Beyond the Dying Light

Chapter 8: A Father in the Shadow

Aria set the ration packs down carefully, like she was trying to make as little noise as possible. Her hands weren't steady.

Natan noticed before she said anything. He'd known her long enough to read the difference between tired and shaken, and this was the second one.

"What happened?" he asked, sitting up.

"I'm fine. I just—" She stopped. Started again. "I saw something. In that room."

Ben looked up from the device he'd been working on.

"The one with the government officers," Aria said. "I know we're supposed to just walk past it. I did, the other times." She was looking at Natan now. "But today I looked through the window."

"And?"

She hesitated for just a moment — the hesitation of someone who has been rehearsing how to say something and still hasn't found the right way.

"There was a man sitting apart from the others. Older. He looked exhausted." She paused. "Natan… it was your father."

The corridor went quiet.

Natan's expression didn't change immediately. It went through several things in rapid succession — confusion, rejection, something that might have been hope before it curdled — and then it just went still.

"That's not possible," he said. "After the company collapsed he just — he was gone. We looked. I looked." His voice stayed flat in the way that meant he was working hard to keep it there. "I spent two years assuming he was dead."

"I know."

"And now he's on a government evacuation ship." He said it like he was reading something off a page, testing whether it meant what it seemed to mean. "Working with the same people who—"

"He didn't look like he was working with anyone," Aria said carefully. "He was sitting by himself. His hands were shaking. He looked like someone who hasn't slept in a long time."

Natan looked at the floor.

Ben set his device down entirely, which for Ben was the equivalent of giving someone his full attention.

The silence stretched. Natan's jaw worked like he was going to say something several times before he did.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that," he finally said. Not angry. Just honest.

"You don't have to do anything with it right now," Aria said.

"He's on the same ship as us."

"I know."

"That's—" He exhaled through his nose. "That's a lot."

Ben leaned back against the wall. "Yeah," he said simply. No speech. No advice. Just agreement.

It was the right thing to say.

Natan sat with it for a while. Then he looked up at the porthole, and something in his expression shifted — not resolved, not healed, just deliberately set aside for later.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. We'll figure out what that means when we have to." He looked at Aria. "You're sure it was him?"

"I'm sure."

He nodded once. That was all.

The days that followed had a specific quality to them — slow and heavy, like waiting for something you couldn't stop.

The ship drifted. The asteroid damage had killed their steering entirely, and without steering they were subject to whatever gravity pulled hardest, and what was pulling hardest was the star ahead of them. It had been a distant point of light when they first boarded. Now it filled a quarter of the porthole view, close enough that the heat was measurable — not dramatic, not yet, but present. A warmth that hadn't been there before, seeping through the hull in a way that the ship's systems were increasingly struggling to compensate for.

They ate their stolen rations and talked less than they used to. The conversation had moved to a quieter register — shorter exchanges, longer silences that weren't uncomfortable so much as shared.

One evening Ben told them about his mother. Not much. Just that she'd been an engineer. That she'd found something she wasn't supposed to find. He said it matter-of-factly, in the same tone he used for everything, but his hands were still while he said it.

Natan didn't push. Aria said I'm sorry and meant it, and Ben nodded like he'd accepted it.

Another day Aria pressed her forehead against the porthole glass and watched the star for a long time without talking. When she finally turned around her expression was calm in a deliberate way.

"It's smaller than our sun," she said. "But if we hit it—"

"We won't," Natan said.

"You don't know that."

"No," he admitted. "But I'm saying it anyway."

She looked at him. He met her eyes steadily, even though his hands weren't entirely still either.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay."

The star kept growing in the window.

— End of Chapter 8 —