Planet Earth is blue 11

We lay in the temple on its dusty wooden floor, surrounded by a litter of broken roof tiles and with moonlight flooding in through the holes above us. Lily held me close, perhaps to make up for nearly killing me earlier, perhaps because it was the only way she could sleep. I stayed awake for an hour or so longer gazing at her skin’s whiteness and wondering, amongst other things, whether she ever dreamed. If she’d possessed a heartbeat, its soft rhythm might have calmed me, but she was as cold and silent as the deep space that she called home.

It was not long before dawn when I woke suddenly to find the pair of eyes I had seen earlier looking in on me. The misshapen creature to which they belonged seemed at variance with their sad beauty.

As I sat up, I glanced warily at Lily’s sleeping form and the gun at her side.

‘Don’t worry,’ the thing said, in a soft voice that was also incongruous. ‘She can’t hear us.’

It snapped a pair of bony fingers and I noticed that a leaf drifting down from the roof had stopped motionless a few feet above the floor.