grin turned mischievous, “You should be used to me beating you by now, anyway.” He rolled his eyes at her.
“I won the first event,” he reminded her.
Liam laughed quietly as he began to walk away. Esther walked between her parents, holding their hands and chattering like a magpie about hoverboarding.
Nightmares
Liam was standing in a field. The sun was warm above him and flowers dotted the grass around him. It was incredibly beautiful and peaceful. He spotted a house in the distance and began to walk towards it. As he drew closer he realized it was his own house. The door opened and Esther ran out onto the porch, dressed in a pink dress like the one she wore in her holographic princess game. Clara stepped out behind her. They spotted Liam and waved, smiling. As he lifted his hand to wave back he stumbled over something in the grass. He looked down with idle curiosity, then stumbled back in horror.
A man’s body lay in the grass, charred beyond recognition. He looked up again and the peaceful meadow was transformed. The grass was blackened with flame, the air thick with smoke. Instead of flowers, more corpses were scattered over the grass, charred and blackened. Liam heard a groan and whirled toward the sound. There, among the human corpses, lay Marek, unburned, but with a gash in his chest. He looked up at Liam, his eyes glazed with pain,
“The Hok-Kar,” he whispered and then the last breath of life went out of him. In the grass next to him lay Elina, her garments stained with her own blood, dead. And beside her lay a tiny baby with pale blue skin and delicate, butterfly-like wings, seemingly unwounded but wailing in fear, though Liam had not heard the wailing a moment before. He looked toward his house and there Clara and Esther stood still waving at him and beaming as though they couldn’t see the carnage around them. Liam heard the scream of a bomber overhead. He looked up and saw it directly over his house. He tried to yell a warning, but his wife and daughter just continued waving happily. Something small dropped from the aircraft and hit the roof of the house. Liam watched in horror as the house exploded in a ball of flame.
“NO!” Liam awoke, jolting up to a sitting position in bed with a strangled yell. His shout woke Clara, who bolted up next to him.
“Lights on,” she ordered. The lights came on to reveal the safe, familiar scene of their sleeping quarters on Amity. Liam realized he was shaking, his forehead soaked in sweat.
Clara turned to him, her eyes gentle as she reached up a hand to stroke his sweat-soaked hair, as she might have done to Esther, “It was a really bad one, wasn’t it?” Clara had woken with Liam and comforted him many nights, and on just as many he had held her as she cried and shook from the things she had seen in her dreams. Nightmares were common to almost everyone on the Amity. They’d all seen horrible things back home on Earth, even if it was just on the news. Even little Esther suffered from bad dreams sometimes. She would wake screaming, or silent and shaking, and creep to her parent’s room and crawl into bed with them.
Liam nodded as his heart rate began to slow. He wrapped his arms around his wife and felt her's wrap around him in response. He held her for a few minutes, eyes closed, listening to the sound of her breathing, then he let go of her and stood up.
“I’ll be right back,” he said softly. He padded barefoot into the living room area of their quarters and then into the bathroom area, where he splashed water on his face. He left the bathroom and went quietly into Esther’s room. The little girl slept peacefully, hugging a little stuffed unicorn to her chest, lit faintly by the holo-projected stars on the ceiling, an image of the Andromeda constellation. Liam stood in the doorway for a moment, then padded back towards his own room. He had just needed to see her, safe and sound in her bed where she belonged.
By the time he slipped into bed again, Clara was almost asleep, but she moved closer to him, laying her head against his chest. Liam wrapped his arms once more around his wife, listening to her breathing deepen into sleep.
The nightmares were a reminder of why they were on the Amity, of what their mission was. A reminder also of those left behind on Earth who suffered through a nightmare there was no waking from every day. Those people only made the mission more important. The crew of the Amity couldn’t help them, but they could learn from the suffering humankind had inflicted on itself. Esther, and the other precious children the ship carried, deserved a peaceful home, not a world of war and death. A home where generations could live in peace. That home was out there somewhere, and the Amity would find it.
But just before he dropped back to sleep, the image of Marek’s pain-filled face popped unbidden into Liam’s head, and he seemed to hear the Lemarian’s ragged whisper, “The Hok-Kar…”
Liam pushed the thought away. There was no reason to believe that the Amity would ever even encounter the Hok-Kar.
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Liam awoke earlier than usual the next morning. He slipped out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Clara up. As he sat alone at a table in the cafeteria, a cup of coffee in his hand, he found his mind drifting back to his life before the war.
He had been nineteen when he first met Clara. At the time he was attending Asteria University, an institution focused solely on preparing students for space related jobs, whether building space ships or traveling on them. The finest school of its kind in Britain, it was a team of students and professors from Asteria who would later create a ship known as the S. S. Amity.
Liam was beginning his second year at Asteria, brimming with hope and excitement to be working toward his dream of traveling to the stars. Clara, at seventeen years old, was just beginning as a student at another nearby university, working towards a degree in education.
One night Liam had been sitting at a small table in a coffee shop packed with university students. He was alone that night; all of his friends were off doing other things.
“Do you mind if I sit here? All of the tables are taken.” Liam looked up at the voice. The girl standing in front of him seemed barely old enough to be a university student. She held a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and her green eyes were warm and friendly in a face framed by black curls.
Liam nodded, “Sure, I don’t mind.” The girl grinned and perched on the chair across the table from him.
“I’m Clara, Clara James.”
Liam held out his hand to shake, “Liam Hawthorn, pleasure to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, Liam.” Clara was friendly and easy to talk to and before long the two had discovered that they shared an interest in old science fiction TV shows, movies, and books. When they had finished their coffee, Liam offered to walk her back to her campus. As they walked they looked at the stars. Before saying goodnight they exchanged phone numbers, and soon they were dating.
They were married two years later. By that time there were stories on the news of war beginning in other countries, but it all seemed far off. The happy young couple never dreamed it would affect them.
Liam vividly remembered the day Esther was born. He had been twenty-two. Just a few weeks earlier he had graduated from Asteria University, magna cum laude, near the top of his class, and thought it the proudest moment of his life. Holding that tiny baby girl in his arms he had a new proudest moment. They named her for the stars, and still the war seemed far off.
Looking back on it, the war had been building up for a long time, but for
