The naked pizza moon was getting closer and closer, and he could see the faint outline of the colony boundaries, the great pulsating dome that protected the new cities from the hostile atmosphere of the sulfurous moon. They had learned all about Io in school. Chinese was the most common language spoken and Piero’s Chinese was very bad, almost as bad as his English. Signorina De Luca had called the colony un miracolo. A miracle.

The great silvery grids of the colony grew sharper, ripples cascading along the protective dome, a swirling mist buffeting against the city limits, as if an army of ghosts tried constantly to storm the gates. What was visible of the ground through the mist was teal and orange, deeply pitted and hilly, but the colony sat on a carved-out rectangular depression, as if some giant had come along to scoop out a flat place for his sandcastle.

No trees. No sandboxes. No stray dogs or old men playing dice. He would miss those old men, their red noses spotted with age, their hats always tilted against the roaring sun. And he already missed the dogs, with their wet, curious noses always pushing into his pockets, looking for sweets.

“Nǐ hǎo, wǒ de míngzì shì Piero,” he mouthed to the window, fogging it. He practiced again and again. It was the only phrase he had ever spelled perfectly on a test.

“Mamma,” he said softly, not wanting the blond girl and her family to overhear.

“Yes, darling?”

“When do I get a better headset? The VIT Fives have been out for ages.” In the window reflection he saw his mother sigh and bend down to rub her swollen ankles. He wished she wouldn’t; the other passengers kept staring at her when she did that.

“You will waste your time with it. You will just play games all day and never study,” she said.

“I won’t. It isn’t fair, I need it for English, for Chinese. The Fives do all the translating for you, you don’t have to try at all!” he cried, forgetting that he didn’t want to draw attention to their fighting. To their poverty.

Mamma gave one of her sweet, indulgent laughs and leaned back on the padded bench, reaching up to comb his messy curls with her fingers. “We will ask Domenico for one when we are all settled, mm?”

Domenico. Her lanky, gray-eyed lover. Piero hated the man and his ugly gold watch, his paisley shirts. They were old-fashioned and gaudy, just like the man himself. He always smelled of too much garlic and played football terribly, stumbling over his flat feet and blaming it on his shoes.

“Never mind,” Piero whispered to the rapidly approaching ground. “I don’t want one.”