“If you don’t behave, Monovalent will make your eyes sightless and cold as the Old-World Sea before earth’s rapid warming, and he’ll make the sound rush from your ears. The warm, watery blood will creep from your skin as it dissolves, and your sweetly-golden hair will shed like sheaves of shorn wool.”

  “No, he won’t. That only happens to criminals and ne’er-do-wells.” The speaker, a fair little boy, tilted his head nervously.

  “That’s what they want you to believe.”

  “You are the worst brother ever.”

  “No, me telling you the truth makes me the best brother ever. He watches you at all times, remember. He sees with a million floating Nano-eyes and no sickness or sin does he turn a blind eye to. You will either be healed or harmed depending on which you deserve.”

  “Okay fine, I won’t kill any more fairy moths. I thought their cool, clear wings were like ice or glass, but they kept fluttering against my eyes and lips when I tried to sleep, making me sneeze so I sprayed them with water as I thought it might make them leave me be. Cats hate water, I thought maybe they did too. I did not know it meant they couldn’t take flight anymore and would die.”

  The younger child, Elias, ceased speaking and glanced up at the violet tree-lamps and noted how wild the bountiful, white array of wind that passed by was. Translucent and fluttering fairly against his elder brother’s hair till the locks lifted; brown and burnt.

  “Gladius, is it true that even the plants and flowers outside Vandalier are sickly and malformed?”

  “Yes. Parts of them are missing or misshapen or broken. The genetic engineering, they do outside of here is utter crud and mutating transposons run wild. The raggedy roses and blundered blossoms form in the poorly-lit walkways and gardens as an amass of half-petals. Their colours run together worse than you with a paint set.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Sure Elias. The creatures there will eat you but never mind because you can see something fascinating and ghastly and yet almost pretty, before your head is slid from your body and an outpouring of entrails twine like ribbons. I think you should hock the holy, Elias. Throw away the sacred gift of safety for curiosity.”

  “I know they have poverty and some starvation there and they’re malformed, but they most certainly don’t eat each other,” Elias countered.

  “Eating us would be a mistake. We build and provide them with self-repairing housing and holographic masks and replacement synthetics: they would die without us.” Gladius flicked his spindly fingers decisively.

  He looked appraisingly at his brother’s fine limbs and diminutive form. His half-ringed hair, neither entirely-straight nor curled in its fall. His eyes large as some little beast’s.

  “Boys, it is inside time. ”

  Snaking and calling out to and imploring them, was the honeycreeper voice of a woman. She had a voice that snuck up on you, silently, and one that had an irritating girlishness at least to Gladius’s judging ears.

  Materialised from clouded pine and impossibly-thin air until her entire form appeared as a small but sweet vision: one of slender sturdiness and the earthly colouring of a little spring oak; all un-gaudy greens, modest browns and sunlit greys. Their mother’s tone conveyed a sudden but slight urgency.

  “Once the trees light up it’s time to come indoors, you know that.”

  The hallway was uprooted by a man, a father both grim and grave. A figure perpetually-adrift and distant in the minds of his children, possibly as he had little interest in the thoughts, curiosities or affairs of youths. He stood with a slightly stooped posture possibly due to an odd discomfort with his high height that towered over others. His eyes were a colour too soft and violet for one of such stern composure and his every expression contained a hardened glint.

  He made young Elias think of things hooded and dark but with a warm undergrowth. Then again, Elias had never met anyone he thought was incapable of being lovely and Gladius felt conversely, he had never met anyone he could consider quite tolerable. The tall stooper handed out plates of split pork and self-growing, roasted greens.

  I don’t see why Vandalier should waste its valued time and research on getting Olden Vale out of a mess they dug themselves into with great fervour.”

  Their father brimmed rosy with rage and popping blue-veined. His mother always brought up Olden Vale, Elias thought with a twisting stomach and the end was ever the same: fierce fighting and no chance of availing his mother’s soon-lighted tears.

  “They didn’t know the genetic revision technology they made would lead to what it did, Lute and Olden Vale is an appalling term to use, honey. They should be referred to not as some primitive monolith but by their various city and state and country names; Holoshire, Swiland, Maidenshed, Green-Rose, Nolita or if you must use a term that encompasses all the various Non-Vandalian nations use the Unified Grounds.”

  “Nolita! you mean Stone Nolita.” Lute’s heavy brows shot up into his sooty hair. “That horrendous place where, because the locals could not afford the more expensive engineering minerals that are harder to find or make but fuse with DNA more effectively, they used awful, cheaper variations like cell-stone: manufactured in sub-par factory labs and well look how that ended up.”

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  He turned to the boys.

  “The pseudo-stone variant of armoured-skin cells is tough and sturdy and flexible but hard to control; has a nasty tendency to form tumours or invade nearby tissues. It will overtake the cells in the body particularly muscle, sinew and ligaments. Once it does so, the ankles and limbs become frozen either in part or fully, like statues.”

  “Cell-stone is also only 1000 times stronger than unaltered flesh instead of the 2000 times of better-made, artificial DNA bases.”

  Lute raised his body from his chair slightly and did an imitation of a frozen person: trying first to crank his heavy head upward and then to move even a fraction, a sturdy upper limb and each to no avail.

  Gladius laughed but Elias’s face was one of horror and his delicate hands trembled whitely beneath his seat.

  “Don’t bring the boys into this and cell-stone is banned now. People there have been using the far more effective, less-invasive and electricity-resistant Silicone cells and Raphalinte, Carbon-based, armours Nelilih, for generations and cell-stone was once useful: it was one of the first bullet-fellers. Vola moved her stiffened limbs; softly-shifted.

  “They have subsidised and provided Nelilih for even the poorest families as a basic health necessity since before I was born. It’s none too different from how our own engineered DNA is made. The only stone people are the original ones’ great-grandchildren who inherited the condition. You know that.”

  “They stole that technology from us, “Lute muttered. Short, black curls bounding.

  “Look, Vola, you can defend and call them anything you want but Hebel was spot on in calling them '“The City of the Moors Flighted.”’ Their technological advances, if you could even call them that, were superficial and about vanity. Not to mention ill-thought-out. Whereas we were practical and looked to science and the stars for solutions to genuine problems.”

  Lute snorted.

  “We did not turn science into a fashion in order to outdo our neighbours with useless but fancy gadgets, and genetically-modified and perfectly-tuned, singing bird voices. As if. We did not pretty ourselves up with ghastly, malfunctioning wings that only dragged us down to ghostly death instead of lifting us up to heaven,” he furthered.

  Elias saw his mother’s face and her eye, where the tip of a tear was beginning to form.

  “We did not pervert scientific processes. We did not in inhumanity darkly-wallow. Split from the humanly lark that seeks betterment and a good outcome for every living thing to instead worship at the altar of our own self-serving image: one so very gravened.”

  “We did not attempt to rejig the mistletoe and to further beautify what was light and bright enough as is and thus need not be sweetened or prettified.” Lute’s quiet, serious voice had risen to a near-shouting pitch.

  “Much of that sounds like quotes from our founder? Some of the things United Grounds did were meant to help people beyond appearances.” His mother shook a little and tried to speak calmly.

  “Well, our brain impulse-communication technology actually made people interconnected through the Hebel spirit-line. Theirs attempted to give some rich snobs telepath-esque superpowers and just left anyone foolish enough to undergo the procedure at best with a mild, lacklustre version of what it had attempted to achieve.” He gave Vola a contemptuous half-glance. “However, in many cases, their version simply turned them into drooling insane, epileptic invalids with malfunctioning chips in their dreary, dripping-away minds.”

  Lute snapped back into his chair.

  Vola trembled. Yellow fell into gray as her honey-fair hair dripped into her eyes.

  “It may not be the best idea to discuss this in front of the children. On that note, Elias, shouldn’t you be looking into the properties of self-lighting, violet groves for school? You have dilly-dallied enough.”

  “I love you, Elias, my young beloved,” she called out softly, sounding almost anguished as his back turned.

  “You too, dearest Gladius.” He heard her voice faintly as he navigated the hall.

  Elias pushed back the heavy-hung door and went to his flower-footed room, a personal holy-land of rose-lanterns and guiding light gardenias and plant bulbs and dragon lids.

  Gladius had many names he threw at Elias for his loving obsession with floral-lights (even to the point of doing his project on them) but the boy loved them from the tip of his sprightly hair to the pale ends of his oddly-curled toes and when they grew and wilted his adoration for them only deepened.

  Memories were ingrained in every inch of decay and so he had asked Monovalent if he would hold off on restoring their DNA to its original, unhampered state for a short while, and it had agreed. He took a few notes on their growth patterns then under his sheets climbed. Slept peacefully through black-and-ivory. Reposed throughout a night awaiting the sun to turn it gold.

  Awoken while the moon still spun and before any first, creaking matchstick of dawn. Wakened by something odd: like electricity sparking and water flowing in the wrong direction. Tired, sagging lids opened, and his eyes lost their night sheen. A twinning of violet danced back into the windows. Richly shone. Such pretty gleamers, his irises: The very light, they faired.

  He gazed upward in the glint of a lantern leaved. Shadows slipped away from each iris’s bright grapevine. Then again they dimmed. Fell neath long, golden-dark lashes; closed. He drifted back to sleep.

  in dusking flutters came a dream of men shaped like moths travelling out of Olden Vale. Stony-winged Nephilim acted as unsettling watchers. Blinking with beauty, stone and fire; through lashes of brimstone.

  Hours passed and morning rays rose through an open window. Harsh and near corporeal, the sunlight as down it hailed. Elias awoke to a sound of belaboured breath, then a simple sigh to nothingness.

  He went to his mother’s room certain she was gone yet little indicated this directly. Not thus far. His shoulders trembled. Her room seemed empty but eventually, he found her whereabouts; huddled at the very edge of the bed. She lay an uneven drape of rapidly- shrinking limbs and hands; snowy lips trapped in the torturous confines of a bleak, half-lit face.

  Her hair had been from all its warm, living honeys unhinged then, suddenly, there was nothing but a rapidly-dissipating, greyish puddle remaining. The teeny, little faces of his favourite lanterns, the blue flowerlings, drooped as his father walked in; disturbing them and setting off their sensors.

  She had been recycled. Elias was too distraught to even begin to wonder why his mum had been punished or what she could have done wrong. His father walked into the room and many an emotion flittered across and then left his long, lean face and none of them were surprise, incredulity or awe.

  The final thing to star his father’s eyes was sorrow and then a rush of warming light. A light he turned upon his son as he opened his mouth and quietly, but assuredly, spoke.

  “Don’t.”

  For many a year later despite all the joys and laughs and richer moments they had shared together that “don’t” would always remain in his mind: overwhelming and overshadowing all else.