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1. The Girl Left Behind, and the Afterglow
After the torrent of white light had swept through and gone, only silence remained in the connecting passage.
Standing against the wall — the only one left — was Kanoa. Just one girl, barely holding herself upright.
She was usually the one eating snacks with half-lidded eyes, saying exactly what she meant and nothing more. But what was in her eyes now was something Ledea had never seen there before: a deep, bewildered vacancy, a bottomless blankness. She was staring at her own hands. Her lips barely moved.
"Asphi... Asphi sis was — she pushed me — "
"Kanoa — !"
Ledea's voice came out broken. She and Shutia crossed the passage to her at once.
They looked around — once, twice, in every direction. There was nothing. No trace of Asphi, who had been standing right there not thirty seconds ago. No scorch marks. No debris. Only an absence so clean it felt unnatural — a hollow in the air where a person had been.
"Liminal Flux..."
Behind them, Shutia pressed the words out through clenched teeth.
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2. A Moonlit Box, and a Grief in Resonance
They suspended the survey and retreated to the interior of the Luna Geist.
Kanoa sat in a narrow seat in the cabin, knees drawn up, her voice barely audible.
"Asphi sis... she pushed me out of the way..."
What she described was brutal and over in an instant. In the moment before the light hit, Asphi had thrown Kanoa clear with everything she had — and taken it herself. Stepped into it in her place. And then she was gone.
Kanoa was not crying. She was not screaming. If anything, the stillness of her face was worse — the expression of someone standing at the edge of a loss so sudden and so large that there was simply nothing left to do with it yet.
"Kanoa..."
Ledea placed a hand gently on her shoulder and said her name. That was all she could do.
Under ordinary circumstances, the two of them would have been trading barbs within thirty seconds — Kanoa calling her small, Ledea bristling, the familiar rhythm of it. But in front of this — Kanoa like this — there was nothing to reach for except quiet, and closeness, and the small pressure of a hand.
"It's the same... exactly the same as what happened with me and sis..."
The voice that broke the silence came from Shutia, at the pilot's seat.
Ledea turned sharply.
"Shutia — that light — was that the same one? From back then?"
"Yeah... The light that took sis away right in front of me, when I was eleven. Liminal Flux."
Shutia kept her eyes on the instruments as she said it.
"...That's not real," Kanoa said. Her vacant eyes moved slightly, fixing on Shutia with the look of someone searching for a foothold. "That's just — a rumor, isn't it. Something people made up."
"Let's keep moving while we talk. There's nothing to be gained by standing still." Ledea's voice was gentle, and precise. "All right?"
Kanoa had no argument left. She nodded, once, without resistance.
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3. Proof of Existence, or: A Long Wake Through the Stars
Shutia sent an encrypted first report to Orange Rock's administration on behalf of the Ryud sisters, and the Luna Geist set course for Subaru Station.
The three of them were in the cockpit. Trailing behind on a docking winch, the Aqua Ignition was being towed through the sea of stars. Neither of them had needed to say it out loud — letting Kanoa pilot her own ship right now was not something either of them was going to allow.
Shutia steadied the output of the main thrusters and spoke.
"Liminal Flux is real."
Among spacefaring navigators, it had long been counted among the phenomena that lived somewhere between legend and possibility — an inexplicable light that split open space without warning, unpredictable in when or where it would appear. Whatever it caught left no trace. It was spoken of as a natural disaster, or an unknown force, or simply as something that took people and did not give them back.
And yet: scattered across recorded history were accounts that complicated that last part. Strange cases. People and objects swallowed by the Liminal Flux — lost, presumed gone — only to surface later. Across time, or across hundreds of light-years of space, in some far corner of the galaxy. The light had been named in those accounts too.
"Thirteen years ago, sis was taken by it. I spent twelve years after that tracking her — following every trace I could find, in this ship, through every part of space I knew how to reach."
Shutia spoke in the flattest register she had. Facts, only facts, laid out in a row. Part of that was the nature of the memory — the kind you learned not to hold directly. But more than that, it was something deliberate: Kanoa was already standing at the same edge Shutia had once stood at, and she was not going to push her further in.
"Shutia..."
Twelve years. Alone, chasing a single person through the dark.
Even now, even after their reunion, Ledea had never heard the details of it — not the shape of those years, not what they had actually been. She looked at her sister's back and felt something tighten in her chest.
"What happened to Asphi sis...? Is she — did she go somewhere — ?"
Kanoa's voice was barely holding. Her small shoulders were trembling.
"...Yeah."
Shutia let a moment pass, then met Kanoa's eyes.
"If my experience means anything — she's safe. I found sis. Asphi is alive. I have to believe that."
"Really...?"
"Yeah. But — "
She swallowed the rest.
*(But where she surfaces — when she surfaces — I don't know.)*
She said nothing more. She set her gaze back on the star field ahead and kept it there.
The Luna Geist accelerated, quietly, carrying one small hope and one enormous unknown toward whatever came next.