The lights of Fairbanks International Airport glimmer below us. To the east, the city glows electric and yellow under a blanket of clouds. At the start of the year, Fairbanks sees fewer than four hours of sunlight a day, and Lost Creek fewer still.
Kyra loved coming to Fairbanks. She thought Lost was claustrophobic. She wanted to travel. She wanted to study and explore. But the city never called to me. It always felt too large, too anonymous. Life may be softer here, the winters less threatening, but back home in Lost, people looked out for one another. In our tight-knit community, surrounded by nothing for miles, we had each other and the deep blue of twilight. To me, Lost felt safe.
Even now, I’m more at ease at St. James’s small boarding school in Dauphin than I am in the large house Mom bought in Winnipeg. She calls the neighborhood affluent and prosperous, though people never leave the confines of their own yards. Mom is rarely there to notice because she works long days at the children’s hospital. At least at school I have a community, friends, teammates. Still, we may have made our home in Canada, but I left my heart in Lost.
The plane leans north, and Fairbanks disappears behind us. We fly to an otherworldly place, one that does not play by the same rules. The evergreens wear an armor of snow. The air shimmers with cold. Lost Creek is godforsaken, with winters that feel cruel and permanent, and we are proud of our resilience. The journey to Lost is a rush of turbulence through snow and memories, and the refrain of those same awful words: Endless night, endless day. Come to steal your soul away.
By the time Lost comes into view, I’m spread thin by exhaustion and fear. Time flies like we do, and I’m not ready. I’m not ready to face that Kyra won’t be waiting for me, and I’m not sure I ever will be. I’m torn between homesickness so deep it aches and the debilitating uncertainty of what lies ahead, of not understanding what happened to my best friend.
I push my nails deep into the palms of my hands and keep my eyes on the landscape as we prepare to land. To the left are the camping grounds where a handful of tourists spend their summers fishing on the lake and hunting bears in the woods. The cabins are abandoned in winter, groaning under their blanket of snow.
To the right are the old mining works. Gold is still rumored to lie beneath the hills—or heavy metals, perhaps—but the easily accessible ores were all exhausted decades ago. Mining deeper would be expensive, and our mine is too small to be profitable. What lies under the land may hold promises of riches, but for Lost Creek, those promises are empty, and people know better than to rush now. Our community has grown to depend on itself and the carefully cultivated land, not on the unpredictable nature.
Our community. Lost Creek, established in 1898, population 247.
I breathe. Two hundred forty-six.
Bordered by its eponymous river, Lost Creek stands against the elements. Our small, narrow, gold-rush town has a police station, a combined elementary and high school, an office for the doctor with whom Mom often worked, a moderately well-stocked grocery store, a bakery, a sole café/pub, a post office/tourist center, and an abandoned spa with hot springs, which sits outside the borders of town. The spa is a dash of color on the bleak horizon. The first time Kyra and I went there, we thought it was a superhero headquarters.
The landing gear hits the ground with a jolt and my seat belt strains against my lap from the force. We bump to a stop. This runway and the single road through the interior are the only paths that connect Lost Creek to civilization. These two connections to the outside world used to be all we needed to survive. Nothing could harm us within these borders. Within this community, we stood together. All of Lost against the rest of the world.
All of us.
All of us except one. All of us except Kyra, who never felt like she belonged. She never cared for hunting or camping. Like her grandfather, Kyra wanted to study storytelling. She collected the town’s myths and legends, and she was always curious about what lay beyond. But Lost is a town that thrives on secrets, and in Kyra, all of Lost’s secrets lay exposed.
Stars and Stories
Two Years Before
In Lost, the easiest way to fit in is to fall into the town’s rhythm. And on the days when Kyra wasn’t with me, I did. I did my homework and my chores. I didn’t talk back to the adults in town. I kept an eye on Luke when Mom was away. I had my stars in the sky, and I didn’t need to go anywhere to observe them.
“It should be enough,” I told Kyra, when I snuck into her room at midnight.
She sat at her desk, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, half a dozen books open in front of her. Her knees were pulled up to her chin, glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She’d been waiting for me. Of course she had. It was exactly three years since Dad left and—aside from calls and cards on birthdays—was never heard from again. I hated that anniversary. I didn’t want to be alone.
Kyra closed her books, one by one. “What should be enough?”
“All of this. I have you and Luke and Mom. Astronomy and home. I don’t want to be as restless as I am. I don’t want to care about him anymore. All of this should be enough.”
“Why?”
I shrugged.
She sat down on her bed and invited me under the blanket. “You’re allowed to be angry. You can be hurt. And more than that, I don’t think you should ever settle for ‘enough.’ Enough by whose standards, anyway?”
I leaned into her. My hands were cold from the night air, but she didn’t flinch. She pulled the blanket up higher.
“Mine, I guess?” I said. “Or Lost’s?”
“Hopefully those aren’t the same,” she teased. “What do you dream about?” And then, after a beat, “What would you dream about if it weren’t for Lost?”
Because she was right. Those weren’t the same. If not for Lost, I would go off to college to study astronomy. Work at one of the observatories around Fairbanks. Maybe study the aurora borealis.
But having Kyra next to me made me feel even braver. “Work on the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, to study the evolution of galaxies,” I answered. Once it was completed, the GMT would be the largest optical observatory in the world, ten times stronger than the Hubble Space Telescope. “Or on the E-ELT, to study the evolution of dark matter in high redshift galaxies.”
I stole a sideways glance at Kyra, who blinked at me owlishly. “I didn’t even understand those words separately, let alone together.”
I giggled and it bubbled into laughter. I didn’t know how Kyra did it, but she focused my restlessness like a telescope, away from the dark energy of Dad’s absence and toward the exoplanets of possibility.
“I’ll come to visit you in Chile,” Kyra said. “And then I’ll drag you with me to Antarctica. We’ll see what the other side of the world looks like. See the southern lights together. I’ll tell you stories about them.” A smile tugged at her lips. “What if they’re upside down?”
I scowled. “That’s not how science works.”
She grinned.
I punched her softly in the arm. “What will you do until then?”
“Travel too, if I can. Study narrative culture around the Arctic.” She motioned to one of the books on her desk. “I don’t want to collect and claim stories like Granddad did. I want to be respectful to Indigenous cultures. But I want to understand how our stories came to be. I don’t want them, and our histories, to melt along with the ice.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to?” I asked, wondering, Will Kyra get out of here? Pursue her dreams? Be well enough to do so?
She recoiled, as if I’d hit her. “Yes. Somehow or other, I’ll find a way.”
“Then we’ll have to find a good college for both of us,” I offered.
Kyra rested her head back on the pillow. “We’ll go farther than anyone in Lost ever has. Adventurers, looking for stories and stars.”
“But we’ll always come home, right?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll get lost on the ice instead.”
Unpredictable
A Year and a Half Before