A Wider Sky Ch 01

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To My Dear Readers,

I have been working on a few different projects over the years taking a break from Tabor and Shy. While this book has already been draft-published, I am posting solely to re-work it based on readers experience and I would love your feedback. I am excited about this foray of one of three books (two stories) I've been working on in a new genre for me: New Adult. BEYOND ECLIPSE has a angst-driven build, hopefully a super hot one, that you will enjoy about a girl and an alien boy. Remember the film "Heathers" and the lunchtime poll: aliens are secretly planning to destroy the world in three days, what do you do? And with that I begin this new adventure with you.

Thank you for reading.

Cheers and Happy Reading,

~Talyis.

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A WIDER SKY: Beyond Eclipse Series

by Talyis Bagley Ellison

Copyright first edition 2013, 2015

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THE PROLOGUE OF MEN

....Before Eclipse

"Your silence will not keep you safe." --Audra Lorde, 1984 A.D.

"The future is already here. It just isn't very evenly distributed." --William Gibson, 1993, A.D.

A society is only as healthy as its ideas are humane." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1973 A.D.

Eclipse

.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

Beyond Eclipse...

"You never know what your place is in the world until you are on the precipice of the past and the future and the present melts away like ice under the scalding sun." --Kiowa Walker, Beyond Eclipse

Chapter 1

Only a few cars are left in the world and this one felt like my forehead was grinding against a pumice stone. If it honked one more time I was going to....

I exhaled, closing my eyes to gather my nerves. The horn was benign compared to what I was really faced and that was death.

In this new world this car -- the sole car I've ever know -- continued to obnoxiously blast, only served to remind me why so few remained. Cars gobbled up so much natural resource just to power them and only certain people in the world had cars. Those people were the governors of the colonies. They would kind of be like presidents if we could only vote for them but they were put into power by the Y'vroi. We survivors have become like tiny landlocked countries of little Puerto Ricos. We had no power with a majority-appointed leader in charge of us all.

The governor's main responsibility was to keep us separate from Them and to report to Them if any of us had gotten any stupid ideas of uprising. In turn, the governors were allowed to plan for us and give us any semblance of the former world, which was more like what it might have been in the fourteenth century.

Our colony governor, Pion, is a skinny scraggly middle-aged guy who really didn't have much importance in the former world - before Eclipse. Maybe he was an accountant or a copy editor; and maybe that is why They chose him to be the governor. He could lead pacifistic cows to pasture.

Pion always seemed really nervous. His knuckles were probably blanched as he drove down the vacant, litter ridden streets of our colony. When curfew wasn't in effect, people milled around pushing carts, like homeless people in New York City, not clean and a bit disheveled at all times. Our colony also was a ramshackle of old buildings and crumbling infrastructure. We're only allowed electricity for a short period of three hours everyday which didn't allow for much time for surfing the internet, watching TV or even taking a hot shower -- it wasn't like those things even existed in the typical household. We lived with practically nothing for entertainment, just our stories of life before and hopes for the future. But even those simplicities where not enough to warm a freezing soul in destitution. Many times, They would not even provide basic electricity to us.

In the cold dark of our colony, I imagine Them saying to each other once in a while, "Oh yeah, humans, they live here too? Actually, this was their home and I'm sorry I forgot to flip the switch to lights up the colonies today. Oh yeah, I forgot to turn the grid on yesterday too. Oh well, the humans will be fine."

Yet, we aren't. We have to work and pay for our resources, and we are barely able to live let alone develop anything for ourselves to make our lives better -- that would only bring us to our knees before Them for execution.

"This is a big deal. Y'vroi allowing you to enter their realm, let alone go to one of their colleges. We don't even have colleges. You have to do a good job, and whatever you do, don't let them think you are going to lead a revolt. Please don't." Pion's voice shook as much as the old creaky Oldsmobile rattled down on our uneven streets.

I didn't respond. I was too busy watching my life whip past me through the dusty brown window as I silently said goodbye.

"I have seen what happens to us when we tried to fight back. There is no winning. Ok?" He quivered and a shiver ran down my back.

"Yes, sir," I whispered. We were reaching the last block of the colony to the enclosing barbed wire gates manned by humans with machine guns.

I had no interest in revolting. My only interest was to just go to school --and try to survive. I remember the stories my mom told me about integration growing up. I know she meant to tell me these before Eclipse history stories as a way to build courage. However, I remember the stories about the children being hunted down after school, tortured and hung from trees, too, just because they went to a white school.

"You will come home during their holiday season --Festivities."

The gates swung open to a vast desert land that looked like a sea of rusty brown marble. I perked up seeing beyond the gates for the first time in my life. "Festivities? You mean Christmas?"

"No," Pion's grip tightened around the steering wheel. "The Festivities is their celebration week during the anniversary of Eclipse." He glanced over at me, seeing my perplexed knitted eyebrows and his jaw tightened. "The day of the human race lost dominion of the Earth."

"Oh." I slumped deeper in my seat. That didn't sound good at all. My imagination ran wild already with images of humans being hunted and vaporized by their engineered weapons. Bonfires, while They, the Y'vori, dressed up like humans mocking our existence and our current plight.

"We are almost at the border." He sighed and glanced over at me again as if it were going to be the last time he would see me.

I had only met our governor a few days before graduation. I had excelled in high school and was allowed to complete A Levels. Which was very rare because most humans were not allowed to take A levels instead of going straight to work assignment training. I finished my A Levels without any pomp or circumstance, literally it was not allowed, and then entered my required work assignment training program.

Even if you were smart and completed A Levels, humans did not go to university or extended study programs. It was just the end of the road for a human's cultivation of knowledge. Regardless of passing our exams, we are still required to live out the rest of our lives doing our assigned work path which wasn't anything that would require an A Level intelligence. I was to be a seamstress for the colony like my mother and when I had finished my training program I was introduced to Pion.

Apparently I had excelled on a special test that the Y'vroi had required all humans to take in their final Levels year. It was the first time a human had passed the test twice, and they wanted me to enter their realm. We were unsure why. We all knew there had to be an ulterior motive. Perhaps, I was too smart and I would lead a revolution and the Y'vori were really planning on extinguishing me in the guise of an injunctive invitation to enter their realm. But who are we to question anything that They mandate. If They wanted me to enter their realm, that meant I was to be there prompt and obedient.

My mom had been three steps ahead and demanded, I repeat, bravely demanded, that They disclose why they really wanted me to enter the realm. I really had to admire my mother. Through Pion's messages, They told her that they want to see how far I could excel, if I could keep up with my alien peers. They wanted to study how the new world generation of aliens and humans would interact. It was as if they read my mother's mind or knew she had a passion for Civil Rights History and just told her what would sound acceptable to her for allowing her daughter to enter enemy territory.

She believed they were just humoring her, and they really planned on killing me, until we started getting packets of information and forms that we had to promptly and obediently turn in. They wanted everything from a description of everything my mother and father did before Eclipse, to what my interests were, what kind of baby I was: a crying type, or a quiet type. They had me retake the test, at the governor's office and I suspected it was the first time that I was in the same building as one of Them, but I couldn't see them behind a two way glass window.

Most of us have never seen what an alien actually looked like, and the stories of their takeover always made me paint them as scary beings that killed my father and my mother's family and friends.

"What do they look like?" I nervously asked Pion.

"Like humans, but they are far from human." Pion seemed to tremble as if recalling what they looked like in his memory.

I gathered rather quickly from our first meeting that he did not like to deal with the Y'vori. Occupational Hazard, I suppose.

"We are here," Pion announced with relief

I sat up in the chair and realized that he had driven me to a stark landscape of nothingness. It was bleak, not like a desert or a plain. It was flat rock or stone-shelled ground, smooth and glassy-looking. For as far as the eye could see, I saw nothing, just the grey-blue dusty horizon in all directions.

"This is where they leveled the area, nothing will ever grow here again. You will need to walk that way--straight--until you get to the border. This is as far as I am allowed to go."

Allowed to go? I arched an eyebrow, this whole time the colony assumed that the governors often met in Their realm, sat cozy with Them for these meetings and state dinners, apparently not. We humans were kept on a very short leash with a strong, taut choker collar -- all of us.

Pion helped me gather my duffle out of the truck of the falling-apart Oldsmobile, and then he just stood in front of me for awhile, not exchanging words just a sympathetic smile in attempts to hide the worry behind his eyes. It seemed like his smile wanted to convey that he was like the neighbor who playfully punched you on the shoulder, encouraging you to "go get 'em champ," but this wasn't that kind of a journey. This was scary, one small step for man a possible leap backwards or forwards for mankind.

"See you in a few weeks." Pion said and then punched me on the shoulder. I pained a smile and then hopped to readjust the weight the large bag pushed onto my body. I simply started walking towards the abyss--'pointed that way'.

I started walking, having nothing the but sun beating down on me and an endless landscape of the strange marble-like ground. I couldn't help but think about my last hours in the colony and my mother this morning.

Early this morning, my mom was at her breaking point as she fluttered around the small area that was our living room. All I could do was sink deeper into our couch rub my forehead not out of frustration, but more out of nervousness.

My mother was able to completely canvas the entire room in three strides. Our minuscule apartment, which I had lived in my entire life, could be toured in six more strides. My mom mumbled to herself, her hair floated around her like a beautiful halo of chaos as she threw any knick-knacks she could find in our home into my duffle bag.

It was an old army bag, the dark green fatigues no longer recognized and respected in this area of town, let alone the world. It was my father's military bag but I had never seen him carry it himself. I had never met my father and what I had of him remains in a single picture taped on the wall above the bed that I share with my mother. It was a sad photo unlike the other photos my mom had salvaged from the old world that she knew. It was a computer print out, the paper faded with time and it was not as brilliant in color as actual photographs on photo paper. But it was my father and it was all that I had left of the closest man I never met.

My mom always said that it's important to cherish the simple things in life because you never know when you are going to lose everything. She talked about how in her world, it was about getting the latest Apple phone, a cellphone with a touchscreen. The latest tablet or the best gadget that would make the other gadgets, phones and tablets obsolete within the same year. She reveled on how everyone saved everything about their lives on The Cloud. Then she would knit her eyebrows together wishing she had taken simple photographs and often would paw a small photo album she had salvage from my grandmother's home before the evacuations. The photos were the only family I had. These photo albums filled with precious pictures of my mother and her brothers growing up became a visual story illustrated with the reminiscences of my mother's.

During Eclipse, The Cloud and social networks were the first to go down, it was how They were able to find everyone. All the pictures of outings, birthday parties, weddings, picnics were gone with the journals that narrated them in the form of social updates and hashtags. The culture of the world overnight disappeared. The pictures of my mother's pregnancy with me, her baby shower with her friends that she dearly missed vanished like they would soon vanish from her life. She was pregnant with me when the world changed, and They showed their true nature. My father was sent to defend, what we first thought was an isolated attack in Virginia at the Pentagon. They had been among us for decades, and their attack blindsided us because it wasn't just the Pentagon. In 24 hours it was The Hague, British Parliament, Tokyo, Nairobi, even North Korea lite up to reach out to the world for a brief 30 seconds before it went completely dark. And with the darkness that covered the planet, a once vibrant world, my dad's life snuffed out like a candle. He missed my birth, missed teaching me how to ride a bike or teasing me about my first crush.

The world was dark for awhile and then it lit up again but not for everyone, only for Them, the Y'vroi.

"Baby, I am sorry I don't have anymore jackets for you. Will you be warm?"

"Yes, Mom, I'll be fine. You know me, I am always running hot anyways. I will be fine," I answered as I watched her fly around the room more.

"They like to keep it cold, Baby. More so than before," She opened a small trunk that had doubled as a coffee table, dining room table and my desk for homework-time for the last 20 years. "I might.... yes..." she mumbled more to herself and then pulled out the colorful afghan her mother knitted and would only bring out once in awhile when she really missed her family. "Here Sweetheart, this should keep you warm."

"No, Mom, that's yours; it should stay with you. I have the blankets you made me."

I loved my mom's afghans, I already predicted that I would be pulling it tight around me very soon when I missed her. I pulled my legs to my chest and tucked my chin to my knee urging myself to keep it together. This was definitely hard on both of us, finally my mom stopped moving around and sighed.

"You know when I went off to college, I had a whole car packed of brand new things, matching kitchenware, bedclothes, a whole new wardrobe, even stupid college dorm decorations," she sighed again and then rummaged through the chest again and pulled out a tangled web of our Christmas lights. She smiled and her eyes brightened up for the first time the entire week. With a sideways smirk she handed it to me and I couldn't help but smile. "You know this is not important; the material things right?"

"Yes Mom. Really, I'm fine. I don't need to have college decorations or anything," I started pulling out the keepsakes that she had salvaged from her previous world out of the bag. They were important things in today's world but insignificant items that happened to be in her emergency go bag during the evacuation. Stuffed in the pockets of the bag were the items she quickly grabbed in her last few minutes before Eclipse: the refrigerator magnet from her honeymoon in Belize with Dad, Dad's expired Video Store Card with his signature on the back that was in her wallet. The only post-Eclipse item in the bag was an un-open bottle of Australian Shiraz wine from Trader Joe's that my mom found in the first refugee camp on my 5th birthday. She believed it was the last bottle of wine to ever exist in the world and would be worth something someday. I pulled out the last item and glanced at my mom, nervously knotting her fingers together while intently watching what I decided to keep and take. Her college graduation cap with puffy paint writing on the top so her parents could find her in the sea of robes. I reconsidered it and decided I should keep it as a reminder to strive to be the best. I smiled again, proud that I was able to make my mom's eyes light up a second time in the short time I had remaining with her.

My mom wrapped her arms around me pulling me abruptly off of the couch into a tight momma bear hug. "Honey, I am so proud of you. You are going to be great. You are going to be amazing."

"Mom..." my mind was already thinking about how hard it was going to be to leave and go to school. I was going to not only have very hard competitors in my classes, but I was most likely going to be a social pariah, and everyone would do as much as they could to see that I fail.

"I dont want to hear it. You show Them that you are just as important. That we are worth something. That you are worth more than the salt of the planet that they destroyed."

I sucked in air and squeezed my eyes shut. I didn't want to think about the Y'vroi too much, but that is all I could think about. I was terrified of the aliens.

"Remember those stories about the kids that had to be brave and go to those school in the south during integration. You have to be brave, strong like them."

"I know Momma, I will try to be strong and brave. I can blend in. I can hide. They couldn't..."

My mom shook her head. I already knew she didn't like that idea. She didn't want me to expose my talents to Them or to anyone. "It's too risky." I opened my mouth to object but she raised a warning eyebrow. "Hey, maybe there are some progressive kids at this school who are not against us humans. Maybe they will be like the white Freedom Riders.

My mom loved to teach me about the Civil Rights Movement, she was hoping that one day we would all rise up and take back our land and our lives. The difference is that blacks and white were humans, the hatred of that time was truly disgusting and that did not eclipse what we all were experiencing now as a human race.

"Above everything else, Baby, know that you earned this. You are smart. And it's not just your talents that have gotten you this far; it is solely you and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Make me proud. I love you my darling." My mom kissed me over and over again and I tried everything in my being to not cry.

I took a deep breath and pulled my father's duffle bag strap over my shoulder. My body lopped to one side as I rested my weight on my right side. I shook my long curly braids out my ponytail more out of habit to make a physical gesture of a decision made. And that decision was to walk into the den of wolves and try to find a life for myself in a world I have only known. But through my mother's dogged lessons, I also knew of a world that could have been.