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He isn’t sleeping well.
It doesn’t make much sense, objectively. Pabu is the safest world they’ve been on in months, maybe in their lives. It’s a paradise here. The people are genuinely kind, grateful to them for all of their help during the sea surge. Omega runs and plays and laughs , and he keeps losing her in crowds of dozens of other children, all unique. Hunter knows he should be sleeping better than ever in a place of such security.
But night after night he wakes up after a few hours of uneasy, broken sleep, and eventually gets up, going on quiet walks alone.
He lets the night-voice of this world wash over him as he walks the mountainside. He’s used to the blending of a place’s scents, sounds, light spectrum, gravity, weather all combining into a particular signature. Pabu is painted in a rich new palette, and he walks through it in the dark, memorizing it on his own.
There’s the ever-present lap of the waves on the shore; during the day he’d have to go to Lower Pabu to pick out the sounds in the maze of the village’s ambient noise, but here in the quiet it’s easy for him to hear, even hundreds of feet from the shore. It mingles with the songs of tree-crickets and the chatter of sea-bats.
There’s the scents of the large shade-trees, green vines bearing lush fruits on the sides of homes, the smells of sand and surf and leaf. He breathes deep of all of it, marveling at the lack of oil, exhaust, ozone.
There’s the mercurial breeze, sometimes sweet and gentle from the south-southwest, sometimes a bold blast from the wild north seas, sometimes a constant gust from the utter west. It dances over his face, flutters his hair against his neck and cheeks.
There’s the low-pitched hum of tectonic plates deep in the stone, the deep and vital shift just barely palpable when he lays his hand on stone. It always makes him pause; he stops, digs his palm against the stone wall, prays for the sake of the people here that there will not be another quake.
There’s the starlight. It’s still so strange to see a starfield unmarred by the steady stream of ships, the lights of landing fields. Countless constellations smatter the darkness in white and twinkling gold. He wonders if Tech knows their names already, if Crosshair could see them in incredible detail.
One night he turns at the top of the stairs. The wind has shifted; someone is coming up behind him, though they exercise no attempt at stealth. Hunter takes a pace forward and pauses as the person steps beneath a string of glowing lights on the veranda above. It’s only Shep.
“Can’t sleep?” Shep asks kindly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you making the rounds.”
Hunter shrugs. “I’m just not used to it here. It’s so…” Peaceful. “Quiet.”
“And you seem restless. A tough combination,” Shep observes. “Do you ever watch the stars?”
“Sometimes. More to scan for any potential threats than for the stars themselves, I suppose.”
“That’s about what I thought,” says Shep. He points up to the sky, to an arc of bright white points loosely near each other. “You see that up there?”
He squints. “Sort of. Is it supposed to be something?”
“That’s the Soldier,” says Shep.
"Really now.”
Shep gives him a rueful smile. “Hey, I didn’t name them.” He gestures, drawing a hint of an outline. Hunter studies the stars above them. If he tilts his head to the side, he supposes he can see something like a figure up above, holding a sword, or maybe a rifle.
“If you say so,” he says.
“In the stories, the Soldier is a tragic figure,” Shep says. “Doomed to wander the skies. It’s one of the easiest constellations you can see shift with the seasons. Sometimes it seems like he’s never in the same place twice.” He turns to Hunter. “It must be hard to settle down after seeing so much.”
The stars glitter above them. The Soldier’s rifle swings high; his feet march onward. Hunter lets out a long breath. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
Shep reaches out, squeezes his shoulder before letting his hand fall. “I hope it gets easier. You and your family deserve it.” He nods to him. “Try to get some sleep, Hunter.” He heads back the way he came, and Hunter’s left alone beneath the stars.
He slowly makes his way back to the ship. For a moment, he thinks about asking Tech in the morning if there really is a constellation here called the Soldier. But the more he thinks about it, the more he decides he doesn’t need to know.
He climbs back into bed, the sounds of night-crickets and waves in his ears. He falls into a deep and dreamless sleep, and when he finally wakes again, the sun is high and the stars are long forgotten.