“It was a dangerous time to befriend a god,” I admit with a smirk. “You were likely to end up dead and immortalized in the night sky.”
A smile steals across his lips, and his eyes relax at the corners,looking more gray than green in the darkness. With his gaze still on me, he asks, “What else do you see in the sky?” His voice is so quiet, it feels like summer air against my skin. Like an exhale.
“I see my own stories,” I admit, letting myself smile a little. Liking the feeling of his eyes on me, the comfort they bring, as if I am lost in a dream. And I never want to wake.
“What kind of stories?”
“About the past,” I tell him, pulling in my bottom lip, deciding what to say, how much I should reveal. “About the first Astronomer—the stories told by my ancestors, and the story I’m living now.”
His face relaxes even more, a small crease forming between his dark eyebrows. “You think of your life as a story?”
“Every life is a story.” I breathe, filling my lungs with the dry night air. “And our story will belong to someone else someday. They will tell it, write it down, maybe even name stars after us.”
Light finds its way into his eyes, and he exhales. Like my words have nested a feeling of calm in his chest, his eyelids heavy.
I turn back to the sky, finding Tova and Llitha—the stars I don’t point out to him. The ones I keep secret. But their alignment has shifted, inching away, night by night. I try to recall how many days it’s been since they first appeared in the valley. How long have I been traveling? I’ve lost track of time; the hours we slept in the old man’s house feel like a dream. It might have been a full day, a full night, or longer. I can’t be sure.
But time is moving too quickly now.
“How many more days to the sea?” I ask.
He is still, and I wonder if he’s fallen asleep, but when I tilt my gaze, his eyes are open, scanning the stars. “Two or three at most. We should be close.”
I study his eyes, looking for what I saw in them when we floated in the lake. I look for something to hold on to, a sturdiness, an assurance that we will reach the sea in time. And when he turns to look back at me, I find it.
“I’ll get you there,” he says, voice deep. And his hand strays to mine again, barely touching, his chest rising with air, with determination. And I believe him.
The sand makes tiny indents into my flesh, and I count the constellations I can see, naming them silently. But the dark half of the sky has swallowed the rest—the atmosphere infused with a vibration, snapping and shivering, nearly imperceptible.The anomaly always there.
Something my ancestors—the Astronomers before me—could never identify.
Until Mom discovered what it was.
Until the night she pointed up at the sky and named it aloud, a shiver in her throat, full of excitement—the rush of knowing a thing that previously had been a mystery.It’s beautiful,I thought then, briefly. The expanding darkness. A soft gleaming in our night skies.
But now, when I look up at it… I feel only fear.
I stand on the shore, the lake a calm, placid blue eye, reflecting the starlight.
I told Noah to sleep, promising to wake him when Taurus dips below the horizon—signaling midnight—then he’d take the next shift until sunrise.
He fell asleep quickly, so exhausted that he could hardly keep hiseyes open, and I watched him for a moment, his chest rising softly with each dreamlike breath, before I stood and walked down to the lake’s edge.
I consider leaving them, stealing the compass Noah keeps in his pocket, and heading off on my own. Traveling north, like he said, then east when I reach mountains. I would be saving them—keeping them alive from the Theorists hunting me. I’d be saving myself from this feeling blooming inside me whenever Noah looks at me. But they’ve sacrificed too much for me to abandon them like that. And I can’t leavehim. The Architect was always meant to take me to the sea—it’s in the stories Mom told. Already written.
He will take me to the edge of this land. The edge of everything. Together.
It can’t be any other way.
I let my legs carry me along the shore, needing the cool air and the night sky to keep me awake—so I won’t doze off beside the warmth of the fire, beside Noah.
A hush sings between the trees, frogs bellow from the shallow pools of water as I walk along the narrow shore, but there is also a crackle in my ears, a hum, and I wonder how long before I’ll be just as sick as Cricket. Before it starts to peel apart my insides. Before it takes my hearing, my sight. Everything.
Time, time,crumbling away beneath me.
The twin stars are already drifting farther on the horizon, becoming less bright, their glow dulled.
I need to get to the sea before then—while there’s still something left of me.
