Forgotten Stars

Day 4,102 of the watch. Or maybe 4,103. The counter on my wristband flickered sometime during the night and I didn't bother resetting it, because who exactly am I reporting to?

Me. I'm reporting to me.

That's the thing about being the only person awake on a ship the size of a small city. You become very good at talking to yourself, and very bad at remembering which of your opinions are the official ones.

I rolled out of the bunk at 0600 because the lights told me to, and the lights are the closest thing I have to a boss. They came up slow, the way they always do, amber bleeding into something paler, until the whole corridor looked like the inside of a peach. I've decided the ship was designed by someone who loved peaches. That's my theory. I have a lot of theories. A person with this much time and this much silence develops theories the way other people develop hobbies.

Her name was Ilsa, and she was still asleep.

I know. I said I'm the last human awake. I lied. Or I told the truth in a way that has a hole in it, which is the kind of truth I've gotten comfortable with.

Ilsa slept in the pod next to mine, and she'd been sleeping for eleven years, four months, and some number of days I stopped counting because counting started to feel like a wound I kept picking at. The pod hummed. They all hummed, a low B-flat that you felt in your teeth before you heard it. Twelve thousand pods in this ring alone, and every one of them singing that same note, and every one of them holding a person who was somewhere else entirely.

I put my palm on the glass over her face. Cold. Always cold. Her hair had done something strange in there, drifting up and out like it was underwater, which I guess it sort of was. She looked peaceful. She always looked peaceful, and I always wanted to shake her, and I never did.

"You're going to miss breakfast," I told her. "It's paste. It's always paste. But it's *breakfast* paste."

She didn't answer. She never answers.

That's fine. I have a routine.

The galley was four decks down and a quarter-mile forward, which sounds like a lot until you remember the ship is eleven miles long and shaped like a needle, and most of it is dark, and most of it is quiet, and I've mapped maybe a third of it in the years I've been walking. I take the spine corridor because it's straight and because the windows along the left side look out into the dark between stars, and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I catch a smear of something, a nebula maybe, a color that doesn't exist anywhere else. Today there was nothing. Just black and the faint reflection of my own face looking back at me like a ghost that got stuck on the wrong side of the glass.

I'm not a handsome man. I want to be honest about that, since I'm the only one who'll remember. My nose is too big, my chin is too small, and the gray came in early, which is funny because I'm thirty-two. Or I was thirty-two when I went under the first time. The math on that gets slippery.

Here's the part I don't tell anyone, because there's no one to tell: I don't know why we launched.

I know the ship's name. The *Amaranth*. I know it left Earth. I know there are twelve thousand sleepers and one waking watch and that the watch rotates every twenty years. I know the protocols, the maintenance schedules, the paste recipes. I know how to fix a coolant line and how to recalibrate a gravity ring and how to euthanize a sleeper whose pod has failed, though I've only had to do that twice and I don't want to talk about it.

What I don't know is *where we're going*. Or why.

The mission files are locked behind a clearance I don't have, which is absurd, because I'm the only person on this ship who's conscious enough to read them. I've tried. I've tried a lot. The system asks for a code and I give it every code I can think of and it tells me, politely, in that flat synthetic voice, that my access is insufficient. Insufficient. Like I'm a waiter who wandered into the wrong room.

I asked the ship once, out loud, standing in the middle of the observation deck with my hands cupped around my mouth like I was yelling across a canyon. "Where are we going?"

The ship said, "Please specify a destination."

"I don't *have* a destination. That's the whole problem."

"Please specify a destination."

So that was the end of that conversation.

I ate my paste. It was gray and it tasted like the idea of oats, which is to say it tasted like nothing with a memory of something. I sat at the long table in the galley, which seats forty, and I sat at the head of it like a king, because why not, and I read the morning diagnostics off my wristband while I chewed.

Hull integrity: nominal. Reactor output: steady. Sleepers: 11,988 stable, one flagged, one critical. That would be Pod 7,412. I'd been watching it for a week. The vitals were drifting, the way a boat drifts when you cut the engine, slow and quiet and then suddenly you're somewhere you didn't plan to be.

I finished my paste and went to look at it.

Pod 7,412 was in Ring C, which meant a tram ride, which meant twenty minutes of watching the ship's ribs go by in the dark, lit up in sections like the spine of something enormous that had lain down and decided to rest. I like the tram. The tram is the closest thing I have to company, because the tram talks to me. Not really. But the automated voice announces each stop, and the stops have names, and the names are the only poetry left in this place.

*Hydroponics. The Long Gallery. Ring C, Berth Nine.*

I got off at Ring C and walked the last stretch on foot because I wanted to. The sleepers were stacked three high along the wall, and their pods glowed a soft blue, and the whole corridor looked like a river at dusk. I passed faces I'd memorized years ago. A woman with a scar through her eyebrow. A man with a tattoo of a bird on his throat. A kid, maybe nineteen, who I always nodded at even though he couldn't see me.

And then Pod 7,412.

The vitals readout on the pod's face had gone from amber to red. The hum was wrong. It was still a B-flat, but it was a B-flat with a crack in it, a wobble, like a singer running out of breath.

I stood there for a long time.

Because here's the thing about being the watch. You're not supposed to wake anyone. The protocol is clear. If a pod fails, you log it, you stabilize if you can, and if you can't, you let it go. You don't wake them. Waking them is worse than losing them, the manual says, because the ship can't support a sleeper who's awake. Not for long. Not without resources we don't have.

But the manual was written by someone. Someone who had a reason. Someone who knew where we were going.

I put my hand on the pod's glass. Warm, this time. Warmer than it should have been.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, in there."

The woman inside didn't move. She had dark hair and a wide mouth and a face that looked like it had been in the middle of an argument when she went under, her brow furrowed, her jaw set. I'd looked at her file once, back when I still had access to the sleeper manifests. Ilsa Reyes. Thirty-four. Engineer, second class. No next of kin listed.

The pod's alarm started to chime. Soft, at first. Then louder.

I had maybe four minutes before the pod made the decision for me. It would flood her with the wake sequence, and she'd come up whether I wanted her to or not, and then I'd have a person. A real one. A voice that wasn't mine.

The manual said don't.

The manual also said I had a destination, and I'd been asking for years, and nobody had ever answered.

I reached for the manual override.

My hand was shaking. I noticed that the way you notice weather, from a distance, like it was happening to someone else. Four minutes. Three. The chime got louder and the corridor lights flickered once, the way they do when the ship is paying attention.

I thought about Ilsa's file. No next of kin. A woman with no one, sleeping next to a man with no one, and between us eleven years of glass.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Let's find out why we're here."