The darkness was thick and suffocating, like a heavy blanket had been thrown on the world. He had to get over the wall, had to get across the border before the guards caught them. Behind him he could hear the whimper of his fellow refugees as they sought to hush the little ones before they attracted attention to themselves.

A shape to his right resolved into the comforting presence of his sister, Mira. She had an anxious look on her face as she glanced back over her shoulder with a twitch of her whiskers and a worried flick of her ear.

“This is going to take all night.” She whispered.

“Then it will take all night.” He responded calmly.

“We need to find a way to speed this up, or we’ll get caught.” She insisted.

“If you have any ideas, then I’m all ears.” He answered dryly. “We aren’t going to abandon our people to…them.”

Mira shuddered. “Of course not, but where do we go? This may be the end of the camps, but they own the whole planet brother. How will we escape that?”

“The mountains.” He responded simply. “They are very remote and rugged, surely too much trouble for their reptilian blood. They might send some of their magic golems out after us, but we’ve learned how to avoid those. I don’t see a long search for a handful of escaped slaves.”

Mira shivered, her hand shooting to her throat as if to make sure the iron collar was truly gone, which it was. That had been his first step as soon as they gathered in the toolshed of their compound. He’d known that, somehow, their overlords had the ability to track them through those horrid collars and if they had any chance at all they had to go. A few moments with some of the chisels and cutters available had snipped right through the strong silvery metal that held their bonds shut.

“We should start immediately.” He rumbled quietly. “The sooner we start, the more likely we are to succeed.”

“What will we do in the day? It’s still a four or five day trek to the foothills of the mountains.” Mira asked.

“We will solve that when it comes time. We must solve the problems in front of our noses first, and move on.” He said as comfortingly as he could.

Mira faded away back into the night in the direction of the group. He looked one more time at the tall stone fence with the metal barbs on top that made up the last barrier between him and freedom. It was ten feet high with curled wire on top that could slice flesh from bone as quick as a fisherman gutting his catch. The thick bricks were set tightly against one another and held together with mortar; the thick streams of mortar would provide plenty of hand-holds for his bare feet and hands. His worry was about the wire; he could lose a lot of people before they got over that.

He cast about for anything that could render the wire ineffective; the land about him was hilly, rocky, and covered in short scrub bushes. All the other plant life around the wall had been destroyed by the invader’s light arrows and clouds of noxious smoke. The scrub here had turned to sickly yellow, indicating it had been hit with the poisonous fog, but the tough little plant had struggled to survive. The invaders, not seeing any special reason to make an effort to remove it as it stood barely three feet off the ground and was so thin as to provide no cover, left it alone after the initial attempt. He wondered.

Gathering a handful of the younger males as quick as lightning, he set them to work weaving the scrub into mats as thick as they could in thirty minutes. Then they scrambled together to the top of the walls to toss the mats over the wire. He tested their efforts himself; easing over one patch until he discovered the wire couldn’t cut him through the mats. They’’d done it!

With a quiet call to the others, he straddled the wall, reaching down with a hand to start pulling others up to the top of the wall and easing them down the other side. First up was a group of males who dropped easily to the other side and stationed themselves to receive the precious bundles of food and infants that were passed over the top. Next they passed the children that they’d managed to rescue—too few, too few could be found in the camp from the invader’s efforts to keep order. Only a handful had remained in the crèche building they’d raided in the dark. Each precious gift was silent as they looked hopefully to the dark smudges ahead in the lightening sky. At last the women and the final few males that had aided the others crossed.

Once the last of their people had crossed the wall, he tore the mats down from the wires and bade some of the males to carry them.

“We do not want the enemy to learn of how we crossed their wall.” He explained. “Perhaps in the future more of our people can use the same paths we did to escape.””

Everyone nodded quickly as the sky started to lighten. Despite the grueling march in the dark they’d just suffered, everyone began to hurry along to find some shelter before the sun raised her head above the edges of the world.

He didn’t call a halt until the Bright Lady stood nearly above the mountains ahead of them. In her radiance, they came across the dark line of a canyon that had been cut into the hard rock of the land in such a way that the walls were leaning close together at the top but broadened below in a shallow cave with a sandy beach for a floor.

“This place is where we shall sleep for the night.” He told them quietly. “Stay as far from the light of the Lady as possible, for though she will warm us from the chill of the Moon Brother, her efforts will aid the enemy in finding us.”

Everyone glanced longingly at the long strip of sunlight that lay next to the sparkling river, looking warm and inviting, but followed his advice and moved further into the shelter of the cave, looking for a comfortable place to rest. The hard day of labor before their night escapade had utterly exhausted them, and they fell asleep before the sun had risen any further into the sky.

He stayed awake, keeping watch, as his people slept. He struggled against the siren call of sleep, pinching his arm regularly to tapping the back of his head when that started to fail. In desperation he began pulling his own tail, the pain washing away the tiredness.

He’d been up for about six hours when a figure stirred. Out from the shadows nearest the wall his sister strode carefully around the sleeping bodies of their people, coming to sit next to him.

“Brother, you must rest. It’s my turn to take the watch.” She said in her sweet voice.

“You need the sleep, too.” He told her stubbornly. “You’ve worked twice as hard as any—“

“And you’ve worked twice as hard as me.” She retorted gently but firmly. “You cannot carry the burden of us all the whole time, it would crush you. Take my advice and get some sleep; you will need it when you lead us again tonight.”

“You are right, sister.” He said wearily. “I just worry what things may go wrong tonight. I’ve already heard the scream of the lizard-folk’s great metal birds as they hunt us on the plains. I fear their wrath will be terrible if they catch us in the open tomorrow.”

“You cannot worry about that now.” Mira said firmly. “You’ve done our father and mother proud by your actions. We aren’t the son and daughter of a great chief, but I think we’d have made ours proud to have called us tribe.”

He looked at her with a disbelieving smile. “You think so?” He asked, remembering the stern old chief of their old tribe. His black spots had faded to silver and his white fur had become more gray then white, but his voice had been firm and his will iron when they’’d last saw him and his children being taken away by the invaders when they’d conquered their people.

“I know so.” Mira reached over and squeezed his hand between her smaller ones. “We will see them again one day, and he will lead us to victory over the invaders, but right now you must lead us to safety and help us overcome our hardships so we are ready.”

“None of which,” she added with an admonishing swish of her long, fluffy tail, “will happen if you fall over dead tonight from lack of sleep. Go and get some rest and let me take over your watch.”

“Yes, I will rest.” He said with a laugh. “Call me if anything seems out of the ordinary.”

“I will.” She promised.

He made his way carefully to the back of the cave, picking a path so as not to wake anybody. When he came to an open patch of sand, he flopped down and instantly drifted into a dreamless sleep.


When he next woke, the light along the river had faded to almost nothing and there was a general murmur as people milled about him. Jumping to his feet he glanced around for his sister and found her talking to one of the young women holding an infant in one arm while she held the paw of a little girl straining to go play with the others by the water’s edge.

“How did the day pass, Mira?” He asked as he approached. The other woman looked anxious a moment before bowing respectfully and hurrying away towards the river.

“Quiet.” Mira said when the others were out of earshot. “Several screaming birds came by, but none stopped and they went away as the heat of the day began to wane.””

“We will wait for full dark again before we move.” He decided. “After that, we will see what the Moon Brother brings for us.””

For the next three days they existed like that, moving as rapidly as they dared at night and finding a good hiding place for the day. Around them the dry, dusty landscape began to change to rolling, rocky hills covered with small trees and bushes. The days were colder and the nights were almost intolerable. The thick scrub mats they’d made back at the walls were put to use as blankets for the children. The adults cuddled close to conserve heat, the outermost ring rotating to the inside of the circle at the turn of the watch.

Everyone began to steadily relax the closer they got to their goal. No one had seen sign of the screaming metal birds since the fourth day of their flight, and people began to believe that they had truly escaped. There was even talk of stopping and finding a place to prepare for winter.

Mira came to him on the night of their ninth day of flight to tell him of the refugee’s desire to stop their flight and start to prepare for the cold winter they expected.

“I would love to stop.” He said after a long silence. He looked at the eyes of each person that stood behind his sister, gauging their determination and will. “I would love to stop, but my heart is against it just yet. We are not far enough yet from the enemies and their sky-pets to be safe. I doubt we ever will be truly safe, but this country is far too open to their gaze to consider stopping. When we get higher, we will find caves, valleys, places that are difficult or impossible to see from the eyes of the bird. There we can at last live in safety, without worry that our children will be taken from us, our wives stolen, our brothers killed in retribution. We must continue.””

No one said anything else, but gripped their newly-made spears and walking staffs and children, slinging their loads and water skins across their back and waited for him to step off as the start of their evening walk.

On the fifteenth day, they were struggling up the side of a mountain when they came across a narrow mouth, almost a crack really, on the face closest to the falling sun. Walking inside they discovered that the crack extended far beyond its initial impression.

The entrance consisted of a narrow, winding passage that led them along walls decorated with hundreds of mushrooms, moss, and even berry bushes in some of the more well-lit areas. They could only pass along in single-file, and the twists and turns made it very suitable for defense, in his mind. He wondered if Mira thought the same as he led his people further along.

Abruptly the walls were gone and they stood blinking in the bright light of the Lady’s favor. When his eyes fully adjusted he gasped at the magnificence that lay before him. In a space about a mile long by half a mile wide, there grew a small forest of trees, meadows, blackberry patches, snowberry patches, and clover. Waterfalls cascading down the distant walls flowed into babbling brooks, streams or creeks that flowed into a single river that journeyed southward into another cave mouth and disappeared. Birds twittered and sang glad songs that seemed to welcome the people while deer bounded away from them in surprise and caution. Splashes and glimpses of silver leaping into the sky betrayed the trout and other fish that swam the waters of this paradise.

“This is our home.” He announced in a strangled whisper. “This is…Hope.”