A Lesson

Nightfall was coming.

Fable Johnson could feel it. Something was compressing the air; an invisible book slamming shut around the world, forcing things into motion. Her mother was quick to anger, so Fable gave her space and resisted the urge to ask, Can you feel it, too?

Fable took her studying up to her room, sitting criss-cross on her bed, nose hovering over the rim of her windowsill, hoping to catch a glimpse of the moon as it approached.

“I thought you said you were going to help me with this?” came Ezra’s voice. It amused Fable to see the large man spread across her bedroom floor, tongue pressed between his teeth as he wrestled a metal contraption.

A world-cube; formed of delicate moving pieces and fasteners so small Fable thought she’s swallow them if she drew too deep a breath. The model Earth was perched on its axis within a series of brass rings - miniature details, mountains and water bodies coming into the light as Ezra gave the planet a spin.

“Is it finished?” Fable asked.

“Uh huh, come on down.”

Fable slid down onto the floor, the world-cube, books and study materials stacked between her and Ezra. He’d been keeping her mind busy throughout the commotion sweeping across Mezzanine, lifting questions from the ACE-10 study guide and probing Fable’s memory for gaps in her understanding. Fable appreciated the distraction and the challenge.

Fable had never seen the world in this form. The slides used in school, projected onto a classroom wall, only showed the topographical form of the planet’s six nations, but the gyroscopic world-cube allowed Fable to turn the world in any direction. She walked her fingers across the four Border Nations, rotating the world-cube in a circle - her eyes following the impossibly small print which labeled capitol cities, rivers and monuments.

Fable wondered if this is how god saw the world; if they could pinch it between their thumb and ring finger and read a mountain range like a sentence. When she released the rings, the world-cube reoriented itself so the nation of Sky was once against faced upward.

“What makes Sky the top side? Why not Banyk or Rayne?” Fable asked.

“You tell me. Why not Banyk or Rayne?” Ezra said.

Fable looked up into Ezra’s sand colored eyes, which shined with encouragement from the sunlight outside.

“If space goes on forever in all directions and has no clouds and no sea,” Fable explained. “Then there is no up or down. No left or right.”

“Then who decides?” he asked.

“We do? People. The Academy.” Fable continued.

“So, tell me,” Ezra said. “Why would we consider Sky the top side of the Earth?"

Fable thought of both history and the science; weighed the evidence gathered from her time in school and from stories Ezra brought home from deployment. He was soldier. A member of the International Border Alliance, tasked with maintaining peace between Sky and her neighbors during the ongoing Border War.

Fable’s bedroom, though intended to be an engineer’s dormitory, was home to the trinkets and books Ezra brought home from offside. Her mother forbade her from bringing any of it with her to class. The other students (and possibly their parents) would consider these offside souvenirs an unfair advantage in regards to preparing for the ACE-10, the first of the three exams that would determine Fable’s future, and the future of every child on Sky.

Fable thought on Ezra’s question and found her answer in a warm sensation creeping across her lower back. She shimmied sideways, letting the light from her window she was blocking with her body shine across the world-cube. The light reflected off the brass rings, washing the nation of Sky in pillars of white and gold.

“Sunlight.” Ezra said, beginning to turn the world-cube so each of Sky’s bordering nations rotated out of the light and into shadow. “While the four border nations experience an evening and night every day, Sky is left exposed to the sun at all times. And the Underside is left–"

“In darkness.” Fable said.

Ezra pulled the gyroscope’s outer ring, flipping the world upside down so he and Fable peered down at another flat, wooden surface. Plain in color. Vague in detail. Three words embedded into the wood at the nation’s center – Made In Banyk.

“I couldn’t find a version that included the Underside, I'm afraid.” Ezra said, his head tilting in a disappointed frown.

The war between Sky and the nation renamed Underside began before Fable was born, and long before her mother and Ezra took their first breaths. Both nations, masters of technology and great manipulators of nature turned the four Border Nations into battlefields. They harvested natural resources for weaponry, and transformed peaceful farmers into foot soldiers.

The scoring of Underside from textbooks and literature caused Fable to wonder if the children in the shadow were raised to hate and fear the nation opposite them just like she was. Kids her age whispered about how the Undersiders carried out experiments on Sky soldiers, driving them out of their minds and using their flesh to create borderwalkers; creatures sewn together from all sorts of hell plucked from the earth’s darkest territories. Even though Fable knew these were stories designed to keep children from wandering too close to the planet's edge, she couldn’t prevent them from illustrating the backs of her eyelids as she slept.