EXODUS
Jupiter shrugged and tucked the bottle back between his legs. He helped Aurora as she climbed onto the roof of the car beside him. The old metal sagged and crunched under the additional weight. Her heart knew how close they suddenly were, and wouldn’t shut up about it. He stank a bit, but she didn’t mind. It only made him a little more real.
She liked the view of Jupiter so much, she hadn’t yet looked out at the real view. When she did, her heart had something new to thump about. She could see everything from up here. The last glimpse of the sun’s orange fire as it clung to the deep blue horizon and the stars caught hold of the sky. The scattered lights of the city that sparkled in the shimmering heat, crowded right up to the high electric fence that restricted access to the dark center of the bright city—the launch operations base, where the space elevator tethered the Earth to the Infinite.
“Do you know how big something has to be to be visible in orbit?” Jupiter said.
Aurora followed his gaze up to the invisible end of the elevator’s umbilical, where it connected to the space dock berths that held the colony ships still under construction. She tried to identify which of the gleaming lattices were which ships based on their stage of completion, but the behemoths were too difficult to distinguish from such a distance.
“And still not enough room for me,” Jupiter added, before taking another pull from the green bottle.