The red ball rolled clattering across the floor, and Lucky went running after it. He had already been at this for a while and was starting to feel it; sweat was flowing freely under his baggy clothes.

He caught up to where the ball had lodged itself in the corner next to the door, and took just a moment to catch his breath before returning it. The top of the ball came up to his chest and although it was surprisingly light for its size, he still needed a running start to get it rolling with any kind of speed.

His aim was true; the ball rolled straight toward the desk where Mirelia was working. She glanced down and idly caught it under the ball of her bare foot.

Mirelia smiled down at Lucky as she rolled the red ball back and forth under her foot, feinting at kicking it in this direction or that. Lucky made sure to shift his whole body back and forth to track the ball's movements as she toyed with it; he knew she found it adorable when he did that.

With a twitch of her ankle, Mirelia launched the ball sideways. It careened toward the side wall and ricocheted off at an angle. Lucky tried to anticipate where it was going and ran in that direction, struggling to get there fast enough to head it off.

His heart pounding, he crossed paths with the red ball and jumped to tackle it. It came to a stop with him lying on top, his arms and legs spread around it in a bear hug.

If the ball had been rolling a little faster, it would have run him over. That had happened once before; he hadn't been badly hurt, but he'd ached for the rest of the day.

Mirelia clapped her hands, laughing. “Good boy! I'm so proud of you! I wish we could play longer, but it's time to go pick up Dallea. Be good while I'm gone!”

She stood up and left the room, passing directly over where Lucky lay sprawled on top of the red ball. He watched her go. She paused in the doorframe and glanced down at him one last time; his ears burned when they momentarily locked eyes.

Mirelia was like a mother to Lucky. Despite that, or perhaps partly because of it, he was besotted with her. It may have been inevitable, since she was the only woman around him, but also she was truly exceptional. Piercing dark eyes and a bewitching dimpled smile. A small heart-shaped face framed by short bobbed hair. And the lithe figure of a gymnast, which she maintained by exercising over an hour each morning. The sight of Mirelia stretching her forty-foot legs high off of the floor and easily lifting eight-ton dumbbells in her slender arms was awe-inspiring for Lucky to behold. And when she spotted him peeking out from behind a table leg watching her, she would grin and playfully call out to him.

He felt the floor thud with her receding footsteps as she passed from the study to the front entrance, and he heard rustling as she put on her shoes and jacket. Then there was a thunderous boom as the front door swung shut, leaving him alone in the empty house.

Lucky walked slowly out of the study and into the living room. He bent over his water basin and took a long deep drink, slaking his thirst from the tiring game, then made his way to the windows on the far wall.

The windows started about a third of the way up the wall. There was a low table set against the wall under them, and he was able to climb up to the top of it using its supports: they were crossed diagonally, so he could use them as ramps and then pull himself up the lip onto the tabletop. It was strenuous, but he'd been doing it a long time.

From the tabletop he watched the clouds. It was close to noon, and the cumulus formations were such a brilliant white that it hurt to look at them directly.

Lucky had been the family pet in this house for as long as he could remember. He had grown from a boy to a man within these walls, under the care of his three owners: Mirelia, the mother; Hifatus, the father; and Dallea, the daughter.

He lived in comfort. He slept on tufts of soft stuffing from the inside of a pillow, piled up in the corner of the hallway opposite the door to Dallea's room.

He wore real human clothes, which were always clean; Mirelia washed them together with her family's giant clothes, in a little mesh pouch to keep them together. They weren't always a perfect fit; he had outgrown his old clothes quickly as he grew up, and perhaps because of that his newer clothes tended to be a little too big. A skilled seamstress would have been able to hem them up, but Mirelia evidently knew nothing of sewing; he had never seen so much as a needle and thread anywhere in the house.

He had two makeshift toilets — chamber pots, really — made from old condiment bowls and filled with odor-absorbent litter. Mirelia or Hifatus emptied and washed them regularly. One was in a corner of the laundry room, where he could take care of his business in private. The other was on the shelf of a closet in the hallway.

He was put in the closet sometimes if he was being punished for some transgression (like knocking over and breaking a nice teacup in an attempt to use it as a stepping-stone to climb up onto a shelf), or if they just needed him out of the way for a while. The shelf was too high for him to climb down, and it was dark inside if the door was closed. But it was bearable, and they always let him out after a couple of hours at most.

There was no other form of punishment besides the closet. None of his giant owners had ever hurt him, at least not deliberately. They didn't even threaten it. Sometimes Dallea, young as she was, didn't know her own strength and handled him roughly enough to leave bruises and aches. But her parents usually kept a watchful eye over her play, and even by herself she was good at stopping when she could see he was in pain.

There were footsteps approaching outside; he could feel a faint tremor even through the tabletop. Mirelia must be coming back with Dallea. He swung from the lip of the table onto the diagonal support, then slid down to the bottom and jogged toward the front door. The door came into view just as it swung open and Dallea bounded in, with Mirelia holding her by the shoulder.

Dallea was preschool age; her head came up about to her mother's waist. To Lucky, who was so familiar with all three of their faces, it was obvious that she had inherited her eyes and nose from her mother, and the long thin shape of her face from her father. She weighted only a fraction of what her parents did, but her unpredictable bouncing left shocks in the floor that could knock Lucky off of his feet when he was unprepared.

It was around Dallea that Lucky most acutely felt how fleeting his life was in comparison to his owners. He had grown up quickly over the past ten-odd years, but she had grown only as much as a human child would have grown in one or two years. Once she had been like a baby sister to him; now she felt more like a niece. He wouldn't live to see her reach adulthood; he'd be a very old man before she was a teenager.

Dallea bent down and grabbed Lucky with both hands, and held him in front of her as she ran back to her room. There was a playset in the middle of the floor there: a rubber mat with an arrangement of walkways drawn against a cloudy sky background, and plastic blocks painted with cartoon facades of buildings. There were houses, a school, an office building, and a market; all arranged so they were connected by the walkways drawn on the mat. The blocks were about waist-high to Lucky, and each block was drawn with two stories of windows. It amused Lucky that he was as large compared to this facsimile of a giant town as the giants were to him.

Dallea set Lucky down on one of the walkways, then got down on her hands and knees overlooking the mat. She had Lucky run around between the different play buildings according to some story that must have made sense in her head at the time. She enlisted two of her dolls, one in each hand, to act as side characters. The dolls stood head and shoulders over Lucky; he had to look up at their heads when he was pretending to talk to them.

Lucky gamely did his best to put on a lively performance, though he mostly had no idea what kind of story he was acting out. He liked Dallea and seeing her happy made him happy, too. At her age, it didn't matter much whether he was following her scenario, as long as he was interesting. So he did silly walks, goose-stepping or crab-walking between the play buildings. He greeted the dolls with pompous bows and salutes, and gesticulated grandly in his pretend conversations with them. If Dallea started to look bored despite all that, he would even break into song and dance; a clumsy little jig was often enough to make her laugh.

As the two of them played, thuds and thumps carried through the floor; Mirelia was moving about doing housework. Sometimes she poked her head into Dallea's room to check on them. Later in the afternoon, as a faint golden cast crept into the light from the windows, the thumping in the floor subsided and was replaced by the noise of activity in the kitchen: the staccato beat of vegetables being sliced on the cutting board; the clanking of pots and pans; the sizzle and hiss of frying. Soon the air was full of spices and steam, and the anticipation of dinner made it hard for Dallea and Lucky to focus on their game. Lucky hoped they would feed him some choice morsels from their plates.

There was a loud boom as the front door opened and closed; Hifatus had come home. Dallea grabbed Lucky in one hand, jumped up, and ran out to greet her father.

When they got to the hallway, Mirelia had emerged from the kitchen and was embracing her husband. She put her arms around his neck and girlishly lifted one foot behind her, like the actresses on romance movie posters.

Hifatus was about half a head taller than his wife, with a face that was long and thin like his figure. He was always perfectly groomed: clean shaven, hair close-cropped, and nails trimmed and buffed. When he went to work he wore turtlenecks or dress shirts in earthy solid colors; he often wore jackets but never a tie. Lucky didn't know what he did, but the impression he left was that he did something precise and exacting, but also creative. Perhaps he was an architect. He did have very neat handwriting.

When Mirelia withdrew, Hifatus bent down and picked up Dallea with both arms, hugging her and lifting her up above his head. She was still clutching Lucky in one hand, and when she was lifted up she raised him up even higher, mimicking what her father was doing with her. It was a rare experience for Lucky to be up so close to the ceiling; for those few moments, he was struck by how small and ordinary everything looked when he was looking down on it from this high. He could take in so much more of it at once, how the table was set and how the chairs were arranged around it. But it was also harrowing; he felt lightheaded and he held on tightly to Dallea's index finger, acutely conscious of what would happen if she accidentally dropped him. He was not made for this height and could not endure it for long.

Hifatus set down Dallea, and she set down Lucky. He scooted underneath the plastic play table in the middle of the living room while the family moved about, washing their hands and getting ready for dinner.

His favorite places were underneath tables and chairs. A low ceiling made him feel safer; the vast open expanses of the house were sometimes overwhelming, especially when all three giants were up and about. The dinner table was too high to give him much comfort; the chairs were better, and the plastic play table was the best. Being built for toddlers it was only about four meters high; standing under it felt almost like it might feel to be inside a room built to his scale.

After the meal had been underway for a few minutes, Lucky came out and approached the dinner table. He stood between Dallea's and Mirelia's chairs, peering up at each of them in turn hoping that one of them would glance down, see his big pitiful eyes, and pass him a bit of food.

He had his own food to eat, of course. Big chunks of toasted grain with bits of nut and dried berry inside, like cubical energy bars, in a bowl on the floor. There was always more of it than he could eat. He was by no means starving, but he liked the variety when he could get scraps and leftovers from the giant table. Even more than that he craved the affection of being fed by hand, seeing a face smiling down from above and knowing that they, too, were enjoying the affectation he was showing them.

Dallea often fed Lucky some her food; Mirelia did from time to time, when her affection overcame her sense of responsibility; Hifatus never did. Whenever Hifatus did happen to look down and see Lucky at the foot of the table he would quickly look away, with an oddly pained expression.

Hifatus was habitually distant and aloof toward Lucky. Part of that was clearly because of his character; he was far less animated than his wife. His words and gestures were few, and chosen carefully. But it also seemed as though he had little interest in Lucky, and deliberately avoided him. Mirelia would sometimes call out to him when she was playing with Lucky, saying something like “Honey, look at what Lucky is doing!” He would just glance over, make a perfunctory comment like “Oh, that's cute,” and quickly look away.

He was by no means harsh or neglectful towards Lucky; he dutifully did his part in keeping his food and water bowls full, and emptying his waste. He probably just didn't like pets, and was tolerating Lucky to indulge his wife and daughter.

Dallea's feet were swinging from the chair, just within Lucky's reach if he jumped. He jumped up and down a few times, patting the side of her foot to get her attention. She looked down and broke into a big grin. Then her hand descended, with a carrot between her thumb and forefinger. They used whole carrots as a kind of garnish, because of their color. He gratefully accepted the carrot and bit into it with relish, while Dallea watched with a smile.

“Sweetheart, don't feed him too much. It's not good for him to eat too much.” Mirelia gently admonished her daughter.

“It's not good for me, either,” she added wryly, with a pointed glance back up at her husband.

But Mirelia too was gazing down at Lucky with a loving smile as he ate and when he finished, she lowered her hand with a dab of creamy dark green sauce on the pad of her thumb. He licked up the sauce with gusto. It was pungent and leafy, with a lingering aftertaste that numbed the tongue. Mirelia patted him on the head with her finger when he had finished.

After dinner, Hifatus read a picture book to Dallea in the living room, while Mirelia did the dishes. Lucky just sat under one of the chairs and relaxed, watching them all. He was happy that he had been able to participate in dinner, in his own way; he wasn't always allowed to. There were days when Mirelia shut him in the closet at dinner time; Mirelia was probably concerned that it was a bad habit to keep feeding him extra food from the table.

Dallea was soon sent to bed. Lucky lingered under the tables and chairs until Mirelia and Hifatus retired to the master bedroom, and then in the dim glow of a night-light he made his way down to the hall to his bed. It had been a good day.

The next morning after Mirelia worked out, she changed into a black skirt, clean white blouse, and black high-heeled shoes. She was probably going out for some formal appointment. She did some kind of part-time, freelance work; mostly at home in the study at morning or at night, but on occasion she went out during the day also. Lucky had no idea what kind of work it was, only that it could be done at home and at irregular hours.

In years past, Mirelia had left the door open when she changed clothes and been blithely unconcerned if Lucky entered the room. She didn't see him as a boy or a man, just a pet. It had driven him mad when he was a teenager. He used to run into the bedroom whenever she changed out of her workout clothes, and watch rapt as she peeled the skin-tight pants off of her legs like a wrapper and pulled the top off over her head.

There had been one night, in the time when his hormones had burned their brightest and hottest, when Hifatus had been away from home for a few days. A business trip, probably. The door to the master bedroom was left open, and Lucky was driven by the fire within him to enter. He climbed from a shoebox onto the bedside table, and from there onto the bed. Then he felt his way along the shoulder strap of Mirelia's nightwear, up over her shoulder and then down under the neckline to her right breast; it stood as high as his chest. He spread his arms and fell into it; the soft flesh sank in and enveloped him.

When Mirelia awoke, fumbled blindly under her top and fished him out, Lucky was terrified. He was trembling so badly that his teeth chattered, but he didn't dare struggle. He had been caught and there was nothing he could do about it.

There was no punishment, no reproach. Mirelia just held him in front of her eyes, her tired face first befuddled, then bemused and resigned. She got up without a word, dangling him from her outstretched hand like a dirty rag, and gently set him down on the floor. Then she closed the door and went to the bathroom to wash off.

After that, she always kept the door closed when she changed.

Hifatus, on the other hand, had habitually shut the doors to keep Lucky out whenever he was in the bedroom or bathroom, for as long as Lucky could remember. Lucky felt no desire to see him naked, but it was a notable difference.

“Be good now!” Mirelia waggled her fingers at Lucky as she walked out the front door. The clack, clack of her high heels receded down the outside hallway.

Lucky passed the morning in front of the window watching the clouds, or climbing the furniture. He enjoyed the chance to explore places he could only see when he was in the house alone, like the top of the dinner table.

Mirelia returned in the early afternoon, holding Dallea by the hand and carrying shopping bags on her shoulders.

Dallea wanted to play hide and seek. This was a new game for them; she must have just played it at her preschool and been eager to try it at home. She set Lucky down on top of the plastic table in the living room and leaned over him, explaining how to play hide and seek by acting out a little skit with her hands.

“Sweetheart, maybe it would be best if you try to find Lucky every time, instead of taking turns? You are bigger.” Mirelia called out as she was putting away the groceries into the pantry and refrigerator.

Dallea thought about that for a while before seeing the wisdom in it. “Okay!”

She grinned down at Lucky where he stood in the center of the table. “Ready?”

Then she sat back and put her hands over her eyes, counting.

Lucky considered where to hide. He wanted to make it easy for her, but this was the first time and he didn't know where she would think to look. He decided to start by hiding behind one of the chair legs around the dinner table.

Dallea found him immediately and wagged a scolding finger. “Hey! You're supposed to hide!”

She already knew that the table legs and chair legs were his usual spots and had looked there first. That was good; she was a smart girl. He decided he could be a little bit more creative.

Next he hid behind the big dehumidifier in the corner, crouching under its power cord. That took Dallea about the right amount of time, he thought. She had looked long enough that she was pleased when she found him, and not so long that she started to get frustrated or dejected.

Mirelia stood and watched them proudly for a few minutes, then withdrew into the study.

They played for most of the afternoon. He hid among the truck-sized toy blocks piled against the wall; he hid in the shade of the potted apple tree by the window; he climbed up onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase and hid in a gap between books; he even hid inside one of the high-heeled shoes that Mirelia had taken off and left on the floor.

He was running out of easy hiding places, and considering whether hiding under the sofa would make it too hard, when Mirelia emerged from the study, got down on one knee, and picked him up.

“Dallea, dear, you've played for long enough. We need to put Lucky away before dinner,” she tapped Dallea, who was still dutifully counting down with her eyes shut. “He ate too much last night. We don't want to make him sick,” she added.

Dallea watched plaintively as her mother put Lucky down on the high shelf of the closet and closed the door.

Lucky sat in the closet. He heard all the usual sounds from the kitchen as Mirelia chopped up ingredients, boiled water, and slid racks in and out of the oven. He heard Dallea pacing the hallway, bored and impatient without her playmate.

He was disappointed at being excluded from dinner, but not upset. It was normal for Mirelia to do this from time to time. He had eaten a lot last night, and was happy.

He heard the front door as Hifatus came home, and heard Mirelia and Dallea come out to greet him. He heard them wash their hands and sit down. He heard clinking utensils and a happy conversation around the dinner table.

It was after she had done the dishes that Mirelia came and retrieved Lucky from the closet. She handed him to Dallea, who was looking up at her impatiently.

“Sorry, dear, but you know we fed him a lot last night, right? And he has food in his bowl.”

Dallea took Lucky and ran back to her room. Her other hand was clutched in a fist. She set him down in the middle of the floor, then closed the door quietly and sat down in front of him.

Her carefully-held poker face broke into a gleeful grin, and she whispered, “I saved the best part for you! Don't tell Mom!”

She looked very pleased with herself as she extended her fist before Lucky and opened it.

Then her pleased smile turned to horror when Lucky screamed.

Now he knew why he had been shut in the closet.

In Dallea's chubby palm was a human leg, severed at the hip, roasted to a golden brown and coated in red sauce.

Lucky gagged and fell to the floor. He felt like his head was boiling over, about to burst. Not just from shock at what he had just seen, not directly. Long-severed connections were snapping back into place, like a line of fallen dominoes standing back up one by one.

He remembered.

He remembered that his name was not Lucky.

He remembered a mysterious seed the size of a gourd, that grew overnight into a thick vine that stretched impossibly high, disappearing into the clouds.

He remembered being told to stay away from the vine, that it led to a dangerous place.

He remembered ignoring the warnings, his curiosity too strong; sneaking out and climbing the vine for hours, shimmying up through the clouds on aching legs and not daring to look down.

He remembered clinging upside down to the top of the vine as it was pulled down to dangle before the curious face of the giant young girl he would later know as Dallea.

He remembered looking plaintively down a round window built into the living room floor, catching glimpses of tiny streets and rooftops from far above when the clouds parted. He remembered the window being covered up by a rubber mat, too heavy for him to lift away.

He remembered Mirelia forcing a purple liquid into his mouth with an eyedropper as Dallea pinned his arms and legs to the table with her fingers.

Half of his life had come back to him in a few seconds. He curled prone on the floor but he felt he was tumbling through empty air, the walls and floor spinning crazy around him. He could not stop gagging.

Dallea was devastated; she started bawling. Tears ran freely down her cheeks and she wailed louder than anything Lucky had heard before.

The floor pounded as Mirelia ran into the room.

“What's wrong, honey? Are you hurt?”

Then she saw the discarded leg on the floor, and Lucky lying gagging next to it.

Without another word, she scooped up Lucky with one hand, her firm fingers easily holding him in place no matter how he struggled. With wide heavy steps she strode quickly to the closet, thrust Lucky inside, and closed the door.

In the dark he heard Dallea still crying, and Mirelia desperately trying to comfort her.

How many times was it that he had been shut in here to keep him from seeing what was for dinner? Once or twice a month, for as long as he'd lived here — it hurt to think about what that added up to.

Did they have bags of humans stocked in the freezer? Or did they buy them fresh from a butcher? Maybe they even personally collected them — maybe Hifatus or Mirelia went down to the surface and knelt over a house-lined street, plucking people up with their fingers and filling a bag with the healthiest specimens, throwing away anyone too young or too old, too stringy or too fatty.

He pictured Mirelia at the kitchen counter, lining up the bodies of men and women on the cutting board and methodically beheading and boning them like fish: chopping off their heads with a kitchen knife; neatly slicing open their backs with the knife's tip; delicately pulling out their backbones and ribcages with her fingers; rolling the discarded heads off the edge of the counter into a trash bag. Humming to herself and swaying back and forth in a carefree little dance, as she did when she was cooking.

He pictured Dallea at the dinner table, picking human bodies up from her plate in her small hand and happily shoving them into her mouth; biting off the arms and legs and rolling them around with her tongue until Mirelia chided her about chewing with her mouth open and playing with her food.

Now he knew how it was that his owners got real human clothes for him to wear, and why the clothes were never quite the right size. He shivered; when he thought about where they had come from, the clothes on his back felt like something alien constricting around him.

He also found that he knew why Hifatus always avoided him, and finally understood the pained look that flickered on his face when he averted his eyes. It wasn't disgust or annoyance — it was guilt.

He hoped they forgot about him and never opened the closet door again. He was too afraid to see them.

“Is she okay?”

“She's resting. I'm going to check on her again in a few minutes.”

“What was wrong?”

“I think she tried to feed Lucky a leg.”

“… I see.”

“I know what you're going to say.”

“I wasn't going to say anything.”

“I know what you want to say. ‘I told you so. I was against this from the start.’ Right?”

“That wouldn't change anything.”

“No, it wouldn't. So… what do we do now?”

“I think we need to come clean with her.”

“… I don't think she could handle it. She's heartbroken right now. She thinks she hurt him somehow, that it's her fault. To tell her that we — no. Not now. Maybe when she's older.”

“What do we tell her then?”

“That Lucky got sick. That it wasn't her fault. That he'll get better soon.”

“Get better? Are you really suggesting we keep him after this?”

“Of course! Dallea loves him. She'd be devastated if he was gone. If she didn't see him again after tonight… she'd think it was her fault, no matter what we told her. He needs to stay. We just need to make sure he doesn't remember. Besides, I like him too. I'd be bored in the morning if he wasn't around to keep me company.”

“I think we should let him go. Take him back down to where he came from and release him. If we do it together with Dallea, won't she understand that he's just going home?”

“Down there in the dirt? I don't want to think about what would happen to him down there. You know the way they treat each other.”

“He should be with his own kind.”

“He's lived with us too long. Gone soft. He wouldn't stand a chance. Just abandoning him down there would be…”

“Would it be worse for him than being kept here, knowing that we use his kind as food?”

“He won't know. We can cover his memories again, and make sure this doesn't happen a second time. We just need to be more careful.”

“We can't be watching all the time. Next time if it's not food, maybe it'll be the floor window. Or something else. There's so many ways it can go wrong. Do you want to risk putting our daughter through this again?”

“What I don't want to put her through is having her playmate taken away. It'll be terrible for her. And it's kinder to Lucky to keep him up here. With food, shelter, and love. Down in the dirt he'd have nothing.”

“What if we let him choose?”

There was a gust of wind as the door swung open, and the walls of the closet glowed dimly with the red-orange of dusk, like embers.

“Lucky?” Mirelia's voice was hoarse, half-whispered.

He didn't want to, but he turned to look. Mirelia's face loomed just beyond the edge of the shelf. She was bending down to look at him face-to-face.

For a long moment she said nothing more, and just looked at him steadily.

Mirelia looked at him the way she had once looked at Dallea all day and all night, staying at her side when she had been sick with fever: silent, strong, and compassionate. Despite everything, he was comforted. He wrapped himself in the care of those tremendous dark concerned eyes, and tried not to let his attention wander to her mouth and dwell on what it had devoured mere hours before.

When she spoke again, her voice was steadier. “You have a choice to make.”

She raised a hand to the shelf. In it was a cardboard box, large enough for him to comfortably sit inside. She turned it around slowly, to let him get a good look at it. On its side was drawn an arrow pointing downward from a cloud to the ground. He could tell that Hifatus had drawn it; the ink was fresh and the strokes straight and precise.

“If you want to go back — back to the place where you came from, stay in here. We'll take it down tomorrow morning.”

She set the box down on the shelf, its open end facing where Lucky sat. Then she raised her other hand. In her palm was a bottle cap filled with a viscous purple liquid.

“But if you want to stay with us, and go back to the way things were, then… I think you know what this does.”

She grasped the bottle cap with her thumb and forefinger and gently set it down on the shelf, opposite the box.

“Do you understand?”

His breath caught in his throat and a tremor spread from his chest. This was the first time, ever, that she had spoken to him expecting a response. Hesitantly, he nodded.

She left without another word, but her eyes lingered on Lucky as she turned away. She left the closet door slightly ajar when she closed it, so that a sliver of light spilled in and illuminated the objects she had left on the shelf. He sat motionless behind them, as the last light of the setting sun faded and gave way to the dim milky glow of the night-light in the hallway.

Returning to the surface and living there wouldn't be easy. He had lived up here at least as long as he'd ever lived down there. Until this evening, he had not even been able to remember that he had a biological family, and even now all he had were faint childhood memories. Their memories of him must have faded as well; they had likely given up looking for him years ago. They probably assumed he'd been caught and eaten. He would have no way of finding them, no guarantee that they would recognize him and be willing to help him; no guarantee that they were even alive. He would have to fend for himself as a young man with no family, no friends, no money, no identification, no education, and no job skills. He could barely read and write, and he had no experience living independently. His only advantage would be that he was strong and fit from climbing furniture and chasing plastic balls all day.

It would be safer to live up here. He would be well taken of: fed, clothed, sheltered, and loved. And if he drank from the bottle cap, he wouldn't have to know that he was the plaything of predators who ate his kind by the dozen. He would be happy.

But would he truly be alive? He was a pet. He was just a minor part of his owners' lives; he had no life of his own. If he stayed here, he would be forever in their shadows, under their feet, never leaving the house until he grew old and died.

Up here he would grow old, but he would not grow up. He would never become a man: he would have no responsibilities, no chance to prove his worth, no way to make an impact on the world or on the lives of others.

At most, he might have a small impact on Dallea's life. He was important to her at this stage in her life, and she to him. Despite knowing now what she was, he still wanted the best for her. He wanted her to be happy, and he hoped that in his own small way he could help her to grow up into a young woman he could be proud of.

Remaining here might not be best for her, though. She would eventually learn that her favorite food and her favorite playmate were of the same kin. She was too young to handle that; it would shock her to the core, and leave lasting trauma. His reaction to seeing the severed leg tonight had made her cry for hours, and she almost certainly still didn't know the reason why. Eventually she would; it was inevitable. It might lessen the blow if he was just a memory when she found out.

Or it might just make things worse if he disappeared the same night that he'd screamed at seeing the leg. If Dallea woke up tomorrow and found out he was gone it would tear tonight's wound back open, and it might hasten the very reckoning he was trying to avoid.

And he himself might not be able to fulfill the potential given him by life as a free man below. He might scrape by day to day begging on the street and sleeping on an alley, an existence no more meaningful than life as a pet would be. He might even be scooped up one day and end up back in the clouds again, this time on someone's dinner plate.

The house was silent, the closet dark and nearly empty. There was only the box and the bottle cap, silhouetted in the dim steady glow of the night-light.