Lara helped her brother walk to the large stone in the garden. Throughout her life, especially when she was a teenager, she would sneak out and hide behind this very stone. However, it seemed larger in her memories.
Not that it mattered either way. Grunting, she helped her brother sit down. She sat him down with his back to the wall. They were identical twins, Keith and her. Lara didn’t have a mother or a father, so Keith was everything to her. After making sure that he wasn’t going to tip over and fall face-first to the grass, she sat next to him. She curled her legs. Keith was mumbling something, far too faint to be understood. His face was worryingly pale. Keith lifted his hand, reaching for his sister. She grabbed it tightly. His hands were cold.
“Look!” she said.
In front of them was a large curved pane of glass. Through it, they saw a large never-ending black canvas with many mesmerizing white dots. The vacuum dulled out the colours a bit, but the view from the garden into the vastness of the space was always stunning. Lara smiled, nudging her brother to look through the fortified and thick glass. The Sun was starting to illuminate the grey marble.
First, a thin curved line appeared, casting light on the edges of the planet in from of them. As time moved, more and more sunlight reached the planet, uncovering a larger part of it. It was black and grey, seemingly colourless, but its size still instilled awe in Lara. Twisting clouds and hurricanes ruled the planet, occasionally hurling lighting onto the soil, which appeared as tiny flickers in Lara’s eyes. On rare occasions, the clouds would part ways, revealing a small part of the planet’s ground. Below, there was only brown and grey ground. It was even hard to tell where the land ended and where the oceans started.
“N-nobody lives… there anymore, you know?” her brother stuttered, coughing blood on his white shirt.
“Hush, hush” Lara gently wiped his mouth. “Everything’s gonna be okay, Keith. We… we are not like them! We will survive.”
His tired eyes lingered on the large lifeless planet in front of them before slowly turning to her. “We… we are them.”
Warning
Lara lifted her gaze above the large stone, looking at the other end of the Garden. She shivered.
All personnel ranked category 4 or below are to immediately evacuate. The pods can be accessed in sectors alfa-three, alfa-four, alfa-six, al–
The announcer’s voice abruptly stopped, but the sirens continued on. Lara and Keith were in the Garden, a large dome-like structure that was built right next to the moonbase Cradle 14. It was a large open space, seeded with all kinds of vegetation that survived. The walls of the dome were built out of hardened glass, enriched with various materials that blocked out deadly particles and radiation from space. Keith knew exactly what elements were used and where. He was an engineer. Lara was a botanist.
She grinned. Even among all the chaos, she instinctively came here, to the Garden. The last place where you could find Eastern White Pine in the whole universe, as far as she knew. The Garden had only one door that connected it to the rest of the moonbase. Above it, a red lightbulb rhythmically flashed. Luckily, nobody seemed to care enough to check the Garden. Loud explosions and shouts sometimes reached Lara through the ventilation vents, but not a single person walked into the Garden after them.
She turned to Keith. “I don’t thi-“
His face was aimlessly looking at the planet in front of them. His cloudy eyes were chained to the Earth.
“Oh…” Lara slumped to the ground. She hugged her dead brother. His blood stained her white shirt. Despite the screeching alarm and the sounds of guns behind them, the Garden seemed silent. Lara joined her brother and glanced at the planet humans once called home. The grey marble. Keith once told her that it had beautiful colours, such as green, blue and yellow. He himself hadn’t seen that, of course. The Earth had been like this for a good few hundred years. The remnants of the planet’s people now lived in various moonbases or in a few orbiting spaceships. Such a pity they hadn’t got the chance to develop space travel sooner, Lara thought.
A loud sound echoed through the moonbase, including the Garden, which was followed by a strong but short quake. The vents and the door automatically shut themselves to stop the air from leaving the Garden.
Another short quake followed. The glass walls around them screeched and a large crack appeared in the glass. Lara instinctively reached for her mask, only to realise that she didn’t have it with her. Nor did Keith. They were only wearing white undershirts. The attack found them unprepared.
She looked at her dead brother. Lara closed his eyes.
Another quake came, now more violent than before, and the crack expanded on the glass. A voice inside of her head urged her to try to run. Maybe even reach the escape pods. However, Lara knew that the moment she would return to inside of the moonbase, someone would shoot her down. And not to mention that the halls were most likely depressurized and without air.
“We had it all. And we could have achieved so much more”, Lara whispered looking at the grey marble. Other moonbases, other Cradles, were also being attacked, destroyed one by one. Humans really were good at one thing. Destroying everything, especially their own species.
Lara gasped as she saw a couple of space pods launching off the surface of the Moon. “Where are you going?” Lara asked nobody. “There is nowhere else-“
The evacuation pods exploded. They looked like two bright, but small globes of light. In the next moment, they disappeared within the blackness of the space.
Another quake came, and the glass walls finally gave in. The crack branched off in millions of other cracks, and the air started leaking out. Tops of the trees leaned towards the crack. Even Lara felt lighter. Drops of blood from her brother’s shot wound started rising.
The glass broke.
The vacuum pulled them out of the Garden, tossing them like weightless ragdolls. The air was sucked out of her lungs and the coldness bit her. Among the dead vegetation that was floating, hurled outside of the Garden, Lara noticed her brother’s body. Although the Moon’s gravity was weaker than the artificial one inside the moonbase, Keith and herself were slowly falling onto the Moon’s surface. Lara knew that she would be long dead before reaching the ground. As the dark coldness was swallowing her, Lara glanced at the lifeless Earth for the last time, trying to imagine it covered in blue and green colours.
