Void (The Far Reaches, #2)

by Veronica Roth

No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.

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.

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.

He used to call me a slip of a thing. Always quiet and always watching. I think . . . I think he thought it was mysterious, at first. He couldn’t get enough of me. But sometimes what you think is a shroud of mystery is just a fucking shroud.

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. It was all relative in the void.