I want none of what I have: this tiny one-man ship spit out into the night sky, air in my treacherous lungs, blood in this broken body. Thoughts in my worthless, shattered mind.
I only want one thing.
One fucking thing.
Him.
LYRA, Alpha Lyrae+38° 47’ 01”
The first Architect said goodbye to the woman he loved—knowing he would never see her again. He walked toward the setting sun, where the northern mountains concealed a ship half-sunk in the sea, off the shore of a black-sand beach.
Only he knew its location, only he knew where the ship crashed into the sea—because only he stayed aboard when the Artemis broke through the atmosphere and careened toward their new planet. The other colonists had been ordered to evacuate, flee in escape pods that would scatter across the continent below. But the Architect stayed aboard, trying to keep the ship from breaking apart on impact. He had been a helmsman during their journey across the stars, but once they landed, like most of the crew, they would take on other roles. He would help to build towns, construct a framework for their new life.
But when the ship crashed into the sea, he nearly didn’t make it ashore—the ocean more violent than any he’d known back on Earth. But he was alive. And when he looked back at the ship that almost looked like an island, he knew, over time, the tide would push sand and rocks over its slick metal exterior. The sea would begin to swallow it up. In time, it would be lost.
Forgotten.
He strode across a series of snowy mountains, three days in the cold and wind, before he reached a forest. And several more days before he found anyone else alive.
It was months before the towns began to sprout up from the soil, homes being built, lives taking shape. They were a colony meant to drive stakes into the ground for communities and towns that would eventually be built, to study the surrounding landscape and the stars in their new solar system. They each came with different roles, tasks to be performed—farmers and teachers and carpenters.
But when the sickness started rising up inside them, when they began burying their dead in the unfamiliar soil, they knew they were the unlucky ones. They had arrived on a planet with an illness that would eventually wipe them out.
The Astronomer knew how to chart paths across the night sky; she knew the way to the second colony who had settled on a planet not far from their own. They could leave this planet, travel to theother place—where perhaps no one was sick. But their ship had been wrecked on impact—no longer able to leave their atmosphere.
Yet there was hope.
The Architect had remained on the ship when it crashed—his lifeboat, his escape pod, was unused. Still attached to the ship. And it could be used to flee the planet.
But it was never built to travel long distances. Only meant as a last resort. If the other colony—in its solar system with its two suns—swung close enough, the escape pod might be able to reach it.
The Astronomer charted the sky; she measured and made formulations. And she knew they would have to wait. It would be a hundred years before the other colony’s orbit swung close enough to their own. Close enough that the escape pod could reach their planet.
They, the originals, would never leave this planet. By sickness or something else.
But they could save others, their descendants, the ones who would be born later. They could sacrifice themselves and hope that enough of them would survive long enough to see the sister stars come into alignment, and then, one person—the Astronomer—could go get help. Hope that the other colony’s ship was still intact. Hope that they could come back and save the rest.
Help would come. A cure for the consumption would come—by escaping the planet. But it wouldn’t arrive for another hundred years.
The Astronomer and the Architect agreed—they would keep the location of the ship hidden, they would hide the map to the other colony. They would keep it all safe.
So they said goodbye, to protect those who would come later, to protect the hope that they could be saved. The Astronomer hid herself in the valley, while the Architect kept to the roads, never settling anywhere for long.
But even if a hundred years should pass, the route to the ship would be taught, the knowledge passed down. Each new Architect would be told the path through the mountains to where a ship sat beneath the sea, waiting.
So when the sister stars appeared, and the other colony was close enough to reach…
The Architect would know the way. But the Astronomer was the map, the key.
Only together could they leave.
THIRTEEN
The small ship, thelifeboat—as Mom called it—spears through the dark, whirling past shimmering starlight in the distance. But I feel nothing. I’m as hollow as a spring seed after the birds have torn it apart.
Fragments of a broken girl. Damaged by what I left behind.
My arms sag at my sides, eyelids heavy, wanting to close and never open again.
