Page 16 of Stars in Halo

Her nightmare had returned.

In it, she was struggling against the bonds, holding her fists tight, eyes brimming with terror as her worst incubus unfolded before her.

‘Please take me, not the children.’

Above, the skies were a broken kaleidoscope, fractured and chaotic, swirling aloft the majestic purple peaks of the volcanic mountain range.

She gasped for air, unable to breathe, overcome by utter devastation.

‘Take me instead,’ she pleaded once more, tears streaming down her face. ‘Not my innocent babies.’

But her weeping fell on deaf ears.

The sentinels, faces hardened by duty, paid no attention to her desperate pleas.

They ushered the screaming youngsters into a waiting vessel with swift pushes and harsh shouts. The children’s hands stretched, reaching out for their mother as they were taken away.

Their wails were to no avail. The gendarmes’ visages contorted in hardness as they grabbed at the small ones, their thick fingers latching onto diminutive wrists, throwing them into the ship’s hold.

The woman wrestled against her bonds and flinched at their cries as they grappled and brawled to run back to her, inconsolable, eyes filled with terror, crying and flailing, resisting their captors.

Some of the adolescents scratched and kicked at their attackers, their previous street smarts coming into play.

‘Kastian,’ the prone woman murmured through her agony when her eldest, a thirteen-year-old boy, broke through the cordon. ‘They’ll hurt you.’

He was soon engulfed by a trio of sentinels, disappearing from her view as they dragged him back to the ship, yelling.

The woman’s heart pounded, fear and fury consuming her. So much so that she keeled over, gasping for air.

She refused to let herself pass out, not yet.

But when a single figure walked onto the runway with a toddler, a plump cherub with dark curls, the woman lost it.

‘Nada, not my littlest, please,’ she called, struggling to her feet.

The caretaker of the youngster turned and gave the wailing woman a kind smile, their eyes weeping as well. ‘I’ll take care of her,’ she mouthed.

The woman’s cries were all the more ignored, the bonds encircling her bound wrists tightened by the man behind her, holding her back.

As the vessel started to pull away from the port, her eyes locked onto her children’s faces pressed against the small windows.

She searched for the smaller, dark-curled face and found her in a view-port.

Slapping her plump little palms on the plex-glass and burbling in happiness, the cherub blew kisses to her mother, unaware of the chaos around her.

Pulling away from her captor, the distraught woman collapsed to the ground on her knees as the crushing weight threatened to consume her.

‘Be brave,’ she whispered, eyes fixed on the departing vessel, wanting so much to save them but powerless to do so.

Not unless she sold her soul to the devil himself.

She was one person against a consuming force that cared nothing for her or the lives of her charges. So she lay there, helpless and broken, her sobs echoing through the spaceport as she mourned, keening.

Tears rolled down her face as the vessel lifted into the treacherous skies, her spirit shattering into a million pieces.

The ship disappeared into a purple, dark, churning heavens, and lightning illuminated the roiling planet, its jagged mountains, and its flaming volcanoes.

The woman stared as thunder roared, and hot white bolts struck the section of sky where it had vanished.

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