Then I stopped hearing her voice.
She was gone.
And it was strange, because her voice was like a thread that kept me connected to my life on Earth, but the thread was getting thinner and thinner, and I started to just want to stay where I was. I was comfortable there, and I had my sister to keep me company.
Earth had given me lots of headaches, I had come up against so many obstacles in my path, and then there was the shooting at school, which had ruined everything. Why should I go back there?
Then I heard her voice—her beautiful voice echoed again somewhere. Or maybe it was all in my head?
Thiago, please, come back. Come back to me, please.
I looked up into the sky, and a drop fell on my face.
Did it rain on Miller’s planet?
“Those are tears,” my sister said.
She had come out of nowhere and taken my hand.
“Tears?” I asked.
She nodded. “They’re hers. Kami’s,” Lucy said, as if she had just seen her the day before, or as if she were seeing her right now.
“How do you know?”
“I just do,” she said, shrugging. “She wants you to go back.”
At first, I didn’t say anything. I just let the rain soak my face, my hair, my clothes, and then I knew it. “It was you, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Lucy smiled. “What do you mean, it was me?”
I kneeled and looked her straight in the eyes. “It was you who guided me through the school. It was you who got Kam and her brother out of there. Am I right?”
Lucy nodded.
“I knew I could never be that lucky on my own.”
“They shot you in the head,” my sister said.
“And yet I’m still alive…here…with you…on Miller’s planet…”
“Where?” she asked, laughing.
I didn’t reply, and she continued, “This isn’t a planet, dummy.”
“What is it, then, smarty-pants?” I asked.
After a second without speaking, she answered, “I guess it’s just the place you were supposed to be during this time.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but I didn’t ask for an explanation either. We just watched the rain, quietly sitting next to each other.
“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” she asked.
I looked into her blue eyes and hesitated. “I don’t know…”
