A story that was always already written. Needles and ink pressed into our flesh, moments that brought us here, to this campfire in the cold, shivering trees, far from home.
And with his fingers tracing my lips, my breath against his skin, I know I can’t let myself need him. Want him.Lovehim.
Because in the end…
At the sea…
I will lose him.
URSA MAJOR, Alpha UMa+61° 45’ 03”
It was raining the night she saw it.
The sky was a blistered shade of orange after the storm, but when the clouds receded and the stars shone through with the kind of clarity only possible on cold, damp nights, she found the patch of horizon where no flecks of light glimmered from the dark.
A place where the sky—strangely—held no stars.
She swiveled her telescope to the north, marking the points where the shadow began, and the rest of the sky ended.
There was something up there: a vast, shivering blur of darkness. Hovering, suspended, where it shouldn’t be.
She made notes onto paper, studied the books she kept on a wood shelf above her bed—about anomalies and star sequences and nebulas. Still, she couldn’t be sure what it was. Only that it made her uneasy; it crept into her dreams.
Whatever it was, it shouldn’t be there—a great bottomless depth of nothing. But each night, with every measurement and notation, she realized something else:
It was getting larger.
Leeching across the night sky, spreading like black ink dropped onto soft paper. But it wasn’t just growing—it was getting closer.
Hour by hour, the darkness was filling up the sky.
Swelling. Widening.
Until eventually there would be no stars left.
EIGHT
Asmall town appears suddenly through the windswept evergreens.
But it’s hardly a town at all: only a two-story building that looks like an oversize farmhouse, painted a soft daffodil yellow with wood-framed windows; and two smaller structures built across the dry, dusty street. Three buildings in all.
It’s more of an outpost than a town. Set down in a clearing between trees.
“Have you been through here before?” I ask Noah, my mouth still recalling the feel of his lips on mine last night, under the dark,darksky. We slept for only an hour or two, before the sun began slanting through the trees, and we continued north, until at last reaching this unknown town.
He shakes his head. “No.” But he stands up from the tree line where we’re crouched, and takes a step into the wide green meadow that separates us from the town.
I stay back, holding Odie’s reins. “What are you doing?” I whisper out at him.
“We can’t keep going like this.”
He’s right, we’ve been traveling a full day since we camped in thetrees. We haven’t eaten a thing, or found fresh water. “But we’ll be seen,” I point out.
“Those men are at least a day behind us. We haven’t seen any sign of them. And this town”—he nods across the meadow—“is probably just filled with homesteaders. We’ll get water and food, then move on.”
He holds out a hand to me, his skin like a river under the evening sun, and I take it, stepping into the open.
We cross the meadow, then follow a rough dirt road into town. Odie sniffs at the ground, looking for something edible, then blows out a breath. We could all use a meal, a long drink of water, and a full night’s sleep. On either side of the road, the ground has been marked with wood stakes, numbers painted on each one. “What is it?” I ask.
