“We won’t.” He kicked off a loose panel and drifted closer, spinning lazily. “Because you’re doing the math.”
“What if we’re wrong about everything?” she asked, the question slipping out before she could tether it. “What if the people who sent us out here—what if the lies are bigger than we think?”
She flinched. Kanata’s voice, clear and warm as a terrestrial summer, cut through the suit’s comms. She looked up. He was floating twenty meters to her port side, untethered, his silhouette sharp against the banded rings of a gas giant in the distance. -DB- Kanata no Astra
She looked past him, at the endless black sewn with distant, cold stars. It was not the void that defined them. It was the small, fragile arc of light—the Astra —and the nine hearts beating inside it.
Aries laughed, a brittle sound. “I’m mapping the gravitational lensing of the next jump. If we miscalculate by even 0.3 degrees—” “We won’t
“Then we’ll find a bigger truth,” he said. “That’s the deal. We don’t leave anyone behind. Not in space. Not in the past.”
She looked at his faceplate. Behind the reflective glare, she could see the shape of his jaw, the scar near his eyebrow he’d gotten from the worm-beast on the forest planet. He was not the same boy who had boarded the Astra five weeks ago. None of them were. Kanata’s voice, clear and warm as a terrestrial
“You’re thinking too loud,” he said. “I can hear your brain grinding from here.”
Kanata stopped drifting. He reached out, and his gloved hand pressed against hers. Through the two layers of fabric and metal, she felt nothing. But she saw the conviction in his posture.
She adjusted her helmet, the click of the visor deafening in the perfect silence. Breathe, she told herself. One… two… three.