The Faarian Chronicles: Exile by Karen Harris Tully

soaked up the sun’s rays coming through the
now clear-as-glass shell of the saucer. I noticed that everyone else had taken
their hats off too and were now fluffing long tresses in the sunlight. Myrihn,
Teague, Sensei, the pilot – everyone I could see had long hair, some curly,
some straight, all green. The shades varied, from darkest evergreen to bright
new spring grass.
    I did a double take as the Robot’s shaggy brown mop suddenly
turned vivid emerald in an effort to fit in. Even though my hair was dyed
black, it was working, like I was breathing in through the hair shafts and out
through my mouth. My hair worked! It actually worked!
    “Unpleasant, isn’t it?” the Robot said with a look of
distaste. At first I thought he meant the air, but… he didn’t actually breathe.
I looked at him in confusion.
    “The wormhole,” he clarified.
    A wormhole. So, that’s what that was. Unpleasant had to be
the understatement of the year, even for the Robot.
    “You know, another minute of you holding your breath like
that and it would have been much worse. Don’t you remember me telling you that
air expands in the wormhole?” I shook my head. “Well, I did.” He rolled his
eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you would listen to me next time.”
    I didn’t reply. I’d appreciate it if he would tell me
important things when I wasn’t freaking out about leaving my whole life behind.
    The windows and holes in the hull closed once more, shutting
out the breeze that was cool on my wet track suit, while we hovered, slowly now,
over land. I focused on how nice the sun felt on my left side… my right side.
It felt like there was sun shining on every part of me, soaking into my skin
and sucking in through my scalp with a warm tingle.
    Confused, I looked around at the pale purple sky above and
immediately saw not one sun, but two. One was larger than Earth’s sun, but not
as bright and distinctly reddish. The other seemed tiny in the sky, a daytime
star so bright white that it bleached the lilac sky surrounding it.
    Macawi was part of a binary star system, I remembered now.
But I guess that was one of those things I had to experience for myself. My
muscles felt relaxed and energized at the same time, as if the sunshine flowed
through my hair to run through my veins like warm syrup.
    It was really a miracle that Macawi could support human life
at all in a binary star system, but then life on Earth was a miracle too. On
both worlds, everything had to be just right; temperature, atmosphere, the very
makeup of the air and water, all had to fall within very narrow parameters.
Both somehow managed the insane feat of supporting human life, but there the
similarities ended.
    It wasn’t long before the ship came to a halt, still
hovering in the air - and the bottom literally fell out of the ship.
    The crates that had been stacked so neatly tumbled out and a
ringing clang reverberated through the air as they hit metal a short
distance below. Teague and Myrihn calmly grabbed long, hooked poles off the
wall and jumped out the trapdoor on either side of the falling boxes. I gripped
the edge of my seat, thankful now for the harness that strapped me to the wall.
    Teague and Myrihn now stood on the top edge of a huge metal
shipping container sitting below us, shoving at the cargo with the long poles
to fit it all back together like building blocks. It wasn’t their method of
packing that had me staring, but rather that they jumped into, out of – and
over – the ten-foot-high steel box like it was nothing.
    I couldn’t see anything special that they were wearing, no
jet packs or spring shoes. And it wasn’t truly like jumping. They seemed to
sort of fuzz out and then zip to their destination, like they were on extreme
fast forward for a millisecond. Obot the Robot was watching me with the closest
thing to amusement on his face I think I’d ever seen.
    “How are they doing that?” I asked.
    “They phase,” he said with a shrug, as if