[anne lamott: "you own everything that has happend to you; tell your stories.
If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved
better"]

Ray tried to nap, not in the dorm cube, but in her usual hiding spot, a little
hollow in the rock of the sea dome, just off the path but out of the way
enough that it was for all intents and purposes private.

Her body would have none of it -- she never slept well during dayside anyway,
only sleeping enough to sustain her until the next three hundred hours of
dark when she could finally catch up -- but this was exceptional. 

She sighed and got up and took a jog down the path, or at least as much as you
can call a series of giant bounds a jog.  Nobody else was around, though that
was hardly unusual.  Nobody who grew up with the womblike confines of the main
domes, the brutal but safe grey presence of the shields overhead liked the
open space that much. Fifty kilometers of open water, and the expanse of dome
so vast that it really did look more like a shimmering sky than it did a dome.

She passed the post that said she was five kilometers from the entrance to the
red dome, and decided to head back. She rarely ran so far.

She arrived back, panting. The dome was quiet. Almost everyone else was
asleep, or at least taking advantage of the relative quiet.

Fifteen hours to go. She tried to push the news out of her mind until she
could read something current, and went to find something to distract her.

The two Cascadian astronauts were sitting in front of the spare dorm cube that
was usually left for arriving crews. Ray was surprised to find them alone.

The man smiled at her, his long hair swinging about his shoulders as he waved
at her.

"Hey. I'm Ray."

"Jason."

She was almost disappointed that his name was so normal. Shouldn't rebels have
interesting names? Heck, shouldn't someone from Cascadia sound a little ...
different?

The woman looked up from something she was reading. "Ashanta" 

_That's a little more like it_ Ray thought, before she realized she was
getting awful close to making patchouli jokes. Cascadia wasn't that different
from any of the EU countries, she told herself.

The silence was awkward after a moment. Ashanta and Ray started to speak at
the same time, but Ray stopped short first.

"I suppose you're wondering about us."

"Of course."

"What do you hear about Cascadia up here?"

"Not much. All the news from Earth comes through the ESA satellites, and the
censors are pretty good."

"It's not the ESA.", Ashanta looked amused. "We've been hiding. After the
Split, we cut the Internet at the border. We still read what's out there, but
not much gets out. Having the EU try to black us out worked out pretty well,
anyway. The EU and the old US media tried so hard to dominate us, it was
easier to just cut it off. You can connect if you know the right places, or
someone inside hooks you up. It's not that hard."