She could hear him laugh at her last question, if only barely audible over the engine and whizzing of traffic as he gracefully swerved his way past much slower vehicles. "I'm going to show and not tell! More exciting that way! Besides, we'll go somewhere nice to eat!" His voice needed to be raised in order to be audible, even through the shortrange radio receivers that linked the helmets together for communication's sake.
The further they seemed to speed along this route, the more the towering spires around them started to shrink and dwindle, as if crouching over in embarrassment of what was ahead. Unsightly pits littered the gravel and sand, dug into by large machines that drained the ground of whatever raw materials it could find for fertilizer. The tall and somewhat rustic designs of buildings seemingly relapsed into smokestacks and chimneys, spouting endless black fumes into the air. Like a predator chewing off the last specks of meat from a bone, if there was even a single substance of value on this planet, then odds were it was being exploited.
And this was saying nothing about the state of people on this planet. The frequency of people being put to hard labor in uniforms that bore serial numbers had increased sharply. Their status as undesirables meant they were pushed further into the outskirts rather than visible. The decrepit reality of this House, hidden in plain view.
