Our planet held so much promise when our ancestors—the colonists—first arrived. With dark soil and more water than the planet they were fleeing. And most important, air they could breathe: nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide. The perfect measure of sustainable life. A rare planet, similar to their own. They were the ones who volunteered—doctors, carpenters, metal workers, astronomers and architects, meant to build towns and colonies and crops—they were pioneers, homesteaders who set out into this bleak, cold frontier with a ship stockpiled with seeds for crops, livestock for farms, even weapons, everything they’d need to begin again. They made the journey into the darkness, to the very edge of their known galaxy.
But they weren’t the only ones.
Two ships left their home planet, two hopeful colonies sent to two life-sustaining planets on far ends of a galaxy. In case one of them was too hostile, unsurvivable. But my ancestors got the shit luck of landing on the bad planet, the one with a sickness. An illness that would kill us slowly. Eventually.
The first colonists didn’t know their new planet hovered so dangerously close to a black bottomless hole that was swallowing up the sky, a whorling silent mass that emanated too much dark matter from its dark, dark center to sustain life on the planet for long. And it would only get worse, year after year, as the black hole drifted closer, gobbling up all light in its path, until our bodies were comprised of more dark matter than anything else.
They didn’t know that the shadow in the sky was to blame.
So the first Astronomer and the first Architect made a plan.
But I reached the ship too late… and now I wish I’d never left. I should have been the one to stay, to die, to sacrifice myself. It should be Noah on this ship—someone brave, someone who can survive. I hate myself for it: all the little moments I can’t take back like blades carving me open, peeling back my flesh, just like Holt wanted to do at the schoolhouse. But in the end, Noah killed Holt,his own father. He died protecting me, as he always said he would.
And I broke my promise to Cricket.
Now… I’m the only one left, the rot inside me more than I can bear. I close my eyes, but I don’t dream. There’s no hope left for dreams, for thoughts beyond the smooth, silver walls of this cell. I wake, and I stare numbly out at the dark: the beautiful, wretched galaxy that I should love. I should trace the stars’ formations on the glass, study how they shift as I move past them, an expanding kaleidoscope of starlight.
But I feel nothing.
Only the ache that twists around my heart, pinching, cracked wide in my chest.
I’ve lost everything.
My ears ring, then fall quiet. The pulsing at my temples disappears. The subtle nagging of pain that has always lived inside me dulls and softens, until it’s hardly there at all.
The black hole that was making us sick is now slipping away behind me.
Hours pass.
I start to wonder if this lifeboat will make it to the other colony. Maybe the first Astronomer got it wrong, the calculations—maybe the other planet is much too far away, and I will die out here, among the stars.
A death I deserve.
A part of me wants it—begs for it. This metal coffin.
I slide my hands into my pockets and feel for the flat piece of paper, pulling it out. I hold it curved in my trembling palm, my finger tracing the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and it feels suddenly ridiculous, useless. A thing I have kept because I thought it reminded me of Mom. But it’s an image of a place I’ve never seen, and never will. I wish instead, I had a postcard of the valley, of the cabin and the river. Of Noah, the evening we swam in the lake and he touched my lips. The night we lay together on the floor of our room inside the hotel, his frame hovering over me, fingers tracing the marks on my flesh. I want to hold these moments in my palm. I want to go back and live them again.
In the end, I found Noah. But I wish I’d had him from the start.
I loved him too late.
I let the postcard fall from my fingertips to the floor, worthless, and I pinch my eyes closed, letting myself cry.
Letting the wretched pain heave through me.
Pain andpainand nothing else.
I wake suddenly, sitting up, hands pressing to the window, and call out, “Noah!” Tears stain my cheeks, the grief waking up inside me, the last moments before Noah yanked Holt over the edge, finding me even in my sleep.
But all around me, the ship begins to make a strange whirring sound, like a windmill turning too fast in a spring gust.
I pull myself up straight, wiping at my eyes—the hunger and thirst a deep, clawed ache, a thing I can no longer ignore. But out beyond the dark, something is drawing closer.
A planet. Round and unnaturally teal blue, a storm of white clouds blurring over a third of the surface.
Theother place.
The tiny ship vibrates as I get closer, rattling through the upper atmosphere, plunging, falling.Crashing. Maybe it’ll end like this. Quick and fiery and blunt.
