Julian slid the telescope open. Each compartment was smaller than the last, tapering toward the eyepiece. At full extension, it was the whole length of his arm.
Just then a kid tore past them, the sparkler in his hand illuminating Julian’s face briefly in the darkness. From this angle, she could see the scar from where he’d split his chin open years ago, scaling the south wall of the palace to see her. He’d just returned from the old ruins, looking for moonsnakes—and that night he’d brought the castoffs of their milk-white skin to show her.
“Look up there.” Julian pointed to the constellation of Terecot. Up in the sky, the maiden’s hair unraveled into a spiral that ended with a tiny orange light. He handed her back the telescope. “Don’t lose that spot.”
But Rhee struggled to find the light when she brought it to her eye. There was only a blue-black sky in the viewfinder, and as she searched left and right she grew anxious. She levered onto the balls of her feet, as if an extra two inches would bring her closer.
Julian guided the telescope higher. She could feel his calloused palm cupping her hand. Her hood fell back as she tilted her head up, and she felt his breath on her neck. A memory surfaced without her calling for it, surfacing organically, making her skin prickle: the moment just a week ago when he’d pinned her in the dojo. If she’d turned her head just a fraction of an inch . . .
She gasped when Kalu came into sight. Swirls of orange and white cascaded across the planet’s surface. It looked just like the birthday sweet Julian’s mom had made Rhee when she’d turned twelve—whipped cream smeared on a warm piece of tenkang—simple and delicate and almost too beautiful to eat. She’d loved it more than the elaborate cake imported from Kalu. “Oh, holy ancestors. That. Is. Awesome.”
“You know the atmosphere on Kalu is so thick that they don’t get yellows in their sunsets?”
“I didn’t know that,” she said absently, still looking up at the brilliant planet. She remembered the sky and sunrise and sunset, though, especially her last dawn on Kalu—blues and purples peeking over the horizon and scattering across the sky.
The moment she learned of her family’s deaths, she’d fumbled through all the memories on her cube, searching to recall their last moment together—only to wish she hadn’t. Her mother’s hair, gray and frizzy; the dark circles under her father’s eyes; her sister purposefully ignoring her. All of them angry, disappointed, colder-looking in recall somehow than they had seemed in the flesh. As if they’d already been dead for years.
No one told you that about the way recall worked: how easily you could ruin the things you loved. Rhee chose to rely on her organic memory to remember only the good moments: Joss sneaking dried myrah candies to her in bed when she was sick; insisting the tailor make them both a set of pants like their father’s; and flinging aside her parasol to cartwheel in the sun, over and over, in the buckwheat fields outside the palace. Her father, a tall man, lifting Rhee easily onto his shoulders for a daily walk along the palace perimeter. And her mother, undoing Rhee’s tight braids every evening—something a servant could’ve easily done—and rubbing her aching head with lavendula oil. “Be a good girl” was the last thing she’d said to Rhee. And Rhee remembered nodding, as if she’d been saying I will.
But she’d lied.
Their father had given the sisters special coins once, souvenirs from a trip he’d taken in the Bazorl Quadrant—one for Joss and one for her. When her father ushered her family on the craft the night of the accident, Joss and Rhee had been fighting about whose turn it was to press the thruster deploy.
“Stars you’re stupid. Soil you’re still stupid,” Joss had told Rhee, flipping her coin to show Rhee it didn’t matter which side landed first. Rhee had been six years old, and furious. She’d snuck off while her parents were distracted. She’d wanted to go get her own coin—and prove Joss was even stupider. Acting like a baby, just like Joss always said.
She’d been gravity-bound when the craft launched, when it tore off into the atmosphere and disappeared. She hadn’t known, of course, that it would never return, that exactly four minutes after takeoff it would burn up in the outer rings of Rylier and crash, killing everyone on board, instantly.
All because her father had wanted peace. In signing the Urnew Treaty that ended the Great War between the planets, he’d signed his own life away. Seotra had warned him. Half the beings in the galaxy will want you dead, he’d practically snarled. His hands clutching onto the collar of her father’s shirt. Your own people will make you pay. Rhee had burst in at that moment, interrupting their standoff. No one had ever spoken to her father that way, or handled him so roughly. Rhee clenched her fists as she remembered the threat laced in the Crown Regent’s words, the menace she felt when she went through her cube playback, searching for all the memories she had of her father just before he died.