“There’s hundreds of them!” a voice calls from halfway up the concrete staircase, and the memory floods back to me.

I must be ten or eleven years old; Molly, my sister, is only eight or nine. We used to play here all the time, imagining that the staircase was our own spaceship in which we would battle armies of aliens who wanted to kill humans and mine the Earth for a precious mineral that we hadn’t even discovered yet.

I turn to face Molly, who holds both hands up as though gripping a steering column. Tears sting my eyes as I look at my sister the way she had been before Happy had ravaged the planet, before I had been imprisoned, before our parents had died, before everything.

In the real world, Molly had become a clone: a name given to addicts of a drug called Ebb. The last time I had seen her she was high, unconscious, emaciated. But here, in the past, in my resurrected memory, she was the young girl I used to know, my best friend.

The tight curls of her black hair bounce as she rocks with the movements of the imaginary spacecraft. The hand-me-down T-shirt (which used to belong to me) reaches her knees.

“Did you hear what I said?” she repeats, turning her head frantically toward me. “There’s hundreds of them. What do we do?”

I take a deep breath, fighting off the emotion of seeing her again, and I get into character. “Captain Molly,” I say, my voice coming out young and high-pitched, almost causing me to burst into fits of laughter. “I suggest we retreat; there’s simply too many of them.”

“Retreat?” Molly says, a grin forming on her face. “Luka, I don’t do running away. Charge the cannons.”

“Right away, Captain,” I reply, and move down two stairs to where the spaceship’s cannons are situated.

And then the ground floor of the Black Road Vertical begins to melt away, the Sane Zone works its weird magic, and we’re no longer just pretending to be mid-battle in outer space, we are in outer space.

The concrete staircase melds into the futuristic deck of our ship. Stars and planets dot the black sky through the enormous window in front of us. We appear to be just outside the orbit of a large green planet, and in front of us are hundreds of smaller ships.

“They’re almost in range,” Molly yells, pulling the steering column left, causing the entire ship to tilt.

I fumble with the cannons, winding them into position and pulling the levers that start the charge. “That means we’re almost in their range,” I point out.

“Let them try it,” Molly says, maneuvering the ship through the expanse of space. “Our firepower is too much for …”

Molly falls silent as an enormous mother ship appears over the horizon of the green planet.

“Okay,” Molly says, “now we run.”