Beyond the Dying Light

Chapter 5: The Sky They Never Saw

The ship climbed hard through the upper atmosphere, hull groaning from the heat below. Aria had both hands twisted into the front of Natan's shirt without quite realizing she'd done it, her forehead pressed against his shoulder, and he held on without saying anything — just one arm around her, the other braced against the wall as the floor vibrated beneath them.

Eventually the shaking eased. The engines found a rhythm.

"I keep thinking about the school," Aria said quietly. "The courtyard. The tree we always sit under."

Natan didn't answer right away. There wasn't anything to say to that.

"It's stupid," she added. "There are people down there and I'm thinking about a tree."

"It's not stupid."

She pulled back enough to look at him, eyes red. "What do we even do now?"

He opened his mouth — and then the ship broke through the cloud layer.

Through the porthole, the sky changed.

Not gradually. Not the way weather changes or light shifts at dusk. It fractured. A long jagged c***k split across the blue expanse above them — the familiar silver-blue of Aurelia's sky that every one of them had looked up at their entire lives — and through that c***k came a light that was nothing like what they knew.

Wrong-colored. Too white. Too sharp.

The c***k widened as the ship climbed, and what had always looked like sky began to peel apart at the edges the way a projection does when the emitter fails — and Natan realized with a cold drop in his stomach that that was exactly what it was. A projection. A ceiling. An artificial shell wrapped around the entire planet like a second atmosphere, built to show them a sky that wasn't there.

And on the other side of it was the sun.

Not the sun they knew. Not the soft filtered orb that appeared every morning right on schedule, perfectly comfortable, perfectly managed. This was the actual star — and it was enormous. It filled the upper view from the porthole like a wall, its surface churning in slow, violent rolls, swollen far beyond what a healthy star should be, radiating heat that Natan could feel through the glass. It didn't look like something that gave life. It looked like something in the process of ending.

The fake sky finished dissolving beneath them as the ship climbed higher, and now they could see Aurelia's surface clearly below — the planet they'd grown up on, the cities and fields and oceans they thought they knew. Except it wasn't that anymore. Wide swaths of the surface were dark and scorched. Not fresh damage. Old damage. Months of slow burning, patiently hidden under a projected blue sky while everyone below went to school and paid their bills and trusted that someone was in charge.

Ben stood at the second porthole, very still.

"The rumors were true," he said quietly. "They really did hide it. All of it."

Natan stared at the burned surface of his planet.

His hands had closed into fists without him noticing.

"Eight months," Ben said. "Maybe longer."

The fist hit the wall before Natan had consciously decided to move — metal on metal, loud in the small corridor. He didn't feel it.

"They built a fake sky," he said. His voice came out low and strange. "They looked people in the eye and built a fake sky so nobody would panic. So nobody would fight back. So they could pack their ships and leave at their own pace while everyone down there—" He stopped. "My family. We lost everything because of their systems. We trusted them. We kept trusting them. And the whole time—"

"Natan." Aria's hand on his arm.

"They were already gone," he finished.

He pressed his forehead against the cool metal wall and stayed there, breathing.

Ben said nothing. Aria stayed close. Outside the porthole the false sky of Aurelia continued to fall away beneath them, and the real one — vast and violent and nothing like what they'd been shown — stretched out ahead.

After a long moment, Aria moved to stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder, both of them looking out at it.

"We're here," she said. "That's something."

It wasn't enough. But it was what they had.

— End of Chapter 5 —