I rake my hands through my hair. This isn’t how it should have happened. This is all wrong. “No,” I mutter to myself. “No,No.” My knees give out, and I sink to the surface of the ship, but through the painful beating of my heart in my chest, I hear a ripple of water breaking against the ship.
I drop my hands, listening, certain I’m wrong.Only the wind.But when I turn, glancing behind me, I see it:
A boat moving toward me.
Long, narrow. Like it’s been carved from the trunk of a tree. And inside sit three people—skin dark, golden hands moving oars seamlessly through the blue-green water.
All the air leaves me. All my thoughts spill out into nothing. And I weep. Tears pour down my cheeks, a long, endless cascade of pain.
“Hello?” one of them calls up to me, standing at the bow of the boat.
Mom was right.
I sit with my knees drawn to my chest inside a small domed structure—a house—with a roof made of strange wooden slats, built around a tree growing green spiky fruit that sags heavy from its limbs. My palms brush across the floor beneath me, a carpet of leafy green fronds woven together, and a woman brings me a wood cup filled with the nectar of the green spiky fruit—it tastes like anot-quite-ripe pear blossom. But it eases my thirst, and even makes me a little sleepy.
I don’t want to sleep, though, because when I wake, I’ll have to remember it all over again.
“You came from the other colony?” The woman’s voice is smooth and careful, her long hair plaited down her shoulder with shells knitted along her scalp. She’s the same woman who stood at the bow of the small boat, then helped me down from the ship and brought me to her half-moon shaped island.
She sits on the woven green floor across from me, knees tucked under her, with a pale, thin dress draped like petals across her legs, the fabric bleached white from the sun.
“Yes,” I answer her, voice dry, and I take another drink.
“But only you?”
My eyes fall to the floor, tracing the tightly knitted pattern of the leaves. The words are a fist in my chest. I may never say them aloud again.
But she nods, like she understands. “How many others were at your colony?” she asks, long, pale eyelashes fluttering against her soft, freckled skin.
I lift my gaze, trying to see something familiar in her: a woman who is descended from the same people as me, those who left their home planet long ago to settle on two new ones. She carries the same origin, the same blood. Yet she feels wholly unknown, another being entirely. A woman who was born on a planet made of mostly water—bodies shaped by the salty sea and two bright suns—who spent a hundred years on this newly colonized land, making a life, while we spent our time, on our planet, dying. Just trying to survive.
“There were thousands,” I say. “But not now.”
Her mouth tucks down, her elaborate braids swaying across her shoulders. A row of freckles dot her cheeks. She’s beautiful, but there is something in her eyes, a ruthlessness, like she could leap forward and end my life quickly if she wanted. Arms strong and scarred in places.
She leans over and places a palm against my head, as if she were anointing me, blessing my grief-ruptured mind. The pressure makes me feel tired, safe, and she doesn’t ask any more questions. She folds a blanket over my shoulders and urges me to rest, to close my eyes. I resist at first, afraid to dream, but then my eyes tumble closed—unable to fight her calming voice, the nectar from the tree blurring out all sounds—and in the hours that pass, sleep becomes the only thing I crave.
It sinks over me like a starless sky, dark and endless, and I pull the blanket up over my eyes, drifting into the nothing.
Someone comes, a plate of food set in front of me, but I push it away and close my eyes again. I hear worried voices whispering around me, but it all means nothing. Each word trickling into my ears is like a hooked knife, pulling me back, reminding me of everything I’ve lost. I am adrift, homeless, motherless. All the people I love—gone. So I sink deeper into my dreams, willing the stars to take me, to rip the air from my lungs so I may never wake again.
I want to disappear.
Become only air and light, barely a memory of the girl I was.
I don’t want to be here.
And in the darkest hours of night, in the pain cracking through my skull, a voice tiptoes up from the shadows, a wind in my ears thatbecomes solid words:The stars belong to you now, Vega. I wince, trying to force the voice away. But it grows louder.You can’t go back. It’s my mother’s voice, not real, and I try to sink deeper into my dreams, but she finds me again.Wake up, Vega. No, I feel my thoughts repeat. No. I don’t want this. I don’t want to be here.You can’t go back, she says again, her voice a smile in my ears.Vega. Wake up.
My eyes snap wide, my throat so dry, I can’t swallow. I gasp, sucking in a jagged rasp of air. I try to blink, but it’s too dark, and then there is a hand on my shoulder, and something is pressed into my palm. A cup. I drink desperately, letting the liquid rush down into my stomach. It’s cool, tasteless water—not the nectar the woman gave me before. She refills the cup, then hands it to me again, and I finish it in one gulp. Sweat pricks my upper lip, my palms, and I let the blanket fall away from my shoulders.
“Sorrow is like a serpent that coils around the heart,” the woman says, and a soft glow appears from the far side of the room. Not a candle but something else—the woman holds a jar filled with water, and inside are small swimming creatures, round with long gossamer tentacles, and they emanate a warm glow from their pale white bellies. This is her light. Her way of seeing in the dark. And she places the jar on the floor between us. “The serpent might never leave your chest,” she continues. “But it will loosen its grip over time.”
Each word is a dull echo, barely reaching my mind.
She places a round, waxy fruit in my palm, green and speckled with seeds. I eat and it warms my insides; it removes the hollowness in my stomach. And after I’ve drunk some more, sunlight begins to peer through the slats in the wood roof. The woman shows me a small bathroom at the back of her house, which is mostly just a roomat the far side of the tree with a hole dug into the ground. When I return, she folds me into the blanket again and brushes her cold hands across my forehead, whispering words with each stroke of her fingertips, as if she is wiping away the hurt. Whispering spells against my skin. But when I lie down to sleep again, my head no longer thumps with the pain—it only lives in my chest now.
A day passes, maybe two, and when my eyes flutter open, the light is pale and gentle through the ceiling. Somewhere between sunrise or sunset. I push myself up and see that I’m alone in the small house. I sit for a moment, staring down at my palms, as if I might find answers in my hands, in the fingers that once pressed to Noah’s flesh, that once swam in the river. I want answers I won’t find.
