The ship passed by again at six in the morning, as usual.
Rael had been there long before, sitting atop Silo Number Three with his legs dangling over the edge, watching the amber horizon slowly brighten. He knew its schedule by heart. Meridian-class cargo ships on the Kepler-Vega route always crossed Ager Nova's sky around dawn, too high to be heard but low enough to appear as steady streaks of light moving among the stars that had not yet fully faded.
He always counted them.
Today made fourteen ships since midnight. Fourteen ships headed somewhere else.
The morning wind struck his face with the smell of wet soil and wheat dust, the same smell every morning, a scent he had known before he knew how to spell his own name. Below, the fields stretched in every direction until the eye could no longer tell crop from sky. Golden green rippled gently in the wind. Beautiful, the city people said when they came for vacation.
Monotonous, Rael thought, but never out loud, because his father had sharper ears than he looked like he did.
The streak of light vanished beyond the western horizon.
Fourteen.
"Rael!"
The voice came from below. He did not need to look to know it was his mother, just as he did not need to look to know the sky was bright enough now, which meant breakfast was ready, which meant he was late again.
He climbed down from the silo the same way he had hundreds of times: down the rusty metal ladder on the eastern side, skipping the fourth rung from the bottom, which had been loose for years, and landing on both feet in Ager Nova's red soil, always slightly damp in the morning. His shoes were instantly dirty. As usual.
The Vander family home stood a hundred meters from the silo, a single-story building with faded molded-brick walls, a solar-panel roof that had needed replacing for two years but still had not been replaced, and a kitchen window that was always fogged up every morning because his mother cooked on an old stove whose left knob could not be turned down. From the outside, the house looked like thousands of other farmhouses on Ager Nova. Nothing special. Nothing to set it apart.
Rael walked in without knocking.
"Back at the silo again?" his mother asked without turning from the stove. It was not a real question.
"Just for a minute."
"That's what you said yesterday."
"Yesterday was just for a minute too."
His mother turned around. She was not angry. Her expression was closer to exhaustion that had been held on to for so long it could no longer be called exhaustion, just part of her face. Her black hair was loosely braided, and there was flour on her wrist. "Wash your hands. Your father is already at the table."
At the long wooden table that took up a quarter of the dining room, Rael's father was already sitting with the posture of a man who had been eating breakfast since before dawn and was now merely repeating the same morning ritual for the fourteen-thousandth time or more. Konrad Vander. Fifty-one years old. Broad-shouldered, with hands that could no longer straighten completely after two decades of operating harvesters. His face always looked like that of someone considering something serious, though usually he was only thinking about the irrigation schedule.
"Sector Seven needs checking today," his father said without preamble. "The secondary pump's been making a strange noise since yesterday afternoon."
"Okay," Rael said, sitting down.
"Did you hear me?"
"I heard you, Dad."
His mother set two plates on the table: warm rice with square-shaped printed protein, the standard mid-range agricultural breakfast on Ager Nova, not much different from a mid-range agricultural breakfast on two hundred other planets familiar with the concept of farming. Rael stared at his food. He was hungry, but his hands did not move.
Outside the window, the sky had turned fully amber. Somewhere above, the fifteenth cargo ship might be crossing low orbit, too far away to be seen from the kitchen, carrying who knew what to who knew where.
"Rael."
He raised his head. His father was looking at him with an unreadable expression—not angry, not impatient, but with something deeper beneath it that Rael had never managed to translate.
"Eat first."
Rael ate.
Dunk arrived at eight, as usual, wearing the face of someone who had just run even though he had not run.
"You're late," Rael said from atop the tractor.
"I'm not late. You're just too early." Dunk climbed into the tractor's rear bed and sat there like a sack of potatoes wearing a shirt. He was big for his age—fourteen, but already built like a seventeen-year-old who liked to eat. His face was round and expressive in a way that made it hard for anyone to stay mad at him for more than five minutes. "Any leftover breakfast?"
"You just ate breakfast."
"That was my first breakfast."
Rael did not answer. He started the tractor, an old engine that hummed unevenly, and began moving toward Sector Seven. Open fields stretched out on either side of them, rows of waist-high wheat swaying as if choreographed. There were no ships in the sky. Not yet.
"Did you see them this morning?" Rael asked.
"See what?"
"The ships. There was a whole convoy. Fourteen in six hours."
Dunk did not answer right away. From behind him, Rael heard chewing, though he had no idea where Dunk had gotten the food. "Where are they headed, anyway?"
"No idea. Vega. Or farther. How would I know?"
"So?"
Rael did not answer immediately. His grip tightened on the wheel for a moment, then relaxed. "It's nothing. Just asking."
Dunk knew it was not just a question. Dunk always knew; that was what was both annoying and reassuring about being friends with someone like him. But Dunk also knew when not to say what he knew, so he stayed quiet, kept chewing, and let the field wind fill the silence between them.
The tractor hummed. The wheat swayed. The amber sky stretched without end.
In the distance, faintly behind the waves of heat beginning to rise from the soil, stood a dark line along the southern horizon. Rael saw it every day. Everyone on Ager Nova saw it every day. No one ever talked about it, just as no one talked about the sky because the sky was always there and always the same and there was no point discussing it.
Veth Canyon. That was what the old people called it, when they called it anything at all. Usually in the same tone people used for bad weather or unpaid bills—something that existed, was known about, and was better not thought about too much.
Rael stared at the dark line for a moment.
Then he turned the tractor right, toward Sector Seven, toward the pump making the strange noise, toward a day that would unfold like every day before it.
Sovi was at the equipment store when Rael and Dunk finished with the pump.
She was sitting on a bench outside with thin scanner glasses covering half her face, her fingers moving over a small holographic screen projected from the band around her left wrist. Beside her sat a stack of physical books—real books, made of paper, the kind no one bought anymore except old collectors and Sovi—and a sandwich that was half-eaten and seemed to have been forgotten.
"What are you reading?" Dunk asked, immediately taking her sandwich.
"Hey—"
"You haven't eaten this in a while."
Sovi looked at him with an expression of complete resignation. She was sixteen, a year younger than Rael and Dunk, with a small build that always made people guess her age wrong until she opened her mouth and spoke with a vocabulary that sometimes made adults pause for a moment. "That's my sandwich."
"It's a memory sandwich now," Dunk said through a mouthful.
Rael sat beside Sovi. "What are you reading?"
"Historical cartography." Sovi closed her holographic display. "Mapping planets before the full digitalization era. People still drew maps by hand back then."
"Why?"
"Because it's interesting."
"Interesting to you," Dunk said.
"Objectively interesting." Sovi picked up one of her physical books and opened it to a marked page. "Look at this. A map of Ager Nova from the year 3,100, eight hundred years ago. Can you see how it's different from the map now?"
Rael and Dunk leaned closer. On the page was a hand-drawn map of their planet. There were no coastlines, because Ager Nova had no large oceans, only scattered lakes, but there were contours of the plains, canyons, and a range of hills in the north. The strange part was the south.
On modern maps, southern Ager Nova had only a blank white label: UNMAPPED ZONE.
But on this old map, there was something. Detailed contour lines, place-names in script Rael did not recognize, and in the middle of it, where the modern map showed nothing but emptiness, a small circle with a symbol inside.
"What's that?" Rael asked.
"I don't know." Sovi closed the book. "I haven't found a translation yet."
"Why is the old map more detailed than the new one?" Dunk asked. This was one of the things Rael liked about Dunk. Beneath all the food and fear, Dunk sometimes asked exactly the right question in the simplest way possible.
Sovi did not answer immediately. She carefully returned the book to the stack, as if she were putting away something that could break.
"That's what I want to find out," she said at last.
In the afternoon, as the sun of Kepler-442 began to sink and the amber sky turned deep orange, Rael climbed to the top of Silo Number Three again.
This time he did not count ships. He simply sat and stared at the southern horizon, toward the dark line that looked more solid from here, closer than it should have been possible for it to be, like the boundary of a world deliberately drawn by someone who did not want people crossing it.
Veth Canyon.
He had asked his father about it once, when he was still little. "Dad, why can't we go there?"
His father had not gotten angry. He had not given a long explanation, either. He had only looked south for a moment, wearing the same expression he had worn that morning at the dining table, an expression Rael could not translate, and said, "There's nothing interesting there."
A strange answer, Rael had thought even then. People usually said: dangerous, far away, no access. There's nothing interesting was the answer of someone who had seen it and made a decision, not someone who did not know.
The evening wind blew in from the south, colder than the morning wind, carrying a different smell—not wheat soil, but something older, heavier, like wet stone and something else that had no name in Rael's vocabulary.
He breathed it in deeply.
Below, his mother called him to dinner. In the distance, a ship crossed the sky, a thin, fast streak of white light. The fifteenth ship of the day, or maybe the sixteenth. He had lost count.
Rael did not move yet.
He stared south until darkness truly fell and the canyon line dissolved into the same color as the night, while the sky above Ager Nova blazed with thousands of stars, each with a name and each with a planet orbiting it, and each one had been visited by humans—except perhaps one or two still too far away even for radio signals.
The universe was full of places other people had already seen, Rael thought.
But there was one place on this planet that no one had.
"Rael!"
He climbed down from the silo.
Dinner was waiting. Tomorrow there would be another pump to check, another field to water, the same sky with the same ships heading to the same places.
But tonight, for the first time in a long while, Rael went to sleep with something different in his chest.
Not impatience. Not boredom.
Something older than either of them, and more dangerous—something adults had a name for but rarely wanted to admit:
Curiosity that had begun to refuse to stay quiet.