0. Ignesco

ignescō ~ere, intr.

1. to start to burn; catch fire

in the same year, on the same space Station orbiting the green gas giant Esther, three children turn five years old.

One of them is a girl, black-haired and skipping barefoot along a steel pipe belching sulfur fumes. Weathered crosses suspended by barbed wire and half-broken holoscreens watch her journey from above, coffee and air-purifier ads winking down at her like fond parents. In one hand she holds a basket of scavenged treats for her mother—burned bread and the parts of fruits no one wants. She has never met her father, but she dreams of him.

One of the children is a boy, platinum-haired and much smaller than his peers. His coat is embroidered silver and his shoes are shiny and new, but his face is smeared with his own days-old blood and excrement. He cries and cries as his mother leads him by the elbow through the marble halls of their mansion and into the cockpit of a red metal beast. The cockpit door slides shut behind him, and he slams his fists against it, begging to be let out. He dreams of freedom, but he has never had it.

The last child is a girl with eyes as deep and blue as a shadowed lake. She’s snuggled under a white-feather blanket, squealing with glee when her father pokes his head in before bedtime. By the light of a holocandle, he reads her the tale of the Knight’s War on old Earth—four hundred years gone and with five billion dead in its wake—and outside the girl’s window, there is only black space and silver stars and a great green planet with a white silica storm rotating slowly across its face. She dreams of great honor, and she will have it.

But then she will lose it all.