Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper Page B

He left her to get Cricket, and she sat and stared in wonder. The sun had been obscured by a layer of clouds. Bright beams of light escaped them and infused the bottoms of the higher clouds with a yellow gold. Slowly, color spread across the whole sky, deepening and gaining subtle hues. All of the light softened.
    Charlie and Cricket took the other bench, both eerily silent.
    She felt big, as expansive as the sky, as if she and it and Charlie and Cricket were all somehow one thing in that moment even though none of them touched.
    Perhaps the sky touched them all. It no longer looked like nothing. It had become art. Orange and gold and hints of fluorescent pink.
    Even Cricket seemed to be watching the sky, although she was also watching Nona. Nona was happy that Charlie didn’t talk; the spectacle in the sky was so far beyond words she didn’t want to break the spell by trying to capture it with anything. She didn’t even take a picture.
    Adiamo gave them a brief glimpse of its near-red body, striped by glowing clouds, and then it was gone. After the colors faded back to a soft gray at the horizon line and stars started to show up, he said, “We’re lucky. They aren’t always so pretty.”
    It took a few breaths before she could say anything. “Lym keeps striking me silent. It’s so big.”
    â€œWhy did you come?” he asked.
    It felt like a personal question, but to her surprise, she answered it. “I promised my parents. They’re dead now.” Before he could express surprise, she added the details. “They were crew on The Creative Fire , the generation ship, and they didn’t have the right drugs and mods when they were young.”
    â€œI read up on that.”
    Oh. Of course. Satyana had told him about her. “I promised my dad I would see a sky. It was a dream of his. He never got here, but he was determined to send me.” In that moment, she realized that it was probably Onor who had talked Marcelle into funding the ship. It might have all been about this place, about a sky.
    Charlie spoke gently. “I’m sorry about your parents. My father is dead, too.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œAccident. He was working in Palat, one of our old cities on Entare. It was a salvage job, and an old metal girder crushed him.”
    â€œDon’t you just use nano?”
    â€œSure. But not the way I hear you do. We’re wilding Lym. That means removing technology, except here and on Lagara, where we grow food.”
    Before she could formulate a question about wilding he asked her another one. “So your dead parents drove you here. But what do you want? If I’m going to show you Lym, I want to know what you want to discover here.”
    It had grown dark enough that she couldn’t really make out his features. “The falls. Some mountains. I’d like to go to Lagara. I want to sail on the ocean. I can’t imagine that much water. We saw it from space but I know that won’t be the same.”
    â€œThat’s good. But that’s a list of places. What do you want to understand?”
    She looked up at the dark of the sky and tried to pick out constellations. It had grown colder now that Lym had turned their location away from the sun. Another thing to marvel at. Rotation. His question seemed important, but it was too damned personal. She didn’t want to answer him. The tongat—Cricket—unsettled her as well. She loved animals, but she’d never been near one that exuded such a sense of power.
    Charlie elaborated. “Most people that come here want something. Some connection to their past or this place or a spiritual evolution. We had one visitor who said she wanted to touch the face of God. Another one wanted to write a book of poetry about a planet. Many come wanting to live here, but we don’t let tourists just decide to live here. We control who stays here pretty tightly.”
    â€œYou’d have