THE STARLESS SKY

What The Void Remembers

Kael would spend the rest of his life trying to describe what it felt like when the hand touched the Earth.

He would never manage it. There were no words built for that particular kind of silence. For one full second, nothing happened at all. Then the ground did.

The entire chamber convulsed, stone grinding against stone somewhere far above them, dust sifting down through cracks that hadn't existed a heartbeat earlier.

Kael was thrown sideways into the base of a console, pain lancing up through his shoulder. The violet light bleeding from the ring guttered, then surged, brighter than it had been at any point since he'd woken. "She went in after me," Kael said, when he could breathe again.

He wasn't asking. He needed to hear it said a second time, out loud, to make it real. "Mira went in after me.

" The creature — his own face, wearing grief like a stranger's coat — didn't answer right away. It was looking upward, toward the ceiling, toward the impossible weight now pressing down on the world above them. "She was eleven," it finally said. "You'd already gone under.

The ring was open — really open, not like this, not a controlled breach, a tear — and everyone who could still run was running. Everyone except her." "Why." "Because you were still inside it." The creature's black eyes finally came back down to Kael's face. "You'd gone in to close the door. It was supposed to take four minutes. It took forty. Nobody thought you were coming back out. Mira didn't care what anybody thought." Kael's chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the fall. "She came in after me." "She held the seal open long enough for you to crawl back through it. I don't know how. I don't remember that part — I wasn't born yet, not really, not until the moment right after, when there wasn't enough of you left whole to carry what happened next. So they split it. Half stayed a thirteen-year-old boy who got to forget. Half became—" it gestured at itself, almost apologetic, almost ashamed, "—this. The half that remembers exactly what it cost." "Then where is she." Kael's voice cracked on the last word. "Where is Mira now." The creature looked past him, at the ring, at the black surface pulsing like something breathing in its sleep. "She never came back out." Kael went still. "The seal closed behind you," the creature said, quiet and relentless, because it had clearly waited seven years to be the one who finally got to say this out loud. "It closed on her side of the door, not yours. You made it through. She didn't. And everyone who might have told you that afterward decided it was kinder to erase her instead of explaining it. No records. No grave. No name anyone could ask you about, because the moment you asked, someone would have had to answer, and no one wanted to be the one who did." The chamber shuddered again, harder this time. Somewhere above, an alarm that had been wailing steadily for the last several minutes finally cut out — not because the danger had passed, Kael understood, but because whatever triggered it no longer existed to keep triggering it. "She's alive," Kael said. It wasn't a question either. He needed it not to be a question. "I don't know." For the first time, the creature's borrowed calm slipped entirely, and underneath it was something raw and young and frightened, closer to a scared thirteen-year-old than to anything that had spent seven years guarding a door alone. "That's the part I've never been able to remember, Kael. Whether she's on the other side waiting, or whether there's nothing on the other side at all. I've stood in front of that ring for seven years too afraid to find out, because if I open it and there's nothing there—" "Then we don't get to not know anymore." Kael pushed himself upright, ignoring the way the floor tilted under him. "Not with that thing already here. Not with the whole sky gone." The creature stared at him. "You want to open it." "I want to finish what I started when I was thirteen." Kael limped toward the ring, every step sending fresh pain through his skull, his shoulder, the raw place behind his ribs where seven years of grief he hadn't been allowed to carry was finally catching up to him all at once. "You've been protecting the wrong thing this whole time. You weren't guarding the door to keep something in." He stopped an arm's length from the black surface. Up close, it wasn't blackness at all — it was a kind of depth, an absence with texture, like staring into water so still it had stopped being able to tell you where the surface ended and the dark underneath began. "You were guarding it to keep yourself from ever having to open it," Kael said. "Because as long as it stayed shut, she could still be alive on the other side. And you'd never have to be wrong." The creature said nothing. That was answer enough. Kael raised his hand toward the surface. "I'm done being protected from things I have a right to know." "Kael—" "If she's gone, I need to know that too. I can't keep living in the version of this where nobody ever has to say it." The black surface rippled at his approach, like something on the other side had felt him coming and leaned closer to the door. Far above, through however many meters of collapsing rock now separated them from the sky, something enormous shifted its weight against the surface of the Earth, patient, unhurried, certain that whatever it had come for was already close enough to wait for. Kael pressed his palm flat against the dark. It didn't feel like glass. It didn't feel like water. It felt like a hand closing around his from the other side — small, cold, and achingly, impossibly familiar. "Mira," he whispered. Somewhere inside the black, something whispered his name back.