But her favorite movies . . .
She smiled.
"Are you ready, Fill?"
The dragonfly nodded. "Always and forever, Row."
Rowan placed the Earthstone into an adapter. Lights shone. Her small monitor, not much larger than her palm, came to life on the shelf. She began typing on her keyboard, pulling in data from the crystal. She had pilfered the electronics from the starship docks, scavenging through the repair shops when everyone was asleep. Fillister had coded an interface, translating Earth's old protocols into the alien code that could read the data.
And like magic, the secrets of Earth were available to Rowan.
She scrolled through her beloved file libraries, then smiled and clicked the right icon. She leaned back, pulled a blanket over her knees, and delved into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
When she was watching these movies, she was no longer in the ducts. No longer in Paradise Lost. No longer in this universe. She was in Middle Earth. She was enjoying sunlight in the Shire. She was visiting Rivendell, admiring its spires and waterfalls. She was crawling with Frodo and Sam across Mordor, and crowds were bowing before her across Minas Tirith. Instead of a scrawny orphan, a pest in a duct, she was a heroine with a world to explore.
Secretly, Rowan dreamed of someday becoming a filmmaker. A screenwriter, a director, maybe cinematographer too. Not an actress. You needed straight teeth to be an actress. Rowan didn't crave the spotlight. But she craved storytelling. Often she stole napkins from the buffets below, and she filled them with her movie scripts. She had already written a movie titled Dinosaur Island about an island where dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed that she was a real director like Spielberg or Lucas, filming Dinosaur Island in the Caribbean.
She lowered her head.
Yet how can I ever achieve this dream? Earth is gone. Tropical islands? I've never even left this space station.
Rowan sighed.
"I've never seen Earth," she said to Fillister when the movie ended. "And I've never met another human, at least not since I was two. But we have a piece of Earth with us." She patted the Earthstone. "We have a bit of home."
Fillister nodded. "Do you reckon we'll someday see Merry Ol' Earth for real?"
Rowan nodded. "I'm sure."
Yet she was lying. They both knew that.
Earth was gone.
Earth had been destroyed.
The Earthstone was a rich library, but it ended in the year 2270. After that year, there were no more movies, no more music, no more books.
After that—silence.
That had been two thousand years ago.
Since then—nothing. Not a whisper from Earth.
Perhaps, Rowan sometimes dared to hope, the Earthstone had simply been made in 2270, and there were other memory crystals out there, some containing treasures from the following centuries. But this was wishful thinking. According to the tales, 2270 was when the Hydrian Empire, an alien civilization that no longer existed, had destroyed Earth. Had slain billions of humans. Had driven the last few survivors into space, into exile.
Now only a few humans remained in the galaxy. Pests, the aliens called them. Vermin.
Every once in a while, the Paradise Lost administrators would hire an exterminator or two, and Rowan would spend a day fleeing through the ducts, avoiding them. They could never catch her. She knew this labyrinth better than anyone. But she heard the exterminators speaking amongst themselves. They spoke of finding humans inside asteroids, lurking outside alien colonies on distant moons, sometimes even infesting large starships. To aliens, humans were no better than mice or cockroaches.
But we're not pests, Rowan thought. We wrote books once. We composed music. We made movies. We're noble, and we're wise, but we're homeless and hunted and afraid.
Her shoulders slumped. Iciness filled her belly. Those familiar demons of loneliness, of depression, of despair—they threatened to reemerge. They had tormented her so often here in the ducts.
With numb fingers, Rowan reached into her pocket, and she pulled out a rumpled, laminated photograph. She caressed the photo, gazing at it through the crinkling plastic.
A photo from fourteen years ago. From when she had been only a toddler. A photo from the Glittering Caves, her family's old hiding place.
The photo showed her father, David Emery, slender and somber. Her mother, Sarai Emery, her eyes green and fierce, her braid golden. In the photo, Jade was six years old, her hair long and blond, and she held a toy sword carved from white crystal. Rowan was there too. Just two years old, her hair short and brown, her eyes solemn. The photograph was wrinkly, blurry, the faces barely visible. But it was her greatest treasure, even greater than the Earthstone.
"My family," she whispered. "I miss them."
"As do I," said Fillister. He nuzzled her. "Chin up. Might be we'll find Jade again someday. She's a tough girl, she is."
Rowan nodded and wiped tears from her eyes. "She is."
"Oi, Row, you up for the second movie now?" Fillister said. "The Two Towers is me favorite, especially the battle of Helm's Deep. Splendid film, that one is."
Rowan rolled her eyes and allowed herself to smile. "I told you, Fillister, the best movie in the trilogy is The Return of the King. It's the most emotional one. I always cry at the end."
The robotic dragonfly rolled his tiny eyes. "Blimey, I'm a robot. I have no bloody emotions."
She snorted. "Is that why you're always a mess when we watch Batteries Not Included?"
Fillister grumbled. "You know that's just the dust in me gears."
"Sure, sure." Rowan sighed. A deep sadness filled her, one that even Middle Earth could not assuage. She thought of all those movies, those books, those songs that would nevermore be written. She thought of her lost planet, her hunted people.
She thought of her parents, slain among shadows and crystals.
She thought of her sister, of Jade, of a girl she could barely remember.
Rowan rubbed her eyes. She began to crawl through the ducts again, leaving the living room. Fillister followed. She climbed higher and higher, the shafts vertical now. Her progress was slow, but she was determined. She rarely moved this high up the space station. It was cold up here, the ducts were narrow, and when air blew through them, it sounded like ghosts. But today she would climb to the top. Today she needed to be there.
Finally she reached the end of the labyrinth. The highest duct in Paradise Lost. The top of her home.
She crawled onto a little ledge, and there she saw it. The porthole.
It was a small window, smaller than her head, gazing out into space. It was the only place in Paradise Lost where she could see the stars.
Oh, there were other windows in Paradise Lost. Before dawn, when she crept into the casinos to rummage through the trash, she saw larger windows than these. In some bars, where Rowan sometimes stole nuts and paper for her scripts, there were windows taller than her. But the view from them was distorted, bright, blinding. Neon lights covered the exterior of Paradise Lost, advertising the brothels, bars, and casinos within. Sometimes you could catch a glimpse of the wormhole outside; its opening was large, as bright as any neon sign. And you could see the starships lumbering outside, belching smoke. But not the stars. To most visitors here, the stars were pedestrian. They preferred the glow of neon or the shine in a bottle of grog.