Author's Note: It is strongly recommended to read the first story in this trilogy, "Earthling," first. This story picks up almost immediately where "Earthling" left off. Reviews are always profoundly appreciated, and often responded to!

DEDICATION
For jdoug4118
Your final review of "Earthling" gave me exactly the creative spark I needed to write this sequel. Thank you for the inspiration! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it.

ZAC 2060: YEAR ONE
Prologue

His company was more essential to her in those early days than she had ever thought possible.

Daytime was preferable to the night. Sunlight and a bright blue layer of atmosphere shielded her sad eyes from the unknowable black depths of space. The waking hours brought with them their own set of problems, however: without sleep to pass the time, the hours dragged interminably. There simply wasn't enough to do. And so she relied on her sole companion, and in the beginning, they spent many a hot afternoon walking up and down the main thoroughfare in town. It ran the entire length of the little ruined settlement that had been unofficially named Fort Zephyr, opening onto empty desert on either end, and was one of the only streets that could accommodate them both, side by side.

He took one small, glacially slow, plodding step for every thirty of hers. But he never rushed ahead, never pushed the pace; he simply and uncomplainingly trod that dusty ground right along with her, back and forth, hour after hour after hour.

He was a great listener. In their first days of solitude, she said very little, but the heavy silence into which her entire world had been so recently distilled proved itself nearly unbearable, and so she began to talk, just to hear another voice besides the one in her head. She spoke only to herself at first, as she dragged wearily through the unforgiving stretch of everlasting days, and then to him, when it dawned on her that he was paying attention to, and actually understanding, what she said.

The nighttime was always the hardest. Although he lay patiently right outside her door when she turned in, and faithfully remained there until she reemerged in the morning, she nevertheless felt the loneliness pressing in on all sides as though it possessed both matter and form. As each fading dusk fell and then made way for night, the vast unfathomable void of outer space opened up above, reaching boundlessly away into a crushing emptiness. Zi's pair of moons cast an eerie luminescence on hollow, half-shelled structures below, and darkness seemed to snuff out every last glimmer of hope in the world. Sad winds moaned around corners and ghosts shuffled lonely through vacant streets.

She hated the night, the deep sky a painful reminder of all that had come before, the winking stars mocking all that she had lost. In her little hut in an abandoned village somewhere in the southern Elemia desert, she lay curled miserably on a straw-stuffed mattress, buried under blankets, preferring the darkness of tightly-shut eyes over that which oppressively converged upon her if she dared open them.

The pair reached now the northern end of the long thoroughfare, where the sand-burned remains of a former army barracks were just barely visible in the distance beyond low rolling hills of sand. Instead of turning around along with her as he usually did, he sat down on his haunches and gazed forlornly out into the desert. She stopped and went over to him, leaning against his great paw. "I miss him too, Zeke," she whispered. The wind sighed around them and gave them no comfort.

That night, like all nights since she had been left behind in this bleak settlement, Willow sobbed into her pillow until, exhausted, she fell into the uneasy twilight of sleep.