The air was crisp and clean. A breeze played over her face. She sighed, content

If anyone were to tell her this place was all artifice, a manufactured facsimile of a world now lost, she wouldn’t believe them.

Tell me how this sky, these trees, this landscape is not real. It was the only reality she had ever known

Earth, the old earth, long since stripped bare and destroyed. Ancient history, no longer taught in schools and barely remembered

This haven, this shangri-la was as real as anything sje had ever known