“What’s it like?” the girl suddenly asked. “The Earth, I mean? We’ve studied it in school but I’ve never met anyone who has actually been there... or Is from there.”

“Exciting and loud,” Tory said not knowing what the girl really wanted to know, “Everything is so open. Not like out here. You can just go outside and breathe. Everything is so old too. Cities are all hundreds and thousands of years old, with so much to discover. There’s great big oceans of blue water, still green forests in some places still. It pretty hot most of the time, at least where I lived.

“Where was that?”

“New Angeles,” Tory said. “A huge city of millions of people. A lot of it was rebuilt when the big floods came, but the old places are still there, for those who want to look. It’s amazing!”

She talked for a while, describing her former life to the wide-eyed girl.

“It sounds even more magical than we’ve been told,” Ekaterina replied. “But weren’t the other Eather’s cruel and mean and treat each other badly?”

“Not most of them,” Tory told her. “Although there are bad people, most of those kinds are found and put into jail.”

She glanced around her room. Um, yeah.

“On Earth, no one locks someone in a room even though they never did anything bad,” she told Ekaterina. “I haven’t done anything bad, but I have been locked in here just because I’m not like one of you.”

That got the girl to return a guilty look.

“I am sure you won’t be kept here for long,” she argued. “And it’s probably safer, too. Some don’t like people from Earth and say bad things about them. Even Yvengie-”

“He is a bully,” Tory told her. “He came after me and deserved what he got.”

“Oh, yes,” Ekaterina agreed, nodding her head vigorously. “No one likes Yvengie. We were all so happy that you knocked him down. Don’t think me and the others are mad at you.”

“Thanks,” Tory replied. “But I wish I was home. And I can’t get there locked in here.”

“It’s not so bad here, in my home” Ekaterina offered cheerily. “Once you learn how to live here.”

“It’s home to you, you see the beauty I guess. You don’t know anything else,” Tory insisted. “My home is Earth.”

“Then why did you come to Mars?” Ekaterina wanted to know.

Tory raised her eyebrow as if the answer was obvious. She repeated the same story she’d given Gurminder and Valentine, but found she received a more sympathetic response from Ekaterina.

“Is that why you snuck onto the Indi’s transport?” the girl realized. “You were trying to get home then?”

Tory nodded and looked at the floor. A lump formed in her throat as she thought about her situation but she swallowed it down. She turned back to the girl.

“I have to get out of here,” she insisted.

“You’re so desperate to leave?” Ekaterina asked, “You haven’t even given this place a chance. You are very strong, much stronger than even Yvengi, that pig. When you grow up, you could be a ruler here! Better than even Great Mina!”

The girl’s sudden unabashed admiration was surprising to Tory. Sure, she was strong, but her, running this place, that was just absurd...

“I can’t survive here,” Tory said, then pulled out her injector “If I kept fighting with Yvengi I would have died without this. My lungs can’t get enough oxygen, because there isn’t enough in the air here, and it messes them up. It’s horrible. I’m not supposed to be here and everyone knows it. The whole planet knows it! Mars wants me to go home!”

Someone pounded on the door.

“I…,” Ekaterina began, then started to get up “I have to go now.”

“You have to do something to help me,” Tory pleaded as the door opened, grabbed and held onto her hand before the girl pulled away on sight of the hulking Martian guard who motioned her to come.

Ekaterina gave one sad glance in Tory’s direction then withdrew, closing the door softly behind her. As her footsteps faded, so did Tory’s only hope.