown strawberries and her apples that ate themselves. Gone. Without the farm, without Earth, without a night sky, she had nothing except the suit on her back. She didn't even know where she was.

"Alice." There, again, the old voice was calling her name. This time, she could feel breath behind it, as if the person who spoke was not far at all. It seemed a nice dream, but she was too bereft to acknowledge it at first. Then her eyes caught the shape of familiar shoes, and she followed them up to see a familiar man, solemnly staring right back at her. She thought at once that she knew his face, and that he had not looked so tired and old the last time she saw him. It seemed impossible. There was no one else on Mars, and Alice knew it better than anyone.

Unless she was no longer on Mars, but somewhere else. She caught her breath, and involuntarily looked up past him, to the ceiling. She wasn't sure if she dared to hope, but hoped for it anyway.

Stars. Infinite stars, more stars than she knew one universe could hold. She could feel her eye watering with tears, and laughed, staring up in childlike wonder. She had never been here, but it didn't matter. She had missed the stars more than anything.

"Alice?"

Yes. She realized that she knew this voice, after all.

"Have I got you, now?"

"Yes, Hans." She swayed with vertigo and shut her eye, dropping her head and smiling to herself. "It's good to hear your voice."

"You're not well," Hans reached out cautiously, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder, "I could do nothing for you, before. I'm sorry. Is standing too much?"

She had never felt so grateful for something as simple as the touch of a hand, and smiled back at him brightly. "I'll manage. I feel better than I did! Are you dead, too? Really, Hans, you should know better."

Guiding her a step, two, he motioned to a platform, outlined in the dreamy glassy nothingness of the floor by a pooling of liquid green, and helped her to stand upon it. "There's something important we must do."

"Ranger business." Alice nodded authoritatively, though she felt completely out of sorts. "I understand. Just point me in the right direction!"

Silence met her bravado, and when she looked again she found that there were many platforms like the one on which she stood, both above and below. Beyond them all stood the sky, vast and impossible, a hundred million universes intersecting all around them, exploding with light and life. Alice felt a giddy thrill, looking wildly about, excited to see something she'd thought she'd never see again. Across the distance in front of her, a faint flicker of green marked someone else on the same tier as herself, standing on some remote platform. It seemed to her the color blossomed and grew even when she looked upon it, and she started to laugh again, drunk with joy at seeing other people after so long alone.

"You have been chosen," Hans's voice warned her, though it seemed he had stepped out of the space in front of her and off to someplace else again. He sounded strained and tired, more nervous than she remembered ever hearing him. Though she could no longer see where he was or where the sound was coming from, she had a sense that in a way he was all around them, part of the stadium itself. A little confused, she looked up again, and back at the green speck-- now rapidly approaching as the platform on which she stood rushed forward to meet it-- as it began to resolve into a not-quite-familiar silhouette in glowing green.

"Chosen?" She parroted, not understanding his meaning, not sure if she liked it. The silhouette was fast approaching her.

"For Omega."

"Who's Omega?" Alice turned in a circle, trying to spot where Hans had gone. He was nowhere to be found. "What do you mean?"

A heavy, thunderous clanking sound signaled the collision of the two platforms, which seemed to have grown longer than Alice had initially guessed them to be. Several meters back, her opponent rose from a battle-ready crouch, her face serious and scowling, her eyes narrowed in a warning glare behind a pale, protective visor. Another familiar face, she realized, and beamed.

"Christine!" Alice blurted out, stumbling forward a step before Christine's warning glare cut through her exultation. The other details of Christine's appearance sank in slowly, as she realized this was not the same young woman she had known once before, not quite. As Alice remembered her, Christine had been sixteen at most and willow-thin. The woman before her stood proudly, stocky and muscular, her hair in a tight black braid, throwing knives in her belt and her hands at the ready to grab them. Though her uniform still glimmered with the distinct color of heavy foliage, what once had seemed to shine with the magic of life's creation now stood dull and shadowed, like camouflage. If there was recognition in those hard brown eyes, it was well concealed.

Drooping a moment, Alice stepped back until her back struck the liquid-like force that sculpted the wall behind her and the floor beneath their feet.

"Christine," this time, the name was a whisper, almost a plea, and Alice sank back against the wall as the whole floor shook, crackling with liquid green electricity. As if the electric pulse of the floor had been a signal, Hans's voice flooded her mind in a rush: Fight well, and with honor. If we fail, all our brothers and sisters in arms will die at the hands of chaos. She could not imagine what had brought chaos across multiple dimensions and time itself to stir Hans to action, nor what purpose a tournament might hold in defeating it.

But she knew what must come next, no matter how she might detest it. Clearly, she was here to fight, and Christine was her opponent. If Hans had summoned her, the need must be great, for Hans did nothing unless it was needed, and Alice had never been much in a fight to begin with.

Taking a deep breath, she stood away from the wall again and called the staff of stars to her hand. She met Christine's even gaze again, and inclined her head in respect of her fellow warrior.

"I'll do my best to be an opponent worthy of you." Alice gripped her staff to steady her nerves, and let herself relax into the familiarity of battle once more. "Let's do this."

Description
In the desolate quiet after everyone had gone, there was little left to do in New Berlin. For the first long while, Alice stood in the walkways that stretched like brittle glass bones between the airlocks and the city. She stood watching the night sky, ignoring the sting of glass in her eye until the blood dripping down her cheek dried. Mars's sky was dusty, a dull purple-red with ice clouds floating by. Even had she been uninjured, she couldn't have seen any stars through the haze.

When morning came, she gathered the glittering bronze pieces of her damaged helmet from the airlock where she'd left them. It had seemed too soon before then, as though somehow to step back inside that place would summon the shuttle back to her, and undo all her hard work to see the launch through. Alice knew, distantly, that she needed to treat her aching eye, needed to extract the glass from her skin and probably lie down for a very long time. There would be no doctor waiting in the city hospital if she visited there, no nurse to guide her along her way, and letting the wound fester risked infection. She knew she needed to act, but instead she lingered by the airlock for shuttle twenty one and cradled the shards in the palms of both hands, reliving those last moments, memorizing the faces of the people she'd sent back to Earth.

The shards eventually began to itch her palms, even through her gloves, and she carried them with her as she turned away from the spaceport toward the city. One shuttle still stood, abandoned and useless without its fueltanks, keeping silent vigil to the west. Alice smiled to it as she passed and told it, "Good work, friend."

One small consolation was that New Berlin had been built to last. The colony spread a hundred kilometers or more over Mars's pale red face, most of it under glass domes for now, with plans to eventually remove them once the planetwide terraforming initiative had been underway. There were thousands of houses and hundreds of shops standing abandoned before her as she stepped from the coiling walkway. The hospital, located at the center of the colony, seemed an impossible distance to travel, at least in her current condition. Alice stepped down off of the bridge between defunct spaceport and city and decided instead to search the nearest houses for emergency supplies, hoping that some might have been left behind.

Following the roads out of habit, rather than necessity, she excavated houses as she came upon them, one by one. From time to time, there was rattling overhead as the air filtration unit went through its daily routine. She found herself going completely still each time, holding her breath in the hope that some human sound would follow. After an hour or two, she began to accept that she was alone, after all. The sounds became a comforting background, and she worked with the tirelessness of desperation.

An abandoned yellow house near the schoolyards caught her attention as she was beginning to grow dizzy, and inside she finally found what she'd been looking for. Someone had left behind a standard-issue first aid kit in the ground floor restroom, replete with gauze and antibacterial ointment. No tweezers, to her dismay, but now that she could see herself in the mirror, she decided she could pluck out the glass by herself. Dropping the bronze shards into the sink to free up her hands, Alice gripped the sink in an effort to stay calm.

Her hand shook at first. When she pinched the big, glass shard of what once had been her helmet and started to work it free, it grew steadier. It might have been possible to save the eye, she thought, if she knew anything about medicine, or could ask someone else who did. As it was, she was grateful that the shard had never wedged deeper into the socket, never splintered. When it was done, the sink was spattered with her blood and she felt light-headed, but better. Reassured, she applied gauze and disinfectant where she could, taping the gauze in place to her aching cheek and eye before she wiped herself down, cleaning away all of the blood she'd spilled.

There was reserve food left behind in the kitchen, and she drank a liter of water straight from the tap to go with it, downing painkillers somewhere along the way to settle her stomach. Her headache persisted even after she was full, throbbing and spinning. Dazed, perhaps still a little in shock from her self-surgery, Alice gave in to the desire to sit down, commandeering the bathtub in the restroom and passing out comfortably with her uninjured cheek pressed to the wall.

She woke to find that it was still light out. She felt achingly stiff, but better, too. Despite the daylight streaming down, the yellow house was outside of the climate-controlled part of the colony, and Alice's cheeks and nose were red with cold when she glanced in the mirror on her way out of the restroom. It was lucky, she told herself, that she'd donned her battle uniform during the evacuation. Civilian clothes were no good at protecting against unregulated weather, and even if it had been temperate right that second, eventually the power generators were going to fail with no one to maintenance them. Alice had never really thought about it much, but Starlight Ranger gear was designed to shield from any element, to last a lifetime. She didn't relish the thought of spending her last days shivering in miserable cold, so she stayed in-uniform, and was grateful for the small comfort it brought, shattered helm and all.

She raided the yellow house's stores of food a second time and returned to the spaceport. Twelve fingers of light had reached up to Earth the day before, each one a ship she'd packed full with civilians herself. They had clawed through the sky, flared and flown until they were beyond sight, safely breaking from Mars's orbit and out into the cold depths of space, beyond where she could see them. Waiting in the spaceport, she watched for more signs of survivors, from other colonies, from halfway across the world. Nothing flew that day, but night came and, in the direction of Romera colony, she saw twelve more shuttles take flight. By next mid-day thirty two more had been sent up one-by-one, probably from the Arabian Sea. Their smoke trails flared out like fat, smoky palm trees, gray-brown against the white-pale of the ice clouds and the dusty scarlet of the sky. She prowled in the spaceport like a stubborn dog, going back and forth to the city and raiding empty houses for food, water, shelter, and more medical supplies as she changed her bandages and waited for the scabs to turn to scars. She would return to the spaceport every few hours to watch, just in case, for more survivors escaping Mars's icy grip. Pacing restlessly, Alice waited, watching the sky flare blue at every sunrise and sunset, trying to make out stars through the dust and clouds.

She thought about Earth often. After five days, the launches happened only in twos and threes. After a fortnight, there were no more.

New Berlin's crops were left solely to her. Once she remembered that she'd had a farm, she dutifully tended to it and began wandering around to find other fields and do the same. There were several in her district, and while some were growing plants with which she was unfamiliar, diagrams had been etched into the metal doors leading to each farming plot. She took them under her wing one by one, cycling through the plots in her daily journey to and from the spaceport. In the spaceport, the weather was unregulated and just a little cold. In the farms, she could fantasize the heat that blanketed her was from the sun. More and more, Alice spent her time there, instead.

She made herself red with the dust as she patrolled the crops and dug furrows for new seeds with her bare hands, fantasizing that back on Earth, somewhere, someone would see the green when they were looking up. It was a sad sort of dream: the sort that led her to wonder if anyone would remember that they had stood here, once. That they had dared.

When the plants flowered, some were just as always, and some seemed to have been made strange by their transplanting from Earth to Mars. Plants that she knew she had not planted began to spring up as the days stretched into weeks and months, and vines sprawled over the glass high above, finding purchase even though it seemed impossible. With the vines came bell-shaped blue flowers, unfamiliar to her but pretty, nonetheless. She talked to them when they spread to her own farm and nestled and nuzzled them affectionately whenever she passed them by. The stalks of her corn were orange when they sprouted from the ground. The strawberries she'd planted first fruited already brown and dead in color, but tasted perfect when she risked one.

"It must be," Alice told the flowers, after puzzling it over until her head had started to ache again, "the soil that makes you grow so differently."

They would answer sometimes, those flowers, whispering with a cold, sharp wind. She could almost believe she heard tinkling laughter from their fluted petals. With nothing else to keep her company, she talked to them often, trudging from farm to farm to farm. She tried to water them on a cycle that kept her active for most of the day. She sang to them and told them stories, and lamented about how dry the air had become. The weather controls included a rain machine that affected humidity, but it had no such convenient instructions upon it as had the farming plots she found. She struggled with them for weeks before it came to her, one morning, as she was watching the blue sun rise. Racing back to the control room, she played with the weather algorithm until she understood it in and out, and dialed the humidity up to eighty percent.

Saplings filled out handsomely in the muggy springlike weather she'd created, sucking in the humidity and putting out bushels of delicate new leaves. Vines unfurled, crawling towards the distant glass dome of the colony ceiling. Giddy at the sudden change in the air, the way the humidity carried the smell of moist soil and greenery up and down all the colony walkways, Alice let the steam blast freely into her farm until it was completely fogged over.

She found that even after a few moments of not seeing it, she began quickly to miss the sky. Since she could walk and the plants could not, she left the humidity controls turned high and instead rushed back, every hour or so, to the glass-and-titanium walkways leading off to the empty airlocks. Day was orange and night was purple-black, and always there were clouds, dust, blocking her view of the stars. Stars were what she missed most of all, on Mars. Even the bright little dot of Earth seemed dim, most nights.

Pressing on, Alice kept her schedule rigorous, running back and forth from the airlocks to her farm. She kept working until she collapsed from exhaustion, and then would lay flat on her back until the dizziness cleared and she could begin her work anew. One of the stranger things about New Berlin was the length of the day, here. A day on Mars was not so much longer than a day on Earth, but the forty minutes at the end meant she was sleeping at midday and waking at midnight as often as not, though she tried to rise and set with the sun. Someone had told her, once, that that was how farmers lived. If she was anything, she supposed she was still a farmer, here.

Very rarely, she wondered how long she had left to live. If she, too, had contracted Peregrine's evidently fatal disease, and that was why she could not sleep, no matter how long she lay waiting.

Other infected persons had not been reported in New Berlin beyond the sixty fatalities that had spurred the exodus, but she'd read the report when it was first published. Peregrine had thoroughly studied her own illness, unaware that it was mirrored in so many others trying to make a living around the colony, and had her sister document her symptoms. Initially she had suffered from sleeplessness, then hallucinations to the point of dementia. After four months, Peregrine had lost her fine motor control, shortly progressed into catatonia, and died: the first of sixty to die that week. Alice had originally meant to keep track of how long she had left, guessing that the illness took between three and six months to reach fatality, but the days and nights played tricks on her. If she was infected, she suspected the answer was 'not very'.

It seemed sad to be the last person left on Mars, but no one had wanted to risk the possibility of infection after the colony-wide declaration that Peregrine's syndrome was not yet proven to be contagious. Still, Alice thought the noises she heard some days must mean that others had stayed behind through the evacuation, despite her efforts to get everyone on-board the shuttles before their departure. If there were others, she never saw them: her farm was on the outskirts of the city and near to the dismally empty shuttle docks, so she was unsurprised that no one would want to visit. Even she found the sad reminder tiring, from time to time. Still, she wondered if they would come forward someday, at least, to ask her if she could do something about the steam, or to thank her for it, depending on whether they liked fog or not.

Little signs beyond the occasional sounds gave her hope that she was not alone. Sometimes flowers would be crushed, as if by someone else's feet sneaking through her garden. It seemed to her, too, that someone must have been stealing from her apple tree, for the fruit kept sprouting bite-marks, white against their smooth red skin. Alice enjoyed running through the colony register and trying to guess who had stayed behind, how they were avoiding her efforts to catch them. She wondered in sing-song to her blue flowers why her mystery thief, or thieves, only took bites out of the apples instead of stealing the whole fruit. They had no answer but to laugh.

The days blurred by, each less distinct than the last. Mars's strangeness seemed to get worse the longer she went without sleeping. Her mysterious blue flowers kept spreading everywhere, following her out into the tunnels that led to the airlocks and back up towards the vacant city. One evening, she discovered the power generator by following the warm air back to its source and huddled near it, grateful of the near-unbearable temperature. Since it was doing only its most basic duties in keeping the colony moderately warm and electrically powered, the generator was in excellent condition. She spent a few days examining and learning it, until she was hot from the sweat still leftover on her skin and confident she knew how the generator worked.

To no one in particular, Alice said: "April showers, May flowers. That's how it goes, right?"

Confident that the generator could handle the needed energy output without so much as a flicker in the lights, Alice returned to her farm. She walked with a spring in her step, trailing her fingers through bushels of blue flowers that had sprouted along the walkway. Using the humidity controls, she programmed in a slow, circular gust of wind and a wealth of hot mist to be released after the speed had picked up. Her first three efforts left the leaves of her flourishing garden sparkling with dew and no more. On the fourth, she succeeded.

Alice crowed as her dome began to grow darker with the tiny cloud she'd created, gray against the yellow-white clouds of Mars's real sky. When the rainstorms began in earnest, she smiled, sitting in her plot with her knees drawn to her chin, watching her young plants' leaves shivering under the light drizzle. Distant bells seemed to glimmer whenever she turned her head, a triumphant chorus that sang and cheered at her victory over New Berlin. For a while, Alice simply closed her eyes, savoring the sensation of the raindrops upon her skin until she was soaked through.

Alice.

Day and night blurred together as she sat there, but she found herself unwilling to move. It seemed pleasant, feeling the rain fall every now and then along her pre-programmed algorithm. She sat and watched her farm begin to blossom, vines unfurling and crawling across the upper panes of the biodome until the light was filtered through with green and the plot had started to get wild with unchecked growth. The storm program she'd set was always followed by gentle winds to clear the steam on the dome's glass ceiling away again, so if she moved her eye she could still see the sky from her seat, and drink in the distant red blob of the sun. It grew warmer, the humidity clinging to her skin even when the rain temporarily subsided.

The cloudy orange sky smiled down on her farm as it transformed itself into a jungle, and the wildness began to spread past its confines and up into the vein-like streets of New Berlin. Somewhere else, she supposed someone must have released the bio-samples of Earth animals from their stasis cells, for butterflies began to explore the verdant paradise of their new home, and some brushed lightly past her face, wondrous and flickering with iridescent patterns in the green filtered sunlight. Mice scampered through the spreading vines, and above them all, a red wolf paced, nosing the floor as it tracked some particular, elusive and delicious scent, hunting. It ignored her completely as it passed. Just as well, she thought. She couldn't bear to move, she was too tired.

Alice.

There, again, a voice. A voice, like a drop of water sliding down a pane of glass, was calling her name.

Alice.

It was an old voice, dark with pain but eminently familiar. She had the most curious sensation of someone reaching for her, and before she had fully decided to do so, Alice realized she was reaching back, curious to know where she'd heard the voice from, before.

The world suddenly snapped into focus beneath her: here was the floor, a viscous, dreamy floor, and here were her hands making ripples in it. For a moment she couldn't breathe. Her farm, gone! The air was bitter cold and sharp, and the only thing she smelled was the tinny scent of magically recycled atmosphere. She didn't remember laying down, but her face was pressed into the glassy chill of the floor, and when she pushed herself up her body ached as if she had slept in a strange position the night before. This was not Mars. This was not Mars!

Alice bit her lip until her eye stopped stinging, and clambered to her feet, shell-shocked and speechless. Gone, all of it gone, just as Earth and the stars had been forever gone, behind the Martian, dusty sky. She wavered where she stood, trying to steady herself against the keen sense of loss she felt for her blue flowers, her brown strawberries and her apples that ate themselves. Gone. Without the farm, without Earth, without a night sky, she had nothing except the suit on her back. She didn't even know where she was.

"Alice." There, again, the old voice was calling her name. This time, she could feel breath behind it, as if the person who spoke was not far at all. It seemed a nice dream, but she was too bereft to acknowledge it at first. Then her eyes caught the shape of familiar shoes, and she followed them up to see a familiar man, solemnly staring right back at her. She thought at once that she knew his face, and that he had not looked so tired and old the last time she saw him. It seemed impossible. There was no one else on Mars, and Alice knew it better than anyone.

Unless she was no longer on Mars, but somewhere else. She caught her breath, and involuntarily looked up past him, to the ceiling. She wasn't sure if she dared to hope, but hoped for it anyway.

Stars. Infinite stars, more stars than she knew one universe could hold. She could feel her eye watering with tears, and laughed, staring up in childlike wonder. She had never been here, but it didn't matter. She had missed the stars more than anything.

"Alice?"

Yes. She realized that she knew this voice, after all.

"Have I got you, now?"

"Yes, Hans." She swayed with vertigo and shut her eye, dropping her head and smiling to herself. "It's good to hear your voice."

"You're not well," Hans reached out cautiously, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder, "I could do nothing for you, before. I'm sorry. Is standing too much?"

She had never felt so grateful for something as simple as the touch of a hand, and smiled back at him brightly. "I'll manage. I feel better than I did! Are you dead, too? Really, Hans, you should know better."

Guiding her a step, two, he motioned to a platform, outlined in the dreamy glassy nothingness of the floor by a pooling of liquid green, and helped her to stand upon it. "There's something important we must do."

"Ranger business." Alice nodded authoritatively, though she felt completely out of sorts. "I understand. Just point me in the right direction!"

Silence met her bravado, and when she looked again she found that there were many platforms like the one on which she stood, both above and below. Beyond them all stood the sky, vast and impossible, a hundred million universes intersecting all around them, exploding with light and life. Alice felt a giddy thrill, looking wildly about, excited to see something she'd thought she'd never see again. Across the distance in front of her, a faint flicker of green marked someone else on the same tier as herself, standing on some remote platform. It seemed to her the color blossomed and grew even when she looked upon it, and she started to laugh again, drunk with joy at seeing other people after so long alone.

"You have been chosen," Hans's voice warned her, though it seemed he had stepped out of the space in front of her and off to someplace else again. He sounded strained and tired, more nervous than she remembered ever hearing him. Though she could no longer see where he was or where the sound was coming from, she had a sense that in a way he was all around them, part of the stadium itself. A little confused, she looked up again, and back at the green speck-- now rapidly approaching as the platform on which she stood rushed forward to meet it-- as it began to resolve into a not-quite-familiar silhouette in glowing green.

"Chosen?" She parroted, not understanding his meaning, not sure if she liked it. The silhouette was fast approaching her.

"For Omega."

"Who's Omega?" Alice turned in a circle, trying to spot where Hans had gone. He was nowhere to be found. "What do you mean?"

A heavy, thunderous clanking sound signaled the collision of the two platforms, which seemed to have grown longer than Alice had initially guessed them to be. Several meters back, her opponent rose from a battle-ready crouch, her face serious and scowling, her eyes narrowed in a warning glare behind a pale, protective visor. Another familiar face, she realized, and beamed.

"Christine!" Alice blurted out, stumbling forward a step before Christine's warning glare cut through her exultation. The other details of Christine's appearance sank in slowly, as she realized this was not the same young woman she had known once before, not quite. As Alice remembered her, Christine had been sixteen at most and willow-thin. The woman before her stood proudly, stocky and muscular, her hair in a tight black braid, throwing knives in her belt and her hands at the ready to grab them. Though her uniform still glimmered with the distinct color of heavy foliage, what once had seemed to shine with the magic of life's creation now stood dull and shadowed, like camouflage. If there was recognition in those hard brown eyes, it was well concealed.

Drooping a moment, Alice stepped back until her back struck the liquid-like force that sculpted the wall behind her and the floor beneath their feet.

"Christine," this time, the name was a whisper, almost a plea, and Alice sank back against the wall as the whole floor shook, crackling with liquid green electricity. As if the electric pulse of the floor had been a signal, Hans's voice flooded her mind in a rush: Fight well, and with honor. If we fail, all our brothers and sisters in arms will die at the hands of chaos. She could not imagine what had brought chaos across multiple dimensions and time itself to stir Hans to action, nor what purpose a tournament might hold in defeating it.

But she knew what must come next, no matter how she might detest it. Clearly, she was here to fight, and Christine was her opponent. If Hans had summoned her, the need must be great, for Hans did nothing unless it was needed, and Alice had never been much in a fight to begin with.

Taking a deep breath, she stood away from the wall again and called the staff of stars to her hand. She met Christine's even gaze again, and inclined her head in respect of her fellow warrior.

"I'll do my best to be an opponent worthy of you." Alice gripped her staff to steady her nerves, and let herself relax into the familiarity of battle once more. "Let's do this."