Romy bent in half. “Can I come?”

Nancy winked. “Got a taste for the guns, right?”

“Right.”

Nancy pulled her through the fence. “The others are already rolling. Took me a while to get the dishes done. Come on.”

She took off through the trees, and Romy skimmed over the grass, which had been flattened by the car moments before.

Salvation.

At least for another day.

* * *

Romy lay back on the ground after checking for bull ants. She wasn’t eager to encounter them after Freya had been bitten five minutes before.

“Does Earth still have koalas?” she asked.

Eddie shook his head, blushing. “N-no, they were classified as extinct last century. Before genetic staples were created.”

Romy went blank. “What?”

“You know, they take a staple of the species DNA to clone,” Nancy said, rolling her eyes.

“I see.” Humans had not only survived global warming, they’d saved some of the at-risk species. Romy tried to keep her face in suitably bored lines, but really the information amazed her.

“They’re g-gone for good,” Eddie explained.

Nancy laid back and placed an arm over her eyes to shield them from the glaring sun. “They all had chlamydia anyway.”

The group laughed. Romy smiled uncertainly.

“What’s chlamydia?”

Nancy wrenched upright. “What?” She laughed. “Don’t tell me—space soldiers don’t get STDs?”

Her mind rang empty. She was unfamiliar with the term. “Not to my knowledge.”

Hannah was the first capable of speech. She wiped a tear from her eye. “That’s bleepin’ priceless.”

Romy shrugged, not in the loop whatsoever. It was something she was getting used to. “What other animals were lost?”

“All the cool ones,” Freya said. “Elephants, tigers, pandas, emus, lemurs, hippos.” She pursed her lips in thought. “Penguins, whales, and dolphins.”

“I liked the lemurs.” Romy frowned. “But you have some new species too, don’t you?”

Nancy scrunched her nose. “Mainly insects. But there are wingos.” She caught Romy’s expression. “Wolf dingos. Not too weird. The dingo is a wolf anyway.”

“There’s mutterflies. Moth butterflies. Quite beautiful, but deadly,” added Eddie.

Romy’s mouth dropped.

“The crows and seagulls have mated with every single bird they can.”

“Polar bears are gone. But not before they did the deed with the grizzly bear.”

Romy wracked her brain for the name. “Pizzly?”

Freya laughed. “Grolar bear. Pizzly is lame.”

It was about as lame as “grolar”, but Romy didn’t argue the point. She shook her head at the information. “That’s amazing.” She couldn’t wait to tell Phobos.

The others didn’t seem impressed.

Nancy brushed away a speck of dirt. “Yeah, whatever, sky girl. I just wish we had a chance to see the other animals before our ancestors killed them off.”

“Yours didn’t,” Eddie said to Nancy. Romy wondered what that meant.

“Doesn’t matter, in the end,” Nancy said brusquely. “They still died like everybody else.”