“Oh my God,” she whispered.
He played another sound, this one was the sound ofcars, of buses driving. Another sound wasrain, of the ocean, of waves crashing.
“And the images?” she asked, excited.
Kirov swiped on his Coms and dragged aphotographonto the screen.
Lainey stood from the table on shaking legs, approaching. It was an image of numbers, of mathematics. Kirov swiped again and another image showed, a picture of a mother breastfeeding her baby. The next was the UN building, the next one after that showed cars in traffic, and then an old photograph ofEarthappeared.
“This is your planet?”
“Y-yes,” Lainey whispered, overwhelmed, happy, homesick.
Kirov flipped through other images: a book, an airplane taking off, a woman with a microscope. He stopped on a black and white diagram of a pregnant woman and a man, staring at it intently.
He paused only for a moment before the next photograph was…sheet musicand a violin.
“Stop,” she whispered, getting closer to the screen.Notes. Actual notes. She could read them better than she could read words.
“Is this your instrument?” he asked, peering at the violin.
“No,” she said. “But it’s a beautiful instrument nonetheless, one I’ve played before.”
“There are other images, other sounds,” Kirov explained, turning his attention back to her. “Many of them that were uploaded and then forgotten.”
“Kirov,” she said, her suspicions confirmed, “I think you found the Golden Record.”
“The Golden Record?” he asked, frowning.
She’d read about it once. She’d been interested in the music NASA had put into space.
“It was launched in a probe called Voyager. It was a collection of sounds and images and greetings in different languages spoken on Earth. They put it all on there, hoping to find an audience,” she explained, looking up at him. “It was supposed to take over 30 or 40,000 years before it got close to another system. But someone found it long before that.”
He absorbed that information like a sponge and inclined his head. “Tev. There are many advanced species with access to that technology.”
“There was more music on Voyager,” she said, hope rising in her chest. “They put on Beethoven and Mozart and Bach. I know they did.”
“It is why I brought you here,” he said. “I wanted to see if your piano sounds were among them, so I can begin creating your instrument.”
Lainey inhaled a sharp breath, deep affection warming her chest.
“My instrument,” she repeated softly.
“Tev,” he murmured, pulling her closer. “I promised you, did I not? That night at the base of thefacev.”
The night he’d taken her to their little meadow, with the pink fireflies and the stream that shimmered with moonstones and the blue moss that felt like velvet against her bare skin. The night they’d been intimate for the first time, when she’d first kissed him.
Lainey shivered withthatmemory. That night had frightened her because she’d realized just how deeply she could fall for Kirov.
That night he’d stolen a piece of her heart and he’d been taking little pieces ever since.
When had she started falling in love with him? She didn’t know. Not truly. It might’ve been that night, or it may have been when she first saw him, bathed and magnificent in moonlight, a fantasy made flesh.
Or it may have been all the other moments after that.
“Yes,” she whispered, looking up at him. It hadn’t been so long ago, but somehow she felt like it’d been ages. She felt like she’d known Kirov for a lot longer than she truly had, as if time moved differently on Luxiria, as if time moved differently betweenthem. “I remember.”
Kirov’s eyes warmed, softened in a way that she knew was only meant for her.
