I was born under a false sky.

  It was painted on the underside of a dome three kilometers wide, a soft blue meant to fool the workers into thinking they still lived under the sun. My mother said it helped people stay sane. My father said it helped the Empire save money on lighting.

  The dome covered Research Enclave E-97, somewhere between the lower Core districts and the deep levels no one admitted existed. From the outside it looked like a stack of silver coins hammered into the bedrock. Inside it smelled of metal polish, coolant, and the faint sweetness of recycled air.

  My earliest memory is of glass—rows and rows of it, the kind that trapped things alive. My parents raised luminescent algae for xenobiological nutrient studies. They glowed in jars along every wall, breathing in perfect rhythm, a slow green pulse. I used to hum to them, and when I did, the light would shimmer just a little faster. Father said it was air pressure; Mother said it was cute. Neither of them was right.

  Father’s name was Alen Solen, thin as a dataprobe, white-eyed like most Arkanians. He spoke in precise measures—never “in a minute,” always “in sixty seconds.”

  Mother was Nerisa Solen, shorter, warmer, with the same pale glow but a voice that carried laughter even when she was exhausted.

  Between them, they directed half a dozen Imperial research contracts in genetics. The Empire paid well for people who provided unique value.

  And sometimes, if they provided enough value, they didn’t disappear in the middle of the night.

  Their work was classified, which meant our home was, too. Visitors were rare, childhood rarer. The Enclave school was a single room and a single instructor: Tutor-droid SR-9, a rolling egg of polished metal who thought jokes were system errors. SR-9 taught arithmetic, xenobiology, and Imperial anthem recitation with equal gravity. “Emotion,” it informed me once, “is a side effect of inefficient cognition.” I told it emotion was what made songs work. It logged my statement as a malfunction.

  ? ? ?

  I was born into a false air.

  It carried hints of oil, antirust paint, filters that needed changing more often, and curtailed freedom. There was no wind, only steady draft from rectangular holes in the walls and a bass grumbling of heat pumps deep within the air ducts.

  By the time I turned three I knew their tunes and silent gasps, and I could tell which one was getting tired of pushing. I sat on the floor in the common room, datapad with incomplete physics test in my lap, and counted the distant hiccups. SR-9 had already wheeled off after informing me it had noted my lack of focus for Father’s review. It could get quite emotional that way, for a droid.

  “Hey Moonbeam,” I heard Mother’s voice from the hall, “I’m back home. How was your day?”

  I responded with a dramatic sigh, raising the datapad from my lap.

  “Oh that well,” she laughed as she walked into the room and ruffled my hair.

  “I hate it,” I informed her vaguely.

  Her sky blue eyes, so light one could have mistaken her for a pure-blood, smiled though the smile carried crow’s feet of many long days. “I have something that you will not hate,” she said, somehow conjuring a packet of Cook’em Cake.

  “Ah-ah,” her laughter rang through the house as she raised it high to keep it safe from my tiny grasping hands, “finish your tests first and then we’ll see about the cake.”

  The staring contest lasted only a moment while I pouted, then I forgot about the dastardly betrayal and ran to my datapad to finish the remaining tests.

  She moved around the small kitchen while I worked, humming one of her wordless tunes. SR-9 rolled back in with yet another complaint about my lack of attention.

  “I know,” she stopped the shiny egg’s rant, “Kae’rin just needs proper motivation.”

  “Learning should be motivation on itself,” it dismissed her.

  “This,” she said, stabbing her finger toward the datapad, “would normally be taught at what age, eight? Nine?”

  “Correct, Mistress. To a human.”

  “She’s three years old, and even I haven’t learned stuff this advanced until I was five.”

  “Three and half,” I chimed in but they both ignored me.

  “Master believes she has the capacity-”

  “I’ll have a talk with ‘Master’ when he gets back. Now zip it, evaluate those tests and I don’t want to hear another word about it, am I clear?”

  “Perfectly,” SR-9 acknowledged, probably feeling threatened by the plastic cake tray Mother brandished.

  A little while later, Mother and I sat at the table. The day was forgotten, only the berry aroma and sweet taste of cake remained, our shared little secret.

  When Father returned, I saw him catch a whiff of the berries, and his pure white eyes narrowed. Mother raised an eyebrow, facing him squarely. He hugged her, and the evening was quiet and peaceful.

  I snuck out of my bedroom later that night, following the faint light pouring out of Father’s lab. I saw him through the crack in the door, surrounded by strange machines, piles of notes, and frustrated mumblings.

  He sat at his desk, eating a slice of Mother’s Cook’em Cake.

  ? ? ?

  Father’s lab was the only place on Coruscant that never felt cold.

  Even when the Empire rationed heat to the lower levels and the walls sweated with condensation, his lab stayed warm — not the gentle warmth of blankets or sun, but an artificial belly-of-a-machine warmth that smelled faintly of sterilizer and hot metal.

  Once a month, Father would take me by the wrist and lead me inside, past the humming towers of gene sequencers and the softly pulsing vats that held things I wasn’t supposed to see. He never smiled on those nights. His face tightened into a mask of numbers and calculations, like he was trying to solve a problem only he could see.

  The bed was always ready. A large oval of glass framed in metal, carved into the floor like a crystal sarcophagus. The first time he lifted me into it, I remember thinking it looked like a coffin for someone too pretty to die. The glass was always warm — warmer than Father’s hands — and it glowed with a soft blue light that made my skin look translucent, like milk poured thin.

  Mother would stand nearby with her arms folded over her chest, as if holding herself together. She never spoke during the procedure, never tried to soothe me or distract me. She just watched Father work with a tense, desperate stillness, as though any sudden motion might shatter her resolve.

  There was always a moment, right before the lid came down, when Father would lean close to my face. He didn’t kiss my forehead — the Empire frowned on unnecessary affection in its laboratories — but his eyes softened in a way I didn’t see anywhere else. “You’ll sleep for a little while,” he’d say, voice low and tight. “When you wake, you’ll feel stronger.”

  The lid would seal with a sighing sound, and then the lights would change.

  Liquid warmth spread around me, heavy and comforting and wrong, like sinking into syrup. Something prickled at the edges of my spine — not pain exactly, more like the feeling your foot gets when it falls asleep, except everywhere. I tried once to count the drifting blue motes that danced above my head, but I always fell under before I reached ten.

  Waking was worse.

  It happened in parts — first the awareness of breath, then a dull throbbing in my joints, then a kind of deep ache in my bones that felt older than I was. The glass lid would lift, and the warm air would spill out, carrying that same sharp, metallic tang that meant Father had been working for hours. My lungs felt too big for my chest. My fingers tingled when I moved them. Sometimes I cried without knowing why.

  Father would always look exhausted when I woke, shadows etched beneath his eyes, sleeves rolled up past his elbows and stained with something reddish-brown that wasn’t quite blood. He’d check my pupils, measure my pulse, murmur things into a datapad. I understood none of it.

  To me, it was just “the sleeping time.”

  A strange ritual adults insisted upon, like brushing your teeth or pretending you weren’t scared of stormtroopers.

  Only later would I realize the truth:

  Every month, Father was rebuilding us.

  Piece by piece, gene by gene, preparing his family for a future we didn’t yet understand — perfecting us, enhancing us, arming us with secrets the Empire would have executed him for if they’d suspected.

  But back then, I only knew the sound of the glass bed closing, the soft glow of the blue light, and the way my body ached afterward as if I had grown too quickly in my sleep.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  ? ? ?

  I was born into a false safety.

  Half a year later, Mother convinced Father to let me attend a “school” in the district. Just for a while, she said. Just to let her be a child for a while. Father didn’t like it, but relented. I heard their hushed arguments through the walls even when they thought I couldn’t. I wasn’t quite sure what Mother meant - I was a child after all, was I not? Why let me be - me?

  Two weeks later I was on my way to school, for the first time.

  The other children—there weren’t many—were pure humans, sons and daughters of engineers, scientists, overseers of the district, and low-ranking Imperial attachés. They’d stare at my eyes, the silver that glowed faintly even in the dark, and at my fingers, longer and paler than theirs. They called me Moonmoth. It wasn’t cruel, exactly. Just the way children mark things they don’t understand.

  Once, not too long after my fourth birthday, an overseer’s boy shoved me during recess near the coolant ponds. I fell, hit the rail, and screamed—not from fear, but from the sound the impact made. The railing rang like a bell, and for a moment the whole platform seemed to vibrate. The boy’s nose started bleeding. Everyone ran. Later, Father said it was “a sympathetic resonance phenomenon.” Mother just held me until the shaking stopped.

  That night, I overheard them whispering in their lab:

  “It’s the markers again,” she said.

  “Keep her readings off the main network,” he answered. “The Empire will take her if they see this.”

  I didn’t know what markers were, but I learned to stay quiet as the sensors scanned.

  I didn’t return to school, and SR-9 got an upgrade out of it, to keep up with Father’s requirements.

  Lessons began at dawn cycle, ended whenever Father remembered I was still awake. He taught me calculus before breakfast, ethics after dinner, and made me diagram the nervous systems of creatures that never existed anymore. Mother slipped in fairy tales between data sets—stories from Arkania about stars that sang and travelers who followed their echoes home.

  I liked her stories better.

  Sometimes, when power outages blacked out the dome, the algae jars kept glowing. We’d sit together in the green light, Mother braiding my hair and humming softly. I’d match her pitch, and for a moment the jars would pulse in time with us. “You’ve got the family ear,” she’d whisper. “Our blood remembers music.”

  Then Father would clear his throat from the other room and the music would stop.

  ? ? ?

  Every few months, the Empire sent inspectors—men in spotless uniforms who smelled of ozone and fear. They praised Father’s efficiency, catalogued Mother’s research, and reminded everyone that Arkanians served by the grace of Imperial tolerance.

  When I was five, one of them bent down, smiled too wide, and pinched my chin. “Almost human,” he said, as if to compliment the craftsmanship. I spat at his boot. The sound echoed off the lab walls like a blaster report.

  Father went pale.

  Mother pulled me away and whispered, “Never do that again.”

  But her hands trembled with something that wasn’t anger.

  That night, a crystal cube etched with fractal lines vanished from its shelf. I found it weeks later by accident.

  It was tucked behind a stack of datacylinders on Mother’s desk — no bigger than my palm, glowing faintly like someone had trapped moonlight inside it. I didn’t even think before picking it up. When I touched it, it vibrated, faintly, like it was purring.

  It was warm, warmer than anything in the apartment except Father’s lab machines, and it hummed ever so softly, like a lullaby someone was singing from the other side of a door.

  I held it up to my ear, because that’s what you do with seashells in the holobooks. The hum grew clearer. Brighter. Not words — just tone. A single long note that felt like it knew my name without needing to say it.

  “Hello,” I whispered, feeling foolish.

  The hum answered. Not louder — just closer, like it leaned in to meet me.

  So I hummed back. A wobbly, made-up tune that wandered around in the wrong key.

  But something in the crystal shifted. The glow brightened for a heartbeat.

  And I laughed — really laughed — because the idea that a shiny rock was talking to me made the whole room feel lighter.

  Mother didn’t notice at first. She passed behind me, carrying a stack of nutrient packs, muttering something about inventory shortages. “Careful with that, sweetling,” she said absently, patting my shoulder. “It’s older than all of us put together.”

  I hummed again.

  The crystal responded again.

  A little clearer.

  Like singing into a cave and hearing your echo try to harmonize.

  That’s when Mother stopped.

  She turned slowly, eyes narrowing just a fraction as she watched the two of us — me on the floor, legs crossed, the crystal glowing like a tiny star in my hands.

  “Kae’rin,” she said softly, “what are you doing?”

  “Singing,” I answered proudly. “It’s singing back.”

  For half a second, something flickered across her face — surprise, then recognition, then something else I didn’t have a word for yet.

  She knelt and gently closed her fingers around mine, lifting the crystal out of my hands.

  “We don’t sing to this one,” she murmured. “Not yet.”

  “But it likes it,” I protested.

  Her smile was warm, but her grip was firm. “Sweetling… things like this always sing back. That’s why we keep them safe.”

  Father appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a towel. He saw the crystal in her hand and frowned. “She found it?”

  Mother nodded.

  “Did it react?”

  Mother nodded again, tighter this time.

  I didn’t understand the exchanged looks, but I’d seen them enough to know they meant I wasn’t supposed to.

  Mother sat beside me on the floor, placing the crystal gently behind her on the desk.

  “Kae’rin,” she said, tucking a strand of white hair behind my ear, “do you remember the stories I tell you? About queens of starlight and warriors who could hear the universe breathing?”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “Well,” she continued, lowering her voice as if telling a secret, “a long time ago, one of those queens was our ancestor. And she left behind a treasure — a little piece of her voice. That crystal.”

  My eyes went wide.

  “A real treasure?”

  “A very real one,” she said with a soft smile. “But treasures can be… delicate. And they remember things we aren’t ready to understand.”

  “So I shouldn’t sing to it?”

  She touched my cheek.

  “You may — someday — when you’re older, when you know how to listen properly. But for now, let it rest. It’s like a storybook with pages too big for small hands. If you tug the wrong way, you might tear something important.”

  I bit my lip, thinking about torn pages and broken lullabies.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “But it did sing.”

  Mother kissed my forehead.

  “Yes,” she said, standing slowly.

  “It always has.”

  And though they put the crystal away after that — sealed in a drawer I wasn’t tall enough to reach — I could still swear some nights I heard that faint hum drifting through the walls.

  A note waiting for its echo.

  ? ? ?

  The day the Empire fell, I was six, and Coruscant smelled different.

  The air conditioners hummed as always, dosing the dome with the same balanced gases, but something invisible had shifted — a metallic brightness, like lightning hiding in the oxygen. The adults didn’t notice. I did. It was the smell of change.

  By midmorning the alarms began. Not the polite chimes of scheduled drills, but the hard, serrated howl of panic. From the observation galleries we saw smoke rising between the towers, thick gray fingers clawing up toward the false sky. Somewhere up there, above the holographic clouds, people were killing the Empire.

  The workers ran first. Engineers in white coats tore off their badges, threw them down the trash chutes, and fled toward the lifts. Stormtroopers tried to block them, shouting through speakers that crackled from overuse. Then one fell. Then another. Someone shouted, “The Palace is ours!” and the shout became a chant that shook the vents.

  Mother told me to stay inside. Father locked the doors and paced like a caged hawk. The holo-feeds showed mobs flooding Imperial Square, waving banners made from lab sheets and flight jackets. The inspectors were gone, or trying to be. The loudspeakers that had always told us when to breathe were silent.

  The dome dimmed in the afternoon. Power outages rolled across the levels like slow thunder. I sat on the stairwell outside our quarters and watched the emergency lights blink red, then red again, like the heartbeat of some giant trapped beneath the floor.

  I thought I heard voices from the outside, and wanted to see.

  So much was happening, and I wanted to know all about it.

  It took me a while to unlock the door to the stairwell leading to the back alley, and by the time I peeked out, it was quiet again.

  That’s when I saw him — the inspector, the one with the too-wide smile. In the middle of a group of his armored guards. He was lying near the service gate at the back of our house, face down on the tiles, one arm bent wrong. His white uniform was no longer white. The side of his head looked soft, as if someone had erased it. His guards didn’t look much better, silent and still.

  People stepped around them without looking. The carrion-eaters of the old order were everywhere that day — some dead, some running, all silent now. For the first time, the air belonged to us.

  I ran back inside. Father was sitting at the kitchen console, staring at nothing. His sleeves — usually so perfect — were rolled up, and the cuffs were stained dark. His knuckles were swollen and split, small crescents of dried blood under each nail. He noticed me staring and folded his hands beneath the table.

  “Go help your mother,” he said. His voice was calm, too calm, the kind of calm that has teeth.

  In the lab, Mother was sealing data chips into containers, eyes red from crying. She pulled me close, kissed the top of my head, and whispered, “Pack light, love. We’re leaving soon.”

  I didn’t ask why. Outside, the sound of cheering rolled through the corridors like surf. Someone had torn a hole in the false sky; sunlight — real sunlight — streamed through, golden and harsh, painting the sterile walls in honest color.

  That night, while the city burned and sang above us, Father sat in the dark with his hands clasped tight, and Mother pretended not to see the red smudges drying on his cuffs. The microscopes in the lab were missing from their stands. Later, when the transports came and the false sky peeled away, I thought of that man by the gate, and of Father’s hands, and of how freedom could look so much like fury.

  ? ? ?

  I remember standing on the boarding platform, clutching the humming cube while the wind whipped dust through the cracks. Mother held me close as the platform speakers crackled to life. Father kissed my hair gently squeezed her hand.

  Some time later, the shuttle rose through the hole in the dome. The false sky peeled away, and for the first time I saw stars that didn’t belong to anyone.

  People like to think childhood is careless. Mine was careful. Every laugh measured, every secret stored. But sometimes, in dreams, I still hear the algae jars humming, and I hum back. That sound fills the dark like a promise.

  ? ? ?

  I was born under a false sky.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve spent my life trying to find the real one.