Her peripheral vision showed her exactly nothing except the occasional movement of a human. No walls.
The air moved across her face and played with her hair.
Wind.
She hit the bottom of the ramp and walked ten steps, looking at her feet. The ground went on and on, in all directions, filling her peripheral vision. No markings or lights on it, no walls. The surface was pocked with holes and cracks that dust had blown into.
A male voice called out, “Hey. Watch where you’re going. Look in front of you.”
Her eyes followed his voice, but before she found the source she stopped and tilted her head back and looked up and up, and up forever. She forgot what she had expected—probably a high blue ceiling. Instead there was nothing. A pale blue expanse of nothing, a few thin white clouds, and the sun Adiamo, too bright to look at. It stunned her, the beauty of nothing. “Sky,” she whispered. “Sky, daddy.” She blinked, unwilling to stop and cry like a tourist but wanting to let the tears fall down her face.
A hand touched her arm. “Wait until you see the stars.”
She hesitated, off-balance. “I bet they’re magnificent.”
“I hear they’re pretty magical from space, too.”
“Most ships don’t have windows, and stations make too much light.” The act of simple conversation refocused her. She tore her eyes from infinity and looked at the man, who still touched her. Tall. A boxy face with strong features and grey-green eyes. He looked older than she was used to people looking, although to be fair it wasn’t wrinkles or anything. His skin just looked more used than she was accustomed to—she couldn’t have said why. “I’m Nona.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m Charlie. I came to greet you. Satyana sent me to look after you, like a guide.”
She almost spit out an expletive, but caught herself and simply stiffened so that he dropped his fingers from her arm. He gestured toward his right. “The bags are ready. Which one is yours?”
He didn’t seem the bag-carrying type. “It’s the only blue one.”
As he headed for the pile, she realized what else bothered her about him. He looked plain. No decoration, nothing particular done with his blonde hair except maybe a brushing, nothing unique about his eyes. She was used to remembering people by the ways they’d chosen to change themselves. How would she remember him?
Then the sky and the horizon caught her up again, and she forgot him and Satyana’s meddling in her trip and even the loneliness that still clung to her insides. The Deep provided views of stars and the lights of other stations, but this was just so much . . . vaster. It had been made by something other than people. By time and evolution, by water and the light of Adiamo.
The sun hung nearer the ground than the middle of the sky. She knew it wasn’t early in the day here, so it must be close to sunset. Another thing her father had wanted to see.
When Charlie came back she startled.
He indicated the case he held lightly in his hand. “Is this all you brought?”
“Yes.”
He looked pleased.
“Is that unusual?”
He looked like he thought so, but he just asked, “Are you hungry?”
She wanted to be alone. “I’d like to check into my hotel.”
“I’ll take you.”
She reached to take the bag from him. “I can carry that.”
“Give yourself a day or so to get used to Lym before you do too much.” He turned and walked away, carrying her bag.
She followed, stumbling once and then jogging to catch up. “Hey! I’m in good shape. I feel good.”
“Trust me.”
“Why should I?” she asked him.
“Look me up after you get checked in. Then you can choose.”
She decided he was at least a little infuriating. And a little egotistical. And worse, hired by Satyana. He also seemed to be walking to their hotel. But he had her bag, so she followed and eventually managed—just—to catch up.
He was silent at first. Eventually she teased a few words out of him by asking questions. Yes, he had been born on Lym. No, he wasn’t a guide. Sometimes. For people with permission to see the wilder lands. Usually he was a ranger. Yes, it was safe here as far as people went, but she needed a guide to leave the city.
That last bit perked her up. She’d been studying Lym on the way down. There were so many places she wanted to see. And animals. There were animals on the Deep, but nothing there was wild. On the Deep, water ran inside pipes. “Will you take me to Ollicle Falls?”
“Tomorrow. If you hire me.”
She startled at that. “I thought Satyana hired you.”
“She wanted to set it up like an accident and not tell you I was working for her.”
Why would he tell her that? She let silence come back up between them while she thought. Satyana hiring him made sense—she’d made Nona a personal project thirty years ago. She was probably going to be even more overbearing now that Marcelle was dead—she’d think it was her duty. The Nona project. But why would Charlie tell her this right away? “Do you know Satyana?”
“Never been off of Lym.”
“So—”
He cut her off. “I don’t like being told what to do. And I don’t like secrets.”
Well. Things must be much simpler down here. Nona had to take a few extra steps every so often to keep up with him. Her thighs and calves had started feeling sore. She didn’t complain. “So I have to hire you?”
“You can hire whoever you want.”
“I’ll hire you for tomorrow.”
“That would be telling me what to do. I’m not interested.”
“So why are you here?”
“It seemed like someone should greet you.”
“So can I hire you for tomorrow?”
“Are you asking?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not cheap.”
“Satyana can pay you.”
“Really?”
He was right. She should pay him. She fell silent, still dizzy with the space all around her. The ground changed from the hard concrete of landing pads to something softer but still man-made. They passed a man heading in toward the spaceport, and two runners passed them. Someone could run forever here, no stopping, no going around in circles. “So what are your rates?”
He told her, and she snorted. “I’ll sort something out.”
He glanced at the sky. “Have you ever seen a sunset?”
“Of course not.”
“About two hours. You’ll have time to eat first.”
“Where should I watch it?”
Just off the spaceport grounds, Charlie stopped for a moment and pointed. “That’s the town, Manna Springs, and there’s your hotel, the Spacer’s Rest. On the far side, there’s the main government buildings and the Port Authority offices—see the tall grey building?”
She nodded. The town fascinated her. Buildings stood up straight from the floor of the world, a myriad of colors and designs. At least that was like the Deep. Except there would be connections between the habitat bubbles at home; everything on a station connected to something else, even if the connections were locked. Manna Springs looked like building blocks, all square and rectangular; the Deep looked more like a collection of rings and rounds and cylinders and even arrows lashed together.
Maybe it wasn’t much like home after all. She expected him to ask if she liked it, and when he didn’t she said, “It’s pretty.”
“I’ll show you pretty tomorrow.” He fell silent again, and that was fine with her. She struggled to take in as much new information as she could and not to complain about her legs or her lower back, which had gotten in on the game. By the time they arrived at the hotel, her legs were shaking, although she refused to complain.
To her surprise, Charlie said, “Go clean up. Eat. I’ll meet you back here twenty minutes before sunset. The first sunset’s free.”
She blinked. “What time is that?”
“Figure it out.”
She’d had a salad for dinner, and all of the parts of it were grown. Every one. The dressing had been made with real eggs from real chickens. It was possible to eat like that on the Deep, but not on her salary.
She supposed she could do that now. She’d been avoiding thinking about it. Her mother wouldn’t have ever spent credit on such things, and Nona couldn’t imagine doing so. She’d hear Marcelle in her head telling her credit is for the collective and for health and education and never, ever for showing off.
She’d never been someplace where there wasn’t anyone she knew. She loved the anonymity of it, the freedom.
Two women dressed in work clothes smiled at her. Five men walked up the street, laughing, almost certainly released from some job. Most of them looked as plain as Charlie, although once she spotted cat-eyes on a teenaged girl and an overly-tall woman walked by with long blue hair that nearly touched the ground in spite of the high heels she wore. A couple rode by on bicycles. There were some on the Deep, but they were in gyms and on tracks, and not . . . so complex. These had baskets in the front and back, and lights in both places, and the riders wore regular clothes. She was still focused on the bikes when she heard her name. She turned and spotted Charlie standing on a skimmer with a huge dog-like creature at his side. As she approached, he said, “This is Cricket. If you hire me, you also hire her.”
Cricket regarded Nona with a controlled stare, nearly as still as a statue. Some of the richer people on the Deep had cats, and there was an aviary in one of the bars. Part of one food habitat she’d gone to visit as a child had real chickens. She’d heard about dogs, knew that some existed. That’s what this had to be. A very big version of a canine. She’d studied the animals on Lym during the trip here, and her brain raced through what she remembered. “Tongat?” she asked.
A smile spread across his face. “Yes.”
“What happened to her leg?”
“Some idiot shot her and left her to die when she was a pup. I scared off a pack of predators and took her home.”
“She’s beautiful.” Nona reached a hand out toward her.
“Stop,” Charlie said.
“I wasn’t going to hurt her.”
“She is the most dangerous animal you have ever been near.”
Nona took a step back.
“And you can’t ever forget that or remind her of it. Don’t act like prey around her. I’ll show you how to greet her later.”
“Will she come with us tomorrow?”
“Yes,” he said. “But now, come around and get in. The sun isn’t going to wait for you and Cricket to get used to each other.”
He helped her up and had her sit down next to him on a seat, careful to keep her as far away from Cricket as possible. “Hold on.”
The machine accelerated fast. Certainly not faster than she was used to, but like the planet, it wasn’t enclosed. She had to put a hand up and hold her hair in a knot to keep it from whipping her face. They flew low, just above the buildings, which let her see the layout of the town. She noticed more animals. A few large ones that people rode, a few dogs that were far smaller than Cricket. She startled as a fat furry ball a little bigger than her closed fist jumped. A tharp, if she remembered right. A common part of the mammal food chain. They’d be plentiful here.
He took her to the top of a hill not far from the town and parked, helping her climb down. “This is a good place.”
Mountains rose up in the east, behind them, but he took her to two benches that faced the west, and the setting sun. He left her to get Cricket, and she sat and stared in wonder. The sun had been obscured by a layer of clouds. Bright beams of light escaped them and infused the bottoms of the higher clouds with a yellow gold. Slowly, color spread across the whole sky, deepening and gaining subtle hues. All of the light softened.
Charlie and Cricket took the other bench, both eerily silent.
She felt big, as expansive as the sky, as if she and it and Charlie and Cricket were all somehow one thing in that moment even though none of them touched.
Perhaps the sky touched them all. It no longer looked like nothing. It had become art. Orange and gold and hints of fluorescent pink.
Even Cricket seemed to be watching the sky, although she was also watching Nona. Nona was happy that Charlie didn’t talk; the spectacle in the sky was so far beyond words she didn’t want to break the spell by trying to capture it with anything. She didn’t even take a picture.
Adiamo gave them a brief glimpse of its near-red body, striped by glowing clouds, and then it was gone. After the colors faded back to a soft gray at the horizon line and stars started to show up, he said, “We’re lucky. They aren’t always so pretty.”
It took a few breaths before she could say anything. “Lym keeps striking me silent. It’s so big.”
“Why did you come?” he asked.
It felt like a personal question, but to her surprise, she answered it. “I promised my parents. They’re dead now.” Before he could express surprise, she added the details. “They were crew on The Creative Fire, the generation ship, and they didn’t have the right drugs and mods when they were young.”
“I read up on that.”
Oh. Of course. Satyana had told him about her. “I promised my dad I would see a sky. It was a dream of his. He never got here, but he was determined to send me.” In that moment, she realized that it was probably Onor who had talked Marcelle into funding the ship. It might have all been about this place, about a sky.
Charlie spoke gently. “I’m sorry about your parents. My father is dead, too.”
“Really?”
“Accident. He was working in Palat, one of our old cities on Entare. It was a salvage job, and an old metal girder crushed him.”
“Don’t you just use nano?”
“Sure. But not the way I hear you do. We’re wilding Lym. That means removing technology, except here and on Lagara, where we grow food.”
Before she could formulate a question about wilding he asked her another one. “So your dead parents drove you here. But what do you want? If I’m going to show you Lym, I want to know what you want to discover here.”
It had grown dark enough that she couldn’t really make out his features. “The falls. Some mountains. I’d like to go to Lagara. I want to sail on the ocean. I can’t imagine that much water. We saw it from space but I know that won’t be the same.”
“That’s good. But that’s a list of places. What do you want to understand?”
She looked up at the dark of the sky and tried to pick out constellations. It had grown colder now that Lym had turned their location away from the sun. Another thing to marvel at. Rotation. His question seemed important, but it was too damned personal. She didn’t want to answer him. The tongat—Cricket—unsettled her as well. She loved animals, but she’d never been near one that exuded such a sense of power.
Charlie elaborated. “Most people that come here want something. Some connection to their past or this place or a spiritual evolution. We had one visitor who said she wanted to touch the face of God. Another one wanted to write a book of poetry about a planet. Many come wanting to live here, but we don’t let tourists just decide to live here. We control who stays here pretty tightly.”
“You’d have to, to keep it so empty.”
“There’s a lottery system with a thousand, thousand entries for every one who wins a chance to even visit.”
She had just come. No problems. No waiting. Probably another perk of knowing Satyana, and another piece of the trap of her life. She blurted out, “I want to be free.”
He laughed, the first truly genuine laugh she had heard from him. It filled the cold air between
them with warmth. “I’ll work on the freedom itinerary.”
Oddly, he didn’t sound sarcastic about it at all.
CHAPTER SIX
CHRYSTAL
Chrystal hated the dark. She had always hated the dark. Near dark was fine, and in the observation bubble, near dark was the worst it ever got. Emergency lighting always glowed in a faint strip near every door and window, top and bottom.
Not now.
Now the dark was absolute, and no matter how much she widened her eyes or how many times she blinked, it remained absolute, a dark so black that it created a wall between her and anything she couldn’t touch or hear.
It seemed like hours and hours had passed, but how could she tell?
The small touch of her pinky toe to Jason’s or Katherine’s calves helped a little, as did the sound of everyone breathing, and of her own breathing, which seemed so loud it filled her. She heard her breath in her ears and in the back of her throat.
Even the loudspeaker had gone silent.
For a long time, nothing happened.
“The animals must be so scared,” she said into the silence, her words loud and grating.
Katherine made a sound of agreement. “We should have put them all in the barn.”
“Maybe.” Chrystal said.
“We can start over,” Yi murmured. “They’re already approved.”
Did he think they were already dead? She didn’t ask. Unlike the other three, Yi was bonded to the idea of the animals far more than he cared about individual animals.
Silence fell again.
“We should put on psuits,” Yi stated.
Katherine laughed. “They’d tell us if we should do that.”
“Maybe.” Yi didn’t sound like he was buying it. “I think we should do it anyway.”
“There must be a battle going on out there,” Chrystal mused. Now, as they lay still and helpless, ships from High Sweet Home were probably fighting pirate ships. She didn’t actually know what the High Sweet Home military ships looked like, and she had even less of an idea what the ships from the Edge looked like. It wasn’t like there had ever been a real space battle in her lifetime; just spats. Border incursions that she had never seen. She was certain the ships were big and powerful, maybe like the biggest of Satyana’s ships from the Deep. That made her think of her friend Nona. “I hope this isn’t happening to other stations.”
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