The sky is an amber color, two like-sized suns hovering against the blue horizon—Tova and Llitha. When I peer down, against the glass, there is more blue than anything else, a shivering, pulsing ocean. With a dozen tiny dots of land.
The ship begins to jolt, a heavy vibration, and I clamp my teeth down against it, lowering myself back against the seat and securing the straps over my chest. I’ll either die or I won’t. Either means nothing to me now.
The shaking clatters my skull so violently that I’m sure I’m going to lose consciousness, everything whipping by too fast.
I press my palms to my ears and let out a sound—a guttural cry—knowing my body is about to be broken apart.
I suck in my last breath of air.
I pinch my eyes closed.
I wait for the end.
But…
… the vibration stops.
Followed by a long, strange lull.
I can feel the change in air pressure, like my ears want to pop, shatter. I press my head to the wall, hands clutching the armrests, eyes pinched closed so tightly that flares of light spark across my vision… just before I feel the ground slam beneath me.
And then nothing.
A soft hum sputters out from somewhere in the small ship, followed by silence.
Quiet.
I hate the quiet, the aliveness of my body,still breathing. I sit for a moment, not wanting to open my eyes, refusing to believe that I made it. That the grief isn’t the only thing pulsing through me.
Reluctantly I drag myself up, fingers gripping the edge of the window, and look out at a blue-white sky. A pale, shivering sea. And soft, wavering sunlight.
Tears try to break over my eyelids again, but my body is too numb. Too desperate for water, forhim.
I stare out at the foreign landscape, little mounds of earth rising up in the distance.
Islands.
But they’re not rocky and battered by ocean waves. They’re blanketed in white sand, beaches glistening against the sunlight.
I breathe, I stuff down the hurt—down down down—and turn the metal bar keeping the door locked in place, pushing it outward. The air instantly smells different: a sweet saltiness, like a flower I’ve never known before, like late-spring evenings. It’s the wrong scent—I want dark, clouded skies and deep, unending rain. I want a world that feels like the unbearable weight in my chest.
But I pull myself out onto the roof of the little ship, head reeling, dizzy, like I’m caught in an impossible, horrible dream where everyone is dead and I’m the only one left alive.
With a hand over my eyes to block the brightness of two suns, I squint out across a perfect, turquoise sea where the lifeboat now bobs at the surface. The water reflects the blue, blue sky, and it’s beautiful.So beautiful.A soft, warm quality of light draped over everything. I hold out my palm, and even my own skin looks different, glistening, like morning dew in the garden, back in the valley.
A sob shutters from my lips.
I don’t want to be alone, the only one to witness this place: crystal water and dazzling sunlight and air that smells of floral, sun-kissed skin. I want him to see it too.
I want his fingers coiled in mine, his mouth against my lips, knowing we made it. We survived.
But when I close my eyes and open them again, none of it’s true.
And I’m still alone.
Alone.
No other ships rest in the distance, no structures on the islands.No colony. Maybe Mom was wrong; maybe the first Astronomer was wrong.Maybe this is the wrong planet. Maybe the colonists died shortly after they arrived—sick just like us. Their bodies scattered across the islands, skeletons now, picked apart.
