Document No.: 005

  Subject: Tiny heart

  Date: 8/12/2382

  Location: Kingstown market and surrounds,

  New Sahara, Mars

  Zoe stared about, wide-eyed, at the kaleidoscope of colours that surrounded her on all sides. Both excitement and a tremor of nervousness shivered through her at the still-foreign environment. Not only were the people of Kingstown generally dressed in bright, warm, colours and flowing, airy outfits, but the sun’s direct kiss on her skin was something she had only rarely experienced in Sancta Terra City’s Merchant Level. Above her, the sky stretched out endlessly in all directions, a fascinating shade of light blue after Zoe’s life-long experience of brown-grey clouds.

  People chattered all around, whether in trade or greeting, and everyone seemed to have an observation or question about something. Passersby would call out to each other as soon as they recognised each other, hold a conversation as they walked toward each other, and continue the conversation as they passed each other by, somehow knowing exactly when to give farewells before the clamour of everyone else doing the same thing drowned them out.

  Zoe held her hands over her ears, although her little face radiated fascination, not panic. All her life, she had watched dour pedestrians trudge past her on their way to wherever they were going. Even her own mother, as positive and optimistic as she had been, had not been free of the odd crestfallen or crushed expression. Zoe had seen more of her mother’s secret disappointment and misery than even a child of her tender years cared to.

  But Mummy and Daddy seem happier here, she mused, her hands still covering her ears as her observant eyes continued to drink up the colours, while her nose tried to make sense of the mixture of spices and other smells wafting through the open-air market. A dusty and ruffled little band of children eyed her warily from where they had collapsed on the ground under a magnificently tall and wide tree after running about like mad for the previous fifteen-minutes. Zoe’s heart pulled her in their direction, but her mind shut the idea down.

  “Oh, yes,” her mother was saying self-consciously, unease in her eyes as she spoke with one of the many vendors. “Um … yes. We do have that heritage, but …”

  “How did you find your way here?” gasped the woman animatedly, seeming to prime herself for a fine tale.

  Huh? wondered Zoe, blinking, and listening slightly closer to the conversation. She isn’t telling Mum to go away?

  “I … um … my husband was transferred …” Caroline looked as mystified as Zoe felt.

  With a vague desire stirring in her heart once again, Zoe looked away from her mother’s conversation, and back over to the gaggle of children. Most were tumbling about again, and two of them were collecting something that Zoe couldn’t make out from this distance.

  “Oh, go on over there, child,” laughed the woman then. “She’ll be safe enough,” the woman assured Caroline, who looked primed to automatically reject the idea, if politely.

  “Really?” asked Caroline and Zoe at the same time, relief spilling across both faces.

  “Of course!” beamed the woman. “We all watch out for each other’s children while we’re at market. There’s simply no other way!” She craned her neck then, a few brunette strands of hair bouncing about her tanned face. “Caleb!” she yelled, her sudden increase in volume making Zoe jump slightly.

  One of the boys dragged himself reluctantly away from the pack of children and trotted over, bare feet making hardly any noise on the packed earth of the marketplace, and nothing on his confidently curious face saying he felt any discomfort from either the stones or heat beneath this feet. Zoe tucked herself safely behind her mother, but stared with blatant curiosity. The boy had dark hair like his mother’s, and it hung in sweaty strands about his dusty face. His dark eyes gave her a cursory glance before focussing on his mother.

  “Yeah, Mom?” he said dutifully, despite every muscle in his wirey body seeming to be agitating to fling him into a blind sprint at any moment.

  “Why don’t you show this little girl the park?”

  Huh? wondered Zoe. Am I …

  The boy grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off, without so much as the pretence of asking permission or even an introduction. Zoe stumbled after him, confused, but not unwilling. Behind her somewhere, she could hear her mother protesting.

  “I should introduce her properly …,” came her mother’s flustered voice.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, kids sort that out themselves,” laughed the other woman.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  And then they were out of earshot and coming up on the group of kids still laying about under a large tree like a small pride of lions. As soon as they had entered the comforting cool of the tree’s shade, the boy – Caleb – released Zoe’s hand and turned to look at her. Smiling didn’t seem to come naturally to him.

  “What’s your name?” he asked directly, dark eyes staring into Zoe’s.

  The rest of the kids – around five, from what Zoe could tell from her peripherals – looked on in interest.

  “I’m Zoe,” she said shyly. Will they be my friends?

  “You don’t look like a Zoe,” said one of the two girls suspiciously.

  “I …”

  “Are you an AI?” laughed a boy who had come up behind Caleb and was hanging his arm over the other’s boy’s shoulder.

  Ah, thought Zoe numbly, feeling the horrible burn of tears in her eyes and a tormented twist in her lips. I’m an idiot. Of course they …

  Crack!

  The boy hanging off Caleb was on his backside in the dust, eyes watering, rubbing his jaw, and looking up in surprise at his friend. Caleb looked down at him coldly before turning back to face Zoe and taking her hand again.

  “C’mon,” he said, pulling her out from beneath the tree and off towards a smaller one atop a grassy crest in the gentle hill. “They’re idiots sometimes. They’ll be nice next time. I’ll make them say sorry.”

  Zoe collapsed on the grass as Caleb pulled her back into another island of shade, but he went straight from pulling her around to clambering up the trunk of the tree like a monkey. Zoe watched him in awe, unable to believe the human body could even do something like that.

  “Th-thank you!” she belatedly burst out, finally remembering her manners. “I …”

  Caleb found a large branch sprouting from the trunk at a more-or-less horizontal orientation, and walked out on it confidently. He looked down at her. Zoe didn’t really have any sense for what different ages looked like physically, but Caleb was definitely older than her.

  “It’s okay,” he shrugged, before promptly falling off the branch backwards, only to catch himself using his legs and hang upside down like a bat, his head now wrong way up, but level with Zoe’s.

  For her part, Zoe nearly jumped out of her skin at his acrobatics, but he fell and corrected so quickly that no sound escaped her. Her little heart, however, had yet to recover from its sudden fright.

  Caleb held out his hand, having procured something at some point in his climb. Zoe wrapped her hands around the cool, gentle, shape of a mango, which looked giant in her tiny hands.

  “These are really good when it’s hot out,” Caleb said in his usual factual way. He swung gently to and fro, still upside down, as if he had decided this was how he would live his life.

  "These are really good when it's hot out."

  AI-rendering of original characters and narrative by T. Sharp

  “Y-You’re bleeding!” exclaimed Zoe, seeing the scratches on the back of his knees, where he had caught himself on the rough bark of the branch like a trapeze artist.

  He just looked at her as if she were strange.

  “So?” he asked, looking baffled. He laughed then. “It was worth it to see the look on your face.” He stopped laughing almost as quickly as he had started, and squinted at her.

  Is he going to ask me if I …

  “You know … you’re kinda pretty now I look close.” Yet again, he was dead serious, brow furrowed, as if he was reading a textbook.

  “Heh?” she inhaled with surprise. She was too young to feel awkward because a boy had called her pretty, but very much old enough to be surprised and made shy by hearing something she had only ever heard from her parents before.

  Caleb shrugged and then suddenly released his hold on the tree and was standing right way up in front of her again. He threw himself down in a way that Zoe was too afraid to copy, and so she sat demurely on the grass, not too far, not too near the strange boy. She stared at the mango for a long time, and was just building up the courage to bite into it when Caleb snatched it back off her with a little sigh.

  “You gotta peel it first,” he laughed, and promptly drove his finger into the fruit and began to messily tear the skin off.

  Zoe watched in a horrified fascination, as if watching the dissection of a creature. It was the sort of mess she would never have dreamed of making. All the while, Caleb stared off into the distance, slowly making his violent way around the whole mango before depositing the dripping mess back into Zoe’s unwilling hands. And yet, when she bit into it, the explosion of cool, tangy, fruitiness in her mouth made her eyes widen and she let out a happy little sound. Even the awful sensation of the juices running down her hands and forearms before dripping onto her clothes and knees couldn’t overshadow the taste.

  “This is delicious,” she declared, her eyes shining.

  “It’s pretty good,” Caleb agreed. Then he frowned. “I’ve never seen her before,” he murmured to himself, his eyes locked on something that Zoe had yet to see.

  She followed his gaze out of curiosity, still eating happily at the mango, the thought of how she would clean herself later yet to occur to her. And then she saw who Caleb had seen. A woman, kneeling down in front of the kids that were still playing beneath the larger tree. Her hair was blonde, although much more than that was hard to tell from this distance. But she was wearing a summery, red dress, which seemed at odds with the generally paler or more earthy tones of the townsfolks’ clothes. Zoe had seen lots of brown, white, blue and green, but no black or red.

  “She must be visiting,” Zoe ventured.

  “Nah,” Caleb said in his blunt way. “Dad says watch out for strangers ‘cos we’re a freight town. Ships drop cargo, pick it up, and keep going. We don’t get visitors. Look.” He gestured with his chin in what Zoe thought was a horrendously rude way to point to an adult.

  As she watched, the woman looked directly up at them as one of the children pointed their way. Zoe’s breath caught in her throat, although at what, she couldn’t tell. Why was she suddenly so afraid? She had no reason to be. But then why was she being pointed at like that? The mango fell from her fingers as she remained unable to look away from the woman. And the woman didn’t move … she just watched for a long time, before slowly turning and moving back toward the marketplace.

  “Do you know her?” asked Caleb, his voice low.

  Zoe shook her head, unable to shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Words wouldn’t come to her.

  “I don’t know her,” Zoe whispered. But I felt something like her once … when those men were waiting for Mummy and me at home … she feels like she’s … hunting.