Ellie stared out of the window from her bed. Waited. Waited some more. Closed her eyes, opened them and waited again. She flicked her ears and rearranged the scratchy blanket she was under. The blanket was little more than a sack that had been cut open; it still had a series of numbers printed in black on the side. Sometimes Ellie thought she was little more than those seven numbers.
She looked to the window again and then to the clock on the wall. The radioactive hands glowed green in the dark. Twelve thirty. Everyone else in the room was asleep. They had fallen asleep hours ago. They told Ellie that she was stupid, waiting up like this, that the girl would never come, that the girl didn't even exist, she was something Ellie had foolishly created in her own mind. They pulled her hair and flicked her ears and threw books across the room at her when she kept tossing and turning in the night.
But Ellie didn't mind. It didn't matter what the other girls said or did to her, all that mattered was if the girl showed up outside the dorm window.
The night sky was a dusky red. The moon glowed burgundy like clay. There were no clouds. Not a single star could break through the clogged up atmosphere with its light. Ellie had once been told that the light from stars took so long to get to Earth, you were seeing the star eight years in the past. Ellie thought it was rubbish. They were just stars and it didn't matter how long the light took to get to Earth; you couldn't see them anyway.
She twitched her ears again and rearranged the blanket over her slim body. It crackled noisily. Someone threw something at her head. It sounded like a book. It hurt like a book. Ellie picked it up off the floor. It was a book. She replaced it silently on the hard wooden floorboards of the dorm.
There was no other sound then apart from the night breathing of twenty-eight other girls. Not even the sound of the matron's feet scuffing along the corridor outside. Not even the ticking of the clock. It was silent.
If hearts could be heard by anyone else but the individual, the twenty-eight sleeping girls would have been woken by the sound of Ellie's heart grinding to a halt. Disappointment swept over her. The girl wasn't coming. She came every night and sat outside on the windowsill for a while, gazing at the view. But tonight she wasn't there. It was twenty to one and she still wasn't there.
Ellie sighed silently. She wasn't coming. The disappointment was overwhelming. But rather than let the few tears behind her eyes fall onto her cheeks, she bit her lip and screwed her eyes shut, trying to sleep. But her disappointment shifted over the edge into unease. Never before had she gone to sleep without seeing the girl outside her window. Ellie opened her eyes. Breathed a sigh of relief. Smiled in the dark.
The girl was there. The girl was outside her window, perched on the sill. Back arched, crouched on the thin ledge like a cat. Her hair was dark and fell in poker-straight strands over her shoulders. She wore a skin-tight black suit that stretched down to just above her ankles and wrists. Over this, she wore a golden metal bodice that just covered her bosom and had marvellous patterns etched all over it. Over her hips, she had tied a wide leather sash, like a sarong and attached to that was the sheath to her sword. Ellie had never seen the girl's face, but she imagined the girl to be fiercely beautiful. Bluey, grey eyes like the sea in a storm, a slim, beautiful, freckled nose and a pair of dusky pink lips, all set in a perfectly oval face, above a chin that wasn't too big, and framed with the girl' silky hair, centre parted. Oh, and pale skin like the moon used to be.
And then the girl put a hand to her sheath as if to reassure herself of the sword it housed. But the next moment the girl was gone, launching herself off the ledge like a predatory cat and into a run, kicking up a cloud of dust behind her, her bare feet thudding softly on the hard earth.
Ellie sighed and closed her eyes.
