When Dopla first saw the Ziggurat, he laughed a little mouse laugh.

  It just looked sillier than it ought to be.

  It looked like it was hovering, just over the rise of the hill they climbed. He could see it, clear as the daytime, even as the mountains obscured the sun from the West. There was a little dome on top, mostly clear, and underneath, there was a lot of steep sloping, jutting out angles, cubic construction of stone and concrete, but in all, it looked more like a cubic toadstool than the disturbingly large pyramidal structure that papa said it would be.

  “Is that really it, over there?” Dopla asked. He pointed up the slope with his little paw. “It looks—”

  Papa gave a thick sneeze behind him. He had his head down, and a large rucksack strapped to him, plastic banding wrapped around him like tape which, due to the weight of his pack, bowed him forward further. He struggled up the path, almost on all fours, sweaty and exhausted and squeaking for air. Soon, he gave up on making another step. He turned around, and his pack, full of the family’s clothes and some of their more precious belongings, smashed heavily into the side of the mountain. From there, papa practically collapsed, and Dopla waited patiently for him to catch his breath.

  Dopla’s pack wasn’t particularly heavy. It only held what he owned, that is, his clothes, a new and unopened box of scented soap, a little bar of copper that his grandpapa had given him, and a pair of boots that were by this point too small. He set it down next to papa and stretched. His tiny arms came out of sleeves that were too large, and then wrapped the sleeves tight so that he could get warm. It was cold on this side of the hill.

  Papa settled down, pulling the plastic banding off so he could be free of the weight. He stretched out his mouse-feet while he leaned his head back, gulping for air. “It’s just—this ridge, my—my boy. And then—a downward slope—and then the path will take us right through,” he wheezed, “…the gates.” He turned to look uphill where Dopla had pointed and squinted. “You said you saw the Ziggurat? I don’t see it.”

  Maemae, Dopla’s mother, called to them from lower on the slope path. “Are you tired yet, papa?” Her voice echoed around the hillside musically.

  She was infinitely more comfortable than papa, since she was the one pulling the Tractor Droid along on a leash. It bobbed next to her on four unsteady rubber feet while it carried everything else the family owned in a precarious vertical stack. Pots and pans, blankets and mini-appliances, their cups and bowls and plates, all tin, unfolding stools, dry grains and butter flavor cubes in foil, and a full container of powdered greens, which was quite, quite heavy, along with knick-knacks and some pretty pictures that papa had printed long ago and were carefully tucked away in moisture-proof envelopes. But because the droid carried it all, similarly strapped like papa, maemae was having an easier time, strolling alongside the machine and gently tugging its tether when it wanted to step off the path.

  Papa called down frantically, “not yet, my love! I am—” he turned to Dopla, painedly trying to catch his breath. Then he shouted down, “I’m just waiting for you, my sweet sunflower seed!”

  The mountains were craggy behind them, all red rock and frost up there at the peaks. Down where Dopla and his family journeyed, it was a slow, unsteady crumble of iron-y stone and belts of sand and crushed concrete and plastic. It was a junk path, laid out here a long time ago, worn to a light gray streak amid the rocky slopes.

  The path was infamous for being uncomfortable, according to the Administrata at the transit center. It was perpetually cold due to the shade. It was why Dopla’s mother suggested they hire a driver to take them from the barge station across the mountain, so they could take the flat roads that circled around instead of going straight through. A single driver with an enclosed cab, and maybe heat, and enough cargo space to carry everything they owned would make the last leg of this journey quite easy. It would cost a lot, but they had rented a tractor droid for a day, and wasn’t that an extraordinary amount already? Why pay and work for a less certain outcome? The driver made more sense.

  But to papa, the Ziggurat was only a walk away (it was a very small distance on the map between the blue circle of the transit center, and then the red square of the Ziggurat), and walking meant they could appreciate the view of their new home for longer as they crossed the valley. By this point, papa was the one regretting his choice most.

  Maemae slowly approached them, letting the tractor droid navigate the uphill path with only gentle corrections. The journey so far was a relaxed saunter for her, while the boys in her family struggled with their packs. When she made it to her family, she directed the droid settle down so it’d stop tottering and threatening to fall all the way down the slope, and then she sat next to papa, her skirt poofing as she plomped down, chiding him about working so hard before they had even started their new jobs. Papa nodded grimly while maemae chuckled and stroked the whiskers above his eyes.

  “And you, Dopla,” she said, giving a kind mouse smile, “do you think you’ll have a good first day? Aren’t you excited to see where we’ll live?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” Dopla replied nervously. He pushed his paws together and worried. A little mouse can’t help but worry, sometimes. Especially with a new home, a new job, and the ever-terrible threat of new animals.

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  “It’s perfectly normal to be nervous, my son,” she said. She pulled a little aluminum bottle of water from the side of the droid and gave it to Dopla. “It’s even normal to be scared.”

  Now, Dopla was barely an adult mouse. Just barely. He personally couldn’t fathom how he was one. By most metrics, he wasn’t an adult at all, since he was smaller than other mice, and shorter, and more afraid. But mice were often afraid of all sorts of things. Dopla, specifically, was afraid that he’d end up without friends, or that the animals there would be unkind, or that they’d laugh at him. That was what he was most afraid of.

  When they got the news that the whole family was accepted into the employment of the Levid Corporation, papa whooped for joy, seeing the green checkmarks on the form and boasting and shaking them in front of everyone he could find. Maemae made a gasp and stared at the vivid colors on the paper when she swiped it from papa, gushing about how their lives were about to change, how the bad harvests wouldn’t grind down the family anymore, how they could all finally be secure, and safe, and happy behind tall, white walls.

  Dopla, however, wanted to cry, as many mice do when things are overwhelming or scary. He didn’t want to leave his friends. Or his home.

  But they did. Papa said it was necessary, and that Dopla would make new friends. Maemae promised Dopla that life would be better and that he could gain new skills, that they would make more money, and maybe, if they all worked very hard, they might even be able to afford an education for him.

  Dopla and his family could not read. Most mice couldn’t, but then, most animals couldn’t by this point in history. Education was too expensive. And in most animal families, every pair of paws was needed to keep everyone fed.

  So the little family, all three (fewer than most mouse families), left everyone they knew behind, and trusted themselves to the Levid Corporation, which owned the Levid Ziggurat, was ran by the Levid Sio, and who would put them to work on the Levid Aquafarms or the Levid Maintenance Crew or the Levid Manufacturing Bay. Dopla had a sick feeling about it. He missed his friends very, very much, and knew that he would likely never get to see them, or Silk Lily Farm, ever again. Travel was expensive. And they only had enough money for big, important things like moving.

  All of papa’s and maemae’s hopes seemed unsure, uncertain to Dopla for some reason. He wondered if they were all making a great mistake.

  Dopla’s family was more optimistic than him. They hoped that they could move into the Ziggurat, work hard, and make things better for the next generation. Education, medical care, filtered air, purified water, all those things would be in reach once they’d established themselves as necessary employees. From there, maybe the next in their family would get to learn to read. Maybe the next in their family could rise up over being Laborers and become Administrata, perhaps! And the life of an Administrata was wonderful by comparison. They only worked at desks and with paper and computers, but of course, one had to be able to read to do that.

  Soon, they picked up their stuff again, and, rubbing their frayed polyester sleeves over their hands for warmth, continued their ascent. The daylight by this point was starting to turn colors to a deeper, redder shade. That meant it was afternoon. Papa finally gave in to maemae’s pleas that he put his pack on top of the Tractor Droid, so they all tottered upward toward the last stretch before they crested the ridge. Dopla didn’t mind still carrying his bag. There wasn’t much in it.

  Papa and maemae reached the top first. Dopla hung behind slightly, but as he looked up, he realized that the Ziggurat now looked different from how it appeared moments ago. For one, there was more base to it, much more stone, and it spread out, wide, exactly as papa had described it. Every step upward revealed more of the structure. Every step revealed that he had only seen the very, very tippy top, and in terraces, the Ziggurat exploded outward in size. It became apparent that the Ziggurat was built into the side of a mountain, or rather, that the mountain had been partially carved out, and then reassembled.

  And when he was closet to the top, Dopla was sure—he was certain, that the massive pyramid ahead wasn’t going to get any bigger. He could tell that it was obscenely far away, and considering how much it filled his vision before he even saw the base, it was going to be massive—gargantuan—monstrous—hopelessly huge.

  His eyes finally peeked over the ridge. While papa and maemae fussed with the droid and the latest imbalance from papa’s pack addition, Dopla found himself stunned.

  He could see the base, then. He could see infinitesimally tiny dots for windows. He could see the broad, broad fields underneath the structure, and the walls that circled far around them. They were farm fields, in the soil. And to the North, he could see solar farms, reflecting the remaining light in sparkles. Even farther north, he could see a deep trench of stripmined stone where some of the Ziggurat had been built from, and as he strained to look at the trench, he realized that it was about half as deep as the Ziggurat was tall, and that meant…

  Well, it meant that the whole valley they would live in was unfathomably huge. Dopla tried to make sense of it. If those little dots on the outer walls were windows, and he were only a little shorter than a standard window, then the Ziggurat itself would be a kadrillion mice tall.

  “Oh. Is that it out there?” Papa squinted as he sidled next to his son. “Ah. How big! Goodness!”

  “It has to be a kabillion mouses tall—” Dopla relayed.

  “Nonsense,” papa shook his head. “Nothing’s that tall.”

  “Why, just look at it, papa! It’s as tall as the mountain. And the windows are so tiny—I think that little square down there might be the front gates.”

  Maemae had already started down the hill. “Come on, you silly mice,” she called. “We can figure it out when we arrive. It might be downhill from here, but the valley is wide. We need to keep a good pace to get there before nighttime.”

  “Yes my love!” Papa replied, his paws going to his chest. “Always right, you are. Hurry, little mouse. That Administrata at the transit center said we needed to get there by midnight tonight, and if we hurry—”

  Papa’s paw slipped on a loose rock, and then he started to slide and tumble down, dust exploding around him, wailing and oofing, until he rolled to a gentle stop in front of maemae and the tractor droid. The droid pawed him for a second before deciding not to step on him to continue down the path. Dopla saw his father’s paw reach out and pat the droid thankfully. Maemae leaned down, saying something with a sweet lilt, and patted papa on the nose.