A rumbling of too many emotions hardens in my throat. “We have to leave,” I urge. “Before the darkness swallows up everything.”
“How?” The wind is a scream now, and I can barely hear him.
“We don’t have time,” I answer. “We have to get into the ship. The lifeboat is only meant to hold one person, but I think we’ll both fit. We have to try.” I remember Mom describing the ship to me, sketching its outline into the soft dirt beside the river.There’s only room for one,she would say.This is what you were born to do—only you can go, only you will know the way.I always knew I’d be leaving Noah behind once we reached the sea—just like Holt said. Just like Mom foretold. It’s been destined from the beginning, since the first Astronomer began marking her skin with a map. But I’d hoped I would be able to come back for him, for Pa, and all the others. That there’d be time to save everyone. But now… the sky is splintering and there’s no time left.We got here too late. And I have to find a way to bring him with me.
Noah shakes his head. “What the hell is a lifeboat?”
A storm stirs inside me and above me. “The other colony,” I shout over the wind. “The lifeboat will take us to the other colony.”
“Where?” His eyes are clouded over, and there is something in them I haven’t seen before—hesitation, doubt, like he’s realizing how much I’ve kept from him.
I reach forward and grab his hand, then lift my eyes to the sky. “To another planet, orbiting two twin suns.” The two twin suns I first saw in the valley, the sister stars that set everything in motion. Stars that will only be in alignment with us for a short time—close enough to reach. “But if we don’t go now, it’ll be too late.”
Time has run out, and now Noah and I stand on a wrecked shipwith the sky twitching and cracking. But if we leave now, maybe,maybe, we can still reach the other colony, the other planet, and return in time to save the others. Before the black hole—thundering and swirling above—destroys everything.
This is what I was always meant to do, what every Astronomer before me has been waiting for, what Mom has taught me. But now it all ends with me. I will be the one.
I look to Noah, needing him to say something, but his eyelashes are stilled, drops of mist caught mid-fall, and his mouth is cut into an uncertain line—like he’s not sure he believes any of it. “You knew this all along?” His voice is ice, evaporating in the air. “You knew, and you never told me?”
These words hurt me more than anything else, daggers through my chest. “I should have,” I admit, dropping my eyes, all the guilt I kept stuffed down, rising up inside me. All the things I didn’t say. “I should have told you everything.” I swallow, but the air rises in my lungs again. “I’m sorry. But I need you to trust me now.”
He stares at me, and the wind slides between us, a torrent, a violent upending of ground and sky. Yet at the rim of his eyes is a hint of light, and I can see in him the boy who rescued me from the schoolhouse when Holt was about to cut me open, the boy who dragged me through a dust storm and kicked through the wall of a barn just to keep me safe. The boy who has kissed me with such need and hunger in his eyes, I thought it might destroy us both. The boy I know now that I love. “Okay,” he says, nodding, meeting my eyes. “Let’s go.”
My heart is already pounding in my ears, and his words send a ripple of relief straight into my chest. Together we kneel down and yank open the hatch in one swift motion.
I can hear the hum of the ship below, the low buzzing of energy like lightning when it charges the air. My body shivers, convulsions that make it hard to breathe, to think. The last of the light empties from the sky, all the stars swallowed up.
But there is another light growing, a rush of it, crackling and bursting overhead, like lightning catching on the remaining drops of moisture in the air. Filling the sky with tiny eruptions of light.
Noah touches my hand, and the feel of his skin settles me, his eyes finding mine—stark and pinpointed—like he’s witnessing tiny particles of dark matter smashing through my retinas, disintegrating my cells, breaking me wide open for him to see. I glance back to shore one last time, where I can no longer see Holt or any of the men. Maybe they’ve retreated back up the beach toward the mountains, toward their homes—days away from here—that they’ll likely never reach in time. The black hole will swallow up the planet before then, pulling it into the black hole’s dark center and likely crushing it, or stretching it out flat until there’s nothing left.
My ears crackle and burn, a pressure in my chest I’ve never felt before. Above us, the sky turns an odd hue of black, dull somehow, but also slit through with ribbons of light as the last of the stars are gobbled up.
I turn, eyes stalling briefly out on the empty ocean floor, when I see it.
A wall—just like the dust storm that overtook us when we crossed the dry farmland—but this one is made of seawater.
Every thought inside me sinks into my stomach, and I feel my eyes expand.
All of the water that had been sucked out is now… surging backinland. A great rising tide. “It’s coming back!” I shout over the wind and thrumming air. “The ocean—it’s coming back in.”
The black hole is tipping everything off-balance and inside out—the tide and gravity—none of it behaving as it should.
“Get inside,” Noah shouts, and I reach a foot down through the hatch, finding the top rung of the ladder. Noah is right above me, about to step inside, when there is a hand at his throat, an arm wrapping around him, yanking him back.Back, back.
“No!” I shout, but the sound is lost just as quickly.
Holt is dragging Noah away from the hatch, away from me. But I scramble back up the ladder, onto the surface of the ship, and run toward them.
Noah’s hands are grasping, trying to reach his father behind him, push him off. But they’re both moving back, toward the edge of the ship, feet slipping on the wet surface. The wind rips over the ship, coiling my hair upward, and when they’re only a foot away from the abrupt edge, Holt stops, pivoting so that Noah is balanced right on the precipice, the ground dropping away beneath him, down to the barren seafloor below.
“Holt!” I shout.
He turns, glances over his shoulder at me. “I only needyoualive,” he yells. “This traitor has done his part, led us here.” He won’t even call him his son anymore, and I realize he was right when he said he’d kill Noah. There is only hate and greed left inside him now. His son is only in the way.
The air feels charged, little pinpricks in my lungs as the temperature drops, turns impossibly cold—the atmosphere evaporating. “No!” I plead, lifting my hands toward him, as if I could reach forNoah and keep him from falling over the edge. “There’s still time—if you let me leave now, I can reach the other colony and come back with their ship, and there’ll be enough room to save everyone. No one has to die.”
Holt bares his teeth, an ominous grin, a twitch in his dead eye. “You know it’s too late for that,” he says, nodding up to the sky.
