She watches me, giving me the space, the time, to continue.
“It’s nearly impossible to find another planet like this one,” I say,glancing out to the motionless water. “Or like the one I came from. One that will sustain life. It’s why we traveled so far from Earth. But I think—” I clear my throat. “I think your Astronomer found another way. We don’t need to find a new planet, we just need to find mine.”
Her flaxen eyebrows tuck together. “I don’t understand.”
“If your Astronomer was right, then there’s a chance my planet survived going through the black hole. It might be out there somewhere, tossed out the other end into some distant part of the universe.” A smile steals across my lips, a rumble in my chest that feels dangerously like hope. “The people on my planet were sick because of the black hole. Too much dark matter was pouring through our atmosphere, but now that it’s passed through the center of the shadow, and out the other side, there shouldn’t be any dark matter left. The planet should be inhabitable… livable.”
She is quiet for a time, the night breeze stirring her long braids. “What about your people?”
The smile fades from my lips, quick as water. “Your Astronomer didn’t think they could survive.” My throat wants to close up, the hurt pulsing behind my eyes. But I continue. “But if the planet is still there, if we can find it, then—”
“It’s our only chance,” she finishes, swaying her eyes up to the sky, finding the blur of black on the horizon—the shadow—the anomaly moving through our galaxy, tearing apart solar systems. Death, inching closer,closer.
“But how will we find it?” she asks.
“Your Astronomer figured out a formula, a calculation, a way to determine the black hole’s end point as long as you know the starting point.”
“And you know the starting point?”
I turn, lifting my hair from my neck, letting her see the tattoo I’ve spent my life keeping hidden. “It’s inked onto my skin,” I say, the words coming out breathless, like I can’t get them out fast enough. Because I know the declinations of my home planet better than I know the valley. I know the exact point in the sky where the black hole swallowed it up, the exact place where everyone I loved perished.
Palona nods, a light in her eyes, a dangerous glimmer of excitement. “We’ll hold a gathering in the morning, tell people what’s coming. We’ll start preparing the ship.”
My name—Vega—meansdweller in the meadow. But it also means something else: it’s the name of our star, our sun, on the planet where our ancestors landed a hundred years ago. A planet that was swallowed up by a black hole.
Palona leaves me on the beach to bring in the last of their fishing nets, and I stay, lying on my back in the sand, overcome with a feeling I can’t begin to describe. I count the stars as they appear in the watery sky—constellations that are nothing like the ones I’ve spent my life memorizing. Formations that have no meaning.
But somewhere out there, I hope… our planet has survived. And maybe, somehow,impossibly, Noah has too. And all the rest.
My fingers dig down into the sand, and the sea slides up onto the beach over my legs, then retreats back down again, displacing sand and driftwood and rocks. Displacing me, in the endless pattern of stars. I am a girl on a planet where she doesn’t belong.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and in the farthest back of my mind, in the deepest hollow of my broken, split-apart chest, some part of me needs to believe—needs to dream. If he didn’t drown, if our planet made it through and out the other side, if there’s a chance my people weren’t broken apart when they slid through the dark, lightless center of the black hole… then I will search for him, all of them.
I swing my gaze upward, force my eyelids back, and look up at the altered sky. If our lives are stories written in the stars… then I will find him again. Just like before.
The Astronomer and the Architect, fated like Perseus and Andromeda.
I will map the sky and make new marks on my skin—black ink to chart the way. I will find Noah. Just like I was always meant to. My path woven into the starlight, braided into my bones, just like every woman before me.
Our story is not done yet.
