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"I wish they hadn't found me," Ivan had whispered to her once. They were lying down in the garden, late at night. Till was snoring on Ivan's arm, head turned away. Sua's head lay on her chest, and Mizi's hand was buried in her black hair, stroking gently.
"What do you mean?" Mizi had asked, squinting. "It's so much better here than ..." She lifted her arm and waved it about arbitrarily. "Out there."
Ivan shook his head. "There's real grass out there," he said.
Mizi twisted her head to face him. "What does that matter?" she asked. She patted the floor beneath her. The grass twitched and shifted beneath her fingers, turning blue, then red, and orange, and finally back to green. "It's just grass."
"I knew an old man there," Ivan said quietly. "He knew people that had lived before the aliens. Artists." He paused. "He had paintings of the old world. There were colors I'd never seen before, and the sky was so bright I shaded my eyes. Like this." He lifted a hand to his brow and held it over his eyes. "There were so many people. At the market, buying food. Bread, cakes, vegetables." There was a dreamy haze over his eyes. "Pot pies and tarts and sugar. There were boys on these wheely things called bicycles, selling newspapers, and girls standing up in the middle of circles, singing."
"There's people now," Mizi said. She didn't quite understand why Ivan was getting so cut up about this. "What, do you miss being out there? Isn't it, like, lawless? Who keeps you safe when you're a stray?"
"Yourself," Ivan said. "But there's other strays. When you stay with them, they teach you things. Sometimes the lawlessness is nice. No rules, no need to entertain. No one tells you you're failing as long as you're alive."
"You're good at singing," Mizi said. She squinted again. "Who's telling you you're failing?" Even as she said it, pretended to be confused, she imagined it, the world that Ivan was talking about. A bustling market, full of humans walking and talking freely. Singing on a little hill made of mud. Grass that didn't glitch beneath her fingers: tangible blades of it. Real flowers that she could pick and grow.
"No one," Ivan said. "But I'll fail one day." He dropped his hand to the ground with a thump.
"I think you'd win Alien Stage," Mizi said. "Your voice is so powerful." She meant it: Ivan injected real feelings into his voice when he sang. Mizi had a beautiful voice, everyone said so. But she wasn't as worldly as Ivan, didn't know as much as him. She couldn't add the same pizzazz.
"You have a good voice too," Ivan said. "Especially when you duet with Sua. I can feel everything you're singing, like I know the words even without ever hearing them before."
"We'll all win Alien Stage," Mizi said definitively. "Sua and I are gonna win together."
"That's not how it works," Ivan murmured, closing his eyes.
"It could," Mizi said. "We're going to tie, and get the same score. And we're going to win, and live forever and ever."
"Hmm," Ivan said. He opened his eyes. "Another thing about the outside," he began, then stopped.
"What?" Mizi asked.
Ivan hesitated another second. "That old man, when he died. He just collapsed. And people cried for him. They sang for him and held a ceremony. I held his hand after he was dead, when they were burying him."
"... So?" Mizi asked, confused.
"So—it just felt real," Ivan said. "The aliens don't care about us. You've seen Alien Stage. When the camera pans to them"—he ripped a red flower from the ground—"they cheer." He tensed his fist, crushing the flower in it. "They don't care about us. They enjoy our deaths." His gaze slid towards hers. "Out there, they mourn us. To the aliens, we're just toys."
"Toys," Mizi repeated.
"Toys," Ivan said. She turned her head away and stared up at the sky.
They were silent for a long while after that, but whenever Mizi looked over at him, Ivan's eyes were always wide open. Till shifted on Ivan's arm, snuffling.
"We should go," Mizi whispered. "It's almost time for lights on."
"There's no lights on outside," Ivan said. "The sky turns pink and orange as the sun goes down, and then it darkens into black. When it's coming up, the sun, it bleeds orange into the black, and turns it blue. Then when it's high up there among the clouds, the sky is the most brilliant blue you've ever seen."
Mizi hesitated, then said, "Do you miss it, out there?"
Ivan scoffed. "Of course I do," he said. "We're not animals, not like they want us to be. Like they treat us."
"They still love us," Mizi said in a small voice. "We wouldn't love them if they didn't love us."
Till shifted again on Ivan's arm. He turned up his face, showing the purple bruise flowering on his cheek, and the cut on his lip. On the eye hidden in Ivan's side, Mizi knew, there was a big, shiny patch of blue where his alien had thrown his fist into it.
"I wanted to show Till," Ivan said, abruptly. "How beautiful it was outside. I took him out there, once, and the sky was dark, but it was lit with stars. There were comets, giant rocks in space lit on fire, hurtling towards somewhere far away. It was the best thing I'd ever seen." Ivan turned his face to hers. She looked into his eyes. "But Till didn't want to leave you guys, so he turned back."
"Why didn't you escape without him?" Mizi found herself asking. "You miss it there so much. Why didn't you leave?"
"Because," Ivan said, then hesitated. "I'd be lonely out there. Without him. Without you and Sua and everyone."
Mizi turned her face away. "Let's go back inside," she said.