I move quickly to catch up to him, weighted by the jug of water sloshing at my side, my ribs throbbing with every step as the adrenaline wears off. As everything starts to sink back into focus.
“They’re outlaws,” he adds, not looking at me. “But some call themHeretics, orTheorists.”
I stare at Pa, my teeth still clamped shut at the back—angry for what he wouldn’t let me do. Angry that we have almost nothing left. “Why?”
“Because they believe in something we don’t.”
I narrow my gaze, not understanding.
He pauses at the edge of the trees, just beyond the river, and turns to look back at me. I sense the irritation in him, the loss of everything he has, and he clears his throat. “They don’t think any of us will survive.”
ARIES, Alpha Arietis+23° 27’ 44”
The first Astronomer charted the constellations that already had names—the oldest ones that had been written about well before her time. But on clear nights, when she gazed toward the western hemisphere, she noted a part of the sky she didn’t recognize: stars that had never been observed or mapped or written down.
So she marked them on paper and labeled them: Lorox and Pala, Harebelle and Allium. She used wildflowers and the names of characters in books she read as a child.
But her neighbors—who had often ignored her work, her nighttime vocation of studying the sky—had begun to show signs of something.
An illness: a cough in the lungs and a fluttering in the eyes and ears.
Consumption.
It started slowly, as things like this often do. Tiptoeing up the back of sunburnt necks; a line of sweat on the spine while harvesting crops; a shiver across the vision when raising a hand to block the wavy, setting sun. A shiver that becomes a blur, a cloud, until it becomes something else: blindness. The itch of fear came next, the panicked whispers with neighbors outside barber shops and barn doors; a murmur at kitchen counters that something doesn’t feel right, hands shaking while flouring bread for the oven; while tuckingtoddlers into bed at night, tiny voices complaining of acracklein their ears. A rumble in their chests.
A sickness had emerged, whether from the land or one another, or something else—people were beginning to die.
THREE
The sky is a map,Mom would say, sweeping her hands above our heads to make her point.It can tell you where you’re going, and how to get back.
She would spin me around in circles, my eyes pinched closed, a dizzying blur of black, then tell me to locate the pole star, the one that marks true south. From there, she would explain, I could navigate my way anywhere.
But tonight, the sky is smudged out by heavy, moisture-rich rainclouds and dense evergreens. We do not follow the road back down along the river—the way we’d come. Pa says the men might camp on the road, so it isn’t safe. Instead we trek up into the forest behind the cabin, following a single animal track that cuts a line through the trees and rocky terrain, the earthy scent of moss and pine sap thick in the air, in my nostrils. A dampness to everything.
I can’t wait to be free of this dark forest, to once again see the stars, to orient myself against the backdrop of the sky. Without it, I feel dangerously untethered. A restive, fidgety ache knocking behind my eyes.
I tuck my hands into my pockets, feeling for the secret bottle ofaspirin—still there. This single bottle, and the crate of tonic that Pa carries, is all that’s left. He is quiet while we walk—no more humming hisroaming songs, and I sense the heavy meaning behind his silence.
He has lost everything: Odie, the wagon, and his entire supply in the miners’ cabin. All of it gone. Taken. By men with marks burned into their forearms. Men who almost took me.
Dawn breaks over the horizon just as we finally step free from the forest. But the landscape is still a rugged series of rocky hills rolling out ahead of us, and a light, drizzling rain begins to fall.
“Do you know where we are?” I ask.
Pa’s eyes are dim, and he shakes his head.
We reach a wide stretch of prairie where the yellowing grass hisses and thrashes in the morning wind. And we keep walking.
I can’t help but think of home, the valley, of what I left behind.Home.A word that is so far away, it feels untouchable, lost all its meaning. I had wanted to be brave—the daughter that Mom needed me to be—but the world is sicker than I knew, more cruel than I wanted to believe, and I can’t seem to shake the chill that has burrowed into my bones. But there’s no turning back now.Nothing to go back to. I am the last one, the only one.
If I don’t find the Architect, Mom’s death will have been for nothing.
I have no choice but to keep going.
Pa and I push on through the meadow, heads down, unprotected from the rain, where fat honeybees retreat from the downpour back to their hive high in the branches of a nearby oak tree, their double rosebud wings beating rhythmically. They make a soft hum while they float through the air, a singsong like a nightingale bird, notes carriedup into the downpour.They didn’t always sing, I remember Mom telling me when I young, when I’d chase the bees up the shore of the river to the far ridge, trying to catch them in my cupped palms. Bees used to buzz silently—but now they warble and chirp like a bird.
Pa looks back at me—my pace slower than his.
