Chapter Text
“Specialization,” Naji had once said, “is a luxury. And Dawn of Fold doesn’t have time for luxuries. So everyone has the same three tasks as everyone else: You fight, you work, or you sleep so you can fight or work later.”
The fighting was done for now, and there was not the slightest possibility of sleep, so Norea worked.
One of the few privileges of being a Witch was that she was free to choose what kind of work she did, rather than suffer at the mercy of the rotating duty roster. Back on Earth, that meant scavenging. Going out into the badlands around the relative safety of the school afforded ample subjects for her sketchbook, and as long as she found something useful, the freedom to be gone for days at a time. Her work in space was similar, except that fuel and oxygen set hard limits to how far afield she could wander, and the eerie stasis of the void removed nearly any chance of serendipity from the equation.
Space was big. Too big, frankly. And whatever happened there would just keep happening forever if gravity or other externalities didn’t disrupt them. It was one of the reasons that the Spacians were so damn precious about cluttering up the firmament; snobbery by way of Newtonian physics. An object at rest would remain at rest. An object in motion would remain in motion. And a spent shell casing, or a shattered mobile suit, or cracked space station would simply drift listlessly through the void for all eternity unless someone came and cleaned up the mess.
In high traffic areas, or anywhere else the Spacians thought merited the attention, that meant dedicated cleanup crews commissioned by the Benerit Group. But space was big, and there were many, many more battlefields outside those rarified sectors. Norea theorized that the majority of man’s presence in the vastness belonged not to the colonies or the plants or the fleets of ships, but to the countless drifting graveyards that marked the approximate sites of human violence. After all, the chances of someone accidentally flying through even the largest cluster of debris was vanishingly small beyond a certain range, and for the Spacians, it was cheaper and easier to simply bring new material up the gravity well. Nevermind all of the dead Earthiens left in the mines; fuel was worth more than Earthian lives any day.
But like specialization, that kind of wastefulness was a luxury. And Dawn of Fold didn’t have time for luxuries. So one of the jobs on the duty roster was to take an available mobile suit, follow the trajectory of known Graveyards, and mark any usable clusters of detritus for future retrieval. The Spacians could use their long range scanners, but for interlopers like Dawn of Fold, the only safe method was to fly in near enough, disembark your MS, and use your spacesuit’s short-range scanners to tag, mark, and categorize everything manually.
It was long, tedious work. For most, it was seen as just one step above latrine duty, and as far as Norea knew, she was the only one who ever volunteered. She found it meditative.
“You’re crazy,” Sophie had once said at the sight of her penciling in her name for the job. “And creepy. Who volunteers for Graverobbing? You’re like some kind of ghostie, or, like, a Dracula.”
Norea had laconically bared her teeth and hissed at the girl, and then invited her to come with.
“No way!” Sophie had replied, brandishing her two index fingers at Norea like a crucifix. “I’m on babysitting.”
That wasn’t surprising. Nobody had even bothered to write babysitting on the duty roster. If Sophie was around, Earth or space, she would always be the one looking after the kids. It was just the way things were: Sophie for the living, Norea for the dead.
Only now Sophie was dead. They would need to put childcare on the duty roster again, wouldn’t they?
Norea tested the thought like she was probing at a chipped tooth. Around her, Lfrith Thorn fell silent as the thrusters automatically disengaged, relying on inertia to carry them the rest of the way to the site.
“She’s dead,” Norea said, experimentally. Watching her own emotions with clinical interest. “Someone else will need to look after the kids from now on, because Sophie Pulone is dead.”
Something sour lurched in the pit of her stomach at the words, but it was just anger. Anger, she was used to. It was hard to remember the times when she wasn’t angry, come to think of it. This particular strain was similar to the noxious, poisonous rage she’d felt as she’d been kicking the go-between half to death. The go-between. The Quisling. The Hanjian, Chinilpa, or Benedict Arnold. Every nation had a name for their kind; the oppressed seduced by the comforts of the oppressor. The victims who cared more for the humanity of the victimizer. Norea wondered if they’d call them “Nanaura” someday. That would only be fair, wouldn’t it? That would at least somewhat make up for the fact that she was still alive while Sophie, who was loyal and protective and good with kids, was dead.
She sighed when that self-flagellation produced only more anger. Thorn pulsed soundlessly around her, indicating that it had come to a full stop. She activated the short-range scans for a quick sweep to check the rough composition of the Graveyard. If the blasted scrap metal had drifted far enough apart, or been reduced to small enough components, it would be a waste of time and fuel to chase them down. For an old Graveyard like this, that was more likely than not. It was a delicate balance, graverobbing. You had to arrive quickly enough that the good stuff hadn’t scattered, but not so quickly that the Spacians were still watching out for you. They wouldn’t bother with places like this themselves, but they took a dim view of anyone else rooting around in their trash.
Once, Norea had read a book on western religions in search of reference images of cathedrals and the like. Those had been mostly burned away, unfortunately, but there had been a part that caught her eye. It was about the Rapture; the Christian end of the world. The fire and brimstone bits hadn’t been too interesting - Norea was plenty used to both even back then. Instead, she’d been fascinated by the depictions of the Raptured, those righteous few who had been lifted bodily into heaven just prior to the apocalypse. The scene depicted was a grotesque tableaux of serene, white-clad people sitting atop the clouds, looking down in beneficent amusement as those left behind writhed in the agonies of the tribulation. This ghoulish spectacle was described as the height of heavenly pleasures; the ability to watch safely as your lessers burned. For a long time that had been how Norea had imagined the Spacians; pallid creatures who delighted in looking down from their heavenly kingdom while those on Earth suffered and suffered and suffered. Only recently, during the disastrous infiltration of Asticassia, had she realized the truth was even worse. The Spacians weren’t even watching their victims’ pain; they simply didn’t care.
Thorn pulsed as its scan finished, and Norea had to check the results twice, and then look through the visible-light cameras to confirm. Sure enough, the Graveyard had hardly drifted at all from its original location. It was a massive collection of mostly intact equipment, held relatively in place by some trick of gravity and momentum. The outer cluster, the largest parts of which included whole mobile suits and one bisected heavy transport, was moving at a crawl undetectable to the human eye. The innermost layer, made up of much smaller and more violently destroyed pieces, was, if she was reading it right, almost completely still.
She drummed her fingers against the side of her helmet, thinking. For a find like this, she could simply record the whole thing from the cockpit and leave. But still, that seemed like a waste. It could, the reasonable part of her suggested, be some kind of trap, or a floating pirate’s cache. Or perhaps there were more valuable prizes in the obscured center, like fuel cells or intel, that the retrieval team could miss. Those were all just excuses, she knew. She wasn’t setting Ur into passive mode and opening the cockpit for any practical reason. She hadn’t come here for the prize, not really.
She’d come here to think. To meditate. To chase the fleeting emotions she’d almost felt in the moment she’d decided to kill Nika Nanaura, before the prince’s creature had stopped her. To remember how to grieve.
–
Back when she’d first met Sophie, Norea had thought that they’d made a mistake selecting her as the second Witch. Or that she was some kind of control sample to measure Norea against. Her carelessness, her mania, her bizarre priorities and absurd belief that they would not only win this war, but that she personally would survive to see it, all seemed more like they belonged to a naive child or madwoman than a hardened pilot.
“Look at her!” she’d said to Olcott once, pointing in accusation.
Olcott’s flat, dead-fish eyes followed Norea’s finger to find Sophie, a few yards away and out of earshot, crying hysterically amongst a patch of kids she’d been playing with. From what they could gather, two of the kids had been fighting, and one of their dolls - a sad little purple rabbit - had been ripped nearly in half during the scuffle. Sophie, who had ostensibly been trying to restore peace to the warring toddlers, had been so upset at the sight that she’d started bawling, and now the kids had somehow united in trying to comfort her .
“Seems like her plan worked out,” Olcott said.
“What plan?!” Norea said, indignant. “She’s throwing a tantrum over a doll ! It’s not even her doll! How can someone so… so weak be a Witch?!”
“Weak,” Olcott mused. He stood in silent contemplation for a moment before speaking again. “Have you talked to her? About how she got here?”
Norea scoffed. “Of course not.”
That was just common courtesy. Among Eathians, it was rude to pry into someone’s past unprompted; it would only dredge up painful memories, and anyway it was a waste of time. Everyone had the same story, more or less.
“Do you think she had it easy?” he went on. “Easier than you or me?”
“No…” Norea answered warily.
“And yet she’s here, same as us. Do you know what makes her different?” Olcott’s glassy eyes turned on her. They were so dark. Darker than the edge of space. “She’s strong.”
“How?” Norea snapped.
“Because she survived everything we did. But unlike us, it didn’t break her. Someone who cries like that… someone can still feel strongly enough to cry like that… has either grown up in luxury like a Spacian, or has become so strong that she can care about things beyond her next meal or finding a safe place to sleep. You and I are survivors. But she’s alive. ”
Norea stared, stupefied. First at him, then at the girl, who had stopped crying and was hugging the kids with both arms, laughing with them.
“If you want to live,” Olcott added as he turned to leave, “You’ll learn from her.”
–
So she was here now, out in the black with only her Gundam for company, plundering the dead. Out here, far removed from other sources of anger like Nanaura or the prince’s creature, her emotions were free from any outside influences. Like the debris, there was nothing to act on them, and thus their movements could be observed, tallied, and categorized with objectivity.
Olcott had told her that Sophie’s strength came from, or at least was evidenced by, her depth of emotions. The war was escalating now, which meant things were only going to get worse. And she would have to face them down alone now that - and again she prodded at the idea - Sophie was dead. She would need to be strong enough for both of them if she was going to live long enough to…
…to what?
She set that idea aside for now. The future, like space, was too damn big. She needed to be fully in the present if this was going to work. She was probably weird for thinking of the grieving process in such clinical terms. Sophie would probably make fun of her if she were here.
“Stupid Norea,” she’d say, “You can’t trick yourself into crying like that. Just cry!”
Easy for her to say. She was strong enough that she could “just cry.” It was as easy and natural as her raw athleticism or effortless charm. But Norea wasn’t special like that. Nothing came easily to her except anger; everything else she had to build up from scratch. Methodically. Intentionally. Piece by laborious piece. Either you fight, you work, or you sleep, and right now she was working on figuring out how to properly mourn her lost partner.
But how? How does someone learn to cry? How do you mourn the dead when your whole planet is a graveyard?
While her mind worked on this problem, her body drifted through the debris field. The matter here was more densely packed than some flotillas, and yet there were still several kilometers between one object and the next. In space, terms like “short range” were relative, and so there was no danger of her crashing into anything absentmindedly. Besides, she’d done this often enough that it was all muscle memory. Engage suit thrusters. Count down from a hundred. Stop. Scan. Use attitude thrusters to make a brief, controlled spin. Scan. Do it again vertically. Scan. Realign. Engage thrusters. Categorize the results while you move and send them to Ilfrith-Ur’s logs. Repeat. Like scraping patterns into white sand, it allowed her to slip into a trance of pure contemplation.
When was the last time she’d cried, anyway? She’d shed a few tears while beating Nanaura, but Sabina, the creature, had pulled her back before she’d even noticed. Her voice had hitched a few times when she was lifting Sophie’s body - how could she just be a body? How could someone so full of movement be so still? - from the Gundam that had murdered her, but she’d forced herself to keep it together, not wanting to show weakness in front of the enemy. So when had she last wept? Back when she was an infant? No, she remembered having cried in front of Sophie. Being embarrassed but grateful at the same time. But when had that been?
Engage thrusters. Count down from a hundred. When had it been? Stop. Scan. It had been in space, hadn’t it? Use attitude thrusters to make a brief, controlled spin. Scan. She remembered the tears floating like bubbles in her helmet, didn’t she? Do it again vertically. Scan. Realign. Realign.
In front of her, a few dozen kilometers away was a small cloud of what looked, at first, like old coins. She toggled her helmet’s zoom function and saw that, no, they were actually spent shell casings, each one the size of Norea’s forearm, drifting in tight formation like a school of goldfish. There were quite a lot of them to even be noticed in all of this darkness. That told a story. Someone must have really been desperate, shooting so much in such a short time. Panic firing, maybe? Or a last stand? There were plenty of broken Mobile Suits around her, but they were all riddled with bullets and beam scorches to one degree or another. Impossible to tell which had fired such a large salvo. Without really knowing why, she engaged her suit’s thrusters in short, controlled bursts, wanting to draw closer to the brass cloud without disturbing them.
A bit of distant sunlight glinted off of one of the shell casings, and just like that, she remembered the last time she’d cried.
–
It had been one of the first sorties she’d flown in Ilfrith Thorn. The battle itself had been a small-scale thing, a bit of mercenary action against some pirates to keep the lights on back home. It was important however, because the mission parameters specified that every target should be neutralized. No prisoners. No witnesses. It was the perfect chance to test how well the Earthian Witches could handle the strain of Permet in real combat. They’d been armed with ballistics rather than the more advanced beam weapons, both to decrease the risk of Spacian attention and because, unproven as they were, fuel cells were still more valuable than the two of them.
Sophie had pounced like a feral cat as soon as they were clear of the transport, flying into Permet level 2 immediately upon enemy contact, quickly pushing herself to level 3 at the first sign of proper resistance. She was wild. Berserk. Shouting and babbling over the shortwave radio, breathing in heavy, ragged gasps. But her movements. They were precise and deadly and terribly beautiful to behold.
Norea felt ashamed of her own caution as she eased gradually into Permet 2, still hesitant to fully commit. One of the pirates was actually pretty good, and she was struggling to pin him down with her own barrage, despite her superior mobile suit.
“Hey, Norea!” Sophie’s voice crackled over the radio.
Norea cursed. Don’t use my name you idiot.
“No-re-a!” Sophie repeated. “Norea Du Noc!”
“What?!” Norea snapped. She switched to her rifle as the enemy pilot pulled back from her. She couldn’t get a clear shot. He kept darting like a mosquito between the debris.
“Step it up! You’re making us look bad!”
“Shut up!”
“Shuuuuut uuuuuup!” Sophie taunted in a bad impersonation. How was it that she could be so annoying even while straining against the Data Storm? “Come on! Don’t be afraid, dummy! Remember what we talked about? You gotta fall into it! Fall!”
“I can’t,” Norea hissed, tears prickling at the edges of her vision.
“You can! Because I’ll be here to catch you!”
Norea let out a frustrated yell. Fine. Fine! She threw herself into Permet Level 3. Fell into it.
Suddenly it was quiet. So quiet. Had space always been this quiet? Her heart was hammering painfully. Her breathing was loud and quick. But even those noises seemed very far away. Louder, closer, were the sounds of Ilfrith Thorn. The joints and actuators whirring, pleased, as she adjusted her aim. The enemy mobile suit was slow. Had it always been so slow? It came into perfect alignment with her rifle, inviting her to take the shot.
She accepted the invitation.
In her heightened state, she thought she could see the bullet exploding out on a plume of fire. It spun with glee as it devoured the distance between her and its target. Connected. Burst clean through the enemy cockpit and out of the other end, dragging with it a comet’s tail of metal and pressurized air and rapidly freezing blood.
Norea stared. The bullet flew away. Past the other enemy mobile suits. Past the range of the battle. Out into the vast beyond, carrying with it traces of the man she’d just killed. An object in motion would remain in motion. It would remain in motion forever. It would travel to the very ends of the universe, beyond the light of any star, and a small piece of the dead would go with it.
It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. It hurt so much. Her heart felt like it would burst. She hurt so, so much.
Norea didn’t realize she was weeping - hysterically, wildly weeping - until Sophie’s static-dusted voice was there in her ear.
“Nice shot!”
“Th-thank you!” Norea bawled. “Thank you, Sophie!”
For a moment she was cognizant enough to realize she sounded unhinged. Despite the carnage around her, she was, in that moment, embarrassed, terrified of being mocked by Sophie.
Instead, Sophie just said, “That was all you, partner! Now let’s finish up here, I’m about to puke!”
Norea laughed as she gave the affirmative, feeling light and happy despite the pain of the data storm.
–
On returning home from the mission, she’d drawn that moment, when the bullet and blood burst free, exactly 49 times, one after the other. Then, just like that, she’d stopped thinking about it and hadn’t since. Until now.
That was a good memory. Bittersweet. Painful, now that Sophie was dead. So why wasn’t it working? She maneuvered carefully between the discarded shell casings, drawn towards the center by some unfathomable curiosity. As if the answers were there, like a secret treasure. Sophie was special. She was special to her. She’d been there to catch Norea whenever she fell, and Norea had failed her the one time it had been her turn. It was as much her fault that Sophie was dead as the Mercurian Witch or Gundam Aerial or Ilfrith Thorn, or even the Spacians. So why didn’t she feel anything different? Why was she so weak that she couldn’t even mourn such a horrible failure?
She stopped her thrusters. She went to activate the scanner. She paused. She saw the treasure at the center of the Graveyard.
The spent casings, like most objects in space, were moving, however slowly. The cloud only appeared stationary from a distance, but up close she could tell that it was gently drifting apart. Eventually, in a few years or a few hundred, the cloud would disperse, each part journeying on into the darkness on their own solitary exodus to the end of the sky. All except for one.
There was a single intact casing. From Norea’s relative position it was upright, and it was spinning in place. Somehow, by some miracle, it wasn’t moving at all except for that spin. She checked the trajectory of the other nearby objects, and found that none of them would come close enough to disturb it. It would just keep on twirling there, spinning, pirouetting like a brass ballerina, forever. It would dance even though there was no one else to see it but Norea. It would dance for the sheer joy of it. Fearlessly, eternally dancing.
–
The memory that finally broke her wasn’t one of anger or sorrow. It was a quiet moment, in an empty classroom of the abandoned school that was their home. It was the magic hour, with the sunlight shining in dusty gold and red through the window. Norea was watching Sophie unwrap the gift she’d brought from her latest scavenging trip. Next to Norea on the windowsill was a menagerie of misfit toys, including the battle-scarred purple bunny which Sophie had claimed after its last owner had died. Sophie tore away the old newspapers used for wrapping in with the same eagerness that she did everything else. When she saw what was inside, she actually gasped and looked up at Norea, beaming.
“Happy birthday, Sophie,” Norea said.
“It’s my birthday?” Sophie asked, looking between her and the old record player.
Norea shrugged. “Let’s just say it is. Otherwise I dragged that heavy thing across the badlands for nothing. You’re on a weird vintage kick lately, right?”
Sophie nodded, oblivious to the teasing. “Sure am! Phillip has one of these, and I got to listen to some old records while looking after the kids. Apparently it was old fashioned even when he was young, like, a hundred years ago, but it sounded good. How’d you know?”
Norea nodded to the small pile of scuffed up vinyl records that Sophie had been collecting lately. “You’ve been looking for one, haven’t you? I passed by some old specialty shop out there and figured it’d be easier than trying to find one in trade.”
Sophie grinned. “Oho! So you’ve been watching me, huh? Can’t take your eyes off me?”
“No, I can’t. You’ve been all sad lately, and your moping is distracting.”
“Well, I’m happy now!” Sophie said.
She set up the player and rooted around among her small collection for a bit before pulling out a record. The label had long since faded away like all the others, so Norea had no idea why she’d picked that one.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Norea said.
She started to get up as Sophie fiddled with her new toy, but the other girl darted over and put a hand against her collarbone, gently pushing her back down.
“No, stay,” Sophie said. Behind her, the record player crackled and popped like radio static. “Please? It’s my birthday, isn’t it?”
Norea sighed but acquiesced. Sophie smiled even wider somehow, and, when the music finally came on, stepped backwards into the center of the room and began to dance.
Like everything Sophie did, it was a nonsense. Chaotic, random movements that jumped from one style, one era, to the next without any particular relation to the grainy, coarse music. Shuffling quick steps into graceful ballet into hard stomping into, of all things, the Charleston, and then back to ballet. And yet, like everything Sophie did, it was somehow beautiful. Her hair shimmered like brass in the twilight sun, and her sharp, lovely smile was one of pure delight. Norea wanted to sketch her, but there was no way to capture Sophie faithfully. She was always moving. Always dancing. Even in photographs, she was usually blurry. So Norea did what she always did; she watched Sophie. Committing the sight of her to memory. Trying, as Olcott had advised, to learn from her. When Sophie started spinning on one toe, Norea leaned forward. When she kept spinning, and spinning, and spinning for longer than seemed possible, Norea actually stood up in surprise.
Sophie, mistaking it for an invitation, grabbed Norea’s hand and pulled her to the impromptu dance floor. Norea tried to protest, but Sophie put one hand on her shoulder and the other on the small of her back and forcibly started to sway her back and forth. When Norea started to shove the other girl off, Sophie pinched Norea’s butt hard enough to make her yelp, and Norea gave up. Fine. She’d see how clumsy Norea was and lose interest soon enough. Easier to indulge her a bit.
But she didn’t lose interest, and somehow they wound up dancing through every record in Sophie’s collection. The sun had long set, and Sophie was still going, refusing to let Norea break away. They were both gasping and sweating, but Sophie somehow found more energy even as Norea was about to collapse. She did that impossible spin again, twirling and twirling and twirling like gravity somehow didn’t apply to her.
“How,” Norea managed, “Do you do that?”
“It’s easy! You just spin!”
Norea shook her head. “No, but,” she swallowed, struggling to speak between each painful breath. “How do you not fall?”
“You gotta fall!” Sophie said. “That’s how you do it! You fall into it, and just keep falling. It’ll carry you, if you let it. Don’t be afraid.”
“That’s stupid. You’re stupid. What if you really do fall?”
To Norea’s shock, Sophie darted in, viper quick, and kissed her. Her lips were salty from the sweat and softer than Norea had imagined. Before Norea could decide whether to kiss back or get angry, Sophie pulled away, grinning her razor-edged grin.
“Then you’ll catch me, right Norea?”
–
At first, Norea thought she’d somehow triggered a data storm, despite Thorn being several kilometers away. It felt like she was running at the jagged edges of Permet 3, her heart hammering hard enough to crack her sternum, her skin freezing with cold sweat, her lungs aflame with every agonizing, difficult breath. She floundered. Fought. Looked wildly around for some means of escape.
You fall into it, and just keep falling.
Was this it? Was this what she’d been searching for? Her strength? Her sorrow? It wasn’t supposed to hurt this badly, was it? It wasn’t supposed to feel like dying, was it?
It’ll carry you, if you let it.
She clawed her way back towards Ilfrith Thorn, careful, even now, to not disturb the dancing brass ballerina. She somehow remembered how to signal the cockpit to open for her. Somehow managed to fall into it, and to remember to wait for the oxygen and pressure to normalize before ripping off her helmet.
Don’t be afraid.
The grief hit her with shattering, obliterating force. A catastrophic impact, bursting her open like a bullet through her belly. It was a pure, bodily response that made thought impossible. It lasted forever, with only short, sketchbook moments of awareness. She heard herself making a noise; not a yell or anything so human. It was more like how she imagined the last whale had sounded, singing alone in an empty ocean. Keening and deep. She choked and gagged. She punched the consoles of Ilfrith Thorn again and again, howling in rage at the Gundam.
“Bastard!” she screamed. “You bastards! Why did you take her? Why did you take her ?!”
The words dissolved. She saw blood and flecks of fabric from her suit’s tattered knuckles drifting through the cockpit before vanishing into the air recyclers. She hated it. This Gundam. This coffin. This graveyard thing that ate her soul bit by bit, just like its twin had devoured Sophie’s.
“You can haunt me,” she babbled. “Okay? I’m some kind of g-ghostie too, right? You can haunt me, if you want to. If you’re there in the data storm like they say, you can - you can - you can please, please, please…”
Words dissolved. She rocked to and fro, embracing herself, moaning, sick to her stomach. Her eyes were dry and her throat was parched.
“Sophie,” she whispered. “Sophie, do you see? Do you see how strong I am now?”
And it was over. The storm of grief had passed, leaving only a delicate sadness behind. She felt emptied out. Not hollow, but clean. Somehow more herself than she had been in… maybe ever.
Sophie Pulone was dead. But Norea Du Noc was still alive.
You sleep, you work, or you fight. For now, the work was done. For now, she would not sleep. But there was still fighting to do.
She began to warm up Thorn’s systems, her movements as mechanical as the Gundam’s own. But she hesitated before entering the coordinates to depart. She thought off her memorial to Sophie; the brass ballerina dancing forever. If the retrieval team came, they might carelessly disturb the dance. This was an incredible haul. A minor miracle. If she weren’t a Witch, what she was about to do could be called treason if discovered. But she couldn’t bear the thought of the greater miracle at the center of it all being broken for something as petty as Graverobbing.
Quietly, secretly, she purged Ilfrith Thorn's records of the salvage data. She replaced it with a few vague but technical notes about how there was nothing of value here. A lie, but one that wouldn’t be noticed in the days to come. Things were going to get worse, and she probably wouldn’t live to see the end of it. But when her time came, when she passed beyond the data storm, she hoped that she would find Sophie here, waiting to dance forever amidst the lonely stars.