24 - Etap

“Up to a point,” Aris echoed. “What point is that, Kael?”

“Welcome back, Kael,” she said, without warmth. “Do you know where you are?”

Because that was the job.

He looked at his hands. They were young, strong. The hands of a man in his thirties. But inside, he felt older. Much older. He tried to remember his life—the one before the ship. A childhood. A mother’s face. A dog. Rain on a window.

He stood up, brushed the dirt off his knees, and walked back to his pallet to sleep. etap 24

“Ah,” Kael said. “So I’m the last one. The final candle. I burn until we arrive, and then…”

He was a soil analyst. He understood dirt. Dirt was patient. Dirt could be rebalanced, replenished, made fertile again. “Up to a point,” Aris echoed

He thought about the final day, when the colonists would wake, stretch, yawn, and look around. And one of them might ask, “Who kept the lights on?”