Chapter Text
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ORION, Gamma Ori
+06˚ 20’ 58”
A hundred years ago, the first Astronomer looked up at the night sky and made note of what she saw: horseshoe nebulas and spiral galaxies and dying star clusters. But she did not yet know what lay hidden in the shadowy darkness between stars. She was not a seer, a fortune-teller, as was common in the old world but rarely talked about now. Instead she used the circular glass rings of her telescope to make sense of the dark; she used physics and chemistry and science. She drafted charts and measured distances and sketched formations like Pleiades and Andromeda onto wax paper.
Maybe if she had believed in fate. If she had listened to her gut—that hollow twisting beneath her lowest ribs—she might have feared what she didn’t understand.
She might have known that the shadow concealed more than dust and particles of broken moons.
She would have looked closer.
And seen.
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ONE
Mom is dying, and we both know it. It’s an awful thought, and you hate to think about it, but she’s been sick for almost a month and the consumption is shredding apart her insides, clouding her eyes, and making it impossible for her to breathe. No matter how hard you try, you can’t deny it. You miss the way she was.
On the roof of our small house, I lie flat on my back, resting, breathing in the cool, windless spring air—the night sky a riddle of stars above me-but inside the cabin, through the open window, I can hear Mom dozing fitifully: fever making her sweat and toss and mumble in her sleep.
I press my palms against the roof beneath me, as if I could push away the awful sound, push away the sickness inside her. I count the constellations, naming them in my mind—a ritual that Mom insists I repeat night after night so I won’t forget-and it calms me, the pattern of unaltered stars, their position always right where they should be. Unlike Mom, who is slipping away. Beyond the row of blue spruce trees on the far side of the summer garden, above the valley wall, I trace Clovis and Andromeda with my fingertip. I find Orion, the hunter from Greek mythology, and Rigel, a bright blue-white supergiant shimmering near the horizon. Each one has some secret to be shared, if I have the patience to look. I follow the simple line of Aries, the golden-fleeced ram, my finger making a slight arc through the midnight sky. Sometimes I let myself fall asleep on the roof, to be closer to the stars; sometimes I stay awake all night, searching for something up there that might bring me hope. I search for something that isn’t there. An owl lets out a low, somber, cry from the toolshed; the wind slides across the roof, stirring my long, light hair, curled slightly at the ends, sending gooseflesh across my scarred, pale skin. And I wonder if it’s all for nothing. All the knowledge I keep safe inside me—patterns and sequences and the names of constellations—all of it useless if I never leave these valley walls.
Heat rises behind my eyes, but I push it down, counting the stars of Leo, the lion, killed by Hercules with his bare hands and placed in the sky. Stories threaded and stitched in the starlight. But I wonder what stories will be told about me. The child who stayed safe in his valley. Who never left. Who died like his mother, taking all their knowledge with him.
I wipe at my eyes, hating the tears, willing the stars to show me something—begging. But the sky sits just as it always has—unaltered, unchanged—and I know I’ve been forgotten by the stars, by the ancient gods. Abandoned. The stars shone unbothered. They do not see me as I see them.
I press a hand to my ear, a soft ringing in my eardrum, an ache so small it’s hardly there—scratch, scratch, like an insect in my skull—but when I swing my gaze back to the sky, blinking away the wetness, a thin, rainless cloud slides along the valley walls, pushing north…
And something catches my eye. Tiny. Flickering.
In the darkness, in the space between the stars…
A light. Small at first. Where none should be.
To the east.
I scramble to my feet, tugging my cloak close across my chest, squinting at the unusual light. Light that shouldn’t be there.
It glows a shimmering whiteness, but its position in the sky makes no sense. I blink and recenter my gaze—as Mom taught me—but when I scan the horizon, it’s still there. There. Only a flicker at first—like a dying ember in a campfire—but after a moment it grows brighter, rising above the treetops.
Not a falling star.
Not a comet.
Something larger. A shiver skips up my throat—a knowing—like the telltale scent of moisture in the air, hours before a single raindrop has fallen from the sky.
I’ve stared at this patch of darkness and tiny pine-needle pricks of ordinary starlight. But when I rub my palms against the hollows of my eyes, then look again to the east… I find it. Still there.
A star…where no star had been the night before.
My heart begins to ram against my rib cage, thoughts crashing and tumbling over one another, wanting to be sure. And then I see it: the star isn’t alone.
There are two.
One fainter than the other, smaller, but they rest side by side: twin stars shivering an amber light from the middle of our galaxy. And they rise higher above the horizon, they appear so close, it feels as if I can reach up and pluck them down, hold them in my palm like an August firefly, golden and pulsing, then carry them inside to show Mom.
Two delicate orbs.
Them.
A hum of excitement and disbelief vibrates into my chest, behind my eyes, and I swing myself down from the roof, perching my foot against the wood post, then landing on the front porch with a thud—something I’ve done hundreds of times—then dart through the front door of the cabin.
A fire still burns in the stone fireplace, the scent of cloves and rosemary heavy in the air from the herbs drying above the fire, and I drop to the floor beside Mom’s bed, taking her skeletal hand in mine. My fingers tremble, and her eyes flit open, damp and bloodshot.
“I saw them.” I say softly, voice catching on each letter, as if I might choke on them. “On the eastern horizon… two twin stars.”
Mom’s eyes struggle to blink, her skin the colour of sun-bleached bones, but her hair is still long and light and wavy at the ends. Freckles sit scattered across her nose, and her mouth is the same shape as mine, like a bow tied from rope. I see myself in her—but she has always been braver, fearless, mightier than a winter storm. And I worry that the things that bind me to her, to our ancestors, don’t live as strong in my bloodstream. But now, as I stare down at her, she is half the woman she once was, weak and addled with sickness. And I’m afraid of what’s to come.
She tried to push herself up, to crane her head to the window—she wants to see the stars for herself—but her elbows buckle and her dust-thin body falls back to the mattress, teeth rattling. I place a cold cloth, dampened with river water, on her forehead to wipe away the sweat. “Are they—“ She coughs, pinches her eyes closed, starts again. “—in alignment with the pole star?”
“Sister stars,” she mutters, a small twitch at the corners of her pale mouth—an almost smile—something she hasn’t done in weeks. “It’s time.” She squeezes my hand and her eyelashes flutter, her sight almost lost completely. She only sees shadows now, waves of dark.
“We can leave in the morning,” I answer, my nerves like fire in my veins—We will finally be leaving the valley. I will finally be going beyond its sheer cliff walls.
But she shakes her head and swallows. “No.”
A small fire burns in the fireplace, but the cold night air still catches at the back of my throat. I already understand what she means: I see it in the dampness of her eyes, the tight pinch of her mouth. She will not be leaving the cabin. Or the valley.
She wants me to go alone.
“I can help you to walk,” I urge, feeling the anxiety clotting in my chest like mud. We will go together, like we’ve always planned. She and I. Venturing beyond the valley walls at last.
But she only blinks, tears running down her cheekbones. “I’ll be too slow.” She coughs and clutches a hand to her trembling mouth, and more tears fall from her chin. “You already know everything,” she whispers, eyes straining to see me through the winter fog of her vision. “You don’t need me.” Her eyes flutter. “Go to the ocean,” she instructs, words I already know, that she has told me so many times, they are like a song in my ears, repeating, repeating, without end.
“Find the Architect. Don’t look back.”
I grip her hand tighter, as if I can already feel the miles, the space widening between us. “I’m not leaving you here.” She won’t be able to bring water up from the river or even pull herself out of bed. If I leave, she’ll die quickly. Of thirst and pain. She’ll die alone.
Her jaw clenches along her cheekbones, and I can see the woman she once was: strong, toughened by the land, by the years, some of that fight still left in her. “There’s no time,” she says forcefully, straining against the words before sinking back against her pillow.
I lift my eyes, wet with tears, to the window, where the twin stars hover against the dark. I know she’s right. Time is already slipping away, hour by hour—the twin stars won’t be visible forever. In just a little while, they will arch away, out of sight, and it will be too late.
Another hundred years before they come back into alignment again.
I think Mom knows I won’t leave her, senses I won’t let her die alone in the cold of the cabin. She knows I’ll stay as long as she’s alive.
Because in two days time, the evening after a rainstorm drenched the valley, she let the consumption tear apart the last of her lungs, her heart, her eyes. She stopped fighting. “Leave the valley, Siffrin…”