Year 11, Day 3

Yoon Min-Jung braids her daughter’s hair while she doodles a picture of Earth. When she was younger, Min-Jung loved to draw with her colored pencils, the Faber-Castell ones her grandmother gave her for her tenth birthday. But there are no colored pencils on board the spaceship, so her daughter uses her finger on an old tablet app.

Bo-Young draws a slightly lopsided circle--still impressive for a six-year-old by Min-Jung’s standards--and colors the ocean blue and the land purple.

I married too young. I was fresh out of high school and still going by “Mighty Girl,” even though I was technically a woman. HOUSE—the Homeland Organization of Undercover Super Enforcers—assigned Mighty Man, one of their first recruits, to check out all the places where super-phenomena had been reported and track down more superheroes for the program. Tales of a seventeen-year-old meteor crater and mighty me drew him to Anytown, Illinois.

Everything in this place keeps time with the tattoo of the drum. The groan of the oars, the rattling of chains, the crack of the lash, all of it in the same cadence. I even find my climb to the deck above matching the tempo of the rhythmic pounding.

No one knows where the metronomic sound comes from. I have long grown familiar with the shape of my prison over the decades of my captivity; combed over every inch, memorized the grain of every wooden plank. There is no drum here, no unoccupied space within which it might be concealed. But the beat impels us all the same.