Aoba could have responded that he’d rarely been in cars, much less ones going up anything resembling a hill, but all he did was nod and sink his fingers into Ren’s fur a little more. Though his little companion had been of even fewer words than himself since yesterday, the comfort he could take from holding him was not refused.
And then…upwards.
It was so unlike the way that space travel was always portrayed in movies that he’d seen that it almost didn’t feel real. A few shakes. Some quiet ‘tinks’ that didn’t even last long enough for him to think the ship had lost some important piece of itself. No nausea, no vertigo. The windows might have been nothing more than highly advanced television screens, or the whole thing might not have been anything other than a simulation in Rhyme. Clouds gave way to stars on a black field, nothing to give him any point of reference or sense of scale.
Not until Declan turned the ship around, that is.
Aoba had never imagined the Earth could look so small. Simple understanding told him that it wasn’t really, and he only had to puzzle at the strange sphere nestled up against it for a brief while to realize that it was the broken shape of the Traveler. So the City was right there. The place that dwarfed the whole of Midorijima, the singular settlement that was all that remained of Earth’s civilian populace, reduced to nothing at all.
no subject
And then…upwards.
It was so unlike the way that space travel was always portrayed in movies that he’d seen that it almost didn’t feel real. A few shakes. Some quiet ‘tinks’ that didn’t even last long enough for him to think the ship had lost some important piece of itself. No nausea, no vertigo. The windows might have been nothing more than highly advanced television screens, or the whole thing might not have been anything other than a simulation in Rhyme. Clouds gave way to stars on a black field, nothing to give him any point of reference or sense of scale.
Not until Declan turned the ship around, that is.
Aoba had never imagined the Earth could look so small. Simple understanding told him that it wasn’t really, and he only had to puzzle at the strange sphere nestled up against it for a brief while to realize that it was the broken shape of the Traveler. So the City was right there. The place that dwarfed the whole of Midorijima, the singular settlement that was all that remained of Earth’s civilian populace, reduced to nothing at all.
He exhaled quietly, heart suddenly heavy.