Hours pass. I focus on the changing landscape outside. Once, some years ago, this land belonged to the Karensa Federation. I had ridden along this same track and seen towns draped in Karensan flags, scarlet-clad soldiers waiting at every stop. Now, though, those flags are gone, replaced instead with Basea’s flag. I have only a vague recollection of them, but now they are everywhere, bold green and yellow, like the ground in summer.

By the time we arrive in Sur Kama, the sun has already begun to set. We get off the train onto a platform shrouded in billowing steam. The town doesn’t look like the one from my childhood, the one that was destroyed. The one I remember had streets lined with thick trees, their branches arching so low that you could simply pull yourself up into their crooks and idle away. Those trees are long gone now, burned away when the Federation first conquered it. But now there are new trees, young and willowy and pale green, stretching up to the sky in neat rows along every boulevard. True to our heritage, the streets overflow with thickly flowering plants, bushes thick and lush along every corner.

My heartbeat quickens as we leave behind the main streets and turn into a smaller neighborhood. Now I start to recognize a few sights. There is the street stall I used to visit when I was small, the one selling frozen cubes of sweet strawberry juice and ice-cold watermelon slices. The one I’d envisioned once in a dream with Red. It is there again, and at the sight of it, I feel a rush of those old memories come back to me: my hand tucked neatly inside my mother’s and the juice sticky on my lips. The homes are like I remember, albeit newly built; rows of small, neat rectangles surrounded on all sides by flowers and trees. Their doors, as they always were when I was little, are open, the neighbors familiar enough with one another that no one feels a need to lock them.

Red smiles in wonder as he walks alongside me, and for a moment, I feel like he is returning to a childhood too.

And then I see my mother’s house.

It is a little different, of course. Its colors are blue and white, the sides not covered yet in thick curtains of green ivy, the stones and roof too new to have that sunbaked quality to them. The trees she has planted around the house are still young, brilliant green and bold and straight. But the flowers are blooming in enormous patterns of yellow and white, and the front door is wide-open.

Standing there in the front entrance is my mother, both how I remember her and how she is now, her hair pulled neatly back and her piercing eyes focused on us, her smile a sight of joy. I find myself breaking into a smile. A laugh bubbles in my chest. She waves. We wave back.