Folding the Sky

-2-

When her father arrived home, Zuri hadn't moved from the kitchen. She was sitting at the wobbly dining table, the paper the soldier had given her clutched so firmly between her fingers that it crinkled in her grasp. She had to start somewhere, she figured. But she didn't know where.

Her father knew that something was wrong, and of course he did. Asante Ayim was a compass, Zuri always thought, fine-tuned to even the tiniest disturbances in the magnetic fields of his loved ones' emotions. Try as she might to hide things from him, she never could.

He dropped his bag by the door and tried in vain to wipe the oil from his hands, mopping them on his jumpsuit. An assembly line worker in one of the city-state's most successful factories, the fine lines of his fingers were always dark with soot and grime, an effortless tattoo of his livelihood.

Zuri could feel his eyes on her, like the faint warmth of the sun on her skin. He said, gently, "Zuri?"

Only then did Zuri look up. She couldn't wipe the worried frown from her face. "A royal soldier came by," she said, watching her father's face blanch in concern. "No. He wasn't looking for you, Baba. He was looking for me."

"For you?" That didn't ease his concern like Zuri had hoped it would. He seemed to shrink into himself, steadying his tired form against the wall like he would otherwise fall over. "What...what for?"

She got up, handing the paper to him. Zuri watched as Asante's gray-rimmed eyes scanned it, then looked up at her again, clearly perplexed. "Who are these people?"

She folded her hands over his. The word was an exhale, a wish finally fulfilled after years of waiting: "Celestials."

Asante said nothing. He just stood there, his mouth agape, eyes a strange collage of both hope and fear at once.

She didn't blame him.

When the meteorite struck, Zuri had been just six years old. Her mother was still alive then, but barely so, clinging to the last remnants of her life even as the fever siphoned more and more of it away each day. Delicate yellow daisies grew in between the cobblestones in front of the Ayim's house, and they were her mother's favorite, so whatever time Zuri wasn't spending in her mother's sickroom, she was outside, stringing daisies together to make crowns and necklaces and promise rings.

She was outside that day, too, when a small white dash arced down from the sky, like someone had drawn a blade across the blue. A moment later, the ground quivered underneath her feet, knocking Zuri to the ground. Her head hit the cobblestones with a loud thwack that rang in her ears, like a painful lullaby as her consciousness drifted away.

She didn't remember much else besides her father's hands reaching for her that next morning, how his memories flooded into her mind like a river past a broken levee. Nothing had been the same that day—not for either of them. So was it a good or terrible thing that there were others who knew what that felt like?

She wasn't sure, and by the looks of it, neither was Asante.

"The Queen wants me to find them," she explained, "so I don't think I have much choice."

"Do you know why she's searching for them?" her father demanded, stepping back, dropping the paper to the table. "I mean, what if it's—"

To have us killed? It was a thought, of course, that had crossed her mind. Celestials were allowed to exist as legends and nothing more than legends. Bedtime stories. Drunken tales. A reality of Celestials was blasphemous, for only one being could have powers beyond the scope of man, and that was Kiro, the God of All. Believing anything else would be upsetting everything the nation was built upon.