THE STARLESS SKY

What The Hand Remembers

The last thing Kael heard before the world went white was his own voice, screaming from somewhere that wasn't his mouth.

Not the creature's voice. Not a memory. His.

Screaming from inside the ring.

Then there was no floor and no ceiling and no walls — only white, stretching farther than sight should have allowed. He was not afraid. That surprised him more than the light did.

"This isn't real," he said, and his voice didn't echo. It simply vanished the moment it left his mouth, swallowed by the emptiness.

The white began to fold.

It happened slowly at first — a seam of grey appearing far in the distance, then widening, then bending inward like paper being creased by an invisible hand. Kael watched as the emptiness folded itself into shapes: a floor, tiled and cold. Walls, pale green, the color of old hospitals. A ceiling, low, humming with fluorescent light.

He recognized it immediately, and recognizing it hurt more than anything that had happened to him since he woke.

It was the observation room. The one from the facility's lower levels, the one his father used to take him past on visitor days when Kael was small — back before Kael himself had ever been anything to observe.

Except now he was standing on the wrong side of the glass.

Through the reinforced window in front of him, a girl was sitting cross-legged on a cot, maybe seven or eight years old, drawing something with a stub of pencil on the back of a medical form. Her dark hair was tied back with a strip of blue cloth. She looked up once, toward the glass, and for a fraction of a second Kael was certain she could see him.

"Mira."

The name left him before he decided to say it.

The girl on the other side of the glass smiled — not at him, he told himself, she couldn't be smiling at him, this was a memory, this was seven years dead — and went back to her drawing.

A man's voice spoke from somewhere behind Kael. Older. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep.

"She doesn't know yet."

Kael turned. His father stood there, wearing a lab coat Kael had never seen him wear in life, his face thinner than Kael remembered, lined with the particular exhaustion of a man who has made a decision he cannot undo.

"Dad?"

His father didn't look at him. His eyes were fixed on the glass, on the girl inside.

"She doesn't know that you volunteered," he said. "She doesn't know what they're going to do to you tonight. She thinks you're just here for a checkup. That's what we told her. That's what we told everyone."

"Volunteered for what?"

His father finally turned, and his eyes — grey, like Kael's own — were wet.

"You don't remember any of this, do you." It wasn't a question. "That's the mercy that was bought for you. I asked for it myself. I told them: whatever happens tonight, when he wakes up, he shouldn't have to carry it."

Kael's chest was tight. "Carry what?"

His father reached out, and for a moment Kael thought he meant to touch his shoulder, the way he used to before a difficult mission briefing. But his hand passed through empty air, because of course it did — this was memory, or something worse than memory, and Kael was only a witness here, a ghost walking through his own unburied past.

"There was a discovery," his father said. "Out past the edge of the solar system. Something none of us understood, and some of us — some of us wanted to bring it home. To study it. To use it." His jaw tightened. "I told them it wasn't a discovery. I told them it was a door, and doors only open one way."

"The ring."

His father's eyes sharpened, surprised. "You do remember something."

"Pieces. I don't know what any of them mean. There's no one left to ask."

Something in his father's face broke at that. "No," he said quietly. "There wouldn't be. I made sure of that too, in my own way. I thought I was protecting you." A bitter, private laugh. "I didn't think about what it would mean to wake up completely alone."

The white room shuddered. The green walls flickered like a dying signal.

"Dad, what happened to me that night?"

"You went in to close it," his father said, and his voice was breaking apart now, dissolving at the edges the way the white had folded into this room, like the memory itself was running out of time to finish telling itself. "And something came out with you. Not all of it. Just — enough. Enough to wear your face. Enough to remember what you forgot on purpose."

"The creature."

"It isn't your enemy, Kael." His father's shape was thinning now, becoming translucent, the green walls showing through him like he was made of smoke. "It's the part of you that stayed behind to hold the door shut. Every night. For seven years. Alone. While the rest of you slept and forgot and healed."

"Then why does it want to hurt me?"

His father's fading face turned, for just a moment, toward the glass — toward Mira, still drawing, still humming something wordless to herself, unaware that this was the last time anyone would ever see her exactly like this.

"It doesn't," his father said. "It wants you to remember what you asked it to protect. Ask it about your sister. Ask it what really happened, before the ring finishes remembering how to open. Because when it does, it will not be your choice anymore which one of you survives it. And there won't be anyone left to tell you the difference."

"Wait—" Kael reached for him. "Dad, wait, what happened to Mira—"

But the room was already folding shut, the walls rushing inward like a held breath finally released, and the girl behind the glass looked up one last time — directly at Kael, this time, unmistakably, impossibly — and mouthed three words he could not hear.

Then the white swallowed everything, and Kael was falling.

He hit the chamber floor hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

Stone. Real stone, freezing cold, slick with condensation. The vibration in the air had become a physical pressure now, thudding against his eardrums in time with the pulse of violet light still bleeding from the ring's black surface. He was back. Wherever back was. There was no calm voice this time to tell him how long he'd been gone, no readout counting the seconds — only the ringing silence of a building that didn't know or care that he'd left at all.

He pushed himself upright. His nose was bleeding again, warm and metallic, dripping onto the stone in small dark blossoms that looked, for one disorienting second, exactly like the message written on the laboratory floor.

Don't trust yourself.

The creature was still standing where he'd left it, watching him with an expression that was no longer amused. It looked almost afraid — an expression so foreign on his own borrowed face that it took Kael a moment to recognize it for what it was.

"You saw him," it said quietly. It wasn't a question.

"I saw my father." Kael got to his feet, swaying. "He said you're not my enemy."

"I'm not." The creature's black eyes flicked, just once, toward the ring. "I never was. I just don't have very much time left to prove it, and neither do you."

"Then prove it. Tell me what happened to my sister."

Something moved behind those black eyes — that same slow, vast turning Kael had noticed before, like a held breath, like a held secret. For a moment he thought the creature — the other him — might actually refuse. Might smile again, cruel and unreadable, and let whatever was coming finish it for both of them.

Instead it said, very quietly, in a voice that for the first time didn't sound like an echo of Kael's own at all — it sounded like grief, wearing his voice as a disguise:

"She's not dead, Kael. She went in after you."

The ring's violet light collapsed inward all at once, the way a held breath finally breaks — and above them, through a hundred meters of stone and steel, the sky-sized hand closed the last of the distance to the Earth, and the whole world held still, waiting to see what it would do.