”Is it true, then? That you fell from the stars?”
When Luna had come to she seemed, against all probability, to be at a garden party. She had slapped herself a couple of times, and the sunny terrace on which she rested had stayed resolutely, irritatingly solid. She had been at these kinds of parties before, as a server, and she had hated them then. After the first slap, one of them came and hovered at her elbow and caught her hand when she tried to stab herself in the leg with a fork.
“His Grace would prefer it if you did not do that,” said the waiter with perfect composure.
Luna remembered her Tond, and specifically the word that the magistrate had used to describe her. “Where the nonsense am I?” she said. It was as if she had fired a gun into the air. God, a gun would have solved so many of these problems so, so quickly.
“She speaks!” said a woman enthusiastically. A smattering of applause went around the party and Luna realised she was tied to a railing by her ankle.
“Where’s Asta?” Luna said. “Where am I?”
“Your friend,” said the woman, putting careful emphasis on ‘friend’, “is elsewhere. We couldn’t very well ask for both of you!” she laughed. Ah. So Asta has talked to them already.
“And me?”
“You are our guest of honour, of sorts,” the woman said. Luna noticed that people were standing just out of reach of the rope around her ankle, like a cat outside a doghouse in an old cartoon. The kind of guest you tie up, she thought. The lady went on: “The idea that life might exist on other worlds was always interesting as a thought experiment, of course, but to actually have a chance to meet it, well!” She smiled, and Luna could see that it was genuine. You really don’t know what you’re doing, do you?
So that was how she ended up, bored and burning in the sun while the partygoers lounged under the shade, being quizzed on cultural matters she could barely understand or explain with her limited vocabulary.
“Is it true, then? That you fell from the stars?” said an eager young man. “You look a lot like us, is all.” he continued. “Like a real person.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said an older gentleman with distinguished whiskers. “It’s makeup, I’ll wager. She’s as blue as any of us.” He licked his thumb and reached out to try and smudge the ‘makeup’. Luna restrained herself from throwing him off the terrace onto the grass on the level below and ducked out of the way. “What did I tell you!” the old man crowed. “She won’t even let me try! She’s false as anything.”
The men swanned off. Luna sighed, her heart pounding. However much she had hated the farm, this was worse by orders of magnitude.

Eventually the guests began to tire of coming over to interrogate her. She leaned against the railing, looking out over the walled garden, and realised she couldn’t see the city walls over the top of the eight-foot barrier that enclosed them. In fact, all the landscape that she could see seemed a little… shorter. She waved over the waiter that had spoken to her before.
“Can I help, miss?” said the waiter.
“I think you can. Why can’t I see the walls?”
The waiter looked confused. “The walls of the garden are quite visible to me, miss. Is there a problem?”
“Not the garden walls, egg head. The city walls.”
The waiter laughed a delicately tuned laugh. “What kind of a garden would this be if it was built below those horrid walls?”
“How high up are we, exactly?” asked Luna. The answer, an impressively large number attached to a unit she had no context for, made her raise an eyebrow. “That’s a lot,” she said, “I imagine.”
The waiter nodded. “It is,” he said. “Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of a Kachkaton?”
“You hum it and I’ll join in when I know the words,” Luna said acidly. The waiter just looked at her, confused. “Listen,” she went on. “You can’t like these people. You’re a working stiff like me. If I needed to get out of here, what would be step one?”
The waiter looked around. “Don’t talk like that! They’ll send you below!” he hissed.

Luna’s room was a cavernous brick-walled room with a marble-ish tiled floor and a bed big enough to get lost in. It was like a hotel room, if hotel rooms here had bars on the windows and doors. Maybe they did. Luna couldn’t leave the room to find out. That night, the woman who had introduced her to the party came to visit her – His elusive Grace’s wife, she assumed. She was small and neat and pretty, and Luna sensed that a lot of people had spent a lot of time making sure she stayed that way.
“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. “I do want to make you comfortable here.”
“How about a hacksaw?” Luna muttered. The woman laughed.
“My husband is going to enjoy your company,” she said. “He’ll be back from the front soon. Is the room to your liking?”
Luna kicked the bars over the doorway as an answer.
“Oh, it’s barbaric, isn’t it? I so hate to imprison any animal. We don’t have prisons for citizens, you know. It’s only temporary, until the council decides on you and your friend’s case.”
When she left – and she had never introduced herself, she remained just the lady of the house, as far as Luna was concerned – Luna paced around the cell for an hour or more trying to find a loose bar, decaying mortar, anything that might offer her an escape. The drop outside her window, she could see when she pressed her face between the bars, was sheer and straight down for at least a hundred meters with only the stone of the walls to cling to. She’d take those odds if it meant getting out of here.

Asta had been awake for several days in strange circumstances indeed. She had been interrogated, educated, interrogated again, placed on a rudimentary treadmill, and fed all sorts of unpleasant foods. All this had been administered by the shaven-headed man who claimed the title of chief philosopher. Apparently the definition of philosophy here was a little different to what Asta understood it to be.
The man came to see her that morning, as he always did, pulling with him a pile of books on a trolley. He selected one from high up on the pile and began to read to her. “Chapter Four: The problem of God,” he intoned. He was a patient teacher, explaining each word Asta struggled with carefully as if to a child. The chapter he was reading to her now explained that the Tond people had once been aggressively theistic, but that their religion was, broadly, nothing but trouble and nearly led to the destruction of their entire race more than once. Consequently, a secret society of the most well-educated atheists among them had overthrown the old theocracy and established a new, perfectly democratic and liberal society, by summarily banishing anyone found to still cling to the old beliefs. Asta listened from inside her cage and wondered what the point of all this was. When the philosopher was finished, she asked him and watched his face suddenly acquire a suite of extra wrinkles.
“It’s all for your own good,” he said. “I’m trying to prepare you for the council. They’ll meet you, and then have to decide whether people from other worlds can be citizens, or if you’ll have to be banished as well.”
Asta explained to him that she didn’t really want to be a citizen, and he chuckled. “Don’t be silly. What else is there to be?”

After a fitful night of searching for a way out, Luna eventually collapsed onto the bed. It was soft, and somehow that was worse than if it had been an unyielding slab. They thought they were being nice. But no matter how polite you are, a cage is a cage.
She stirred and woke and was looking into the eyes of a broad-faced man. They were large, dark eyes with tiny flecks of blue-green in them like the gold in her own. She could read no emotion in them.
“Well, well.” said the big man. He offered his hand to help her out of the suffocating white desert of the bedsheets. Luna struggled her own way free, and stood before him, bold and unafraid. Actually, she was afraid, but she was damned if she was going to let it show.
“It is an honour,” said the man. “You may call me His Grace Pek-Tchat. I have been selected by the council as your host. I hope you will find me to be a gracious one, and I hope to make your time here edifying and informative as well as pleasant. I understand you are called Lyonna?” he said, struggling to wrap his mouth around the alien name.
“I’ll call you what I want,” said Luna.