Chapter 2

Kviye

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I have something for you here.”

The call had woken Kviye up, and only a hint of blue light was streaming in through the window, but even through the sleepy fog, Kviye realized immediately what Valyen was talking about and sat up in bed.

“Are you serious?” Kviye asked, peaking through the window to see if the skiff was parked outside.

“They said it was completely spent and still charged me three thousand for it.”

“Three?” She had to admit the price made her hesitate, for the briefest moment; with her father not using the skiff, she might actually have it in her hands within hours. “I really owe you one Valyen.”

“Yeah you do. Three thousand, like I said.” Valyen may have had her reasons to be short, yet Kviye knew if anyone would let her take however long she needed to pay them back without interest, it would be Valyen. “Now get this thing off my hands before I change my mind and toss it in the river.”

Valyen’s voice on the line sounded distant; likely storms brewing over the marsh flats, which would slow her flight, so she wasted no time and was already putting on her clothes as she answered, “I’ll be there in a couple.”

“Right.” There was a pause before Valyen finally dropped the call, during which Kviye could almost feel the pain on the other end of the line, but any sympathy she felt for Valyen was drowned by her own excitement. Valyen made no secret of the fact that she thought Kviye’s plan was stupid, and that it would probably kill her, and frequently voiced her displeasure at Kviye’s unwavering commitment to her idea. And even though Kviye respected the concerns of her oldest and closest friend, by her estimation, this should have been the last piece she needed to answer a question that had preoccupied her ever since she could remember.

Kviye walked along soft damp earth in the direction of the skiff’s hangar. Shreds of mist rolled across the fields outside their house as unseen creatures chattered from dense shrubs and sang their morning song. The whole world was drowned in shades of green and blue, including the exterior of the hangar, which had grown slick with moss, and Kviye promised, probably for the tenth time, that she would clean it when she had a spare minute. The only exception was the skiff itself, which strikingly stood out in its dull silver sheen, a metal bird with a flat bill and wide behind, two narrow wings tucked at its sides. There were only two such skiffs in her town, among no more than a couple of dozen left spread across the whole moon, with this one having been in her family for generations.

Her father was likely in town, starting the morning early in search for new jobs. The day in Zhakitrinbur, on the other hand, was already in full swing. Not that Valyen was ever one to have much consideration for the time difference, but waking Kviye up before dawn meant that she may have been serious about changing her mind any minute and trashing Kviye’s prize before she got a chance to get her hands on it, so she picked up her pace even as her boots sank into the ground.

She could have called up her father and let him know she was taking the skiff out on the off-chance some rush job came in that couldn’t wait for her to bring it back in. Unlike Valyen, though, he hadn’t been aware of her plans beyond the mere suggestion of a hopeless dream, so explaining why she had to jet to Zhakitrinbur on such short notice would have invited too many unwanted questions.

Kviye’s father had always had a persnickety approach to the business, even though it was her mother, who was raised from childhood to be a pilot, who was the one that made the difficult last-minute decisions to make sure cargo and skiff arrived on time and in one piece. Kviye’s father was perfectly content to stay on the ground. What he had trouble with, was dealing with the lack of control, so he threw his energies into meticulous ledgers that grew like voracious fungus in his office and around his desk and led to more than one argument between her parents about flight schedules and route efficiencies. After her mother had died, and Kviye took over as pilot, her father had no longer kept as much of a watchful eye on the details and numbers, and seemed merely content that his daughter returned safely after every flight rather than get into the sporting rivalry he seemed to have carried on with his spouse. Trade between the three major cities on the moon was fairly sparse, especially during the stormy season and passengers infrequently needed a ride to some remote destination that would justify paying for a skiff flight. Any business was good business these days, and she hoped it would be a slow morning, because even she would have a hard time facing her father over a lost fare.

The dew coalesced and dripped off the skiff’s access ramp as it lowered towards the hangar floor. Kviye walked up into the cargo hold that took up most of the area inside the ship. These days, it had been mostly stripped bare, save for a few seats for passengers, while the rest was allotted for cargo. The hold below was also mostly empty, though she observed that its configuration and wall paneling was markedly different from the other storage space, leading her to suspect it was once suited for some other purpose. As she walked towards the cockpit she imagined most of the area taken up by seats, her ancestors huddled together side-by-side as the ship hurtled them across lightyears from their home towards dark unknown reaches of space. At least, unknown then, and now known to her and her people, the only world they knew even though a great busy universe was bustling next door to them.

As Kviye made her way up the ladder and into the passage that led towards the cockpit, she was hit with the same familiar smell – of getting tucked in at bedtime, of breakfast around the table in the early blue light of dawn as her mother readied to go on a flight, of evenings spent reading or tinkering with spare parts by lamplight. It was the smell of her mother, and after all these years this space still exuded it. In all likelihood, it was her mother who had actually soaked up the ancient smells of the skiff, but Kviye pushed away this truth in favour of her mother’s presence lingering here after all these years, watching over Kviye, ready to guide her through the flight she was about to undertake.

The skiff’s engine purred to life, only a high-pitched whine and vibrations in her feet indicating it was on. She gently lifted the ship off the ground and out of the hangar, and then having pointed the nose to her destination, initiated the throttle and shot above the landscape.

Lakes and crisscrossing streams zipped by underfoot as she slowly gained altitude to get above the storm whose edges she could already see on the horizon. Within fifteen minutes, all that lay below were cobalt churning clouds pressing down on the marshes where even the soil would ripple in waves from the wind. The cabin of the skiff shuddered and she brought it up even higher.

The previous year, she attempted to prove her theory and tested the limits of the skiff’s ability. She brought it up higher than she ever had, higher than the altitude her mother had warned her never to try rise above, a rather specific number that made Kviye wonder as to the origins of its calculation, and just when she thought everything she heard was simply an old fable designed to keep hearts rooted firmly to the ground, the ship stalled and she made it hallway to the surface before regaining control, telling of her failed experiment to no one but Valyen. Even with that knowledge, Valyen still procured the part for her, and if it worked the way Kviye expected, then the next time she made the attempt, she should be able to take the skiff out of the atmosphere and make it one step closer to proving that it was these ships that were what brought her ancestors here from somewhere out there; the birthplace of humanity.

Once the storm cleared, she was already past the marshes, and entering the drier hilly grasslands on the south side of their small continent. She lowered the ship closer to the ground, observing the small moving dots of the massive four-legged creatures that grazed these parts undisturbed by their human neighbours. There were only two rivers that meandered through these valleys, the occasional white blemishes of human settlements jutting off to the side. Kviye wondered how everyone that below was so content to assume they had always been there, that there was no other home than this small moon circling a grey gas giant. “Where had they come from?” was a question that not only didn’t have an answer, but no askers as well. Valyen’s response had always been “why do you care?” and even her mother couldn’t provide her with anything satisfactory.

Kviye had brought it up about ten years earlier, before her mother had fallen sick with the grey, when her parents decided she was old enough to learn the family business and she started accompanying her mother on her flights as co-pilot.

“Ma, so how old is this skiff anyway?” Kviye had asked, running her hand over the main console, her fingers tracing buttons that had probably long lost their original colour.

“I’m not sure,” her mother answered, not taking her eyes off the view outside. “It must’ve been in our family for, well, at least a hundred generations.”

Kviye sighed. “Yes, but who built it?”

“Someone who knew what they were doing.” Her mother smiled, and then gently tapped one of the displays on the console. “Hey, are you going to watch that gauge?” Kviye had snapped out of her daydream, about the ancestors that must have built the skiffs and taken their secrets with them, and pressed a lever to correct the ship’s vibration before the turbulence had truly kicked in.

It was the same gauge that was bothering her now, and she corrected for the strong winds coming off the sea. The pale walls of Zhakitrinbur glimmered in the distance, nestled against a vast ocean that contained nothing but the opposite side of their continent. Her and Valyen had spent many evenings of their childhood lying on the rooftop of Valyen’s family’s garage staring out over the dark expanse of water, with the perforated black blanket of sky overhead. Valyen had wondered about what lands may lie beyond the horizon, and while she gradually accepted the fact that the only land peaking above the waves on the moon was theirs and had turned her thoughts inward, to the garage downstairs and her growing list of responsibilities, Kviye’s own questions instead grew until their enormity dwarfed her life on Tanfana and threatened to push her from the shrunken rock.