“That opinion never gets less surprising to me,” she said. “But he was kind to say so.”
“No,” said Laila. “Not kind. Honest.”
Nazarenko considered her. She seemed skeptical but didn’t answer.
A smile found Laila’s lips as she backed away.
“Thank you for everything,” she said, turning, gaining momentum. Ahead, through the door, was a rectangle of sky, an undecided color that she could call gray or blue or heather. She fixed her eyes to that patch and imagined an unidentified object—oblong, maybe, with a silver bracing mechanism wrapped around its middle—that shone as it descended into that crevice of dusk, bringing first contact. Maybe, against all odds, the others would say, Take me to your leader. Maybe a multitude of voices had repeated the words this many times because they had something true in them. Or maybe the creatures aboard that ship would be silent, or all-knowing, or malevolent. Maybe they’d be a cloud of microscopic life too complex to understand even if a thousand people each spent a thousand years writing a thousand stories about them.
Maybe the ship would never arrive. Maybe Earth was alone in its buzz, in its blue-green bloom of oxygen and exhalation and time measured out burst by burst, and there was no galaxy on the opposite side of the universe where anybody dreamed in the same looping, illogical, impossible way that human beings could. No Darsinnians with dreams of love, no Watchers with secret dreams of power and redemption. No Resters who dreamed of sherbet-orange sky. She had seen these things so vividly, though, that she wondered if it mattered whether they could ever, in any conceivable universe, be true.
“Piedra,” Nazarenko called, but her voice was as distant as the murmur of a jet plane at a stratospheric height. When Laila arrived home, she would rewrite the section with Eden crashing her ship into the enemy station. She could never see that clearly, anyway, the way her heroine would look on impact, and if she couldn’t explain to Camille why it had to happen, it didn’t have to happen. There would be some way for Eden to bounce back under the ricocheting sounds of laser fire, to return home and kiss her friends on their beautiful weird foreheads, greet them in their own language.
“Laila.”
She crossed the threshold and strode down the hall. She felt happiness in concentrate, a dwarf star roaring at her center. Part of her wondered if Nazarenko would chase her; mostly she knew there was no chance. She walked until the voice faded and all she heard was the sound of her own footsteps, deliberate. New silver shoes squeaking against new wax, lit up white as starlight.
Acknowledgments
Most people have heard the famous proverb: It takes a village to prevent a writer from spiraling into paralyzing self-doubt, and even then, sometimes the village privately thinks to itself, Jesus Christ, she’s a lost cause.
So I’d like to thank every person who, astoundingly, didn’t voice the latter sentiment. For their friendship and humor, I’m so indebted to Noelle Wells, Li An, Nate Winer, Ben Jacoby, Liam Horsman, Nick Foster, Kate Markey, Amy Young, Sophia Babai, Lauren Michael, Lauren Melville, Bailey Luke, and especially Eamon Levesque: Thank you for—either advertently or inadvertently—helping me get through this one.
I’m so fortunate to have on my team Caryn Wiseman, dream literary agent, whose insight and advocacy can’t be over-praised, and my editor at Abrams, Anne Heltzel, who shed her clarifying light through the formless chasms of this book’s truly demoralizing first draft. As a rigorous agnostic, I thank the likely concept of God for both of y’all every day.
To Siofra, thank you for always giving me somebody to admire.
To my parents, thank you for absolutely everything else.
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