The Space Between Stars

SORA — Year One

The thing about living on the moon was that you were always aware of the direction of down.

Earth's gravity was a memory in the bones; the colony's pull was real but lesser, and your body knew the difference even when your mind had forgotten to notice. Sora had been born here, which meant she had never known anything else, which meant the lesser gravity was simply the gravity of her life — and yet sometimes, standing in a corridor, she felt something in her chest lean toward a planet she had never stood on, as if longing could be inherited the way eye color was, carried in the body across a distance the body itself had never crossed.

She had her grandmother's photographs of Earth. She looked at them the way you look at something you have lost without ever having had it — which is its own kind of grief, quieter than most, with no clear beginning and no clear end.

The colony hummed.

It always hummed — the oxygen recyclers, the heating coils, the ventilation shafts running through the walls like a circulatory system. Sora had grown up with it the way you grow up with the sound of your own heartbeat: so constant it became silence, until some small hour of the night when everything else went still and you could hear it underneath everything else, keeping the whole place alive.

She was seven years old the first time she found the observation deck.

She had been following a light, a blue maintenance glow from a door left open, and had wandered into the largest window she had ever seen. It curved from floor to ceiling, three meters wide, and through it the Earth hung in black space like something left behind. Blue and white and heartbreakingly, impossibly far.

She had stood very still.

The colony hummed around her. Four hundred people breathed and slept and argued in the corridors beyond this door, and none of that reached her here. Here there was only the glass and the cold coming through it and the Earth.

She pressed her palm flat against the window.

The glass was cold enough to ache.

Because some distances, her grandmother had told her once, are not meant to be crossed. Only sent across.

Sora hadn't understood then. She wasn't sure she understood now.

But she kept her hand on the glass anyway, and the Earth kept hanging there, and between them was everything that couldn't be crossed.