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Chapter Text

Lanthani

It's not that her people were particularly good at space travel. Or technology. Or anything specific, now that she thought about it. Except for enduring.

Admittedly, she has only come to realise the latter over time. Realise is a suitably neutral term, one that could be replaced with appreciate or resent depending on the day.

She remembers the Others, the ones who, legend had it, came down to her people's home quite by accident, and introduced them to concepts like space travel and clean energy and the very fact that their home was on an enormous orb floating in an even more enormous expanse. It was a lot for her people to process, and even when she was born, people weren't entirely sure of whether or not there was truth to the claims.

But the Others still appeared, every now and then, usually when a request was made by someone of adequate political sway. The Ledger of Favours had many lines yet to be filled, but those in power were still wary of overdoing it. It had seemed too good to be true – that these strange beings with improbable claims of knowledge would be willing to grant these Favours in exchange for taking waste from her people. Strands of hair. Saliva scraped from their mouths. Sometimes, with gentle voices and sharp sticks, a little blood.

She'd been on the lottery once, when she was still in the murky space between infancy and formal education, a few years before her four hundredth. Her mother had put a bow in her hair and patted her cheek. 'Do whatever they say, my love. They are wise beyond our understanding.'

She had nodded and followed the strange man who came to collect her. The Others didn't look so very different from her people, but there was something about them. She couldn't quite tell what it was, but the man was not unkind. He had clipped her nails and gently picked off hairs from her shoulders and made her giggle when he wiggled a stick against the inside of her cheek.

'Do you need to use your pointy stick too?'

The man had paused, looking confused. She looked meaningfully at him and then rubbed the inside of her elbow. 'My Papa got picked once and he had a sticker on his arm because of the pointy stick.'

He'd chuckled. 'Ah. No, no blood draw for you, little one. I should have all I need here. You can go back to your mother now.'

She'd nodded and stood up, offering another loose hair that she picked off her skirt. He took it with a smile. 'Thank you.'

But something stopped her before she walked through the door. A thought. 'What do you need them for?'

'Hmm?' He'd looked at her intently after his initial sound of surprise. 'What do we need the samples for?'

She'd nodded again. 'I know that you like to take our stuff.'

'Well. It's how we can do some exploration of what makes you and the rest of the people of Lanthani special.'

She'd thought about for a moment. 'That makes sense.' She wasn't sure of too many things, but she certainly felt special. 'Okay. I hope you have fun with my spit and stuff.'

'We always do, Pelia. Thanks for your cooperation.'

Her father was an important man. Pelia couldn't tell you what he did for work, but she knew it had to matter a lot because he was always busy. Sometimes he even had meetings with the Others. By the time Pelia began her schooling, that was a pretty great brag to be able to announce when people tried to make her feel small.

'I'm going to tell my Papa to put a Favour in the Ledger to have you thrown onto one of the moons,' she hissed at Kino. He was mean and he was stupid – everyone else in their class was in their 520s at the oldest, but Kino had been held back and was over 650. He was way too big to be in their class but way too stupid to be with the older kids. Pelia hated him. And he hated everyone.

'That's not how the Ledger works,' he argued.

Everyone laughed and Pelia pulled a face at him. 'How would you know?'

'Nobody can go to the moons.'

'Can too. Where do you think the Others stop for extra rocks for their rocketship on their way here?' She put her hands on her hips.

'Children!'

They all whipped their heads around as Teacher Feria marched towards them. 'Kino. Pelia. In my office, now.'

Pelia fumed. It was the big dumb idiot's fault for saying big dumb idiot things and now she was in trouble just for trying to make him get his facts straight? There was nothing fair about that. She sat silently on the couch, arms folded, as Teacher Feria reprimanded Kino before sending him out.

'Now. Pelia.'

Pelia really tried to school her expression into one of contrite innocence, but it fell back into a scowl almost immediately. 'I didn't do anything!'

Her teacher shook her head. 'You were baiting him. And threatening him. And not for the first time! Pelia, you must be more controlled. You're a bright girl, but you don't know everything. And you certainly have a lot to learn about interpersonal relations in an educational environment.'

Pelia scrunched up her nose. 'You talk like the Others do.'

Teacher Feria smiled faintly. 'I'm sure that's a compliment as far as they're concerned. Their education facilities do have a certain… elevated quality to them, compared to what we're used to here.'

Pelia stared at her, trying to make sense of her remark. 'Wait! You went to one of the Others' schools?'

She nodded. 'Favour 472. My parents thought I was capable of more than what was available to me here. And they were right.' She sighed. 'But the Favour only extended to the education. Not ongoing intermingling with their society. They didn't need the… reminder. So they sent me back to pass on my knowledge to our young people. Like you.'

The usually present smile returned to Teacher Feria's lips, but Pelia was still caught on her words. 'The reminder of what?'

'Of… how different we are from them.'

'Why wouldn't they want to think about that?'

Teacher Feria looked down. 'It's… hard to say.'

Pelia wasn't sure she believed her. Hard to say? Or hard to admit? But Teacher Feria was right about one thing. She was a bright girl. And this, she realised wasn't the time to push her luck. 'Well. I'm sorry that I was mean to Kino.' And maybe he should stop being mean to me, she thought.

Teacher Feria nodded. 'All right. I don't want to see you in here again for behaviour issues, Pelia. I'll have to call your parents in next time.'

Pelia shivered. 'I understand.'

It was hard to try to be good, when there were so many questions. It was another few years before she ended up in her teacher's office again, but as promised, her parents were called in. Her mother came alone, the first few times. The seventh time, she knew it was serious when her father came through the door at the same time as her mother.

'Teacher Feria, I'm so sorry. Pelia knows better.'

'I know she does. I just… I worry that she isn't going to settle down without some kind of intervention. She has a lot of spirit and a sharp mind. I don't want her to lose those things, but I do want her to… hone them, perhaps.'

Her father cleared his throat. 'Do you have any ideas in mind?'

Pelia, eyes on her lap, heard a note of uncertainty in her teacher's voice. 'Well. It might be a bit extreme…'

'Pelia needs to be a good citizen like the rest of us. I know that she's still early in her education, but I have no time for bad habits to be setting in. What are you thinking?'

'I understand that you have friends in high places.'

Pelia looked up at that, to see her father nodding. 'I do.'

'There's a pilot programme underway with some representatives from the Others. They call it wilderworld therapy. Now, Pelia's too young to be considered yet. They don't take people under 800, usually those in their final decades of secondary education.' Teacher Feria leaned in. 'It could be worth discussing the matter with any officials you have contact with. Just to know future options.'

'Or to put some fear into the girl,' her father said, nodding. 'Good idea.'

Teacher Feria leaned back in her chair with a long exhale. 'I'm glad we understand each other.' She turned her attention to Pelia. 'Pelia, I'm not trying to punish you. I'm just trying to make sure that you're ready for your next centuries.'

'Sure,' Pelia mumbled, looking back down. 'Whatever.'

Her father sniffed. 'I'll be making that call sooner rather than later, then.'

The man looked familiar. Pelia hadn't had many encounters with Others, but she was pretty sure she hadn't seen anyone who has quite so far into their years of myriad. And then it clicked, while he was swiping through something on his device. 'Oh!'

He looked up, and she flushed. 'Sorry. I just realised why you look familiar. Your…' she squinted at him. 'Great-great grandson, maybe? He took my samples once. That's some strong genes.'

He looked confused, then snorted. 'Strong genes are more your kind's forte than mine.'

'We only know what genes are because of you.'

'Knowledge, as it turns out, isn't always power.' He drummed a stylus on the desk. 'I don't have a great-great-grandson, Pelia.'

Pelia was confused. 'How many greats then?'

He shook his head. 'I don't have any children. My work here keeps me too busy for anything like that.'

'Weird. He really looked just like you. Just, you know…' She waved a hand. 'Younger.'

'How long ago was this?'

She thought for a moment. 'It was before I started school. So… a little over a century I guess.'

He nodded. 'Usually our sample collectors are new graduates of our exploration academy. That's where I started out.'

'Uh huh. That makes sense. He was young. For a grown-up.'

'Yes. Young by our standards. Impossibly young by yours.'

'What do you mean?'

He exhaled and set the stylus down. 'Pelia, I know many Lanthanites struggle to comprehend this, but I know you're smart. You know that there are different species out in the cosmos. Like my people.'

'Yeah?'

'Have you ever had a pet?'

It seemed like a weird shift of topic, but she nodded. 'Yeah. We got Yoriq when I was little. But he died a couple of decades ago. And Mama said I had to be better behaved if we were going to get another amneth any time soon. And I guess I haven't been.' She wrung her hands. 'What does that have to do with anything?'

'Amneths don't live as long as people, do they?'

'No.' She sighed. 'Better than winneks though. My friend Uriyu had a tank of them and only one made it to 30.'

The man nodded gravely. 'So some species don't live as long as others.'

'Yeah, animals don't live as long as people do I guess.' She hadn't really thought about it too much at the time. It was just the way things were. People were born and then they just… were. Animals were born and then lived and then died.

'It's not just animals, Pelia. Lanthanites are very special. My people have never encountered anyone quite like yours before. And we've met a fair few different people in our time.'

'I know. I remember that man telling me that we were special.'

'And you didn't think about why.'

She shrugged. 'I already knew I was special. It didn't seem like an important question.'

That drew a small laugh from him. 'You're a very self-assured young woman, aren't you, Pelia?'

She shrugged again. 'Maybe?'

'The thing is, Pelia, there are of course lots of reasons why you and everyone who lives on Lanthani is special. But there's one specific reason why my people are so intrigued by you. Your lifespans are unlike anything we've ever seen. There's a lot of the galaxy we know nothing about, admittedly, but in the areas we've explored, you're unique.'

'Our lifespans?'

'How old do you think I am, Pelia?'

She squinted at him. She didn't want to be rude. Adults could get grumpy about things like that. She thought he looked like he was coming up to his 23rd or so millenium. 'Umm. Like 15000, maybe?' That was definitely wrong, but it was always better to play it safe.

His eyes were sad. 'I'm 142, Pelia. And in my society, that makes me an old man.'

So he really did look rough for his age. '14200 isn't that old,' she reassured him.

She couldn't quite make sense of the bark of laughter. 'No, Pelia. I'm not 14200. I'm just… 142. One century, and forty two years. I was 22 when I first came here and took your samples.'

Her disbelief must have shown on her face, because his expression softened even as he gave her time to process.

'I don't understand,' she said, finally, looking down at her lap and examining her hands before looking at his, old and weathered and wrinkled. 'My friend has a sister who is 150 and she can barely walk.'

'We're a different species. We age at a different rate. Or rather, I should say, you age at a different rate. Our ageing is relatively standard for most sentient species that we've encountered. It's a rare person indeed who makes it over 200.'

'I'm over 200,' she murmured. 'I'm way over 200. I'm not a baby.'

'And that's why we're so interested in all of you. And your genes.' He steepled his fingers. 'If we could harness whatever it is that gives you such a long life, we could do things that seem impossible to us now.'

'We're your experiments,' she said, voice slow and low.

'Willing participants in research into lifespans,' he corrected. 'And while we haven't made progress yet, we're persevering. There may not be a breakthrough while I'm around to see it, but I have faith that there will be one day.'

'With no descendants to see it,' Pelia replied before she could stop herself. 'Sorry.'

He shook his head. 'It's fine. I've dedicated my life to this, and I'm at peace with it. We've been exploring it for generations. And granting a few technological requests here and there is a small price to pay for the potential your people hold for mine.'

'The Ledger of Favours,' she says. 'Oh.'

He nodded, and seemed to shake off the strange shifting melancholy and hope that had shrouded his face for most of their conversation. 'Which brings us to the actual reason for our meeting. Your father has indicated that he wishes to lodge a Favour for us to send you on a wilderworld trip.'

Pelia's mind was anywhere but her father's wishes for her future behavioural changes. 'Um, yeah.' She tried to remember what had been discussed at the meeting with Teacher Feria last year where it had come up. 'But I'm too young.'

The hollow laugh returned. 'Indeed. At 554, you're too young for the programme. Individuals typically need to be in their late adolescence before we send them out, and the equivalent for Lanthanites is around 800. But he's a man of influence. So we have confirmed a place for you in the intake around two centuries from now, shortly after your 756th birthday. If you get yourself on track, he may be willing to withdraw you, or commit to a short visit, rather than the usual half-century.'

'A half-century's not so bad,' Pelia said. 'I could handle that.'

'The programme's still in its infancy. We may find that we need to extend the standard timeframe to really have a strong effect on Lanthanite adolescents, admittedly. Some people seem to really enjoy it, and don't even want to come back afterwards.'

'So why do they?'

He shifted uncomfortably. 'Well, we need to keep you all safe. If others got wind of your genetic predispositions, it could be dangerous.'

'But you're the Others.'

'Other others. We, of course, don't call ourselves Others.' He makes a strange noise that makes Pelia want to cover her ears. 'It doesn't translate well, unfortunately. So we've come to accept being Others while we're among your kind.'

'That's kind of sad.'

'I suppose it is.'

'So, um. I'm going to be going… somewhere in 200 years? Where?'

The man shrugged. 'I don't know. They'll confirm the location closer to the time.'

'Who's they?'

He shrugged again. 'They haven't been born yet.'

When Pelia turned 750, there was a year-long lull in communication from the Others. It was unusual; her parents couldn't recall such a situation happening before.

'Maybe they're making a breakthrough in their research,' she suggested, when she walked in on her parents discussing it in the kitchen. 'And it's keeping them all busy.'

'Not all of them are researchers, Pelia,' her father snapped. 'What a silly thing to say.'

She refused to let herself be dissuaded. 'Well maybe there's been some kind of disaster. Like a volcano or a war.'

Her mother stared at her. 'Where did you learn about things like that? From that Teacher Feria of yours?'

Pelia nodded. 'Yeah. She said we were old enough to know about the worlds beyond.'

'Ridiculous,' her father muttered. 'Utterly ridiculous. Filling young minds with the mythologies of other places.'

'They're real,' Pelia insisted. 'The Others and the other others all have horrible things like that happen on their planets sometimes! She said even on Lanthani they happen sometimes. Just not very often.' She scowled at her father. 'Besides, I'm off to the wilderworlds in a few years anyway, right? What's a little advance knowledge of the sorts of places they might be taking me?'

Her mother went pale. 'Pelia… Do you really think that the worlds they'd take you to would face such things?'

She shrugged. 'Who knows? Probably? Everyone else lives such tiny lives.' She fixed her attention on her father again. 'And it's so important that I go off and learn from that, right?'

He cleared his throat. 'It's the best option for wayward young people. All the research agrees. You'll realise how harnessing your intellect for our mutual benefit is more important than letting yourself follow the whims of your creativity.'

She rolled her eyes. 'Sure.'

'You are not doing anything to convince me you don't need this, young lady.'

'Well if we haven't heard from them in a year, maybe we won't hear from them before they're due to pick me up and throw me into the wilderness.'

'Don't get your hopes up. They can't let the Ledger of Favours be abandoned.'

Pelia couldn't help but think that the Ledger of Favours was probably the least of the Others' concerns, but knew a losing battle with her father when she was in one. 'Well, I'll get packing in a couple of years then.'

'You do that,' he shot back. Her mother still looked faintly ill.

Communication resumed sporadically six months later. There was no explanation, and few planetside visits. Pelia swore under her breath when the news broke, although later that night, in bed, listening to her father slam the door on his way in from work, she couldn't help but think that the worlds beyond might actually be nicer to be in than this particular neighbourhood of the Lanthani capital.

A four-month communications blackout ended with the arrival of two grim-faced Others on their doorstep. Their uniform was a little different from the ones that Pelia had seen before. They looked… unkempt, somehow. Tired. Ragged.

'We're here to collect the child Pelia for the pre-requested wilderworld trip,' one announced.

Pelia stepped out from behind her father. 'That's not meant to be for another year.'

'Opportunities for travel here have been limited by the ionic storms in this region of space. It's now or it's not for another generation.'

'Our generation,' the other man clarified. 'Another fifty of your years. Give or take.'

'We could wait fifty years,' her mother offered from beside Pelia. 'Things haven't been so bad, right, darling?'

She patted Pelia on the shoulder, but Pelia's father took the endearment to be directed to him. 'They've been bad enough.'

Pelia thought back to her second and third century. 'You used to like my… oddities. My creativity.'

'When you were an infant. When it was just an indicator of intelligence that the specialists assured us would develop into pure intellect, not…' he waved his hand at her. 'This.'

Pelia tucked a curl behind her ear. 'Thanks.'

Then men look perturbed. 'We, uh, need to get going.'

'How many others are coming?' She tried to look past the men at their vehicle, but couldn't make out any other figures, just that strange curve of glass and alien cladding.

'Only you.'

'Only me from this neighbourhood?'

The first man to have spoken shook his head. 'Only you. The cosmic climate is making even your collection ill-advised, but this was apparently a Favour that couldn't be denied.' There was a tone of disapproval in his voice. 'We need to be off Lanthani within twenty minutes or the departure will be severely compromised.'

Pelia's mother burst into tears. 'No.'

'It's for the best,' her father said, turning to face mother and daughter alike. His voice was gruff, no trace of emotion cracking his veneer. 'You'll be a new you when you're back here.'

Pelia's heart skipped a beat. 'So I'm really going.'

'I really hope so, otherwise we put up with that turbulence for nothing.'

'She'll be all right, won't she?' Pelia's mother lunged at the Others, grabbing at their shirts. 'You'll make sure of that.'

The two men looked at each other. 'Sure,' one offered. 'It'll be business as usual on our end once we get out of this god-fo–I mean, get out of this sector.'

Pelia's mother tried to get her sobs under control but soon gave up, throwing herself into her husband's arms. 'I can't bear it,' she wailed. 'Our baby.'

'Not a baby,' Pelia said as she turned and made her way down the hallway.

'Where are you going?' Her father's voice rang over her mother's sobs.

'To get my bag. I packed one. Just like I said I would.'

There wasn't much in it. Trinkets. Scraps of stories. Jewellery she and her friends had made. Images of the people she cared about. There weren't many of those.

'I'll be back before you know it, Mama,' she said, patting her on the shoulder before moving swiftly to join the Others outside. She couldn't promsie herself or anyone else what her reaction would be if she were to be engulfed in a teary hug. Her mother seemed most inclined to demonstrate her love at moments like these; moments where it wasn't going to help anything at all. 'Let's go, then.'

'Good. We always appreciate an easy departure,' one of the Others said, a new note of approval in his voice. He looked back at her parents. 'We'll keep you abreast of any updates while she away. As best we can.'

Her father nodded stiffly. 'Her mother would appreciate that.'

A fresh wail sounded from his arms. Pelia bit her lip. 'Bye, then.'

Before anything else untoward could happen, she pulled the door shut. 'Next stop, where, exactly?'

The man closest to her smirked, slightly. 'Well, isn't that the question. At the moment, we just have it recorded as Sol-3.'

They weren't monsters. She was fitted with a universal translator and given provisions that in theory could last her several months. There was an emergency beacon she could set off if she was in danger, or if she hadn't managed to embed herself in any communities by the time her supplies ran out.

'So you're really just… leaving me there?' She looked out the viewport of the craft that had taken them into high orbit over Sol-3. It looked pretty enough, she supposed, if you liked blues and greens and whites all sort of muddling together. And if she didn't think too much about the fact that it was a whole different planet than the one she'd known her whole life, or the fact that she was in space. 'There's nobody else coming?'

The bolder of the two Others who had transported her here – she still didn't know their names and she was more comfortable that way – shrugged. 'Well, you know that you were the only pickup on Lanthani.'

'But don't you, I don't know, take people from other worlds on this little activity?'

He looked at her strangely. 'What other worlds? Any alliances we've had in the past were broken in the war. It's just you and us. And we don't make a habit of sending our youths into the unknown. We're less… robust than your kind are.'

'War?' She tried not to feel too gleeful, the vindication of her past arguments with her father singing through her head.

He looked at his comrade then back at her. 'Well, yes. The war. Why else would we have virtually ceased contact with your people?'

She couldn't help herself. 'I knew it,' she hissed. 'But all your other allies?'

'When did you last talk to one of our people?'

She knew exactly when, and who it was. 'A little under 200 years ago.'

The man let out a whistle. 'You hear about what you Lanthanites are like in a vague way, but it's another thing to have it in your face like this, huh? You look like my 19-year-old niece.'

Pelia tried not to snort at the very idea. 'I haven't been 19 in a while.'

'No kidding. Look, there was… unrest. It was in my grandad's time, really. 160 years ago or so. Some big shifts in our halls of power that a lot of people didn't like. Neither did a lot of the races we thought were our friends. By the time the war really came to a head for us, we were on our own. The last planet we'd have called true allies were wiped out before the worst of the fighting reached us. For the last century or so we've been flying solo.'

'Except for us.'

He laughs. 'Yeah. Except for you, kid.' He throws his arm towards the planet. 'But these guys are even earlier in their development than Lanthani is. I think they've managed the wheel by now, but that's about it.'

'And are they like you or like me?'

'Like us or– oh. You mean…' He placed two finger tips together and then drew them apart. 'They're closer to you than us developmentally, but yes, their lifespans are more like ours.'

'Shorter, even,' his companion chipped in.

'Which is why their planet is a playground for wayward youth instead of a science lab?'

They both managed to look slightly guilty. 'Something like that.'

She shook her head as she checked over her gear. 'You're real heroes, huh?'

'Never claimed to be.' He clapped a hand on her shoulder, and Pelia was reminded of her own gesture as she left her mother. 'Time to go.'

He drew his hand away, and Pelia felt a small device settle itself against her shirt in its absence. 'Okay, so how do we–'

There was a shimmer of light around her, golds and blues, and she was gone.

Chapter Text

Roviana was a small island, and that was fine, as far as Pelia was concerned. Fewer people to try to maintain some kind of consistent lie with. They thought she was some kind of ghost or spirit when she first stepped out of the jungle; her understanding them and responding in their own tongue did little to dissuade them of that notion.

But she showed that she was willing to work, and so they were willing to keep her around. She collected shellfish and pounded bark and made up stories to tell the kids at night and they would all look at her with huge eyes and whisper 'Vineki Maqomaqo, is it true?'

And depending on her mood and the story itself, she'd either match their wide eyes and nod, or laugh and shrug and tell them that they would have to decide for themselves.

They started calling her Vineki Keoro for a while, after they decided she was, in fact, probably just a strange looking pale person, and not a ghost. But as time passed, and the children at her storytime sessions were replaced with the children of those she used to entertain, the name made a comeback. Vineki Maqomaqo, Spirit Girl. Na Vineki Ninae Rane Ka Rane, The Forever Girl. Qoele Vaqurana, The Young Old Woman. She watched those around her grow weaker, watched their skin wrinkle and hair lighten. She saw death. She wept, and then she followed the lead of those around her and went on with living.

When the first grandchild of her initial storytelling audience sat in front of her, she realised it was time to journey on. Strange pale ghost girls were different from the people of Roviana, but she wasn't sure that she could continue to watch the cruel passage of time here. She didn't have long left, if her occasional check-ins with the Others technology were accurate. Perhaps seven, eight years, and then she would be collected and taken back to Lanthani and maybe even follow through on the expectations that had been placed on her by her father. Just to keep the peace. She'd come to have an appreciation for keeping the peace, from time to time. As long as there were still opportunities for chaos.

Her new people claimed to understand, after she gave a story she'd been cooking up for weeks, about the call of her people and the need to travel to find her way to the sky. It seemed reasonable.

Havorona, the wife of the chief – who had once sat by Pelia's knee, waiting for the next instalment of a story of the stars – hugged her tightly. 'Pelia,' she said, the syllables almost falling in the cadence of the language. 'We will call you by your true name in your absence. Totoso koa goi pa korapa nada vasileana si tupelia gami si goi. You are our push.'

Pelia felt a little surprised. 'Nada vasileana?'

'Of course. You are one of us now. You are of your own people too, but you are part of our story.'

She picked at her nails, suddenly worried, suddenly thinking about things that the Others had said about where this planet was at in their evolution. 'Maybe some stories need to be forgotten.'

Havorona, a woman, a mother, a bright-burning flash of a moment in Pelia's life, shrugged. 'Maybe with time they will be. But you will always be part of my story.'

She reached a continent eventually. Chains of islands, some small, some vast, kept her moving north, befriending some, avoiding others, luxuriating in trading knowledge for transport at times, crying over calloused palms as she steered her way across straits and rivers and occasional stretches of open ocean.

Her approach was to always be temporary. Her heart felt tethered to Roviana even after a year of journeying, and putting down roots – even though it wouldn't be for such a long as her first stable decades on the planet – felt like a betrayal. Or an admission of emotions she wasn't quite ready to acknowledge. So she kept moving. The people she encountered looked different, shifting skin tones and features. But she was always another kind of different from them.

The slow movement on foot and occasional rafts and basic watercrafts wasn't the worst. It meant that as she moved between regions of sweltering humidity and arid desert and lofty wind-whipped mountains she had time to adjust. When the final months of her Sol-3 stay drew near, she was temporarily settling in with a band of nomads in high plateau. The work, like it was everywhere, was hard. But she didn't mind. She almost thought she'd miss it.

She shared a tent and blankets with Sulamey, who promised she'd teach Pelia how to milk the goats when they returned from the upper pastures.

'I don't know if I'll still be here by then.' Pelia looked up at the top of the tent, moonlight cutting through the smallest holes in the seams.

'Where would you go?'

'Someone might be coming for me.'

'That's mysterious.'

Pelia could see the slight hint of a smile on Sulamey's face when she rolled to face her. 'I thought I was already incredibly mysterious.'

'Oh, you are. It's just good to be reminded of just how mysterious you are.'

Pelia rolled back. 'You have no idea.'

She waited. She knew there was a chance that they had gotten the timings off. They'd said that a year on Sol-3 was comparable to a year on Lanthani, but it wasn't necessarily precisely the same. And perhaps something else had held them up. Or they were calculating off the originally intended departure date not the earlier date they had ended up with.

She shared responsibility for the goats with Sulamey now. They didn't care that her hair was light and wild or that her voice sounded strange no matter how much she fiddled with the universal translator when nobody was watching. They just knew that she was reliable when it came to making sure they moved to where there was more grass and milking them when they were uncomfortably full and their kids had wandered off elsewhere.

'The air here agrees with you, Mysterious Girl,' Sulamey declared one day. 'You look exactly the same as you did when you arrived.'

Pelia's heart picked up, but she shook her head and wiped her hand across her forehead. 'Nah. I never had this much sunburn on my nose before I moved to the snow.'

'I was fourteen when you arrived. You were, what, sixteen?'

'So I was already more mature then.'

Sulamey squinted at her. 'But now I'm the one who looks older.'

'You're imagining things. We all notice our own flaws more.'

It had been two years since they were supposed to retrieve her. She crept out from the tent that night and went west.

She gave it another eleven years before activating the beacon. Not because she desperately wanted to leave. But it was disconcerting, not knowing. She stood at the shores of a sea the people nearby called Wadj-Ur, and entered the sequence. The response wouldn't be immediate, she knew that much. The Others had told her how it could take a day or two for a transmission to reach them. So she waited, looking every now and then at the indicator that confirmed that the message had been sent.

Hope doesn't last forever. But Lanthanites almost do.

It was another year before she started to acknowledge that perhaps they weren't coming. It was a decade before she fully came to terms with that. And it was a full century before she let herself spend more than a month or two with any one group of people as she canvassed the lands of this place that had become her home.

She started to feel like she belonged. In a strange, nobody really belongs anywhere, kind of way. It took centuries. But so did everything else.

Some skills she learned in service of different communities stuck. Others didn't. She fell in love, but never too deeply. Only enough to take the edge off the feeling of isolation that crept into her mind when she looked up on a clear night.

And every time, she moved on before anyone could catch with of her endurance. Sometimes, she'd watch their lives from a safe distance. She'd hear rumours of children named for her and by the fifth one, she didn't cry about it anymore. Time was something different for her than everyone else she encountered, and she couldn't hold it against them. But she wouldn't let it turn her into somebody disconnected from the world she lived in either. She drifted. Waited for interesting things to start happening, for word of advances from lands far from her.

The shores of the Wadj-Ur were a good place to drift back to. The people on its south-eastern shores were inventive. Builders. Artists. Huge monuments that seemed wasteful to Pelia, but that she felt like her father would appreciate. She didn't think of him often, and her mother even less. She had built her own life here. She would be a young adult now, back there. Back home, she told herself, but there was a question in there. She'd been on Sol-3 for much longer than she'd ever been on Lanthani.

Centuries became millennia. It was slow-moving; sometimes she wished she could hibernate a while, wake up ten thousand years down the line and see what the people of this place came up with over that time. But it was a waiting game. A watching game. A keep moving, wondering, hoping game. Logically, at some point, they had to catch up where Lanthani had been when she left. Surely.

The journeys through the polar regions to explore other continents were always touch-and-go. But she made it, every time. Everyone else was always more surprised than she was. At some point, she was fairly certain that she'd visited most of the landmasses that she'd seen from orbit. There were islands she thought she recalled that seemed out of reach of the technology of the time. But she wasn't going anywhere any time soon.

They were still building big things in Kemet when she arrived back in the region around her 16th millennium. But interesting things seemed to be happening on the other side of the sea. She sailed across the sea that they called Thalassa when she disembarked, and wove her way through the streets veiled and unnoticed.She blended in a little more here than in Kemet; the yellow of her hair was unusual but not unknown.

She found was she was looking for easily enough, and people were freely discussing the new developments in mathematics. The concepts were different than those she grew up learning, but the outcomes seemed similar – more sophisticated, even. She held her breath.

'Where do you come by this kind of learning, sir?'

A heavily bearded man scowled at her. 'The very question!'

She ducked her head. 'I have only just arrived. I heard rumours of great scholars and wanted to see for myself. My father was–' a nightmare, a misogynist, a politician –'mathematician.'

The man perked up slightly. 'You don't say. Where are you from?'

'Far from here.' Not a lie. 'Beyond the borders of Hellas.'

'Indeed? And what is the name of this place far from our borders?' He bristled slightly. 'I'm a very learned man.'

What was the harm? 'Lanthani,' she said, speaking the place out loud for the first time in longer than she could remember. 'I truly doubt you have heard of it.'

She watched him turn the name over in his mind. 'Perhaps I have not. But perhaps you are lying.'

She closed her eyes so that she wouldn't roll them. 'Sir, I can assure you that I'm telling the truth. Would you please be so kind as to tell me where you have.. encountered this knowledge. It would delight my father–' it would do no such thing '- to know I was continuing on that path.'

'Kroton. Across the lesser sea.' He folded his arms over his chest. 'The Pythagorean community is not for wide-eyed girls. Silence is demanded of initiates for years before they are permitted to explore the truths uncovered by Pythagoras. You are sworn to secrecy.'

'Secrecy?' She raised an eyebrow. 'You appear to have forsaken you vows.'

He cleared his throat. 'Well. Interest must be drummed up somehow. But regardless. You don't strike me as the sort who can wait in silence.'

A smile touched her lips. 'You'd be surprised at the ways I can wait.'