Sunless

Lyle Hopwood

Tilting his head to help staunch the blood streaming from his nose, Tomey caught sight of the orbital funicular, tangerine glints strung along a barely visible thread in the yellow sky. At this distance the tower looked like a trailing cobweb, not a sky railroad that connected the world’s surface with interplanetary space. Or, as Tomey thought of it, the money funnel.

Down that silver skein poured all the wealth that came to New Hawaii. Tourists in their thousands descended, passed through the casinos, bars and restaurants then ascended again, leaving their money behind. The space elevator was the brainchild of one man, Kerrial Choudhary. It showered him with money even as it destroyed the planet’s agrarian economy.

Tomey, originally engineered as a fieldworker, quickly grasped Choudhary’s genius insight and reinvented himself as a professional gambler, diverting funnel money to his own credit account. He worked the smaller pits and game-rooms, eventually levelling up to ply his card tricks in Choudhary’s own city-sized casino, the Hanging Gardens.

Right now, Tomey was sitting on his ass on the filthy concrete at the end of the Hanging Gardens’ service tunnel where the massive dumpsters lurked, his head tilted toward the sky. Two bouncers wiped their hands clean of his thin blue blood as a third primed the entry alarms with his biometrics. At least, he thought, they didn’t tear my jacket. Black leather, the jacket was his prized possession.

He called a cab and heaved himself into the passenger bay, wishing that there was a driver to assist him. Deadweights, including luggage, drunks and those beaten by the Mob, used to be the driver’s responsibility.

‘Where would you like to go, sir?’ said the cab.

‘My apartment.’

‘You don’t have an apartment, sir.’

‘Hell I don’t.’ He lifted his arm, paused briefly as he caught a glimpse of the bruises darkening his forest-green skin, and checked his wrist chip. The casino’s muscle had got to his apartment landlord. The locks had already been changed. ‘I guess I don’t. That was quick, Choudhary, you bastard.’

‘Sir?’

‘Not you. Take me to the bar on Frith Street.’

‘That area is characterized as unsafe for agricultural workers such as yourself.’

‘Just do it.’

The euphemism ‘agricultural workers’ infuriated him. Locals called him ‘Greenie’ and never failed to let him know how much they despised him. The tourists had no idea that this peculiar prejudice existed, which meant he’d been able to gain their confidences and inexorably win their money. No fraud. He’d taken care to be borderline-lawful in all his endeavours. An ability to memorize cards and odds and faces wasn’t illegal. Tomey let the House earn its cut and only skimmed a little from the punters. His caution proved insufficient. He’d gone too far, and the House had reacted accordingly.

‘It’s bad for business,’ one of the bouncers told him as he kneed him in the groin. ‘You little greenie shits put the tourists off. We like tourists. Tourists are money.’

Luckily for Tomey, he didn’t have external testicles, so the kneeing didn’t have the intended effect. It was one of a suite of genetic modifications. His skin was packed with neo-chloroplasts, so he could thrive under greenhouse lights, making nutrients from carbon dioxide and water. His thrifty designers had given him the same capabilities as the plants he was created to tend, reducing the need to provide food for workers. His hair resembled a mane of fine bristles, filled with a cocktail of chlorophyll and xanthophyll, glowing chartreuse in sunlight. Watery blue blood filled his veins, and his two-chambered heart distributed the oxygen made in his skin along with that from his lungs. Some of that blood still ran from a cut on his cheek, a sapphire streak.

---

The cab stopped and Tomey hobbled out, raising his wrist chip to the payment square. To his relief, the pad flashed green. They hadn’t yet disabled his credit. Above him, much closer now, the bright beads of light glinted from the orbital funicular. From here it looked as thick as his finger. He’d heard the base measured four hundred meters across, deep foundations anchoring a rope of fibres that led to the orbital station thousands of kilometres beyond.

The Frith Street Bar was where kitchen workers and housekeepers relaxed after work. Someone had whitewashed the lower half of the bar windows to prevent pedestrians peering inside. There was no neon, and little sign of street-sweeping or garbage collection. He climbed a short flight of steps to the door.

There would be people here who could find him an apartment that would take his cryptocurrency – if, as he expected, Choudhary’s people froze his bank accounts. There would be other cardsharps, who might give clues to smaller casinos not affiliated with the Hanging Gardens, where he could restart his trade.

Inside no music played. Orange sunlight filtered into the cavernous dance room from skylights above. Workers played poker at a couple of tables in the corner. A bartender sterilized glasses with a dazzling UV-wand while watching a sports screen, and at the bar, on a tall stool, sat a beautiful woman, who looked over her shoulder and smiled at him. He smiled back.

He put a wad of notes on the bar and signalled the bartender, who briefly turned to look at him and dismissed him with a single glance.

‘I have crypto,’ he said to her back. ‘Or credit. Take your pick.’

‘You see the sign? Right to refuse service. I’m refusing it, greenie. Leave or I’ll call for help.’

‘Help’ would be syndicate people – Choudhary’s men. He was trying to think of a reply when one of the card guys came up behind him.

‘You want the greenie out of here?’ the man said to the server. He grabbed Tomey’s arm. Exasperated at the way his day was going, Tomey jabbed him in the solar plexus with two stiff fingers. The man doubled over, long strands of ginger hair from his comb-over falling across his face.

The woman sitting at the bar shouted, ‘Tomey!’ He looked around to see another man behind him swing a knife. He dodged, the blade tearing through his jacket sleeve as it came down. He grabbed the man’s wrist, banging it on the counter to loosen the weapon. Tomey pried it out of his hand as ginger-combover man straightened up. Too bruised to fight both opponents at once, Tomey turned the knife on its original owner, burying it in his neck, kicked ginger in the nuts and looked around for somewhere to run.

‘Tomey,’ the woman said again. She caught his arm and he let her rush him into a backroom.

‘How do you know my name?’ he said, checking his clothes. It surprised him to see so much blood, and not all of it the thick, dark blood of humankind.

‘It’s not a secret,’ she said.

She was a Kuru. Horns resembling those of a ram, eight of them, curled tightly over her skull like a helmet. She had ten eyes, eight black in two groups of four and two larger, more human eyes beneath.

‘Nice jacket,’ she said, indicating it with a tip of her horn.

‘This?’ he tugged it to point it out.

She smiled, revealing rows of sharp teeth, and it sank in that he’d said a stupid thing. She couldn’t have meant anything else.

‘Kind of matches yours.’ She wore a black jacket as well. His mind foggy from the morning’s beating followed by a whirlwind knife fight, he ran out of things to say. And things to do.

‘You need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Like, yesterday.’

‘I get you, Sister. I thought I’d merely been bum-rushed from Hanging Gardens, but I guess I’m a targeted man anywhere Choudhary has eyes.’

‘Whatever. You’re also a murderer.’

‘What?’ With an effort he recalled the details. ‘But he attacked me first.’

‘You think anyone’s going to take your word for it? A greenie? You’re looking at fifteen to twenty. Midnight Rambler’s docking in a couple hours. You need to be on it when it launches.’

‘At the orbital funicular?’

‘There’s no other way off this rock.’

‘I’m sure he’s found all my credit by now.’ He tapped his wrist chip. It flashed up zero. ‘See? Persona non grata.’

As he lowered his arm, a stream of inky blue ran out of his jacket cuff. He felt his shoulder. The knife must have sliced through the jacket and carved a divot in his triceps before he could turn it on its wielder.

‘I should get that seen to,’ he said, hoping that sounded like a macho, funny thing to say.

‘Go to the funicular. I can have someone there to courier you.’

There were sirens outside. The police were a wholly-owned subsidiary of Choudhary’s mob, though that wasn’t what the official org chart said. Electronic commands issued from phones and sound chips, including his: Get out on the sidewalk. Face the wall.

‘I c-can’t take a ship off-planet,’ he said, his voice cracking with stress. ‘Customs and excise go through every passenger, bag, and chip before they seal the ship.’

‘Were you born on New Hawaii?’

‘Huh? Made. Twenty years on the farms, indentured servitude. I—’

She interrupted, ‘Your only records are on the ground. When you loft, you’ll be undocumented. Free to start afresh.’ Her spider eyes glinted as she opened the door and pushed him down to keep his head low. She took him through the kitchen, steel benches hung with sculptural rows of aluminium and copper vessels. They reached a warped plastic door that wedged stubbornly against a cracked tile. Freeing it with a powerful tug, she gestured down the stairs at an alley.

‘I can’t buy passage on a ship,’ he reiterated.

‘Just go to the ground-level fence.’

‘There’s a ground level?’

‘Someone will meet you there.’

---

There was a ground level, ringed by a zinc chain-link fence such as a farmer might have around a yard for his furloughed tractors. Inside, there sprawled a vast marshalling yard, its outer slopes held at bay with piles of magenta riprap. Humps of brown grass struggled between the rocks. Combustion engines steamed in the gloom between plaited railroad tracks dotted and dashed with motionless train cars. The air reeked of lubricant unsuccessfully disguised with citrus oil. In the centre, the vast footing of the orbital funicular clung to the bedrock of New Hawaii. The base was a metallic mountain crammed with machinery, but unlike a mountain, it had no summit. It climbed into the sky until it vanished in yellow haze.

On the ground, the Midnight Rambler finished reprovisioning and made ready to depart. The fuel lines snaked around it disengaged with satisfied snaps and retracted one by one. It was a long metal cylinder, blunt ended and garlanded with metal stems and rods. Steam vented from the portside tubes in a continuous scream, filling the air with the smell of overheated coolant. Hard radiation had burned its hull blue-black.

A descending ship dropped below the clouds, the exposed tubes over the hull blazing orange in the sunlight. As it halted, it detached from the downline cables. A ripple shook the base of the tower and a sinuous echo shivered back up into the darkening sky overhead. The setting sun caused the snaking skein to shine like a spirochaete screwing into the warehouses of New Hawaii. A metallic clang akin to a devil’s cowbell shimmered down the track from high above – the wave generated by the Rambler’s counterweight ship as she glommed onto the track thousands of kilometres above.

Apart from the beauty of the tower itself, curving backward into infinity, the tilt-up buildings and scrub-grass could have been anywhere outside the city centre.

---

He knew the city-sized passenger concourse was underground. Embarkation was impossible here. He turned from the fence and found himself enveloped in the softest leather jacket he’d ever felt. It took him a moment to figure out he’d backed into a person. But not a human, or a Kuru or a greenie. He’d stumbled into the wings of a Devadip.

The Devadip stepped back, the black skin of his wings folding neatly as he held his clawed hands at rest, crossed in front of his chest as if praying. His head and body were covered in dark brown fur, the doggy appearance of his face offsetting the nightmare look of the sheath of black leather skin. He shook his head, pitying Tomey.

A flash came from a black cavity between the ship’s steam vents. For a moment, Tomey thought there had been an unscheduled ignition and the docked ship would blow apart. But answering flashes came from the other vessel – Morse code.

‘They’re ready for us on the Rambler,’ the Devadip said.

---

No one spotted them as they climbed the fence and made it to the block-wide sinews of the cables. The Devadip located a metal ladder and climbed onto one of the lines. Following his lead, Tomey saw the cables carried on down to their anchors in the living rock. He tried not to think how deep that might be as he shinned up one of the threads spun into the skein. He levered his way on to a service catwalk and from there to the hull of the ship. Here, the base of the tower looked almost organic, an ancient oak with twisted trunks surging from tangled roots.

Only a short distance above his head, the fibres coalesced into cables three or four meters in diameter and the tower settled down into a regular configuration. There were wide cables to haul ships into orbit and thinner service cords dragging elevators and equipment. Metal trees displayed signal lights – green and yellow, which were not lit, and another one. He knew the last one must be red, ‘no go’, and that it must be shining, though it looked charcoal grey to his eyes. The Rambler was attached with magnetic clamps to the berthing cable and gantries provided walkways to the loading doors. The Devadip stood on a hatch latch and wormed his way behind the silver insulation of the lateral drive, near the stern of the ship. Tomey followed him.

‘How cold does it get on the outside?’ Tomey asked. He only had the leather jacket and a pair of pants, but then the Devadip had only his leather wings.

‘It’s warm,’ the Devadip said. ‘All this machinery. Won’t get cold ‘til there’s no atmosphere for conduction. You be inside by then.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going down, Tomey.’ He shook the thin sheets of his flying membrane. ‘I just come here for ride up an’ flight. Oh, an’ collect my money from Miss Marisa for ferrying your kind.’

Tomey shifted his feet and tried not to look down at the refuelling vehicles crawling on the ground below. ‘Marisa – the Kuru woman?’

‘Her, yes.’ The Devadip’s pointed tongue flickered out to lick his lips. ‘She tol’ me take you for little ride.’

A thunderous rapping commenced and the whole ship shook as if it had been hit with a giant’s club. A complex vibration began, some as high-pitched as sound waves, some slow undulations like sea waves, and then, the longest slowest movement approximating an earthquake underfoot.

‘The Rambler’s clamped on the upline,’ Tomey’s companion said. ‘It take time for the shock wave to die down, then we start moving.’

‘Then what?’

‘Customs mens are leaving now,’ he said.

Tomey followed his gaze. Two gantries had retracted, and a team of uniformed men disembarked across the last one. Their walkway withdrew, and the light tree’s signals changed from colourless to green. A ‘go’ signal.

The low hum from the inward, starboard side changed pitch and the noise rose in a screaming, clanging crescendo. Billows of steam issued from beneath the Rambler and the ship began to ascend the funicular. The ground fell away slowly, the trucks first resembling a collection of toy trucks in mud, then mere coloured squares on a charcoal background. The steam blowing past them transformed from yellow to blue.

‘Regretting it yet?’ yipped the man-bat.

‘Just glad to get away,’ Tomey said, wondering what prompted his question.

‘Hope you have a head for heights!’ the Devadip yelped.

Tomey caught a glimpse of a flashlight beam, hurriedly extinguished, and the man-bat started to traverse the side of the vessel.

‘Who is that?’ Tomey asked.

‘Who is who?’ He peered at Tomey’s face. ‘Oh, you see the shutter lights? I thought mens can’t see it. Ultraviolet A. It’s not hurtful.’

As he said it, he made a gesture with his long fingers, as if scratching in sand. Tomey realized it was an off-worlder’s beckon. He placed his feet carefully on the network of life support tubing, grabbing at handholds as he moved from the cable side of the Rambler’s hull to the outward-facing side. The ship slid upwards, cables screeching.

Soon, the ground vehicles were no longer visible. To the west, green veins of copper ore shot through the orange rock of the treeless Lono Hills. The mangled ground formed a circle near the foot of the funicular, the green, white and yellow squares of farms filled the horizon to the east, and to the south the garden-roofed skyscrapers of the city flourished like a jungle streaked with black crevasses. The cold, hard metal of a liquid oxygen pipe burned Tomey’s hands, and he switched his grip, cursing under his breath.

‘Here,’ the Devadip said, turning the latch of an egress hatch as the lingering steam in the air changed direction. On the ground it had risen around them. As the ship gained speed, it appeared to sink down. The hatch opened and Tomey swung inside. He put a hand out to help the Devadip.

The bat-man shook his head. ‘I come for flight, me. You go inside now, greenie. Air is getting thin – soon we all be inside or go down. All animals choke above us.’ He put one hand to his throat and stuck his sharp tongue out to mime lack of air.

‘Down?’ Tomey remembered he had said that before. It hadn’t registered until now.

The Devadip jumped. Over the keening of tortured air from the lift mechanism, he heard the thump as the membrane of skin tightened over Devadip’s bones and filled with thinning atmosphere. His taut black wings shone in the glorious light of the sun. He banked to face the tower and wave at Tomey, before setting his course for down, down, down.

Tomey dragged the hatch closed and secured it, shutting out the noise and bitter steam.

---

As he turned away from the hatch, a light blinded him.

‘Going somewhere, greenie?’ a voice said.

Tomey recognized a local accent. A crew-cut human male stood in the equipment-packed compartment inside the hatch. He held an air pistol, a ship-rated weapon for taking out people without taking out the hull.

‘Ah,’ he began, uselessly. ‘Uh, Marisa sent me.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ the man said. ‘And me, I’ve never seen a green man close up before. Up there, that weird stuff you call hair will come in handy. We need you in the orbital greenhouses.’ He held up a zip fastener. ‘Take your jacket off so I can tie your hands behind your back.’

Several puzzling things became suddenly clear to Tomey. The sudden, almost scripted bar brawl. The way the Kuru woman knew his name and selflessly pledged to ‘help’ him, even checking if he had off-world ID. Her sympathy, bordering on flirtation. The Devadip asking him if he regretted boarding the ship. The exchange of UV signals in the ship’s rigging. He sighed. Everyone has a hustle. Theirs was picking up undocumented drifters, or maybe everyone Choudhary threw out of the credit system, and smuggling them into servitude in the orbital habitats.

He had his jacket half down his arms now, heavy with the inky blood that soaked the lining.

‘You’re lucky,’ the man with the gun said. ‘Being a greenie. It’s better than working in a mine.’ He laughed. ‘Or maybe that’s where you’ll end up anyway. In the dark, do you turn yellow like a housepl—?’

He didn’t finish his taunt because Tomey, keeping a fist in one inside-out sleeve, swung the jacket hard at his head, knocking him sideways. He grabbed the gun.

‘You can’t get away,’ the man said, blood dripping from his scalp where the zip had hit. ‘We’re six kilometres high and accelerating fast.’

Could he tie the crewman up and hide with the passengers? Tomey hit him with the butt of the gun, laid him on his side, picked up his jacket and left the room, jamming the handle with a tool he found in the fire suppression locker. The passageways were narrow, and the bulkheads frequent, with round sealing hatches hardly large enough to pass through. The sound of the drive motors hammered the metal of the ship as he followed signs for the passenger decks. When he finally found the hatch, it was sealed.

He reasoned that the crew and the passengers must at least mingle physically where food distribution took place, but that would risk the cooks seeing him. A bruised green man leaking blue ichor would raise questions.

Fuck being green.

An idea dawned then, as cloudless as those over New Hawaii’s fields of life-giving Cruciferae.

The ground-rated hatch through which he’d boarded the ship would have sealed itself closed at this altitude. He followed signs to the space-hardened freight airlock, closed the inner door and performed the emergency purge. The decompression almost blew him out of the hatch – he’d forgotten the ship now grazed the edge of space, far higher than the altitude where the Devadip leapt out for his joyride. Exhaling slowly, he watched his last breath stream into the sunlight. He swung his leg over the sill and clambered laboriously over the ship’s body to the mechanism that held it to the cables.

He was half-plant, after all. In full sun a plant takes in carbon dioxide and produces oxygen. His human half produced carbon dioxide and required oxygen. He knew he had not been designed for suitless spacewalks, but now wasn’t a good time to work though the equations.

He climbed towards the top of the Rambler. It lay vertical against the cables, so it was possible in this combination of gravity and centripetal force to swing himself hand-over-hand up the silver piping adorning the hull. The uppermost part of the ship was a flat platform, where he could plan his next move.

He found not breathing unexpectedly difficult. Oxygen entered his bloodstream and carbon dioxide diffused out, but evolution had developed reflexes in humans lacking air, and his modifications had not excised them. The need to breathe pounded at him. It took a long time, sitting in the glare of the naked sun, to suppress panic and get to his feet again.

Standing at the edge of the flat bow, the geometry of his predicament became apparent and he realized that if he lost his balance, he could fall for fifteen minutes, breaking the sound barrier with his ass, conscious all the way down.

He hauled himself over to the enormous magnetic coil around the upline fibres and assessed the jump to the stationary centre of the tower. He leapt for the upline cable, then jumped for the service cable, which moved at half the speed. Now he was within reach of a service deck, which were built at kilometre intervals in the centre of the tower. They were considerably larger than the nose of the ship. Hanging on to the cable with his hands and feet, he eventually came level with a platform. He leapt for it, tucking and rolling to kill his momentum.

The whole tower radiated heat, and the metal deck was warm to the touch. Floodlights illuminated the surface as he landed on it, having sensed his presence and assumed he was a technician. He stopped to catch his…well, not his breath. To wait for the oxygen debt to dissipate. The Rambler still travelled relatively slowly up the tower. Somewhere a hundred kilometres above him the counterweight ship was equally slowly winching down.

He picked the sunniest spot on the platform, tried to shut the thin shriek and bone-aching rattle of the cables out of his mind, and lost consciousness.

---

He woke up in a pool of blood. The sudden jerk as he’d grabbed the moving service cable had reopened his wound. He spotted the counterweight ship through the cable structure, high above him, moving down fast. He walked across the platform to the half-speed downbound service line. He swung his injured arm experimentally – and doubled over with pain. He would not be able to grab the cable. He waited for the downbound ship to come level, legs shaking. The cables were racing through their magnetic rings beside his body and their ancillary machinery seemed bound to swing momentarily and crush him.

The downbound ship pushed a superheated wave of air ahead of it that carried a screeching wail even in the ragged remnant of atmosphere. The ship reached his level and slid on down in a rush of wind and heated metal. Eventually, the flat stern came level. He prepared to jump, but before he could make his trembling legs obey, the ship was a dozen meters below, heading on down. He watched it recede with mounting despair.

Hours passed. Sunset came and went.

He crouched motionless on the floodlit central platform. So long as the bright white sun came back to warm him, he might live.

A night and a day he stayed there, hypoxic at the edge of space, thinking about life and death, and the smile of a Kuru woman with a spider’s eyes.

---

The rattle of cables and the clatter of machinery awakened him from a dream of cutting and tying bunches of beetroots that became the heads of Choudhary’s men crowned with green leaves. He climbed to his knees and peered between the black carbon struts at the ground so far away that mountains resembled ant heaps. A grating sound, like the scrape of a metal key on a taut wire, issued from the downline and a rattle shook the cable. The upline answered with a deep thrum and rumble like a mine’s rock crusher.

Another ship had provisioned on the ground, clamped on, and was rising from below. Its matching counterweight was coming down. If he jumped for the ship on the downline, he would have to make a terrifying leap to a rapidly diminishing circle, a task he had already considered without success. The upbound ship would reach him first. If he tried to catch it, he would be jumping for the ship’s flat nose coming towards where he stood. The upbound ship headed for unknown ports, but the downline would always lead to New Hawaii and Choudhary’s men.

No contest.

When the flat nose of the upbound ship neared, he prepared for the transfer. His wound had stabilized, or so he told himself. He stepped over to the half-speed line, grabbed hold as a pole dancer might, and as the front end of the upbound ship became an unmissably large platform, he jumped for it.

And missed.

For a frantic moment, he scrabbled at the smooth metal bow of the ship, lost all remaining traction, and began to fall. Centrifugal force and gravity combined to leave him completely disoriented. He had no idea which way to twist, but the decision was taken from him as a large life support duct came up under him and smacked him hard on the ass, wedging his legs between itself and the ship’s hull. The pain eventually died down and he started a traverse across the exterior. After a dizzying few minutes of bad light, freezing temperatures and poor oxygen saturation, he found an emergency airlock switch, hit it and waited for what seemed like hours for it to close the inner door, depressurize, and open the outer door.

---

Inside, he hid for the thirteen minutes it took for the first ultrasonic cleaner he found to wash the blood and oil off his clothes. Then he dressed in his laundry-fresh shirt and black pants, shined leather boots and supple jacket, swept his freshly-showered green needles back from his eyes, and followed signs to the passenger galley. He pushed open the swinging doors and strode with a high roller’s feigned confidence into the ship’s restaurant. A nameplate over the back bar gave the ship’s name – Sans Soleil, literally the Sunless. He bared his wrist, then, thinking better of it, ripped the lining of his precious leather jacket to remove one of his cryptocurrency keys. He showed it to the barman and asked for a potato vodka.

The man scanned the chip and his eyes widened. ‘There’s quite a lot of value here, sir. Regulations state it must be deposited with the purser for safekeeping.’

‘Sure.’

He made the transfer. The ship’s line no doubt paid the barman a bonus to find quasi-legal credit and deposit it with the purser. No problem; he had plenty more glued inside the jacket. Up above, there’d be a hacker who could wipe the ID from his wrist chip.

He took his drink to a table near a porthole.

There was a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. She had eight black eyes, two human eyes, and horns curved back over her skull like the golden mean, but it wasn’t Marisa. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled.

He smiled back, picked up his drink and went over. Like the lady said, he was undocumented, free to start afresh. ∎

---

Lyle Hopwood, originally from the UK, now lives in the US, where she worked as a director of medical regulatory affairs. Her reading tastes have always run to speculative fiction and fantasy. Reading was not enough, so she joined the conversation herself. She has had short stories published in magazines including Interzone, Eldritch Science, Edge Detector, Back Brain Recluse, Aurealis and others. Another is coming up in BFS Horizons. Her short stories have also appeared in two German anthologies. Her non-fiction credits include pieces in Science Fiction Eye and a chapter in a clinical laboratory textbook. She lives in Southern California with a holographer, her herptiles and her collection of Kalanchoe.

Juliana Pinho is a Brazilian illustrator who has recently immigrated to the US to live with her beautiful wife. Find more of her work at Behance.

---