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Living aboard the Sagitta is nothing like living in Township Number Nine.
Building the satellite constituted a mission. A purpose. Anna knew what she needed to do and how to do it, what had to be done before the dream she’d forged in a nightmare of crashing, white-capped waves and utter desolation could finally be realised. There were no questions left to resolve, for those had already been asked and tested and answered thanks to ponderance-filled conversations with Hershey back in university; there was only the doing that remained. She had a goal, and fulfilling it was all that mattered.
The Sagitta, however, is nothing short of a mystery. The vines sprawling across the brick and stretching along the floor, the sudden and miraculous appearance of dirt and air and water precisely when they needed them the most, the sun --- or, at least, the thing she calls the sun --- floating gloriously in an impossible sky… all of it, bringing forth questions just waiting to be answered. (Anna couldn’t name half the flora if she tried and, true, Hershey might’ve been the better botanist between them, but she was relatively sure that no one would be able to recognise a vast majority of the plants before her.) There is no single-minded goal for her to relentlessly pursue --- save, perhaps, that of sheer, wilful exploration --- because she has instead been given a veritable playground: a living, growing, evolving conundrum against which to pit herself.
It’s almost funny, really: the satellite was one of the few things about which she knew everything, and it has (quite literally) taken on a life beyond her understanding all the same. It’s a good thing that she has grown accustomed to being buffeted about by life’s winds, else this might’ve bowled her over.
The Sagitta feels timeless. Anna can’t say for sure that it is --- finding a metric for the passage of time is a complicated task even without her tendency to lose track of it in the throes of her work --- but she can’t say for sure it’s not either. With the magic the Traveller has already wielded on their behalf, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out that time --- once thought immutable and interminable --- was as malleable as the other laws of physics already broken by their voyage. (She hasn’t asked. Doesn't know why she hasn’t asked. The Traveller would answer, she has no doubt, for she has answered everything Anna has worked up the desire and will to ask. Perhaps she is simply too attached to her understanding of the world to shatter it so abruptly. Perhaps it feels too simple to know without investigating, without working for it. Perhaps it is both, or neither, or something she hasn’t yet considered.)
Here, exploration is a joy newly remembered. Having the time, energy, and material for novel investigation has been a very rare phenomenon for too long, but returning to that inventive, questioning frame of mind feels like slipping into an old skin with all the muscle memory of freer days. This is learning for the sake of learning, absent the pressure of hostile classmates or memories that won’t leave her alone, and she knows she’s where she’s meant to be.
It feels too right for her to doubt.
All the same, she still misses the earth fiercely. It’s an almost hollow longing, rooted in her chest and spreading out in tendrils like the very plants she’s studying. A subtle feeling, yes, and yet it hits her anew at the strangest times. A plant that makes her think of Hershey. A thought about how much Samuel could write about the glories surrounding her. The memory of drinking with Rose and Margaret. A legion of small, precious moments kept preserved in her head along with all of the affection she holds for the friends from which she’s derived a family. She constructs an altar to those she misses --- in her mind, yes, but so too at the base of the windows that had so moved her when Hershey suggested including them --- and leaves the things that make her miss them the most in a reverent pile there. It helps, some. (Not enough.)
She understands, now, the life of a satellite, for her orbit, too, is born of how deeply she loves the earth.
Thus do the days --- or whatever the satellite’s equivalent may be --- tick on. Her peace is a deep thing, into which she falls with nary a doubt, but nested with it comes that equally natural, equally inescapable grief, and on and on the cycle goes.
The Traveller knows, she’s sure. Anna catches odd looks sometimes, when they’re both at the satellite and her newest friend thinks she’s not watching. They’re not quite commiserating and not quite pitying; rather, they’re simply understanding. (It’d be hypocritical for Anna to be bothered by them when she has no doubt that her face has taken on a similar cast many a time, as she’s faced with the distant, sad expression that occasionally flits into Sia’s eyes too.)
She asked about it, once, when her curiosity --- or, dare she say, concern --- overwhelmed her reticence about prying too far. Even then, she kept her tone light, her manner casual. It could have been any other conversation except for how much it hadn’t been. “You okay?”
Sia --- and, oh, she was still getting used to that one --- merely smiled. (The look was still there, as mournful as ever, with the faded familiarity of an old hurt that ached from time to time. Her smile was tinged with it.) “I’m perfectly fine, Miss Hanover. And you?”
Her answer was as true as the Traveller’s had been. “Of course.”
The conversation shifted after that, and Anna let it slip through her fingertips because holding on might just worsen the damage. Whatever had happened in Sia’s past, words would be an empty consolation, Anna was sure. The catharsis of talking about it could only do so much.
Instead, they have an easy routine of pointedly not talking about past devastations. Sia’s losses remain her own --- a final way of retaining the last traces of whatever she misses, perhaps --- and Anna’s father remains lost in a remembered sea.
It’s… easier.
Anna still dwells on those days, sometimes. It’s rarer than it was, of course, as she’s no longer motivated solely by the memory of a salt spray that bit into her skin with every driving gust of wind and chapped her lips until they bled, of her father vanishing into the darkness of waves rendered unnavigable by their own violence, but she’s not certain they’ll ever truly vanish. They’ve been a part of her for so long --- too long: years built upon years --- and shedding them would be like pulling a part of herself from the flesh that houses it. Living in the proof of her own devotion --- of her love and of her success --- helps too, for she’s ensured that no one else will find the gaping questions left behind by a loved one lost in more ways than one.
She draws maps of the Sagitta as she explores, layering the blueprints she’d drawn up at the start of it all with as much information as she can condense into the space. She’s occupying uncharted territory, new to human eyes (not least of which her own), but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Can’t, for her peace of mind. (Perhaps that is what first drew her to engineering, where set rules apply and everything must be mapped out before you begin.)
She hasn’t made much progress. Has, in fact, barely finished a single section, thanks to the sheer biodiversity of the sphere and its specimens. It’s this that brings her to a halt, notebook suspended in one hand and pen in the other, because Hershey would be loving this if he were here is only running through her head because he isn’t. Nor is Samuel, nor Rose, nor Margaret, and… She misses them.
She’s not crying.
She’s not.
Except she is, a little, because her eyes have gone a tad misty and the words she’s just written are a touch blurry as she tries to reread them. She’s aware, dimly, of the ground beneath her, of moisture soaking in through her breeches until her knees feel chilled beneath her, but the sensation is muted, buried beneath her own confusion about why she’s finding herself to be so devastated. It doesn’t make sense: after all, she’s happy. Genuinely, so. She loves her life --- loves the mysteries she has the privilege of solving, the family she’s made along the way, Sia --- and wouldn’t trade any of it for the world so why-–?
She takes a breath: long and slow and calming. It shakes a little on the way out. In. Out. In–
“Miss Hanover?” Oh, and now Sia’s worried, like she always seems to be, and this only makes it worse because Anna didn’t want to make things harder on her, and–- “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” The confidence of the answer is belied by the way her voice cracks on the word, splitting open with all the rawness of her bifurcated soul. (How is it possible to feel so happy yet miss people so keenly?) “I’m fine.”
Sia walks over --- Does she walk? She’s always so graceful as to look like she’s floating instead --- and settles down beside Anna, her knees pressing into the soil with only white (stainable!) cloth as protection. Anna gestures feebly, makes some kind of half-strangled noise in protest, but Sia waves it off and interjects with a too-steady, too-concerned, “Talk to me, Miss Hanover.”
“How many times? You can call me Anna, you know.” Her voice is choked, she knows, but she can’t address that or it’ll get worse.
“And you’re avoiding the question, Anna.” Her voice, in turn, is calm. Infuriating, that: Anna feels like she’s falling apart and Sia gets to maintain that gorgeous, unflappable calm of hers. “You don’t have to say anything, but I’d like to hear, if you don’t mind.”
“I just-–” A pause. A hitching breath that won’t make it far enough out of her lungs.
“Take your time.”
“I just miss them sometimes.” She probably doesn’t have to clarify who she means, but she does anyway. “John and-– and Rose and Samuel and Margaret. They-–” A moment. “Are they okay?”
Sia pauses. Closes her eyes like she’s looking at something within her head and, hell, maybe she is. (Does this imply that she’s… psychic? The implications of her being able to close her eyes and see elsewhere --- possibly even to see the future, judging by her miraculous arrival on the satellite --- are astounding, and Anna files this on her list of facts and inferences about the Traveller.) “Yes.” She nods, once, and the motion is sharp enough --- decisive enough --- that Anna finds herself believing it. “All is well.”
“Did Hershey get his courage to stop pining and ask out Rose?”
A small smile. “Eventually.”
“That’s good.” She wasn’t there to see that. Or, if it’s yet to happen, as the Traveller’s wording implies, likely won’t be. The realisation forces her glee to dull a little, and she’d love to say she hides it well but she knows she likely isn’t. “That’s… that’s good.”
The silence draws out for a moment, filled only with the rustling of exotic, unfamiliar foliage.
Sia speaks first, voice quieter, perhaps, than it so often is. “Do you regret staying on board your satellite?” (Did Anna make up the unspoken “with me” thanks to her own wishful thinking or had it actually been implied?)
“No!” This, at least, is as emphatic as she intended it to be, undisturbed by her emotions because it’s bolstered by them instead. “Of course not!” But that raises the question of what she does mean, doesn’t it? “I–- I just miss home sometimes. And I have a new home here, of course, and it’s absolutely wonderful! But it still… hits me sometimes.” It’s a lame way to finish but it’s the closest she has come to explaining her feelings to herself, never mind someone else. “Does that make any sense?”
For a moment, Sia is silent, eyes filled with an assessing kind of look, and Anna wonders if she sounds nonsensical. She wouldn’t be surprised if so --- her thoughts are muddled and tangled, a spool of thread that has twisted itself into knots --- but she hopes she’s a little better than she fears she may be. This conversation feels all too serious for unclear communication.
Relief floods through her when Sia nods, slowly, but it vanishes again as the look Anna detests so much --- that soft, sad thing that looks too much like old scar tissue --- shows itself in her piercing eyes. “You’ve spent a long time here, Miss Hanover.” A pause, then a correction. “Anna.”
Anna herself nods. “Yeah.”
“I presume, knowing your mind and the creativity and curiosity that so drive it, that you have wondered whence the plants here came.”
Another nod. “I have.”
Sia reaches out, and her hand curls delicately around a plant nearby. (Anna’s been wondering about this particular flower for a while --- night-blooming, it is, and so how is it flowering now? --- but she at least knows its names. Ipomea alba. The white morning glory. Moonflower, she’s heard it called, and isn’t that fitting?) The delicate trumpet formed by its white petals floats elegantly over Sia’s fingers as she holds it, as she strokes the pads of her fingertips along the fluttering edges. “They’re from my home.”
Oh. “I didn’t–-”
“I know. I want to tell you.” She smiles and, for a moment, Anna can’t tell if she’s ever looked more divine. For a moment, she’s never looked more human, either. “I… haven’t been home in a long while. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my home hasn’t existed for my return to be possible, rather.”
The look strengthens, and Anna was right: she knows it well. She’s seen it in her own eyes often enough, a ghost held just barely incorporeal behind eyes glassy with a pain of a less-than-physical sort, a wound that’s just barely healed and throbs with every oncoming rain. (There are days when it’s worse than others, when she’s too bothered by the idea of water on her skin to splash some against the fevered flush of her skin, when she’d swear the sound of waves echoes in her ears and her mouth tastes of salt.) They’ve never talked about Sia’s past before, and yet it lurks between them now, a truth --- a memory --- only seconds away from being spoken into existence, and Anna wants to know but not if it’ll make her relive the whole thing.
She can barely bring herself to speak, though, and certainly not enough to do something so rash as telling Sia to stop. She’ll listen as long as the Traveller wants to speak, for she may not be able to change what happened but she’ll damn well be there for her friend all the same, and then she’ll try to help as well as she can after the fact. “I’m sorry,” she manages instead, and wishes she had something more profound to say, but, of the two of them, Hershey’s always been better with words. Actions, though, Anna manages well, so she reaches out, presses her hand against Sia’s. “Really.”
Sia’s fingers intertwine with her own, pressing tighter for a second. “Thank you, Anna.” Another moment of nothing but them sitting in silence, of the plants rustling around them. “It was long ago. In many ways, things have… healed. Not perfectly, of course, as you well know-–” Anna nods, but doesn’t interrupt; she does know, and knows well. “–-but better nonetheless. And, for the most part, that’s enough.” Another pause, and the fingers of her other hand twitch from around the flower she still holds. “But sometimes… Sometimes, I miss it a little more keenly. A little more terribly.”
“Then the flowers…” Anna trails off, somewhere between so abruptly as to qualify as cutting herself off and so slowly as to be almost painful. (This was Sia’s conversation --- her revelation to make, and her pace to set --- and Anna really hadn’t meant to interfere, but the connections click and the words flow and she can only ever catch herself all too late.)
Sia smiles, and her hand gestures with an ease Anna doesn’t think can be faked. Doesn’t think Sia would fake. “Go on.”
“They help you keep a bit of your home, don’t they?” They’re memories more than they are living, growing plants: an ecosystem built from love and longing and grief too all-consuming to fully be repressed and so they’ve been sown into the earth instead. “So it hurts a little less.”
“Yes.” Sia drops her hand from the flower she held, sinks her fingers into the soil instead. “Some of these plants don’t grow anywhere else, you know. Unique.” She points to one: a crimson bloom, with luscious, curled petals that shine richly from amongst the plentiful green. “Take that one, for instance. This might be the last place it grows.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Isn’t it just?” The edges of the words tilt up, too calm for what Anna would sound like were she talking about material so devastating as what Sia is telling her, only two shades too subdued to be sanguine. “It was one of my favourites.”
Anna nods, then: “Is.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Is.” She smiles, hopes she isn’t making a mistake, and commits. “It’s growing still, right there. Preserved, up here. Thanks to you.”
Sia’s quiet contentedness flickers into something a little more quietly happy. “That’s true.” A small chuckle, and that look is still lurking in her eyes somewhere but it’s dulled a little, like it hasn’t been whetted nearly recently enough to do as much damage as it once did. “Your satellite has accomplished many wonders, Miss Hanover. It seems you may add another to the list, for you have given me back my home.”
Anna shifts, rocks her shoulder into Sia’s before pulling back. Her skin feels dry where she’d been crying, but the tear tracks have stopped replenishing themselves, and her mouth may still taste of saline but at least it’s not draining down her throat anymore. “You’ve done the same, you know. This place is gorgeous. I may have built its structure, but you made it more than I ever could, and I truly can’t thank you enough for it. For staying here with me and putting up with my mad ramblings-–”
Sia laughs and it’s genuine in a way that makes Anna smile as well. “I happen to like your mad ramblings, Miss Hanover.”
“Again with the Miss Hanover?” She rolls her eyes, hooks her thumbs around her own suspenders to keep from reaching out again. “I’ll talk you into using Anna one of these days.”
“Come, then, Anna.” Sia stands, her robes falling until they cascade delicately around her like they always do. “I believe you said something about moving to the next chamber today, did you not?”
“I did!” Anna takes the proffered hand, pulls herself to her feet with it. Notices, on the way, that Sia’s robes have remained as pure and spotless as ever despite how long they’ve both been kneeling, and huffs out a breath in response. “You know, it’s unfair that your clothes don’t get as soiled as mine. Really, truly unfair. Is that magic? Are you magicking your robes clean? Because I sit down for two seconds and there are grass stains in places that didn’t even touch the ground, not to mention dirt in far too many places, and I know it’s silly because you’re the only other person here but it’s still not fair!”
Sia doesn’t answer. She puts out her arm instead, bent at the elbow, as Anna slips her hand through until their arms are linked and strolls out the door with her, still chattering. Somehow, she knows Sia won’t mind.
– – –
The next day, Anna is back at her cataloguing, her notebook in one hand as she scribbles down notes with the other, and she stumbles across a flower she’s sure Rose and Margaret would want to see. It’s darkly coloured --- a royal purple, maybe, or navy --- but spotted with little bits of white until it looks something like stars and something like dappled moonlight cast through scattered foliage. She smiles, rests the thing in her hand as Sia had the day before, admires it without plucking it. Lets herself get lost in fancying that the other two are around to see it, in the speculation of what they might say. Allows herself to dwell, just for a moment, in the fantasy that her two homes didn’t separate the way she knows they have. And then she calls Sia over from where she sits nearby and displays her newest discovery, rambling about it until the words exhaust themselves and they’re both left smiling instead.
Somehow, the thoughts hurt a little less than they had before.