Zia Sunroot's Arc

Chapter 10 of 17

The shard glows between them as the sun drops lower. Zia is ready to plan their next step. Then the stranger reaches into the bedroll and lifts out a second tablet, wrapped in cloth. It is older than hers. The clay is darker, the edges worn soft. They set it beside the shard without speaking. Zia leans close. The star maps are the same, but this one has a name pressed into the corner. Jarek. A keeper's mark, like her own, but with a small broken circle beside it. She knows that symbol from her mother's stories. It means the keeper never came back. The stranger pulls one more thing from the cloth. A flute, carved from sun-cracked bone, painted with faded blue water drops. They lay it on the tablet. "His station still stands," they say. "A sandstone dome, west of here. The glass is broken. The sand has taken the inside." Zia's hands go cold. She thinks of a shrub she passed once on the way back from the monument, a dead tree wrapped in a torn turquoise scarf. She had walked past it without stopping. Now she understands it was a marker. A keeper had left things behind because a keeper had not survived to gather them. "He went looking for the unmarked place," the stranger says. "The crater. He did not come home." They place a hand flat on the older tablet. "I brought this so you would know what we are walking toward." Zia picks up the flute. It is light. The finger holes are worn smooth from a real mouth, a real breath, years of music in a place no one sings now. She sets it down beside her own work. The question is no longer whether to be found. The question is whether she and the stranger can finish what Jarek could not, and return.