RAIN WHISPERED AGAINST the cottage windows, and the candle flickered in a draft hissing through some small gap in need of patching.

The old woman, Constance Crellin, continued to hand-stitch the quilt she’d been making for days, and Patsy, the yellow tabby, had curled up on the floor by the hearth, emitting a content purr while dreaming of rodents. The fire had died down to orange embers, not that Constance needed a fire this time of year. It was supposedly June or July, or perhaps even August, though such distinctions mattered little here.

“Could be December now, for all I know,” she muttered. Patsy twitched in her sleep, and Constance blinked to refocus on her sewing. It was so hard to see anymore. The reading glasses that once belonged to Dan had been rendered nearly useless by scratches, so Constance rarely used them.

Sometimes she wondered if she was dead, too, like Dan now these long years. Dead and buried and long forgotten.

Constance jerked her head up. She’d dozed off again, hadn’t she? The crude needle had fallen from her fingers and landed on the quilt under construction in her lap. Shayla, who raised livestock on her ranch a mile away, wove cloth when she wasn’t feeding her flocks, and she sent most of it Constance’s way to “work her magic” upon it.

Constance squinted and grasped the needle between her right thumb and forefinger, determined to finish her project no matter what. A fat lot of magic I’ll be working if my eyesight gets any worse. The quilt was to be a present for Shayla’s birthday—as if things like birthdays made sense when they weren’t even sure what month it was.

She made a few more stitches in the homespun fabric before her eyelids grew heavy again. This time when she closed them, she dreamed.

CONSTANCE Hernandez—known as “Connie” to her friends—climbed out of the twin bed in the room she shared with no one (her sister Luce had her own room across the hall) and hurried barefoot across the hardwood floor, then down the hallway and stairs to the mudroom.

Connie shoved her small feet into a pair of blue rubber boots, undid the deadbolt, and crept out into the June darkness.

It was late enough that the fireflies she loved to watch at dusk had all gone to sleep, and the moon hadn’t risen, so the black heavens were awash with infinite stars. She raced down the worn footpath toward the barn where Bourbon Queen and Hotshot and Wednesday’s Child and all the others stood sleeping in their stalls, then veered to the right into the untamed meadow, where she flopped onto her back despite the mosquitoes and ticks and watched the stars’ slow waltz across the sky.

Abuelita had given her a constellation guidebook for her fifth birthday, and Connie had paged through it so many times since then it was practically in tatters. It had taken her little time to memorize the shapes in the stars as well as their names. As the dew soaked into her clothes, Connie picked out Cygnus the Swan stretching out great wings toward its neighbors Draco and Pegasus. The stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair glowed brighter than most of their companions. Like diamonds.

While Connie watched the night move past her, she remembered the time her family spent a weekend in Louisville for a family reunion. Connie had snuck out to the hotel balcony while her parents and sister slept, and instead of the stars she’d expected, the sky had been lit up with a yellow urban glow that broke a tiny part of her heart.

She sighed as she lay in the damp meadow. The horse farm was a far cry from Louisville or any other city: a dark refuge in a world drowning with light.

Cloudless nights like this one were timeless. Half a night could feel like an hour, and an hour could seem half a night, which was why she didn’t know how much time had passed when soft footsteps muffled by grass came up beside her and a voice said, “Stargazing again, Con?”

She turned her face toward her father the moment a meteor streaked overhead. “It’s so beautiful.”

He sat in the grass to her left. Though it was too dark for her to see, she felt he was smiling. “I know it is. Like little diamonds, right?”

Connie nodded, but she knew that which glimmered above was far more precious than the diamonds they resembled. “I’m going there someday.”

“To the stars?”

“Yes.”

BANGING on the front door jolted Constance awake. It took a moment to orient herself. The candle had burned down to a waxy nub, and Patsy stood on all sixes, staring at the door with glowing violet eyes.

“Constance?” More banging. “Constance, wake up!”

Constance tossed the quilt aside and crossed the bare floor. She threw the door open to see a white-faced Shayla holding a lantern at her side. The dancing flames cast eerie shadows over the woman’s features.

Rain fell in sheets now, and ominous thunder crackled overhead. The rain had plastered Shayla’s still-black hair to her forehead and cheeks.

“What’s the matter?” Constance snapped when it became evident Shayla wouldn’t be forthcoming with an explanation. “Is it Kess?”

“Kess? No, I haven’t talked to her. Oh, Constance, look.” Shayla stepped farther out into the downpour and pointed toward the western sky that lit up with intermittent flashes of lightning.

Doing her best to withhold a growing sense of dread, Constance left the shelter of her living room and followed the line of Shayla’s finger with her gaze.

A silvery white light cutting through the storm descended from the heavens in silence. Based on its trajectory, it would land near the orchards that lay beyond the narrow stream where Constance drew her water. Eerie shadows swept across the lavender grasses, and nocturnal insects took flight from the unexpected disturbance.

“This is the third one.” Shayla’s voice quaked. “I’d gone out to use the loo when I saw the first. I ran here as fast as I could.”

Constance’s mouth drew into a thin line as yet another silvery light appeared and silently lowered to the ground.

CONSTANCE and Shayla barricaded themselves inside the cottage and doused the lantern. The final light had landed and winked out, and now they waited in fearful anticipation of what might happen next.

Patsy paced back and forth mewing, her eyes now the blue-green of distress.

“I’ve never seen anything like them,” Shayla whispered. The rain had died down to a sprinkle, and one orange moon peeked through dissipating clouds. “They could be hostile.”

Yes, they could be, Constance supposed, but there wasn’t a thing they could do if that were the case. Aside from Constance and Shayla there was only Kess, and three old women well past their primes would hardly be a match against invaders.

It hadn’t always been just the three of them. There had once been five, but Ez and Dan had succumbed many years before and were now buried near Tower Rock, the stone formation that marked the edge of their settlement.

“What are we going to do?” Shayla asked.

Constance plucked Patsy off the floor and held her close to her chest. “We’re going to watch and wait.”

THE night progressed, still and slow, and Constance Crellin’s mind wandered.

She remembered a different Constance, a younger Constance, one who had yet to see a wrinkle or a gray hair. A Constance who had flown for the first time at age sixteen, and who’d felt a rush of exhilaration from pulling back the throttles and leaving the ground behind, letting out a whoop of glee that made her instructor cover her ears.

She flew almost as high as the air lanes before her instructor demanded that she take the ship back down.

After that, the younger Constance craved her weekly flying lessons like a drug. On her off days she’d sit in the same meadow beyond the horse barn memorizing flight manuals (she kept the constellation guidebook with her too even though it was close to disintegrating), and at night she’d dream that she wouldn’t stop at the air lanes…that she’d keep flying higher and higher into space and finally get to see countless unseen worlds orbiting the diamonds of her childhood.

The older Constance, waiting with Shayla by the window in her cottage, thought of how the younger Constance earned her pilot’s license at seventeen and joined the Air Force at eighteen.

She thought of how she’d kissed her family and Bourbon Queen and Hotshot and Wednesday’s Child and all the others goodbye.

She thought of Horatio Crellin, a fellow pilot who’d caught her eye. He’d impregnated her, they’d wed, she’d miscarried, and they’d divorced; all before the Earth had made a full orbit around the sun.

“Why don’t you take your name back?” her sister Luce had asked over lunch during a rare visit.

The younger Constance had been unable to answer. Sometimes the older Constance wondered what would have happened had Abuelita not given her the constellation guidebook for her birthday.

SHAYLA put a hand over her mouth. “Something’s moving!”

Constance gave a start but relaxed when she eyed a creature they’d dubbed a “bear yak.” The large nocturnal animal paused to turn its lamp-like eyes toward the cottage before lumbering onward to places unknown.

Then a beam of light swept over the ground, sending a spike of fear through Constance’s heart.

“What do you think they are?” Shayla asked.

Constance, who found it useless to speculate before they’d acquired details, gave a derisive sniff. “Giant bloodsucking monsters from hell, I suppose. Why don’t you shut your mouth and pray they aren’t here to kill us?”

Shayla fell silent. A second beam joined the first, and Shayla’s breathing came in quick hitches. Constance realized the younger woman was crying.

SHAYLA always had been the emotional one. When the voyage began she’d been a bright-eyed twenty-five and had wept nearly nonstop during the first full day of the journey, claiming that she would miss her cat and boyfriend and parents terribly during the year she and the rest of the crew would be gone.

Kess, the ship physician, had rolled her eyes when Shayla’s back was turned, and Ez and Dan traded snide remarks about the “girl in diapers.”

“I mean, it’s only a year,” Dan muttered to Constance while Shayla was preoccupied in the galley. “The kid acts like we’re never coming back.”

THE planet had no name.

It appeared below them like a great blue, green, and violet marble, and the moment the five-member crew laid eyes on it, Constance could hear a collective gasp from everyone that made a single tear well in her eye.

A decade prior, the initial scouting expedition had found no signs of intelligent life (“That’s rare enough even on Earth,” Dan had quipped), so the goal of the year-long assignment was to study the planet in greater detail and see if it was fit for long-term human habitation.

XGC2097, as the planet was classified, was slightly smaller than Earth, had an atmosphere consisting of nitrogen and oxygen, a twenty-two hour day, and a 326 day year that amounted roughly to 299 days on Earth. The scouting expedition had found three continents: a giant one that filled most of a hemisphere and two small ones isolated by ocean on the other side.

They were to land on the large continent, and they did, but the engine failed on the way down and they crashed into a hillside. Constance and Dan had forced open the damaged hatch and beheld acres of a lavender grass-like plant swaying in a sweet-smelling wind. The faint outlines of mountains jutted above a distant horizon, and something that looked like a stone tower thrust toward the sky in the opposite direction.

Despite the grimness of their situation, they’d looked at each other and grinned.

Then Dan’s expression faltered as wind riffled through his hair. Constance knew what he was thinking without him having to say it.

With the engine gone, they were stranded.

“DADDY, would you miss me if I went to the stars?” young Connie had asked that night in the meadow near the horse barn.

“With all my heart,” her father had said, “but I’d be happy you were following your dreams.”

THE visitors were human.

They appeared through the mist not long after the yellow sun rose above the horizon. Kess came with them. Her closely-cropped gray hair was evident even at a distance.

“Constance, it’s okay!” Kess called. “They’re friends!”

Constance and Shayla exchanged a glance. More tears welled in the younger woman’s eyes, and without a moment of hesitation she threw open the cottage door and ran toward the new arrivals, sobbing all the way.

Constance frowned and stepped into the open doorway with folded arms. The visitors numbered twenty, and all wore gray uniforms bearing logos she didn’t recognize.

A broad-shouldered man stepped forward. “Captain Crellin?”

Constance’s eyes stung but she kept her tears in check. It was an effort to speak. “This is she.”

The man had electric blue eyes and hair so blond it could have been mistaken for white. He’s so young, he could be my son. “Captain Crellin,” he said, “I’m Captain Erlund of the E. S. Paloma. We’re here to take you home.”

At first Constance just stared at him; this young captain who would be no older than forty, perhaps thirty-five.

Then she strode right up to him, resisting the urge to slap him as hard as she could. Before he could speak, Constance said, “It’s been forty Earth years. At least forty. Is that how long it takes for a distress signal to go through?”

Erlund blinked.

“Is it?” Constance bellowed, her voice raw. “We broadcast it every day for fifteen years until the transmitter died. We begged the heavens for someone to come get us. No one did.”

An older man stepped forward. “Unfortunately, retrieving you turned out to be of little concern.”

Constance’s blood ran cold. It was Horatio, the one who had given her his name. His hair had started to go white and a smattering of wrinkles etched his face, but his eyes were the same as when they’d captivated her as a young woman.

Overall, he looked younger than his years. Constance tried to ignore a twinge of jealousy.

“War broke out right after you left, so all expeditions were called off,” Horatio said. “Constance, you might not believe me, but I argued your case for years. At first they all said you’d be better off here than on Earth, and then once your signal stopped transmitting, they all said you were dead. I didn’t believe them.”

Constance’s jaw quivered. “Should I presume this ‘war’ is over?”

A shadow passed over her old lover’s eyes. “That depends on who you ask.”

“YOU know,” Kess said to Constance some five years after they’d crashed on that lavender hillside, “I think I’m starting to like it here. I mean, I’ve always liked it, but now I’m starting to like it like it. It feels like home.”

They’d been in the middle of shelling peas that weren’t actual peas, since they had been spawned from XGC2097’s soil, not Earth’s. Constance threw an empty pod into the compost bucket and regarded Kess with a dull stare. “Might I ask why?”

“We all get along for the most part, don’t we?” Kess smiled. “Life can’t get much more peaceful than that.”

Constance sighed and picked up another pod, peeling it open along the seam. She supposed Kess was right. Peace wasn’t an easy thing to come by, and for all the things they lacked, at least they had that.

CAPTAIN Erlund invited Constance, Shayla, and Kess to breakfast aboard the E. S. Paloma. For the first time in more than four decades Constance dined upon eggs, sausage, and bacon and washed it down with freshly-squeezed orange juice.

She kept having to remind herself she wasn’t dreaming.

Captain Erlund had talked all the way through the meal, and he was still talking now. “We started a colony on XGC2095d about five years ago,” he said to Shayla, who looked as captivated as a teenager meeting her favorite Hollywood heartthrob. “Most of the program funding has been going there.”

“They named it ‘Duncan,’” one of Erlund’s crewmembers sniffed. “Can you imagine a worse name for a planet?”

“I’m sure Alistair Duncan would disagree,” Erlund said with a smirk.

The crewmember rolled his eyes. “The man’s head is about the size of a planet. They probably got confused about which was which.”

Constance found their banter too taxing to follow properly, but perhaps that was because she wasn’t accustomed to people who weren’t Shayla or Kess. “XGC2095d?” she asked. “Isn’t that one mostly desert?” Constance had almost been sent there but chose to go to the more habitable planet on the list instead.

Perhaps if she’d chosen the other, she wouldn’t have been stranded.

“It’s mineral-rich,” Erlund said proudly. “Population’s already ten thousand and growing. You’d like it there. Lots of sun.”

You don’t even know what I’d like or dislike. Constance pursed her lips. “What about this planet? Will you start a colony here, too?”

Erlund gave a light cough. “Only if more funding comes in. As it stands, it could be decades before another ship comes out this way.”

“Why did you come with so many?”

“Just following orders. I was told to bring multiple ships in case any of them didn’t survive the trip. We couldn’t leave you stranded again.”

As if Captain Erlund would have cared. “When are you planning on leaving?”

“As soon as you three are ready.”

CONSTANCE walked back to her cottage alone.

The familiar scents of burnt wood from the hearth and the cut flowers in a clay vase greeted her when she stepped inside, and Patsy let out a chirrup from where she lay on the windowsill.

Constance scratched behind the furry creature’s ears, and Patsy’s eyes closed in contentment. Patsy’s species was the closest thing here resembling a cat, although with a much sweeter temperament.

“They’re going to take us home,” she murmured. “I don’t even know what ‘home’ means anymore.”

Patsy cracked open an eyelid and stared at her.

“Because I’ve lived here so long now. You know?” Constance’s heart ached at the thought of leaving her pet behind. She could hardly take Patsy with her; the drastic change in environment might make the creature sick.

But what if she wouldn’t have to leave Patsy behind at all?

The voice of her father echoed through her head. Sometimes it’s wrong to follow your head. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart.

SHE left the cottage and snuck down the earthen path behind it, hoping no one would see and follow.

It led down a wooded slope for a quarter of a mile and veered to the right, where it stopped at the edge of a pond coated in teal plants that looked like lily pads but weren’t.

She sat down on the bench Dan had built, watching ripples distort the water’s surface. At first glance the whole scene looked like it could have been on Earth, yet there were just enough differences to remind her it was alien.

But it isn’t alien. Not to me. Not anymore.

Footsteps behind her made her heart sink, and without turning her head, she said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

Horatio sat down on the bench beside her. “Constance, I know what you’re thinking.”

“That’s a surprise.”

“The three of you have been isolated for so long, it’s affected you in a bad way.”

“Is it so bad?”

“People can’t live alone. It drives them mad.”

“Like you’d know.”

They were silent for a time. Constance tried not to remember when she had loved him.

“I’ve lived here longer than I did on Earth,” she finally said. “This place that doesn’t even have a name.”

“Why didn’t you name it?”

“Would it matter if we had?”

An insect that wasn’t an insect skimmed the surface of the pond and buzzed out of sight into a patch of violet reeds on the far bank.

“You should start packing your things,” Horatio said. “We’ll send a transport from one of the ships to pick you up.”

CONSTANCE watched from her window as Shayla made her way in the direction of the ships, holding a canvas sack in each hand. A crewmember Constance didn’t remember seeing earlier followed the woman with a crate in his arms. I see they didn’t send a transport for her.

Constance drew away from the window and went to the shelf beside the hearth. She hadn’t looked at the old photo album in years but felt it was time, so she pulled it out, blew off the dust, and opened it out on the table.

Pictures of herself and her sister Luce playing behind their house smiled up at her across the ravages of time. The images hadn’t faded much since then—the benefits of premium photo paper, she supposed—but the memories of childhood had softened throughout the decades until Constance had only the general idea of most of them.

Except for the stars and the meadow. I will always remember those.

She turned a page, and her heart felt heavy at the sight of her parents standing on their front porch. It was possible, however unlikely, that her parents were still alive. She could ask Horatio if he knew, but she dared not, because then she would know.

She slammed the album closed and let her tears fall.

SHAYLA paced back and forth in front of the E. S. Paloma, glancing worriedly in the direction of Constance’s house. “Why haven’t they come back with the transport?” she asked Kess, who stood beside her with arms crossed. “It’s been three hours.”

Kess pursed her lips. “Oh, you know Constance.” She couldn’t help but feel dread gnawing at her insides. She did know Constance. The woman’s stubbornness had practically been a legend back in the Air Force, and it had by no means mellowed since they’d all been stranded here. “I hope she’s not doing anything stupid.”

No sooner had she said this when the whine of the transport engine cut through the orchard. Shayla stopped pacing to exchange a glance with Kess, who held her breath.

The transport came into view. Save for the driver, it was empty.

He hopped down from behind the wheel. His brown hair stuck up in different directions like he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly. “I can’t find her!” he panted. “I looked all over. I found a weird cat-thing in her house, and all of her things are still there, but it’s like she’s just gone.”

Kess began kneading her temples. “Oh, Constance…”

CONSTANCE’S sides hitched as she walked. Every so many yards she had to stop and catch her breath, gather up her reserves of strength, and convince herself to keep moving.

After an hour she came to Tower Rock, the tall stone column that jutted into the sky. None of them had ever figured out the formation’s origin. It didn’t match any other rock samples in the area, so they’d long ago surmised that it had been put there, but by whom and for what intent, they didn’t know.

Constance knelt before the two headstones placed at the tower base. She thought of Ez and his always-messy black hair, and Dan with his tender eyes and smile.

Eventually Constance stood, glanced back toward her home (not visible at this distance, or through the trees), and headed onward. Erlund and his crew would try to find her. She would do her best to make sure they did not.

She walked beneath the shade of the trees until her legs nearly gave out, then followed a path down a hillside and into a cave overlooking a lake. Shayla and Kess didn’t know about the cave. Constance had made sure that it stayed her place and hers alone.

Constance sat down a few feet back from the cave entrance and stared down at the water, wondering if she was being foolish. To not look at another person’s face again? To never hear another voice?

Was staying here really worth it?

Eventually she thought she heard voices calling her name. It took every ounce of her will not to rise from her refuge and shout out a reply.

At long last, as the shadows grew long, Erlund’s ships flew over the lake as if searching for her. Then they angled toward the sky, shrank to tiny points, and were gone.

Constance stood. “Well. That’s that, I suppose.” She brushed the dirt from her clothes and walked home.

She scooped Patsy into her arms when she came through the door and scratched behind her pointed ears, to Patsy’s pleasure.

“This is what I always wanted, Patsy,” Constance murmured as she stared out the window at her land, where lavender grasses swayed in the wind and the yellow fruits growing on the orchard trees were ripe for picking. “I wouldn’t give any of this up for the world. It’s taken me too long to realize that.”

CAPTAIN Erlund stood on the ship’s bridge watching Crellin—the planet catalogued as XGC2097—loom closer in the viewing screen.

It had been twenty years since he had led the rescue mission that brought Shayla Sheffield Hanes and Kessiga Wu back to Earth.

It had been twenty years since Constance Crellin had been left behind. Constance’s comrades had been beside themselves when he’d announced that if the woman didn’t come out of hiding he’d simply leave without her. He’d had a tight schedule to keep. It wasn’t his problem if a batty old woman wanted to exile herself from the human race.

“Captain Crellin,” he whispered, “you’ll be pleased to know the funding has finally come through.”

They landed in the same place they had before. The yellow sun was just setting when the hatch opened and Erlund and his crew emerged into the fresh air.

“It’s beautiful!” exclaimed one of his youngest crewmembers, a twentysomething biologist named Caroline Ojigwe. “I didn’t think there would be so much color.”

Erlund gave a curt nod. There would be time enough to gawk at the scenery later.

He trudged through a grove of twisted trees and soon laid eyes upon the cabin where Constance Crellin had lived. It was weathered and broken now, like a child’s toy left out to face the elements. Part of the roof had even caved in.

To Erlund’s horror, a stooped figure sat in a hand-hewn rocker on the sagging porch.

He ran toward it.

The old woman—older now—had white hair so thin that Erlund could see her scalp through it. Her gnarled hands lay in her lap, and her brown eyes gazed up at him in wonder.

“Daddy, is that you?” Her voice creaked like an old staircase.

Maintaining his professional composure, he said, “Captain Crellin, it’s me, Captain Erlund. Don’t you remember?”

“I’ve missed you, Daddy. Did you see them? They’re so beautiful.”

“Did I see what?” Erlund’s throat tightened. He had heard of the elderly developing dementia in ancient times but had never seen it for himself, as the phenomenon had long ago been eradicated by medicine.

Captain Crellin’s eyes went out of focus as she tilted her head toward the heavens. “Those things, up there. They’re like diamonds in the sky.”

THE tour group gathered beneath a sunny sky on the sidewalk running past Memorial Square in Erlund City, First Colony, Crellin.

The tour guide, a skinny woman with hot pink braids, shouted to be heard over the sound of morning traffic. “Gather closer, gather closer, everyone! Can you all hear me now? Great!” She gestured at the twenty-foot-tall obelisk behind her, on which was mounted a plaque that Sammy couldn’t read from where she stood at the back of the group. Sammy didn’t really want to be here in the city. Cities were boring. She’d only signed up for the tour to see Tower Rock—a tall stone formation that had survived several centuries of urban sprawl. There were supposedly graves near it. Those might be neat to look at.

The tour guide droned on and on about early Crellin history, and as the group finally moved off to the next stop, Sammy approached the bronze plaque and read:

In memory of our Mother

Constance Linette Hernandez Crellin.

2101-2198.

Sammy snapped a picture of the plaque with her ocular implant and uploaded it to the Net with the push of a few buttons on her armband. She pulled up a holographic keyboard and began to type midair.

Tour is taking too long. Look, an old plaque! (history)

She deactivated the keyboard and jogged to catch up with the group.