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I.
It isn’t forbidden to leave Beta. Leward’s survey teams go into the valley daily to take samples of soil and water, the various flora and fauna. They set sensors to track weather patterns, monitor the planet Jannah's unusually gentle seismology. Watching, listening to their new home—all they have now—and learning its idiosyncrasies. The townspeople leave the walls as they wish, to think or curse or pray.
Yes, passing through the gates is routine, unsuspicious, as mundane as venturing into the wilds of an alien world can be.
Even so, Nami feels observed as she leaves with a satchel slung over her shoulder. Like a teenager sneaking out the back door.
But she is Nami Volovodov. She squares her shoulders, smiles at the maintenance crew fortifying the wall’s foundations, and walks like she has somewhere to be. Which she does. If the workers guess her motivations, if they remember the anniversary, they don’t call over. Don’t stop her.
She sets out in the direction of the last sighting. Hikes nine hours, following the remains of camps scratched from the moss.
Anticlimactic, after everything, not to find Filip Nagata.
She leaves the bag under an outcrop.
Begins the journey home.
II.
Jannah rotates on its axis, circles its home star. The days are slightly shorter; Nami still counts 365 of them to mark a year. They haven’t forsaken the Sol calendar yet. Future generations will no doubt find that strange. If there are future generations.
The rain falls in its characteristic mist, mostly diffused by the low gravity, save for the fatter orbs of water that periodically splash the hood of her poncho.
“Oye, Nami Veh,” Filip greets her. He’s perched on a boulder halfway up the verdant hillside, the curtain of gray seeming to part around him. His curly hair silvered, beard fuller, but he's here. Alive.
Nami squints at him from under the shelter of her palm. “You knew I’d be coming today.” It sounds like an accusation, but it’s damp and she’s tired. “How?”
Filip shrugs with his hands, that Belter affectation unabandoned, even in the absence of vacuum suits. “The rain.”
“Huh.” Nami tosses over this year’s offering. Nothing they can’t spare, as she’s rationalized it. The food is scavenged; the (questionable) beer from Merton’s still; the blanket woven from a reed-analog that grows by the river.
Filip catches, cradles the bag. “Tenye nafut?”
III.
“Do you pensa,” Filip asks. Worn as a tree on a mountaintop, he sits crosslegged opposite her, under the glittering swath of stars. “Do you think there’s anyone else? More than 1300 systems, maybe somebody. Or was it a fluke we survive the—” He gestures to the side of his head, a wiping motion. Meaning the loss of individuality, of self, they’d all suffered. The bleed.
Nami chews her stewed mushrooms slowly, considering her answer. It’s not a new question, in her own thoughts or in Beta. The weekly town meetings are part democracy, part group therapy. She believes it’s working; she has to believe that. But this isn’t Mose or Evelyn asking. It’s Filip, his eyes yet dull with private grief, regret. Filip, who killed a man to keep him from becoming—someone he hated. His father. Filip, who told her to martyr him, who ached to die for something.
“Is it better or worse to think we are?” Nami wonders. “Does it change anything we do here?”
He’s quiet for so long she worries he won’t speak again. It feels oddly important that he does.
“Maybe it will change the stories we tell,” Filip muses. “The dreams we have.”
IV.
Nami thinks about her often on these walks. Saint Anna. It isn’t lost on her that this is exactly the kind of thing her mother would have done. Holding Beta together with both hands. Skirting the rules to make a point. These visits to Filip Nagata, their yearly talks, which she has come to rely on. You’re so like her, Mama Nono told her, in refrain.
Maybe, Nami allowed occasionally. If you mean we're both stubborn as hell.
I’m not her, she insisted more.
You demand too much of people, Nami shouted at Anna, too many times. We can’t all be perfect.
“My mother was an engineer,” Filip tells her. He’s moving slower today, with a hitch in his breathing. A bad fall, he'd explained, and his bones Belter-brittle. “Most brilliant engineer in Sol system.”
Come back now, you don’t need to do this anymore. This penance. I shouldn’t have sent you to die out here. It's cruel. Who knows if we’re even going to make it. I’m not like her.
But she can't say if Anna’s mercy would be harsher. Or gentler.
“I didn’t know her well,” Filip continues. “But she told me something important once. About leaving. And staying.”
V.
Jannah rotates, circles. The rainy season arrives and passes. The hills are empty; no one has seen the exile.
One pale morning, a ruckus drags Nami from her cot. She stumbles into the square, stomping her boots flat. The local megafauna haven't lumbered through the town in years, not after the technicians discovered the pheromone trails and made the path around. People, arrives the next thought. But Alpha has been silent since the bleed; no ships have come.
Most of Beta gathers at the wall. Much as they were five years ago. They lost Cameron in a storm, Muhammed to a heart attack. But there are seven children now: the youngest three months, the eldest (Alejo) four years. Her town, her people. They look to her.
Beyond the gate, Filip Nagata leans on a staff cut from the predominant tree-analog. He’s gone all to whipcord, reduced to his most essential substance, his hair and beard clouding white around his face, like a sage of old. He extends an overburdened satchel towards the inquisitive crowd. “Here. Harvested from the lake country.” His voice scatters like leaves.
He looks at Nami. “Since it’s only us, we must not waste it. Any of it.”