At fourteen, she had exactly two options: she could stay at the orphanage – she’d read enough Dickens to know it wasn’t a bad one – or she could go to a military academy. That would have been fine up until the attacks of 2093, when the academies all upped sticks and went off planet. Now, if you went there for four years non-stop, which orphans had no choice about since they had no Earthly home to go back to, you wouldn’t be able to readjust to Earth gravity and you’d be stuck in space for ever.
On days when the wind blew from the north and whole sections of the building were off-limits because the walls, at three meters, weren’t thick enough, space seemed like a good idea. As a girl, the micromanagement of what environmental hazards she could expose herself to was aggravatingly focused on her ovaries. Her brain could leak out of her ears for all they cared, but her eggs! Her eggs had to be protected. From the north wind, from certain fruit, from tap water. As if anyone had tap water.
Which was all funny as hell because most of the kids who went to the de-Earthed military academies could never have kids of their own. Too much radiation, not enough gravity. The orphanage would gladly let her sacrifice her fertility for that, though. Not because the military was some form of noble higher calling, of course. No; it was because the death rate there was 17% and her life insurance beneficiary was her “parent” – the orphanage itself, run by the charitable arm of Bannon Pottery Industries, locally known as Bacon Butty.
Who were, to no one’s great surprise, the same people who ran the only two military academies who’d take orphans. The others claimed not to be able to stay open year-round – gravity apparatuses needed maintenance, don’t you know – and so could not, regrettably, take on the orphans. At first everyone thought it was elitism, but as it turned out, Bacon Butty had bribed them. The orphanages and academies run by Bacon Butty would gladly take kids in, but they weren’t letting them out.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one way out – her third option. And that was to just walk out the door and do her best to survive. She was old enough that they couldn’t legally make her stay. They didn’t need to; out of hundreds of kids who turned fourteen every year, only one or two would choose Door Number Three. Because beyond it, even when the wind wasn’t from the north, was a slow and painful death.
Or so the orphans were told, again and again, from the moment they were old enough to listen to stories. It was all in their new fairytales. Sure, they’d read Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk and all those classics, but they also had brand new stories, none of them written before 2071, all about mutant bears, purple-green water, air as unbreathable as the vacuum of space and solid enough to hold in your hand. Outside was Death, at a much higher rate than 17%.
But she could go. She should go. Just open the door and walk out. That was an option. That was The Option.
She had never been outside. Up until 2103 there would be short excursions to the woods around the orphanage complex, but she was born in 2105. She had never been outside and if she chose either of her first two options, she never would be.
Outside, then. To touch the fog, if such a thing could be touched. To feel rain, though only carefully – it could burn your skin off, said the fairytales. To see a wild animal. To die at fourteen, or fourteen and a few days, or maybe live to old age without ever revealing her fate to the kids at the orphanage so that only those willing to die would venture out and join her. Maybe it was all a rite of passage. Maybe all you needed to live was to be willing to die.
At fourteen, that made sense to her. At fourteen and a few days, moments before her final breath, she’d see how silly that was. The fairytales were true, in spirit if not in detail. The world was uninhabitable; safety, for a little girl, was a bacon butty.
Arkin Prose 
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