The woman appears in the doorway, her aqua eyes meeting mine, and she steps inside, bringing me a cup of water, then sinking onto the floor in front of me. “You have slept a long time,” she says gently.
I want to tell her that time doesn’t mean a thing to me anymore. I could sleep for a thousand years and it wouldn’t be enough to heal what has happened.
She lets me drink, lets the minutes pass between us, and then her thin eyebrows turn down at the corners. “The others want to know what happened on your planet. Why you are the only one left?”
I grip the cup in my palms, squeezing, needing it to keep the sob from rising in my throat. “There was a shadow in our sky,” I manage, barely louder than a whisper.
She tilts her head, examining me.
“It was a black hole.” I clear my throat, looking to the small thatched door of the house, longing for fresh air, but knowing thatif I step outside, nothing will look or smell as it should. Nothing familiar. So I stay put. “There’s no one left.”
She taps her fingers against her strong thigh, lips puckering, then leans forward. “You came on one of the escape pods,” she says. “You had a map.” Her blue eyes narrow on me. “Are you the Astronomer?”
I should feel a glimmer of something, hearing her say the name, yet it no longer feels like mine. A title I left behind, a girl who is destroyed now. But I nod my head, keeping my mouth flat.
She stands, walking to the door of her home and looking out at the sea. “Our Astronomer died many generations ago. He drowned.” Her eyes swivel back to me. “We’ve lost much of the knowledge of the sky.”
A soft wind stirs through the doorway, bringing with it the scent of fruit and sand and sea air.
“The shadow in your sky,” she goes on. “We see one too, at night, after the suns have dipped into the ocean.”
My eyebrows lift, an itch at the back of my neck—an old feeling, a curiosity rising inside me—the part of me that breathes starlight, that longs to understand their patterns. The part of me that isn’t dead just yet. “Show me.”
She takes me by the hand and leads me outside, where the air is warm and gentle, blowing up from the sea. We stand on the shore of her tiny island, my boots sinking into the pale sand, and it isn’t long before the twin suns begin to slip past their horizon, the light dusky and muted. The two other people who had been in the boat with the woman when they found me—a man and a woman, both tall and lean with long waves of dark auburn hair—are pulling in nets from the shallows, each filled with strange, hard-shelled creatures that they place into a round woven basket.
When the last of the sunlight peels away into the night, the sky is a flurry of starlight, patterns and constellations I don’t recognize. Everything out of order. Bright points of light I’ve never seen before, collections of stars clotted together that make no sense. It’s a new sky, unmapped, uncharted. But the woman points a finger up to our left, to a place beyond the swaying treetops, where the sky is a small stain of black. No stars blinking. No light breaking through.
The black hole that I escaped is crossing through the galaxy, swallowing everything up, and soon it will reach this planet too.
“Is it the same as your shadow?” she asks.
I nod, memories snapping through me, of the moments just before the end. The erupting sky and crackling air and my body vibrating like I was going to shatter into pieces. “It’s the same,” I tell her.
“Every year it gets larger,” she says, an edge to her voice. Like she already senses what it means. “How long do we have?”
I lower my eyes. “I’m not sure,” I tell her honestly. “Years, probably. But your people will start getting sick before it ever reaches this planet. You will start losing your eyesight, your hearing, and then you will all begin dying.”
She blinks at me, the dark sky in her eyes, weighing my words. “Then we have to leave before that happens.”
I turn away from the shadow, unable to look at the thing that took everything from me, knowing that I haven’t escaped it yet, that it’s still coming for me. It should make me afraid, or angry, but instead I want to sink onto the sand and lie on my back and wait for it to come.
The woman touches my shoulder. “Thank you,” she says, nodding.
But I’m unable to look at her.
“I know you lost people you loved.” She lowers her hand, gazing back up at the shadow. “But you made it here, and you’ll save many people who would have died if you hadn’t come.”
I look at her now. “Where is your ship?”
“A day’s sail from here, to the west. Near the rock island where we travel once a year for the founder’s celebration.”
I turn so I’m facing her, pale starlight casting across the strong features of her face. “But where will you go?”
“I don’t know.” The light dims in her eyes. “Without an Astronomer, we can’t chart a course. But”—her mouth relaxes as she touches the braided strands of her hair—“we have all the maps from our Astronomer, before he died. Everything he recorded, all his notes. I can show you.”
I want to tell herno. Tell her I’m not that girl anymore, that I just want to lie here and wait for the end.
But I also know…
