I live in a house in the Original City called Thessaly, and I’m one of the first humans to live in a pod. We used to live around the corner with my grandparents, and we still see them all the time. I have five pod-parents, and I love them all, and also Camilla, my pod-sister, she’s a year older than me. We also have new brothers and sisters, Leonidas and Perictione and Simmias. Simmias is Saeli, but the others are too little to be any fun yet. Humans take a long time to learn to talk, but it doesn’t make things any easier for Saeli, only different, Hilfa says.

I only met my real father once. It was on Mount Maia, last winter. I was skiing fast downhill. Skiing is a thing we learned from the space humans, and it’s amazing fun. People do it on Earth and other planets, but not in Greece because you need snow, which they didn’t have there. But we have it here, and so the space humans introduced us to skiing as part of art exchange, and it’s the best thing they offered in my opinion. In our pod, Sokrates and Camilla and I all love it.

It was one of those days when it’s really cold but the sun is shining. The air felt almost sharp in my lungs, and I felt full of life and energy and enthusiasm. Camilla was ahead, in her red hat and jacket that Thetis had made her, matching the purple ones she had made me. I could see her whipping her way down the trail, and I knew Sokrates was coming along behind. I was racing fast downhill, curving around the rocks that stuck up out of the snow. I thought I’d taken the curve too tight and was going to crash straight into a big greenish rock, which would have been bad. Even with autodocs to put you right again afterwards, you don’t want to get all smashed up in the mountains. As I leaned into the turn I prayed to Hermes, and I whizzed past the rock, almost close enough to smell it. Nothing marked the snow stretching clear downhill but Camilla’s tracks.