“We go?” Izza asks me, secretive and whispering, dark, deep eyes dead serious. We are up late, in the middle of the night when everyone else in our slave quarters is sleeping. The air is dark and cool and just slightly moist. It would be comfortable, if it wasn’t for the emptiness in my stomach, the way my muscles ache and strain, the way my joints grate. We are making sure to be careful, careful, so that no-one can hear us.

“I’m ready if you are. Are you?” There is affection in my hushed voice. Affection for my deepest friend. Though, I guess all the slaves here are my deepest friends. It’s just that Izza understands me in a desperate way, a way that no-one else does.

“Yeah,” she answers, “I am.”

“You got the wires?”

“Yes, I do. You have the batteries?” She shows me the coiled wires that she gets out from a fold in her skirt. The wires are copper-coloured, though it's hard to see colour here. They are malleable, and can be bent into any shape. They keep the shape they have been bent into, unless enough force is applied to bend them into something different. We got them from the junk pile, they were thrown out because they conduct too much, and aren't useful for the purpose they are meant to serve. But this means that they serve our purpose well.

“I do.” I get out the batteries from a fold in my clothes. She hands me the wires, and I hide them both together. Before putting them in my pocket, though, I twist one end of each of the wires around the nodes of the battery. Our weapon is ready. A weapon we forged out of nothing but carefully-stolen parts from the trash and our own ingenuity. The more important weapon, though, will be our acting skills.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asks me, voice tinged with worry.

"I am. I will. Do you want to do this?" Part of me wants to bring her along. Part of me doesn't. We will both die in the end. Even if we escape, even if we get to the surface, the detonators of our collars will be set off and we will die, once roll call happens in the morning and they see that we aren't there. But still, it's going to be worth it. We are going somewhere beautiful.

"Of course I want to go," Izza insists. "I want to see the moon. Anything is worth getting to see the moon. I've heard the stories."

"I heard the stories as well. I'm sure it will be worth it."

She smiles at me. I smile back at her. She kisses my hand. And the kiss is soft and warm. It's both fantastical and grounding at the same time. Izza is my dearest friend, she is like a sister to me, and I am so, so incredibly glad that I have her. And I'm so incredibly glad that I'm getting to go on this mission with her, even if this mission will mean both of our deaths. I want to show her the moon.

We start arguing, a false, choreographed argument that we thought about and coordinated months in advance.

"You are so lazy!" she yells at me. "You never do any of the work after our assigned tasks!"

"Maybe I'm tired! You're no better than the enforcers, who force us to do all this stuff!”

We make our way to the dimly-lit entrance of the slave quarters, past the double doors that lead to a hallway. On either side of the door at the end of the hallway, there is a guard. They are sitting on plush chairs, idly looking through the Galawork. They both look up at us, as we burst into the room. I see this from the corner of my eye.

“We’re all tired!” Izza bellows. “But we all share our work! Everyone except you!”

“I don’t owe you guys anything!”

We keep fighting, pretending to get increasingly agitated at each other, coming up with more and more ridiculous things to accuse each other with. The whole while, we keep drawing more and more of the guards’ attention. Not only are we loud, but we are reaching soap opera levels of dramaticness. That’s good though. We need to distract them.

“I have had enough of you!” I scream at Izza. I get out the battery and the wires from my clothes, and start uncoiling the wires, bending them straight.

“Oh, what are you gonna do!” Izza demands. “Are you gonna kill me? You don’t have the guts!”

“Yeah? You want a bet?” I finish uncoiling the wires and aim them at Izza. But, at the last moment, I swivel around super fast and dig the ends of the wires into the stomach of the guard to my left. He screams in pain while convulsing to his death. Before the second guard has time to even process what has happened, I electrocute him too.

“Good job.” Izza smiles at me, solemn and mischievous. We show our pinkies to the camera in the corner.

We drag the dead bodies of the guards with us, using their eyes to unlock all the doors and force fields. It’s tiring, dragging two fully-grown, well-fed men up the tunnels that lead to the surface. But we manage it. It’s nerve-racking, going down these halls that we have never been down before. We don’t know if we’ll reach another set of guards. If we reach another set of guards, we are screwed.

But thankfully, we do not reach any more guards, and emerge outside, into the cool night air.

“We made it!” Izza whisper-shouts. The sheer jubilation on her face is glorious. It is worth anything and everything.

“We did,” I reply back to her, my voice soft and soaring like the clouds of stories.

“So, I guess we should look up now.”

“We should.”

“Do you want to do it on the count of three? Both at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. One. Two. Three!” There is so much pure, concentrated excitement pooling in her words. We look up.

The moon is nothing at all like it’s described in the stories. Instead of being a silver disk of pure light, calm and serene, still and shining within the black darkness of the night, it is a bruised and bleeding thing.

There are snaking lines all over the marred surface of the moon. Some are thick, some are as thin as hairs, and many overlap and connect to each other like fractalled hydra. There are all sorts of colours, black and gray and copper. And tired, gray lines also scar the surface of the moon, giant cracks and chasms everywhere. There are splotchy bruises of all sorts of colours all over each and every part of the moon, different colours melding and mixing with each other, smaller splotches nestled within bigger splotches.

The moon is a sick thing. The moon is a dying thing. The moon is not at all what the stories told us it would be like, not at all brave and unconquerable. The moon has fallen to the powerful of this world. We have fallen to the powerful of this world. There is nothing which can save us.

I look at Izza, and the defeated horror in her eyes mirrors my own. The devastation I see in her cuts me deep into the soft core of my very soul, and yet I have no blood left to bleed. We died for nothing.

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