To think that somewhere in her mind laid the spiderweb-covered remnants of massive, important thoughts, which upon reflection appeared so crucial to the formation of her core person yet were forgotten so completely, terrified Aster deeply. The act of forgetting— the realization she had done so— was a sudden, sharp cry echoing out into an empty hall. It was a distinct proclamation that she did not know herself; that reality as she knew it was founded on a bed of sand. It could not be anything but— if she could not even remember witnessing the death of a person, what could Aster be certain about?

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine holding the boy's limp body, hoping that in recalling the feeling she could find the key to unbarring the floodgates of memory. In darkness the room appeared once more, but came to her as though through a window fogged with condensation; the details had been lost along with the effects of Marienne's drug, and she found nothing but a sense of nostalgia and deep lamentation choking the air of an empty room— it would not give up its secrets for a penny of effort, regardless of how evidently the truth lived inside her. And she knew it did, this memory of a memory, for like a large shadow brushing up against the surface of a lake she felt its presence humming just beyond the border of comprehension. Though it never broke the water's surface it was undeniable; the waves did not darken of their own accord.

But did she only believe they did because of some influence of Marienne's? Was it possible that the drug she had given Aster influenced a sort of hallucination? This was a question Aster investigated thoroughly in her first few days bed-ridden, for it seemed more sufferable to imagine someone she knew as evil seeding her with doubts for some nefarious aim than it did to realize her life had been hitherto built on misconception. But, in the end, she could not lay the blame on Marienne, no matter how much she wished to; the truth, no matter how buried, always shimmers like spiderweb in the sun if you just graze your finger across it.

For days she lay in anguish as she drifted in and out of a traumatic, exhausted sleep, returning to life like a half-dead pilgrim spat out from the desert. Her father and aunt came about her like a pair of protective arms in response, waiting on every need, smothering her with love so that her life's fire did not go out. But Aster found it hard to fuel a life she no longer knew the contours of— her self-image was centered completely on the belief she had been alone her entire life. To be told that this wasn't true was to sweep the rug out from under everything that established her; the concepts that defined her, both good and bad, crashed to the floor like pottery melting into shards.

She had a friend, and that friend was Marienne's son. But what was Aster supposed to do with this? Where was she supposed to find a home for the knowledge that her life's greatest threat, Marienne, hailed from the family circle of friends, and had been somebody so close to her?

Her life was a lie, she concluded. It was a little garden of wilting shrubs penned in by fiction, perhaps protecting her from facts that had not yet come to light. But would they ever, she wondered? And what were they protecting her from? Surely she deserved to know what her life had actually been.

A surge of chills came upon her as her mind turned to the memory of her father's ghastly expressions; they were the physical evidence of that secret past being restrained, and had existed right in front of her! They had been shown like secret code, and all the while she was utterly clueless. They'd just appeared to her before as natural reactions to whatever terrible events were happening at the time— a state therapist getting involved, her mother's trial— but now, colored in by testimony they took a new, alarming depth— one that went beyond the present and indicted the past.

The trial, too, had unearthed the first revelations of her parents' pre-revolution careers, a topic she had told herself she'd never touched out of a lack of interest, though subconsciously it was a matter of defense. They had said that her father was an AI architect and that her mother had held an important role, whatever that meant, and Aster could not help but feel her brain writhe in her skull as the universe prodded it with a trillion implications. She should not be alarmed; even she knew that AI architects were a more populated job field than even fast-food workers pre-revolution.

But this did not stop a sense of idiocy like no other from rushing in as she, at last, connected the massive structure she dwelled in with the fact that you needed to be somebody to live in it. How stupid was she to have never considered why they lived in a superscraper while fleets of tenement houses stretched below it like a dismal, brown tide? That was the power of complacency. That was the power of the test-tube life. Aster was born in that tower and her view of reality sprouted from it; it wasn't any more natural for her to ask 'why' as it was to wonder if the sky on other planets was blue. It didn't mean it wasn't a question you couldn't ask, but it was one which had never occurred to her. And when it did the floodgates had no sympathy. There was no relent, no emergency warning for the deluge of thought that now tore through her. Who were her parents? What gave them the privilege of this life while billions suffered below?

The answers were not forthcoming. Aster hardly had the energy to give menial requests let alone find the strength to confront her father. She still loved him with all of her heart, for her love wasn't as flimsy as to be a weathervane in this storm, and rather than feel any sense of betrayal she instead felt a dull pain at the realization that nobody is perfect and even the truly good things in this world will cut you if you hold onto them for long enough.

She did not want to think about anything outside of the world she thought she knew. She had finally reached a place where her miserable life, confined to a moderately-sized apartment, containing a caring father, abusive mother, and wretched sister had become bearable, or at the very least, in hindsight of the trial, infinitely more simple. Her grand tribulations which sent her into Peppermint Plains' arms now seemed a nostalgic trifle, and she actually found herself wishing for the day they could return.

—

Aster was eventually able to glean from conversations outside her door, once she had separated them from the ramblings of a dream, that Dahlia was to be sent to live with Aunt Margot for the summer. Her father, alarmed at the state of the family, had wished to act before they were irreversibly torn asunder. “You only need some time apart to cool down,” she overheard him saying to Dahlia. Dahlia of course responded with venom, but Aster didn't care. She sank back into her pillow with a soft smile painted across her weary face. It was as if a saint, some guardian angel, had taken a hatchet to the coal-black clouds above her, rending with brutal blows a skylight through which shafts of light could spill upon her bed and hope could speak: Do not give up! Relief is still to come!

In the days following her father confirmed what she had assumed; he gave her the same talk about separation being good for the both of them, said that Dahlia still loved her and was only stressed, and apologized about the noise of their moving. Aster, from the shelter of her comforter drawn up past the bridge of her nose, gave a weak affirmative, but inside was brimming with the wish to tell him what a symphony the noise of Dahlia's departure played in her ears. He didn't know what a relief it was, how it was possibly only for that reason and Peppermint Plains alone that she was able to go on living following the events of the trial, for if she had to continue with that cancer of the heart she called a sister, that locust wind in front of the sun, then it would be more a preparation for the grave than any real sort of life.

It was like a shrubbery drowned by shade finally seeing the sun; freed from the imperious darkness energy returned to her little by little, and at last, she began to find the strength, however faint, to begin pulling out the shards of glass left in her heart, when Dahlia, blood of her blood, had swung the crystal truncheon of sisterly protection at her exposed, aching, utterly vulnerable soul.

How greater still was it when her father followed up with the news that her mother, upon release, would be joining Dahlia at Aunt Margot's estate for the foreseeable future. Aster just about felt as if she could jump out of bed in glee for that short moment; how was it possible that after all that had occurred, she might be seeing the start of a new, happier life? Not only was she to be free from her sister and mother, but back in Peppermint Plains she was about to release her first album ever— about to embark on her first tour! Her anxiety rebelled against the thought— good things don't happen to you, only opportunities to get your hopes up.

She had lived for so long with the belief that nothing good ever happened to her that her body fought against any opportunity that might open herself up to even more pain. It had constructed a defense system, a laser-guided construct for the annihilation of even the smallest sliver of hope, lest it sprout into an even deeper despair.

Aster fought against it. Peppermint Plains had given her the courage for the first time in her life to believe that things could change, that she could have the pompously stupid courage to believe that she might be able to live two great lives— that Aster may be able to be a happy soul.

But as great as this relief was, as vital as it was to somewhat stabilizing the existential breakdown Aster was undergoing, it also posed new questions: where did her mother and sister's hatred come from? Why was she surrounded by so much of it when all she ever wished to do was create and be happy? Was it a genetic predisposition, a malignancy that mother had passed down to daughter? Or was it the environment rearing the child? Because Aster, although not so unaware as to be ignorant of her own attitude, wanted to believe she wasn't like that. She didn't hate people, for as much time as she spent infuriated by them; there were only a handful of people she truly despised.

Whatever the reasons, things were what they were, and they weren't without consequence. However unaffected Aster wished to appear about Dahlia's betrayal, however much she wished to play the role of the angry older sister, she still had loved Dahlia at one point, and the remnants of that love even now smoldered within, albeit so faintly that even Aster herself couldn't detect it. It wept subconsciously; a youthful love who couldn't understand why people change, wounded in the deep, terrible way that only those who come of your flesh possess the power to do. It wished to call out to Aster, speaking to her through pains of the heart so that she might talk to her, or do anything to right the rift, but Aster would not listen; there is gravity to relationships, and sometimes once orbits change all there is to do is watch them drift.

Where there was lament with Dahlia, there was confusion with her mother. Her mother, once so neatly categorizable as an evil, aggressive presence which Aster knew to hate by nature like trout swim upstream became less defined in the shadow of the pathetic form she displayed at the trial. No longer was she so easy to hate, because she, against Aster's deepest wishes, drew out what could only be understood as a form of pity— how was something so powerful in her life able to wilt into nothing? What good was hate when the object of its receipt could barely register the world around itself, let alone be wounded by that which took so much of Aster's energy to produce?

This simplistic, natural compulsion seemed less and less justified as the days went by. The black and white hues of the world had been spattered with iridescent blood let loose from the neck of Aster's reality, which had been slit before her very eyes, and in whose hollow of the throat was revealed the unbelievably complicated truth of all things, delivered in death rattle, and unintelligible to any human mind.

It was in this storm, in this squall of existential promise of oblivion that she anchored her eye to the single sweeping light which made out across the plain of darkness, kept safe upon a lighthouse that rescued voyagers from sirens. In and among the shattered remnants of who she had been was the clarion truth: the only true her remained in Peppermint Plains. Even if the world fell apart, even if all manner of misery visited her, as long as she could be there amongst her friends and her dreams, there would still be some corner of the universe in which the real her existed.

—

Dahlia left with Aunt Margot several days later for a townhouse elsewhere in the city. Particulars to settle regarding the trial and the upcoming celebration over Margreta's release would keep them nearby for the foreseeable future, but even being a block away was enough for Aster to feel like she could finally draw breath without a mountain atop her lungs. For the first time in a week she began to venture outside of her room, where she was greeted by a world which, although appearing similar on the surface, had unmistakably changed, as if the filter through which her body received the world's stimuli had been transformed, or even been replaced entirely altogether. Everything, from the most mundane objects to the light that surrounded them, seemed imbued with a new weight, seemed to belong to a completely different world, as if she were given someone else's eyes.

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She was returning to a daily routine that would be a restoration in name only. There was still untold confusion running amok in her brain which great relief alone would not be able to silence, and her newly augmented view of the world extended to persons, including her father. He was overjoyed to see her out of bed and tentatively recovering, but her eyes couldn't behold him without some sort of lingering analysis whenever he came into view, as if she hoped any moment to make the deduction that would unravel the mystery behind him. It hurt her to do so, for she felt he could sense her scrutinizing gaze, or at the very least tell that it had changed, but it was impossible to quell her curiosity now; a secret has two components, and one of them is knowledge of its very existence— if that is known then the secret itself may very well still be safe, but the one who holds it walks around like a sheet-ghost trying to be inconspicuous. This was life, Aster now understood— it augments in starts and fits— one day you wake up and it's totally, irrevocably changed forever.

No sooner did this notion cross her mind than she found herself in the living room, gazing with stupid disbelief at the television. Thousands of people were pouring into the streets in the city below, washing like seafoam over the pavement and around buildings. Before them were the organs of government: the Departments of Inner Peace, Safety, Stability, Production, and Ingenuity. The crowd surged toward them with a riotous cry, carrying like debris in a flood the bright, imperious flags of the party and the nation itself, which quivered proudly in the strong wind. The day had come— all details surrounding Cedar Czukay's trial were to be announced shortly.

On the couch sat her father, his hand digging into his knee as if he wished to draw blood. Aster had been on her way to Nancy's when she had passed him sobbing into his hands. He attempted to compose himself upon noticing her, but the wreckage is impossible to hide.

“Your sleepless nights are over,” declared the talking head. “In only moments our four loyal Czars, our fathers, will be announcing details on the trial of former Czar Cedar Czukay. They will also be giving details on additional pledges and plans to help you, the people, begin to heal. Rest assured— with this moment the revolution will be finished forever. There will be peace in our time.”

A crack of thunder, or the resemblance of one, ripped across the crowd at the close of the commencement. The seafoam people, who loosely ebbed against street fixtures and buildings compacted, and flags and signs were now so numerous as to give the appearance of a sea of cotton candy below the streets.

“Never since the Great Revolution have witnessed a sight like this,” the talking head continued, and from his exclamation was birthed the explosive fanfare of the national anthem. Aster's father sobbed.

There was a dull notion in Aster's brain that everything wasn't alright; there was that electricity in the air that seems to manifest whenever momentous occasions, blessing or disaster, are around the corner, and it felt as if the entire world, together, was hurtling lightspeed towards a new conclusion. But Aster's brain was so devastated by the past few days, and she had been looking forward to her return to Peppermint Plains with such Bodhisattva-like fervor that it passed over her concern like a mosquito skipping the surface of a pond.

“I'm going to my guitar lesson,” she whispered, quietly enough for it to be a snack for the explosive anthem.

But her father heard, and just as quickly as he had begun to sob choked his cries back into some loose form of composure. “Alright,” he said firmly, looking up at his daughter. “Remember, your mother comes back home tonight.”

A look of dark surprise came over Aster, who nodded nonetheless. “I know.”

“We're going to be having a get-together for her at your aunt's tonight,” he continued, before adding to check her pensive reaction. “Don't worry— I don't expect you to be there. Just be safe coming home, okay? I'll be gone until ten or eleven depending on how things go, and who knows what people are liable to do now. Just make sure you come right home, okay?”

Aster nodded again.

“Is this really a big deal?” she asked against her better judgment. Her father's composure disappeared.

“Yes,” he replied solemnly. “The biggest since you were born.”

A cry came from the television; a shot of youth happily burning digital effigies of Cedar Czukay.

“We live in Elysia, we will be okay. It is those down below, who have no protection against chaos, that you must worry for.

Noah smiled, rose, and stepped towards his daughter, planting a kiss between her bangs.

“We're not so weak as to let this break us, are we?”

—

“We were a happy family until he started using it,” lamented a middle-aged woman on a screen in front of Aster, who was waiting in the penthouse elevator for security scans to complete and clear her to go. She turned away from the screen, but its projection followed her eyes, skating around the glass interior, where every inch acted as a monitor. She could not stop shaking.

“He began to grow distant,” the lady continued, sobbing. “He was always so proud of the community service he engaged in, but—” She paused to stifle her hiccupping tears. “It seemed like he wasn't going out to events or rallies anymore; he started keeping strange hours. It was less 'helping the homeless find places in the tenements' and more talk about how we'd been lied to by the government— how everything was worthless.”

“I was really scared,” a young girl chimes in. The camera pans to her. She is holding in her hand a holographic portrait of a man. “Dad was so nice, but now he's gone,” she continued, before breaking into hysterics with her mother.

“Do not be a victim,” punctuated an authoritative voice. “Stay present, stay real. If you believe anyone you know to be a victim of Eden device abuse do not hesitate to contact the proper authorities; all BelAir AR devices have been updated with the tools and information to both detect and report suspected abuse. Together we can believe in the beauty of life and keep this society safe.”

Aster began to retch as the program segued into a calming scene of a brook buried in verdure, which expanded to encase the whole of the elevator in a little, 360-degree cove. Calming muzak, perfectly tailored to appease Aster's current mood, filtered down out of nowhere.

Her shaking worsened. How was it that the tower behaved so normally when Aster knew the city below was in chaos? She hadn't passed a face on the way here that didn't seem utterly unconcerned with anything that wasn't in their own heads. But she had seen the news, she had seen the wave of life lap up against the state buildings, behaving more as an act of nature than a human gathering. That was not an everyday occurrence; that was the turning of the tide. And yet the tower went on in idle bliss; they, like Aster, lived in their very own world.

—

Nancy was waiting in the living room, clearly agitated. Aster saw this and was confused, but before she could even make her way over Nancy began, “You told me nothing about your mother's situation.” Her voice was coarse, and Aster couldn't even scowl, though she was so taken aback, because of her surprise.

“What?” she croaked. Though she asked this, Aster was in no state of ignorance. She had been purposely hiding the fact from Nancy, for she knew that if she had revealed it there was a very good chance Nancy would rescind everything.

Aster's blood went cold.

“The trial!” Nancy barked. “Don't pretend it didn't occur to you how big a deal this is!”

“I—I didn't—” Aster began to stutter, but in the face of Nancy's fury her lie began to unravel, her concentration disintegrated, and she couldn't string together any response.

“You were in the Department of Inner Peace; you were watched for hours! They could be outside this door right now!”

Aster, in terror, reflexively turned back to face the door. Though her lie was genuine, it never occurred to her what the consequences could be outside of Nancy having a potentially negative reaction and calling everything off; the idea of there being true, negative repercussions never entered her mind. They now flooded in like a psychic tap had been turned, and she could not believe how she could be so stupid. Her throat went dry, and her eyes watched the door like a gun to her temple.

“There are God knows how many people outside the entrances to the penthouse?!” Nancy continued, pointing towards the door. “They saw you board the elevator! And even if it is true; even if it never occurred to you to tell me,

the fact that you would put this little thought or concern into the whole affair distresses me deeply, Aster.”

Aster turned from the door towards Nancy with a look reserved for the condemned and the guillotine.

“I'm sorry, I couldn't think straight—” she sputtered.

“'Sorry' does not cut it when you're dead, Aster. Your family is not nothing; there are more lives at stake than your own.”

Aster felt as though her knees had turned to sand and her body to stone; she began to crumple, causing Nancy to intervene and walk her over to the couch.

“Think about them,” she continued. “Your father, your mother, your sister—” Aster clenched her teeth.

"Two of them won't even miss me! And the other—” she hesitated, choking up. “—Deserves better."

“Your father? Surely that includes not dying because of his daughter's actions?”

Aster began to sob and Nancy turned away.

“I don't say this to torture you. I say this to convey the gravity of what is going on.”

Aster, now in hysterics, could not take her face from her hands.

“Look at me,” Nancy commanded. A second passed, and then Nancy forced them apart.

“Listen to me— we will all die if you are not more careful. Not just me, not just you, not even just your immediate family— the families of your family will all be wiped out. The entire tree from which you sprouted will be expunged; its sap will turn to arsenic and every root will perish. This is no time to play games when one of the very Council themselves is to be executed for Eden device abuse! They are more than eager to find scapegoats; they will make a spectacle of destroying you because it makes them look like they have a semblance of control; just because you do not want to live in this world does not mean you can involve others in your suicide.”

Aster's heart sank. She moved to speak but her voice faltered.

“I know about your wish; you talk in your sleep: you will never be allowed to stay in that world, Peppermint Plains, permanently.”

Aster turned to look at her, feeling as though she had been struck in the stomach.

“What?” she muttered, her voice threadbare and shaken.

“Don't pretend it isn't your wish.”

“I never said—”

“Again, you talk in your sleep.”

Aster dug her fingers into the seat.

“Well, who gives a fuck if I want to?!”

“Lower your voice!” Nancy commanded.

“What does it matter if I want to leave this world?! Isn't that why the device was invented?!”

Nancy grabbed Aster by the cheeks and dug in, pinching her mouth. “How would I keep you here?! What would I tell your parents?!

“I don't know!”

“Exactly— you don't know.”

A convulsive sob burst from Aster, followed by the heaving of her chest as a breakdown struck.

“I don't want to live here— I don't want to fucking live! This world sucks, the people around me suck— the world is an awful fucking place!”

“—Said everyone who's ever lived.”

“They didn't live here; they didn't live now. Imagine if they saw this place. We have no voice, we have no reasons to live! Just look at the people outside; they drift in and out of life day in and day out, waiting for something like an execution to celebrate! We sell the soul to people because we lost ours long ago— I mean, they even have holographic tours of you! Is that not fucked up?!”

“I stopped trying to justify the world long ago. As far as I see it there is no answer to anything, everything that exists is just a random occurrence; a trillion ping-pong balls left to scatter across the universe and meet their matches. The only thing you can do is accept it and let life take you. You're young, so of course it will take a long time to know this.”

“I don't need to know anything, I can already see what's before me! I can see my sister, and her love for all the shit that's happening with the state; and that fucking therapist!”

Nancy went pale. “A Mother's Helper?” Her voice was guttural and low. It did not hold in it exclamation and anger, but a deep, primal terror; the kind of fear that is produced when all the decorum of society falls by the wayside, and there is nothing to protect you from that which you fear but fate itself.

Her terror was infectious, and it mirrored itself in Aster. Nancy's reaction was a surprise; it was as if Aster had been walking on thin ice proudly but was just now told to look down.

While her failure to mention anything about the trial was intentional, her sessions with Marienne, and the choice of whether or not to bring them up, had completely slipped her mind; Aster wished to put them as far out of thought as possible the second they were over.

“It was my mom's idea,” she started weakly. “Her idea of me standing up for myself was to call me fucking crazy and have me put under watch.”

“Aster— how long?”

Aster turned her eyes up, ready to be admonished.

“A month,” she answered meekly. “It started after our first session.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nancy whispered. Placing her hand to her cheek in an expression of thought she turned from Aster and paced several steps before her. “You know it can't continue like this,” she at last said.

It was as though she ran a dagger of ice through Aster's heart. “What?” she exclaimed, half rising from the couch.

“We can't meet like this while you have a Mother's Helper watching you!”

“We're done with the sessions!” Aster countered. “She excused herself with the trial.”

Nancy shook her head vigorously. “No, it does not work like that. She's still there. She sought you out for a reason. Just because she said she's gone does not mean she's gone away, it just means you can't see her. And that's far more dangerous than anything.”

Aster didn't understand. Her heart was now thrashing, and she looked at Nancy with frantic, imploring eyes. “I don't get what you're saying; we're done?”

Nancy turned to her, looking to be under immense regret and pain. “What do you want me to say? We are both guaranteed to die if we carry on like this.”

“But you want to die!” Aster shouted. Nancy scowled.

“I do not want to die! I want to stop suffering! And most of all I do not want to see you die, Aster! Why do you think I do this? Why do you think I risk both our lives? Because it is evident you are not living, so it is worth it to give you a chance at life. But if it now endangers your entire existence, then that is not worth betting on.”

“I won't be alive if I can't return! I'll kill myself!”

“Shut your mouth! Do you want to draw even more attention to yourself?! You will live, Aster. It may be difficult, but that's the most important thing. ”

Aster shook her head. “No, NO!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. “I won't, I'm not leaving them! I'M NOT!”

Sparing no time, Nancy grabbed Aster by the hair and slammed the device against her temple. “Say goodbye, Aster.”

How mournful was her aged face as she turned it from the sight of the girl below her— that boundless will to live all wrapped up in small form— going limp, and cast it in the direction of the great windows of her apartment. Perhaps it was out of fear for feelings such as these that God never intervened on Earth.