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The first thing she noticed was the sky. Back in the city — she couldn't think of it as home — there had been too many lights, and she had never seen the stars. Now, they rushed above her, a glittering arc of golden light. The men who had taken her murmured calming things, as if the sight of alien stars would disturb her, but as they were the first she had ever seen, she had no familiar stars with which to compare them, and thus no difference to find unsettling. For reasons that no one ever bothered to explain to her, the hours of daylight were much shorter than they were on Earth, and so she grew used to the sight of the night sky, with its twin moons and shining constellations, and forgot to associate natural light with wakefulness.
That first morning in the Gymna, with all those other children — the peb, she learned later — fluttering about like magpies, was overwhelming. They were in constant motion, leaping from ground to overhanging equipment, running up the giant ropes without effort, launching themselves between trapezes, tumbling from the soaring heights of the room, then swooping back up to do it all again. What struck her, later, was the silence — back in the city, back on Earth, groups of people, especially groups of children, had been noisy, shouting and chattering all the time. But here, the only noise was that of bodies in motion, cut by the occasional call to signal when individual children should perform specific acrobatic manoeuvres.
There were undoubtedly children among the peb who spoke her language, but she had decided, standing beneath the mass of small bodies in flight above her, that it was preferable to leave all that back on Earth — shedding her words and her name like a skin, leaving something hard, and smooth, and metallic behind. Better to retreat into silence until she had learnt the language, and the rules that came with it. She stayed quiet, and watched.
They wanted to see what she could do, that first day, and so she climbed the ropes in silence, and launched herself into the empty air, moving like water from trapeze to hoop to the tangle of ladders that crisscrossed the heights of the Gymna like a spider's web. Nothing remained but her own feet, and eyes, and hands — the strength and certainty of her own small body. Here, she was on surer ground. She danced through the air, and learnt the span and shape of her new world.
*
The spoken rules of the place, she learnt later, were simple: train hard in the Gymna (and refuse no acrobatic feat asked of you), put on a good show in the Arena (those peb not good enough to be selected to perform were beneath contempt), and remain a child. But there were other, unspoken rules, too. The peb — superstitious, as was perhaps to be expected, given the nature of their community — refused to give those rules voice, as if speaking them aloud would bring calamity down on their heads. But it was not difficult to work them out, and she repeated those rules, too, in the silence of her own mind:
Risk your life in the Arena, and fall, and die.
They performed without ropes, or harnesses, or safety nets — and indeed the peb were loudly contemptuous of any performers back on Earth who had used such things. (Those who had come from circuses where such safety measures were routine kept quiet about it, although in that horde of children stolen from street performances in the poorest parts of the world's poorer cities, those who had grown up in the relative safety of circuses were rare.) Leeward — who would come later — tried to teach them that in the absence of equipment to ensure their safety, the peb were each other's safety. This kind of earnest, collaborative belief found favour with some of the peb, but they knew to keep it quiet. It contradicted the final, unspoken rule of the place — the one they only admitted to themselves in the true darkness of nightmares: the adrenaline of a child's Arena performance was good, but what was really wanted was their fear.
To her, this was obvious, and had been obvious from the first day in the Gymna. She could see the fear that ran through everything, in the tension of the children as they ran up the ropes, trying not to look to check if the trainers were watching them, in small hands barely catching the trapezes, in the palpable relief in the eyes of one older girl as the boy acting as the base to her flyer caught her after a particularly difficult tumbling arc through the air. Fear was the invisible thread that held the whole thing together.
This fear was the hardest rule for her to fulfill. She trusted completely in her own body — it was only in the air, on the ropes, somersaulting between trapezes, that she felt certain of her own safety — and never felt the slightest scrap of fear that she would fail. Genuine terror was impossible to fake in the Arena, and she didn't bother to try, trusting that her technical competence would bring her back every time as a performer. They would find a way to make her afraid, eventually.
(She had braced herself for this, from the beginning, and even so it was the only time the Arena managed to surprise her: the sullen young red-headed boy, glaring around the Gymna as if he owned the place, and his friend, slipping out from behind him like a shadow, his face creased with worry. And then, the order — nothing in that place was ever a request — for all three of them to perform together, the two boys flinging her between their arms, from hoops to trapeze to their waiting hands, like some kind of doll. She trusted her own hands and arms and legs. She did not trust the hands of others. She certainly did not trust Allyman or Ashmaq. The fear came, then, throughout every perfomance.)
*
It was Allyman, inevitably, who insisted on opening her eyes. One morning after training, he caught her hand, and dragged her through the maze of corridors, the sense of urgency plain in every line in his body. She had been hungry, and just wanted to go with the other peb to eat, but there was no point in arguing with Allyman when he was in this single-minded state, and so she allowed herself to be drawn along behind him until he came to an abrupt halt at what appeared to be a nondescript section of hallway. The space was empty, and fluorescent lights burned down on them from the ceiling, as always. Allyman pushed her until she was facing the outer wall, which was, like all the other walls that surrounded them, transparent so as to show the moons and sky over Vexak.
'Look,' he told her.
And he reached up a hand, and tore at the wall. She made no move to stop him, watching silently as the Vexan skyscape disappeared.
'Can't you see? We are still on Earth! There was no spaceship, no journey to an alien planet, no Vexa, no Vexak!' Allyman clearly wanted her to share his sense of outraged betrayal.
She thought, the Arena is real, though. Our fear is real, and falling is real, but she left those thoughts unspoken.
'Does it matter?' she said, instead.
The facade of the outer wall hung in a loose flap from where Allyman had torn it free. Whatever power source generated the false night sky continued to do so in spite of his act of vandalism. She shivered, still dressed in the light leotard of the Gymna, her bare feet cold against the metallic floor. Allyman stood, as if waiting, and she watched his hands — another trick, learnt in her long years living the lie that was their life: people's hands and shoulders were sometimes more revealing than their eyes, an early warning against eruptions of anger, or grief, or violence. Allyman's hands were very still. The artificial glow of the Vexan moons and stars split the floor between them, and she made no attempt to bridge the gap.