When starships leapt into the atmosphere, they almost looked like shooting stars. With a flash of light, they would appear in the night sky overhead. Then with faint trails of stardust in their wake, they would continue to the spaceport, often flying right over the city of Hoffman. 

“Make a wish.” 

Sorrel could hear her father’s voice as clearly as she could see the stars above her, even though it had been over ten years since his death. If she just looked at the sky, she could imagine that she was seven years old again and sitting by her father on the slanted roof outside of her parents’ bedroom. He’d point out the constellations to her, and tell her the stories behind the stars. 

Sometimes they would be stories of grand knights who ventured to defeat an evil witch in a castle, of a princess who ran away with a pirate, of a queen who lived in a castle made of ice. Other times, they would be stories about spacer trading routes and those who’d ventured beyond the borders of the Society of Worlds to undiscovered planets. Or they’d be more mundane explanations of the gases and chemical reactions that made the light seen beyond space and time. 

Sorrel preferred the fairytales or the spacers’ tales. 

She found her hand drifting toward the bronze compact in her pocket, cold from the winter air even in the flannel-lined pocket of her winter jacket. The engraved letters of V. M. were intimately familiar to her, as was the little heart beneath it. She knew that if she took it out, she would see the cracked glass, and the little ticking hands of the clock. In fact, even now she could feel the ticking like a heartbeat beneath her fingertips. 

But she did not take it out now. Instead she sighed and continued scavenging the broken ship at the top of the heap for parts, adding the parts that weren’t completely cracked or decayed from exposure to the elements to the large burlap bag slung across her upper body and over her shoulder. 

“I think that’s about the last of what we can expect from this one.” Across from her, on the other side of the open side-panel of the fallen starship, her sister wiped her hands on her stained coveralls. “This one’s pretty old. Vintage parts can go a pretty crown or two—but the problem is they’re so worn down, we’ll be lucky if even half of what we found will actually function once they’re cleaned up.”

“If that’s the case, then we return the rest for scrap, as usual.” Sorrel shrugged. 

Next to the open panel into the innards of the ship, she could start to see the faded purple paint of letters on the side. Eternity, the ship had once been called. The irony wasn’t exactly lost on her. 

“What kind of ship do you think this was?” Sorrel brushed her hand over what remained of the ship’s name. “Maybe this belonged to pirates who were headed for the edge of the system—or it could have been a merchant ship, that belonged to a traveling family who brought in goods from the Inner Worlds?”

Gwynn hummed noncommittally and tucked a black curl behind her pale ear. “This is a Rosebrier AT-426 model. A smaller, cheaper cargo freighter, but fairly sturdy. The name suggests it wasn’t owned by one of the larger companies.”

She looked up at Sorrel, meeting her matching eyes—one of the few things the twins had in common, both in appearance and otherwise. She smiled faintly. “I’d say your guess about a smaller, independent merchant is likely. Maybe it was a family heirloom, passed on through the ages before it wrecked here.”

She looked back down at the worn metal, her smile deflating. “It feels like everything from space wrecks and dies here.”

Sorrel knew she wasn’t just talking about the ship. She placed her hand over Gwynn’s and didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. 

For a moment, they sat there under the stars as their shared sorrow passed over them like a shadow. Ten years had crept along like a small eternity and passed like the blink of an eye. They both had been little girls, still, when their father died. At nineteen, would the twins be unrecognizable to him?

It was a question that kept Sorrel awake at night, with no idea as to how to answer it. 

Gwynn was the first to withdraw her hand and stand up. “I suppose Maman will be waiting for us. We’d better take this back home, and we can clean up and sort through the parts tomorrow morning.”

Sorrel bit her lip and rose to join her. The winter wind picked up, gently blowing strands of her dark red hair free from her loose braid. Snowflakes danced in their airborne waltz, to a tune inaudible to humanity. She paused and turned to look up at the stars one last time. They were so much more visible out here in the junkyards, than back home at the bed-and-breakfast in the center of town. 

She blinked—once, twice. 

The bright light of a ship flashed into act atmosphere. But it did not dim and glide gracefully to the spaceport.

No, it was growing brighter, and larger, and was it coming closer—

“That is not a controlled descent,” Gwynn muttered, shielding her eyes from the light. 

Sorrel’s own eyes widened and she grabbed Gwynn’s arm. “And it’s headed straight for us! Come on!”

She glanced around before locating one of the grimy orange safety pads scattered around the piles. She didn’t particularly like the idea of jumping onto one of them. But she liked the idea of being crushed and burned by a falling spacecraft even less.

She and Gwynn exchanged a glance. Sorrel let go of Gwynn’s arm long enough for both of them to ditch the bags of scrap, tossing them to the dirt at the bottom of the heap. They took each other’s hand and leapt. 

KA-BOOM.

It was as they crashed onto the landing pad that the shockwave of impact rang out. Sorrel scrambled to her feet and turned to see a sleek silver capsule where they’d once stood on the top of the heap. 

“Well, that’s convenient,” Gwynn muttered as she rose next to Sorrel. “Looks stable where it is.”

“We’d better check it out.” Sorrel started climbing up the heap. 

“Maybe we should call the paramedics—who knows if the pile is going to hold?” Gwynn lingered on the ground, craning her neck up at Sorrel. 

“But what if someone needs us now?” Sorrel turned her head as she continued her climb. They’d been scavenging from the Eternity for the last month. She knew the ascent as well as she knew the grooves of her father’s initials and hte little heart on her compass. “We can’t leave someone in trouble.”

Gwynn sighed. “No, we can’t.” 

She then joined Sorrel, quickly catching up in the climb back to the top of the scrap heap and the flat side of the Eternity.

By the time they’d gotten to the top, the silver capsule had cooled considerably. No heat radiated off of it. But still, Sorrel and Gwynn donned their thick work gloves as they approached and Gwynn drew her small metal toolkit from a pouch on her belt. 

“It’s an older style,” Gwynn declared, tilting her head as she examined it. “You can see from the bolt shape, that’s from—wait. . .”

She froze in place, her lips still parted. Then she shook her head. “That can’t be right.”

Sorrel frowned. “What do you mean?”

Gwynn ignored her, crouching down to examine a line of bolts and rivets. “Look at the shape, it’s octagonal, not hexagonal. And it’s got a symbol of a maker that was in business back before the Society of Worlds formed.”

“What?” Sorrel blinked rapidly. “But that would mean it’s over five-hundred years old.”

“That’s why I don’t think it’s right, but also. . .” Gwynn trailed off, biting her lip. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“We should get it open, I think if anyone inside was alright by now, they’d have gotten out.” Sorrel stood and looked for a door. 

A very thin line in a vaguely rectangular shape was off to the side, just barely accessible. A degree or more turned, and Sorrel wouldn’t have been able to open it at all because the door would have been partially or completely blocked. There was a black handle right above a viewing port. Sorrel glanced inside, but could only see a very faint glow inside, something white, but she wasn’t sure. 

She tried the handle. To her surprise, the door swung open easily, requiring no extra force than opening the door to her house. 

Inside, lying crumpled between the edge of a seat and the cold metal floor was a boy, who looked to be around her age. He wore a longer dark-blue jacket made of a fine material and a slender golden chain from around his throat with a matching azure stone that glowed. He had a boyish face with freckles like galaxies swirling on his cheeks, but it was somewhat marred by a collection of scars like a spider’s web around his right eye.

However, what was most peculiar was the boy’s hair—it was as white as the snow falling around them, and glowing. 

By this point, Gwynn had abandoned her investigation of the capsule to see who or what was inside the capsule—and she gasped. 

“I don’t recognize—I don’t think there’s anyone from any of the other worlds in the Society that look like that.” Gwynn spoke the words that were on Sorrel’s mind. It was funny, how they had a way of doing that. 

“Is—is he alive?” Sorrel reached out to touch his arm. 

His eyelids fluttered and he groaned, but he otherwise did not move. 

Sorrel and Gwynn exchanged a look. With her sister’s help, Sorrel gently moved the boy to see red, stark against the boy’s glowing white hair. The smell of iron filled the air. 

“He’s injured, we should take him to the hospital.” Gwynn looked up at Sorrel. “I think we should—“

She was interrupted by a roar like thunder. 

Sorrel looked up. More ships had jumped into the atmosphere. Some were the smaller, standard size Sorrel had come to expect—but they were all around one massive ship, blocking out the crystalline moon. Even from a distance, Sorrel could recognize the draconic silhouette of an Annwynese warship. 

She’d only seen them on news broadcasts. Most of the Annwynese ships that came to Perrault were merchant ships, here to take advantage of their location as a Border World between the Society of Worlds and the Undiscovered Worlds who refused to join them. 

Never had she imagined that they would be here.

“We’ve gotta get out of here.” Sorrel looked to Gwynn. “And I don’t think we want to take him to a hospital.”

Gwynn’s eyes widened. “You mean you think all of that is here for him? Maybe we shouldn’t. . .”

“Look at him, he has to be around our age.” Sorrel grabbed one of his arms. “How much trouble can he be? And we’ve seen the newscasts—the Annwynese are a bunch of bullies, attacking other, smaller worlds every other day it seems.”

Gwynn was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded. “You’re right, we can’t leave him. Where’s the hoverboard?”

“Hang on a sec.” Sorrel pulled the remote out of her pocket and hit a button, calling the old hoverboard to the top of the heap. It hadn’t been far, waiting faithfully at the bottom of the pile. “We’ll grab our bags, then we’ll get the hell out of dodge.” 

Gwynn nodded, and the girls pulled on the stranger in sync, and managed to lift his unconscious body onto the board. Gwynn and Sorrel climbed on, with Sorrel grabbing the paddle off of the side of the board. 

She looked one last time at the stars and the ships blocking them out. How long had she wished for her life to change? 

Well, she’d finally gotten what she’d wished for all her life. She could only hope that she wouldn’t regret it.