As Trevor climbed into the driver's seat, the area around the real van went from the color of silver to every color of the rainbow. blazing reds, greens, blues, purples.

     It was like they were back on Earth in a park rather than hovering thousands of feet ​over the Earth. 

     Also, no more fornicating people. 

     There were people, though. 

     And they looked like real people, too. They looked like real humans from the planet Earth, not Silverian constructs. 

     They weren't beautiful, for one thing. 

     They looked thin. No one looked like they'd bathed in days, maybe weeks. 

     They huddled amongst a copse of trees, a hundred yards from the van.

     Skip found himself peering into the eyes of a young woman who looked to be around his age. Her eyes were as big as those portraits of sad kids from the sixties. They told him the young woman yearned for a single, happy moment, but knew in her heart such a thing could never be. 

     Skip's heart went out to her. 

​     "Don't trust a single moment of any of this," Trevor said. 

     The people walked over to stand at the windows of the van. 

     Cathy peered into the eyes of a young man her age. He looked at her with an expression that asked, why are we suffering like this? 

     Abby looked into the eyes of a woman her age, another mother. She sheltered her two children with a ragged coat.

     "Can you hear me?" the mother asked Abby through the window. 

     Abby nodded.  

     "We don't belong here," the woman said. "Silveria snatched us up. We're starving. Is there any way you can get us back to the ground?"

CONTINUE