Here are your fingers, here are your toes. Here is the great black eternity outside your window, the sky that is not sky. Feel that first hurt blooming within you; that planet-shaped hole. You may come to love canned air and the sweet antiseptic of your pillow each morning as you wake. You may live a full life and die here. But know that every second your bare feet scuffed laminate floor they were never truly touching earth. That this ship has never been home.

We know that Distal is a liar. She’s faked radiation poisoning to lay sucking iodine pops in the med bay, and claimed to have seen rats scuttling through the busted floor on C-deck, even though rats only exist in educoil videos and the ship’s pressure would turn their tiny guts to pulp. So when Distal tells us there’s a phantom blinking on her trawler, we don’t flinch. Fluoro pulls the hoodie strings tight around his face, and I keep staring out the observation window, at a planet that looks like chunky beige barleymeal and dried up five hundred sleeps before our dying ship arrived.

The lights are low on the observation deck. Just the three of us in a suite meant for fifty, listening to the tak-tssk-tak-tak of data crawling across the monitors and trying not to think about the way our muscles don’t sit right over their bones. They are my favorite, these wakeup days, when we’re sitting together sick and weak and I can hear the blood struggling to pulse through our arteries, in unison, like a little harmony. My skin’s tacky with the cough-syrup odor of pod fluid, and the sweat of a low-grade fever. Three foreign inches of ankle protrude from the bottom of the playdress that was big on me yesterday, or what feels like yesterday, when I’d gone to sleep dreaming of dead ice planets and woke up with swollen nipples and a trail of black hair below my navel.

All of us twelves came out of our pods more or less the same, a fresh patchwork of unibrows and gangly legs dripping stasis goo onto the cold floor. The little ink flowers I’d doodled along my forearms were still there under the layer of magenta fluid. Fluoro woke up to his first period. After the techs disconnected the catheters, he watched the watery blood trickle down his pedestal and into the pod drain, a strange shiver in his eyes. Because I felt like I should say something, I asked if he remembered the planet from my dream: Hamemela, the ice giant from when we were eights. How we all learned the word blizzard, and the educoil showed us crispy-thin ice over Earth lakes, and when the ship finally arrived we found an atmosphere exactly three torrs short of hosting anything but cold, dead water. Fluoro said nothing, just kept blinking at his little trail of red. But Distal said she remembered. That as Hamemela had grown small behind us, she’d seen something alive and migrating over its surface like spilled sorghum, even though it was impossible for her to have seen anything like that at all.

On the observation deck, Distal prods the back of my chair with her foot. Her face is flushed with a sleep’s worth of new baby fat, but the defiance is still there in the eyes.

“I swear, I saw it. Right off Camelopardalis. A planet that’s perfect and beautiful, just like Earth.”

“Fine, Distal.” Fluoro rests his forehead on the desk, tracing the sharp-angled hearts and initials carved into the keypanel. “So call the bridge.”

The bridgie that shows up is Bacher, a sixteen who haunts the heritage cavern of the educoil watching Earth celebrations—always something twentieth century, like the part with the birthday candles. He leans over Distal’s monitor and asks us if we think this is all some kind of fucking joke.

There’s nothing to see on Distal’s screen, but of course with a phantom, there wouldn’t be. The trawler net shifts as the ship moves: recalibrating the search radius, sorting through endless vacuum and ice moons and almost-planets with good water but air that will choke your lungs. In theory, phantoms are planets too far away to show up on the bridge’s official slate of viable new homes, but close enough to flash on the general trawler like a floater across the eye. They’re nothing more than an old superstition from centuries ago, back when our great-great-grandparents hit Promising Planet Number 7,000 or 4,000,002, each just a few check marks away from habitability. Even with the alternating years of sleep, people were clawing at the walls. So some bridgie put the phantom trawlers on the observation deck and said: look, don’t despair. Although we are carving through the void in starving slumber, there is sure to be a planet of ferns and bacteria just beyond the tips of our outstretched fingers. If we only keep looking.

“Don’t call us again,” Bacher says, but I can see him avoiding the observation window. The planet looming there, dry and blank as disappointment itself.

Maybe it’s my cold ankles, or the barley planet, or the patchy back of Fluoro’s head, where his brain rested in a ceramic groove for twelve months and told his uterus to prepare for life, but when Distal insists that, really, she saw it—our future home in a smudge off Camelopardalis—I tell Bacher that I saw it, too.

The next planet we visit is a desert rock, its center cleaved like a weeping wound, in a system nowhere near Camelopardalis. Distal sulks and Fluoro is apathetic and I am relieved. Even if Bacher actually bothered to tell the other bridgies about the phantom, they don’t have any reason to believe us or care. There are already hundreds of thousands of official waiting targets. In the next year that we’re awake, we visit 116 of them. An ash planet that looks like two conjoined potatoes and has a poison sky. Then a green one, close to perfect, that turns out to have recently coated every fern on its surface in iodine-violet lava that still glows so hot we can see it from space.

The educoil always told us that we were lucky to have the cube drive. The miracle of our little box of nothing, how it lets us blink from one planet to the next by expanding and contracting space around us. How we could visit any planet in the universe, millions upon millions of waiting homes. How we could keep going forever and never stop.

We spend our waking year sprawled on the floor of the educoil, picking out each other’s ingrown toenails and arguing over what to watch. Through the interactive flush of its cave walls, the coil can show us anything we want. Music videos from the 2090s. Steel girders collapsing in a 24th-century wind village. A home video of a baby crawling up fuzzy carpeted stairs. We all have our favorites. Mine is the bedtime story Jana used to tell us about the cube drive. The little box of nothing that makes up the heart of our ship.

“Not that one, we’ve watched it a million times.”

“Put on something from the cyclone years,” Distal says. “I wanna see the waves.”

“No, a coremelding.” Fluoro’s own addiction, pretty little mid-23rd century ceremonies where everyone wore crowns made of aluminum-twisted flowers. He presses his fingers to the cave wall with a strange sense of urgency, like a four who’s lost their blanket. “Jana, the one with the spilled pistachio pudding.”

“Is this the one?” Jana is our favorite teacher. She speaks from high in the back of her throat like she has a spit bubble, and has spindly eyelashes that we used to trace with our fingers when we were little.

“Yes, yes that one.”

The fingernail-pink of the cavern flushes blue then yellow then green. Through the vents comes a grassy smell of wetness, like tinned algae. Fluoro pulls his gangly knees up to his chin, watching the images flicker over the cave walls. He mouths the words along with the home video footage. It’s the part where the couple is standing on a windblown cliff, index fingers twined together, smiling like it hurts but they don’t want to stop.

Distal curls up beside Fluoro, resting her head in his lap, and I use her legs as my pillow. We lay there together, watching the wind whip the couple’s faces, their teeth-gritting smiles. The smell of the sensory vents makes me sick to my stomach.

I know that Distal lies, it’s what she does. What I don’t understand is the feeling I had back on the observation deck staring at the barley planet, the feeling that made me lie along with her. A hole deep inside me with no shape or meaning. A little box of nothing, just like Jana always said.

We go back to sleep. We blink through galaxies. Our particles tear apart and reassemble and the teeth crowd in our mouths. When we wake up, we’re passing by a planet marked with storms like a billion eyes. Fluoro names it Freckles.

Among the three of us, the inventory is this: two flat stares, one crop of cystic acne along the jaw, a nose that grew to suit the face, one that didn’t, three thighs identically striped with stretch marks, and pinches upon pinches of flesh where it doesn’t belong.

We are fourteens now, almost grown, and our rations leave us chewing at the inside of our cheeks. In the time that we’ve been asleep, two of the bridgies have stuffed their veins with cleaning fluid. The potato system has started to fail, yielding tough skin and grainy guts. And in the coil’s nursery cavern there are six newborn babies—a fresh crop of zeros—wrinkled and wide-eyed and squirming.

“Look how tiny the fingers are.” Fluoro rests his forehead against the glass of the incubation chamber built into a soft silicone ridge. “And the noses, too.”

“That little one in the corner is mine,” Distal says. “When we get to Camelopardalis I’m going to make her a hab that’s all her own. She’ll look out the window and see clouds.”

We call Jana to the craggy grooves of the ceiling and she shows us how to hold them. Make a basket with your arms, careful of the neck, oh so careful, because babies will loll and wither away at the slightest wrong thing. We cradle the soft weight and start laughing; a giddy panic at the absurdity that we’re the only force keeping their tiny heads from thudding to the floor.

“It’s heavier than I thought,” Fluoro says.

Jana explains that babies need to hear lots of talking in order to develop healthy, strong brains. Tell them about the room, the world, the wonder of Earth. Distal and Fluoro scrunch up their faces and coo, but I am finding the room all too hot, the muted pink of this cavern like the inside of an ear. I can’t stop thinking about the barley planet, about the low white of Fluoro’s eyes as he stared up at the flashing colors of our dead home, a dull slackness in his face like when he used to suck his thumb. The baby in my arms is so heavy, and it’s squirming, and part of me wants to let go.

“Here are your fingers,” I say, holding its tiny worm of a pinkie. “Here are your toes.”

On the last day of our waking year, we reach LR-740-I, a planet with sand and promising nitrogen projections and a litany of volcanic moons. Something about this one feels exciting. Almost everyone on the ship crowds into one observation suite. The room is stuffy in its silence, a forest of ripe bodies in unraveling tunics. We can all see the asteroid burrowed in the planet’s surface, the stranglehold blanket of debris and smoke. I don’t know why it’s different this time. I can feel the weight of the disappointment in the room. Maybe it’s the dead bridgies or the woody algae we’ve been eating or the way the older ones have been waking up in the pods, teeth stained magenta, only to lay back down and re-close the hatch. Across the room Bacher is staring at the planet as if he’s not really seeing anything at all. Fluoro comes up behind and lays his head against Bacher’s shoulder blades. Even in the low orange light, I can see the breath leave Bacher’s body. Beside us, a hollow-eyed twenty starts crying, and Distal whispers to him about Camelopardalis. How we will soon know what it feels like to have wind whipping our eyes, our mouth, our teeth. How it will be perfect, just like Earth.

We go to sleep. We wake up. The room smells rancid, something emanating from the pods where the older ones have been camping out, choosing sleep over anything else. In the pod beside Fluoro, Bacher is shivering on his own pedestal, freshly woken. Fluoro smiles, his face smeared with magenta goo. It’s not Bacher’s time to sleep, not if he doesn’t want to. The meaning of the gesture is clear—the couple on the cliff, their happy grimaces—but I find that it is abstract to me, like the time we asked Jana what a pomegranate tastes like. I thought it would be like pod fluid, medicine and aluminum, but she said it tasted sour and sweet and bright like the sun, and in that moment I felt a chasm open up beneath me, the space of a billion lightyears between me and my home.

In the time we’ve been asleep, the educoil has gone on the fritz. The sensory filters are busted, spewing an acrid mix that smells like burnt oatcake. The silicone walls of our cavern no longer grow back as they should. They hang down in stretched putty like stalactites. The floor is littered with dried-up silicone resembling bits of dead skin, probably from sixes who kept building ships and hab huts and castles, too dumb or too stubborn to understand that their destruction was now permanent.

Fluoro’s off in a different cavern with Bacher, watching his 20th-century videos of birthday candles and gray-faced people and rooms in which trees grow, their branches pimpled with garish light like the keypads below the trawlers on the observation deck.

It feels strange with just Distal and me here in our cavern, feels like everything is crumbling. I touch my fingers to the wounded, strobing silicone and ask Jana for her bedtime story about the cube drive, the little box of nothing at the heart of our ship. This time, Distal doesn’t protest.

“Imagine that you are trying to fly,” Jana starts.

“It seems impossible, and you have nothing to help you. In fact, you have so much nothing that you’ve shoved and pushed and squished all of the nothing down into a box.”

A caretaker named Rosiah wanders into our cavern with his group of fours, all eye boogers and hair matted at the crown. He’s the only caretaker left that I know of, the only one still shepherding the babies once they start walking and the nursery arms can no longer contain them. The rest of the caretakers are in the pods that smell funny, the ones that everyone’s afraid to open.

“You jump and kick your feet and stretch your arms as far as they can go. But you’re just too heavy. You think, maybe I’ll turn off the gravity and make myself float. But floating is not the same as flying.”

Rosiah lays down on the ground and closes his eyes. He looks like one of the spent potato pods shriveled up on the aluminum mesh of the C-deck farm. The hiccupping fours settle around him like a halo of dried-up roots. Distal rests her face parallel to a kid with chapped, flaking lips. The kid is too old for her coos and wide smiles, but it seems to mesmerize him all the same.

“Then one day, you are tired and hopeless. You open your box, and all of the nothing comes out. It’s a special kind of nothing, hungry and contagious. It gobbles up all of the something, from the tip of your nose right up to the ceiling. And do you know what that means?”

One of the children starts wailing, wet hiccups filling the cavern from wall to wall. The sound sets my teeth on edge, but Distal pulls the child into her lap. She clicks her tongue and whispers about the planet off Camelopardalis, how we’ll soon live there and be happy and feel the grit of soil between our toes.

Jana snaps her fingers.

“There’s nothing between you and the ceiling. You have found a way to fly.”

Distal and I go to sleep alone. We wake up circled by faces. The crying man from the observation deck, Rosiah the caretaker, all of the people that heard Distal’s stories about Camelopardalis, who said nothing at the time but now look at her with a strange hunger. They lift her, shivering, from her pedestal, wiping the slime from her cheeks like I’ve seen the nursery arms do to babies after they are birthed from the wall of the coil, shrieking and wet.

“Did you really see it,” they whisper. “Was it perfect like Earth with water that falls from the sky?”

Distal only blinks, struck with paralysis at the sight of their earnest faces, as if this was all a game she was playing, that she never really expected anyone to listen.

Beside us one of the pods has been turned on its side, flipped open, cough syrup pink oozed over the laminate floor. It’s Kime, once the oldest and now nothing. What’s left of his bloated face is pointed at the ceiling, the rotten sinew of his jaw hanging open in an expression of awe.

“Yes,” I tell them in Distal’s silence. “It was beautiful. It was home.”

The bridge has been abandoned. They’ve all spread out like Bacher, packing themselves into the deepest caverns of the coil or scratching murals into the mess hall or digging into the farm on C-deck, not stopping when they’ve hit aluminum, or even when their nails peel back.

None of us know how to work the manual commands, to veer the ship from its hundreds of thousands of targets that are not home. Rosiah is the first to break. He takes the metal legs of a chair and shatters monitors, one after the other. It doesn’t do anything but make the emergency lights flash. Others rush into the room, drawn by the noise and flickering light. They stand there for a moment, blank and wordless, then they join in.

In the center of it all stands Distal, ragged playdress barely covering her gangly legs where there is not enough flesh, only bone grown in the darkness by a brain that thinks it’s on solid earth. She covers her ears, frenzied, hysterical. When I come up behind her and wrap her in my arms, she dissolves. A sack of loose cartilage. I whisper to her about Camelopardalis, how everything will be alright, even as she tries to break free, even as I feel her ribs heaving, the sobs puckering her body like a wet-eyed four.

I wake up. The observation deck is full of sleeping bodies, nestled between each other’s limbs. Out the window is a planet that is blue and green and perfect. The home we’d all stared at for hours, until our eyes would no longer open. Distal is curled up at my feet. Bacher has fallen asleep against Fluoro’s chest. In the center of the room, a bleary-eyed two is sitting up among the prone bodies, a silhouette against the looming planet. It’s not crying, not even looking around the room like I’ve seen other babies do, grasping for comfort with doughy, jerking limbs. I realize that the child looks familiar, that its soft body was once so heavy in my arms, and that’s when I see it: the other side of the planet, the part we couldn’t see last night, rotating into view. A hangnail crescent of light along the horizon. The planet is split open like the pomegranate Jana once showed us, a weeping gash of magma haloing the child’s fuzzy head.

The heart of our ship is warm like a feverish scab. The child’s body is sticky against my hip. Its skin smells like oil and sweetness, like all of the smells of Earth purging from the coil, all of the things I can’t recognize without a picture or Jana’s voice, because they mean nothing to me.

When I reach the cube drive, the child starts to fuss. It should be old enough to talk by now, but it can’t. Babies need lots of words, like Jana said. They need to hear you speak, tell them about the world, about everything you see.

“Shh,” I whisper to the child. “I’m going to tell you a bedtime story.”

I open the box of nothing that is hungry and contagious. I make everything fly.

Here are your fingers, here are your toes. Here is the sound of a dream dying, of steel pulled from its seams. Hear that sound, that groaning, behemoth wail? Your tiny synapses were born in the desert to fear starless night, but look, here I have them for you: all of the stars. Watch their light as the ground shudders beneath you. Hope is a lie, and I only want you to feel truth. When your skin starts to evaporate, there is no pain. You are whole. Tainted with gravity, strained to bursting with everything that ever registered as carbon. You are sinking, you are buried, you are deep down farther in the earth than anyone has ever been.

© 2023 Steph Kwiatkowski