The Vela (The Vela #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Ironic that so much of the Khayyami aesthetic favored sun depictions, when they all knew what their harvesting had done to the sun. Knew, and hadn’t stopped. At least Asala would be dead before the whole system finally killed itself.

Eratos wasn’t the only dying world, just the one dying fastest—the tiny colony on Samos had been gone for a decade, and after Eratos would be Hypatia and then Gan-De, and maybe the Inner Ring would finally come to care when it was their turn to freeze to death as the sun collapsed. A leisurely extinction. One that allowed everyone to push any inconvenience to another place or another generation.

for many it meant replacing a cold death on the planet with an even colder one in space, the refugees’ ragtag scrap ships disintegrating while their unlucky passengers begged for a sliver of room in an overcrowded orbital refugee camp. If they got in, they won the right to die more gradually.

government people never felt useful unless they invented ways to make everything twice as much bother.

To my little sister, on her birthday, with love from Dayo. The words sister and her were written in slightly different ink on neatly cut rectangles of glued paper, which Dayo had covered the original misnomers with a year or so after the gift had been given, after an important conversation had been had. Dayo hadn’t told Asala she’d altered the inscription. She’d just done it, leaving it for Asala to find on her own. Dayo had been like that, always performing quiet kindnesses without expectation of praise.

“War,” Cynwrig said, “is math. How many dead, how many miles, how many bullets you have left. We—me, you, our stalwart protector here—we are all at war. Only, our enemy isn’t something we can outgun or outfox. It’s time. Time is our enemy, and resources are the only weapon we have.”

“You don’t even get the jokes. How can I imagine that you and I see the world anything alike?”

It’s different when you know their faces. When it’s not just people who are dying, it’s your mom and your dad and your friends, it’s everybody on your street, it’s your language teacher who stayed after school to help you pass your quizzes, it’s the lady who used to sell you fireworks whose name you never bothered to learn. It’s everyone you ever met, and there is no hope for any of them. That’s what we’re going up against here.

There were two roads before her. One: grief—a longing that would never abate because home never left a person. The second road, the better road: life. It meant abandoning the idea of home altogether as a social construct designed to hold people captive to places and traditions long after it was good to do so.

It was strange how knowledge that used to be a piece of her was now out of her grasp.

She didn’t have to consider it her home for it to consider her its subject.

Asala had spent more time off this planet than on it, but there was no doubt as she looked at the harsh landscape that it had made her.

All any of them had wanted was a tiny corner of the universe where they could live their lives.

In her clan they’d said that some people burned hot when they got mad, and others burned cold. Hafiz must be one of the latter.

All security procedures had weaknesses because of the very fact that they were procedures.

Why was it Asala felt most Hypatian away from Hypatia?

It’s genocide. Literally. Millions of people are dead because of their greed and selfishness.

“It’s just, how can you ever know what to do when you’re just a small piece in a small maze, one tiny subsection of a labyrinth that stretches back centuries?” asked Asala. These weren’t real choices. She was unable to undo anything that had been done. Her only option was focusing on the task at hand, and she couldn’t figure out why Niko didn't see that.

Nobody could think properly when sitting still, with slow blood and idle bones.

Fear and foolishness were close cousins.

What a weird thing, having nature remind you of its mimic rather than the other way around.

“Poison's passive. You have to eat it or touch it. Venom's something that something else injects into you. Insects are venomous.”

None of them deserved it, these planets full of bystanders who could only react to a carefully curated window into someone else's game.

Dayo, who still might be somewhere on Camp Ghala, lost between the bureaucratic cracks. But even if she wasn’t . . . the clanners of the Thoroughfare laughed and hugged and bartered in her mind’s eye again, the smell of jinma, the shouts of Hypatian slang. Maybe this was the one small way Asala’s planet could live on, light-years away, in another solar system, far from the people who had left them to die.

What was the point of making a decision that would leave her empty the rest of her life? Even if it was the smart one?

The stars may be numberless, but we number our dead.

Both battles and hunts might end in slaughters. The difference was how you got there.

People spoke about the death of planets as if the rock itself would shatter, but the truth was never so dramatic. The entire sphere wasn’t in danger of ceasing to exist. All that mattered was the inner goings-on of that tiny strip of gauze, that onion skin of atmosphere clinging to the rocky surface like morning dew. The narrowest of margins on which everything depended.

the question of who deserved what was broken to begin with.

Who deserved saving, and why? As if that were a question any of them could answer. As if any of them were gods.

Asala would save Dayo now, not because she herself deserved that joy, and not because of whether or not Dayo had earned it. She would do it because it was what love demanded.