My name is Lara and this is a story about how my good intentions went awry and somehow turned out even better than I planned.

You see, when I was nine years old, I lived in a unique village. It was run by a woman who only had her own selfish needs and wants to consider. My parents and everyone else's that I knew of, were feverishly trying to finish a massive device that was supposed to save us all. The woman promised that it'd be our salvation, because the Earth was dying. But when the final day of construction came, her true motives became blaringly clear.

I was running around outside, playing and laughing with other young kids around my age when I felt the earth start to shake and the spear of the device all the big people had worked so hard on rose into the sky and I felt myself being yanked back alongside my friend Dane. But instead of the shock I felt myself feel, my friend's face registers shock, but also a deep, abiding hurt. When I'm on my feet again, I look up to see a huge castle in the sky, floating as if it owns the clouds and air.

"Mother!" I hear Dane scream and tears stain his face as he stares at the sky castle with a mixture of fear and hatred. "Dane," I say gently, half afraid that he'll turn those dark, angry eyes on me. He blinks rapidly before wiping his eyes and rubbing his nose on his shirt. "She just left me here."

"Who?" I ask, still not understanding.

"My mother!" Dane says, his voice shrill and on the verge of panic. He starts running and I follow, thinking he means to play.

"Dane, who's your mother?" I ask, breathless.

"The woman in the castle!" he yells back over his shoulder.

For a moment I'm speechless and then I start laughing, because I know the perfect way to get revenge on that spiteful hag.

"That's so great! I'm gonna marry you when we're grown!"

Instead of the instant denial I thought he'd throw my way, he just looks back at me with those fathomless sunset orange eyes.

I don't remember when I stopped calling her Mama and started calling her Vera Windchaser, like everyone else did. Maybe it was the day she stopped tucking me in and started locking herself in the workshop instead, poring over sketches and emerging covered in ink and the stink of rust. Maybe it was earlier than that, and I just hadn't noticed yet.

She used to sing. I remember that much. It was a low, cracked sort of humming that she did without noticing, the way some people tap their foot. She sang when she braided ribbon into the hair of the little girls in the village, when she carried water up from the well two buckets at a time, when she stitched a rip in my only good shirt by lamplight. She had a laugh that made the whole room feel warmer. Everyone loved Vera, and that was the trouble with her.

I was seven when the digging. It started as the digging, before it became the building, before it became the device, before it became her device, though no one dared call it that to her face. She stood on an overturned crate in the square and told us the ground was dying beneath our feet, that the sky was thinning, that within our children's lifetimes there would be nothing left to breathe. She said she'd found a way to save us. A spear to pierce the failing sky and carry us above it, into cleaner air, into a second chance.

I believed her before anyone else did. I was so proud that the woman everyone looked to, looked up to, was mine. Mine to run home to, to show my drawings to, my skinned knees, my loose teeth. I used to imagine that when the device was finished and we all rose together into the clean bright air, she'd take my hand first, before anyone else's.

She should have. I was the only person in that village who never once doubted her.

I think about the last night before the spear went up. She sat at the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair back from my forehead the way she used to when I was small enough to fit against her side. I remember thinking, half-dreaming, that whatever came next, at least this part of her hadn't changed.

"You're going to be so brave tomorrow," she told me.

I didn't understand it then. I understand it perfectly now.

She built her escape out of their hands. Their fathers' backs bent double hauling iron. Their mothers' fingers bleeding from the wiring. She let an entire village spend itself hollow on the promise of a shared sky, and when the spear finally rose, she took the only piece of it that could fly, and she left the rest of us standing in the dirt she said was dying, watching her go.

I keep asking myself what I was to her, in all of it. A hostage kept quiet with kindness, so no one would ask too many questions about a woman who loved her son so publicly? A rehearsal for the tenderness she wanted people to believe she was capable of, spent on me because I was cheap and close at hand? Or was I simply extra weight; something she meant to take, until the moment came and taking me was one burden too many for a castle that only had room for a queen?

What I do know is this: somewhere above the clouds tonight, my mother is standing on a floor I will never walk on again, in a castle built from the ruin of everyone who trusted her, and she is not thinking about me. She was never going to think about me.

Lara found me still staring up long after the others had gone back to what was left of their homes. I don't know why I let her see me like that, red-eyed withh snot on my sleeve. I'm gonna marry you when we're grown, she had said, like it was common sense. I looked at her and thought: someone in this village still means the things they say.