Void (The Far Reaches, #2)

by Veronica Roth

“What is it the Jovians say? ‘Joy is the thief of time, and time is the thief of joy’?”

smothering. Odd that you could be in the expanse to define all expanses—what the astropoets called the “Big Empty”—and still feel claustrophobic, but the mind was not built to comprehend such endlessness. Humans liked containers.

“Keep your promises between your teeth,” she said, and then added: “. . . so you can bite them back as needed.”

Maybe life in the void should have eradicated her faith in humanity. Separation from time tended to do that to people. All the little struggles of people’s lives—and the great ones—became meaningless. Empires fell and rose, governments rebuilt themselves and collapsed, borders shifted, power flowed in and out, and still the Redundancy flew its endless circuit between star systems. The one thing that was constant was people fucking up what they’d made. But they kept making things, didn’t they? They kept trying. And so did she.

Out in the void, you know more than most people how insignificant we are. What’s one more bloated body adrift? Just matter converting to matter. Stardust to stardust.”

“Only—out here we’re also impossibly big,” she said. “Bigger than time. We watch kingdoms rise and fall. Names change. Fashions change. A thousand tiny cataclysms pass us by, and we see better than anybody, you know? That all things pass.”

They waited for a long stretch of time. Like a tide receding, or a moon creeping across the sky by fractions too tiny to observe in the moment. An eternity, really, depending on how tiny you allowed time to be. A millisecond was nothing compared to an hour, and an hour was nothing compared to an eon.

“At first I did it to make myself hurt. To see what they saw, at the end.” She shrugged. “But then . . . I realized that what’s out there is oblivious to us. There’s no menace to it, because there’s no intent. We’re just fragile, and we break sometimes. And time keeps moving. I don’t know. I think it’s comforting—our smallness is comforting to me.”

It was strange how an ache that had persisted for years could just . . . subside. Just like that. Matter not disappearing, just . . . transforming.

But the void was also nothing, and now it contained her entire world. And so all things passed, eventually. Even pain.