The first time Juno went through the Shallows she was sixteen and moving to Kaskall to live with her father’s sister. She remembered almost nothing of the transit itself. She remembered the boarding, and she remembered the exit. In between was a blank that she carried the way you carry a night of heavy sleep — aware that time had passed, unable to account for it.
Her aunt met her at the dock. Juno had not seen her aunt in four years. Her aunt was smaller than she remembered and had cut her hair short. On the ride from the orbital to the surface, her aunt asked about the transit. Juno said it was fine. Her aunt asked if she had felt anything. Juno said no. Her aunt nodded and did not ask again.
Juno lived with her aunt for three years. She attended school. She made friends. She did not go through the Shallows again during that time. She did not think about it. She had no reason to.
When she was nineteen, she met someone.
His name was Daev. He was a cargo handler at the orbital facility, which meant he spent his days loading and unloading the ships that came through Kaskall. He was tall and quiet and had a scar on his left hand from a coupling that had closed on it. He was not from Kaskall. He had come through on a cargo run from Maund three years earlier and had stayed. He said he stayed because the work was steady and the rent was cheap and he liked the way the sky looked from the eastern ridge. Juno thought he stayed because he was tired of moving.
They spent six months together before he told her he was leaving. Not leaving her — leaving Kaskall. A berth had opened on a cargo ship heading to Veridian. The ship was called Kaskall-SC-3A1F. He would be gone for four months, including transit and stops. He would be back.
She asked him why. He said the pay was better and he wanted to see something else. She asked if Veridian was worth seeing. He said he didn’t know. That was the point.
He left on a Tuesday in early spring. Juno did not go to the dock to watch the ship leave. She went to work — she was a trainee at the station’s water treatment facility, which was not interesting but was steady, like Daev had said about his work. She thought about him intermittently during the day, the way you think about weather that might or might not arrive.
He sent a message through the Relay on the third day. The message was short. “Transit fine. Ship is small. Crew is okay. Miss you.” She read it four times. She wrote back: “Water plant is boring. Come back.” She sent it. The Relay would take however long the Relay took.
Four months passed. Juno did not count the days. She counted the messages — eight in total, evenly spaced, each one a little shorter than the last. The seventh message said “Coming back soon.” The eighth said “Back in two days.”
She went to the dock to meet him. The ship came in on schedule. The cargo was offloaded. The crew came down the ramp. She counted them. Four people. She did not recognize any of them.
She asked the dock supervisor where Daev was. The supervisor checked the manifest. Daev had disembarked at Veridian. He had taken a position at the orbital there. He had sent a message through the Relay. The supervisor did not know this. The dock did not handle personal messages.
Juno went home. She checked the Relay terminal in the public library. There was a message, three days old.
“Juno, I’m sorry. I should have said something. Veridian is different. The sky here is wrong and I can’t explain it. I think I needed to be somewhere where nothing was the same. It’s not about you. I will write more when I can. — D”
She read it once. She did not read it again.
She left the library and walked to the eastern ridge, where Daev used to go. The sky was the color it always was. She sat there until it got dark and then she walked home and she did not cry and she did not sleep and she did not think about the Shallows.
Six years later, Juno went through the Shallows again.
She was going to Veridian. She had been offered a position at the water treatment facility there — a promotion, a bigger plant, a chance to run her own operation. She accepted it. She told herself she accepted it because of the work. This was mostly true.
The ship was a small cargo vessel with four crew and three passengers. The passengers were given a briefing by the senior crew member, a woman named Torin, who explained what to expect. Torin was calm and thorough and did not make eye contact with anyone for longer than was necessary. She said the transit would take five days. She said they should eat regularly and sleep when tired and not look out the portholes. A crew member named Vesh laughed at this, quietly, and Torin looked at Vesh and Vesh stopped.
On the first day, Juno stayed in her cabin. She read. She did not look at the porthole. She could feel it there, though — a circle of something that was not space, pressed against the wall like a window onto a room she had been in before and could not remember.
On the second day, she went to the galley. The other two passengers were there — an older man named Soren who was going to Veridian to retire, and a young woman named Nima who was going to visit family. Nima was nervous. Soren was not. Soren had made the transit eleven times. He ate his meal slowly and told Nima that the trick was to keep busy. Nima asked what kind of busy. Soren said anything. “The ship has a library. Read. The ship has a galley. Cook. The ship has a corridor. Walk it. Just don’t sit and look.”
Nima asked what happened if you looked.
Soren was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Nothing. Nothing happens. That’s what happens.”
Juno went back to her cabin and closed the door. She did not look at the porthole. She thought about Daev, who had come this way six years ago on this same ship — Kaskall-SC-3A1F, the same hull, the same Navigator, the same corridor. She wondered if he had looked. She wondered what he had seen.
On the third day she looked.
The Shallows was nothing. Soren had been right. Through the porthole, the Shallows was an absence where stars should have been — not darkness, exactly, but a quality of not-thereness that was different from darkness. Like looking at a space that had been cleared. Like a room after the furniture has been moved out.
She looked for a long time. She did not feel afraid. She felt something else — a recognition, as if she had been here before, in the blank between boarding and exit when she was sixteen. As if the blank had a shape, and the shape was this: a window onto nothing, and the nothing was not empty. It was just not hers.
She thought about Daev, who had come to Veridian and stayed. Who said the sky was wrong and he couldn’t explain it. Who had gone through the Shallows and come out the other side and decided not to come back. She wondered if what he had seen through this same porthole had anything to do with it. She thought it probably didn’t. She thought people leave for reasons they can’t explain and the Shallows is a convenient excuse for something that was already happening.
She closed the porthole cover and went to the galley and cooked something she didn’t eat.
On the fifth day, they emerged. The stars came back. Torin was on the bridge and her voice came over the intercom, calm and flat: “Exit confirmed. Welcome to Veridian orbital.”
Juno felt the ship change — a settling, a loosening, as if something that had been holding very still had finally exhaled. She wondered if the Navigator had felt it too. She did not know if the Navigator felt things. She did not know if the Navigator was aware of her. She had been on this ship for five days and she had never spoken to it directly. She had spoken to Torin, to Vesh, to the crew. She had not spoken to the mind that was the ship.
She thought about asking Torin. She thought about going to the bridge and saying something through the console. She did not know what she would say. She did not know what you say to a mind that carried you through nothing and brought you out the other side.
She said nothing. She collected her bag and went down the ramp.
Veridian orbital was small. The shuttle to the surface took forty minutes. Juno sat by the window and watched the planet come up — green and brown and blue, ordinary, the same colors as Kaskall from the same distance. She looked for the eastern ridge. She couldn’t find it from this angle.
The sky was different here. Not wrong, the way Daev had said. Just different. A different quality of light. A different color at dusk. She thought she could get used to it. She thought she would try.
She did not look for Daev. She had not come to Veridian to find him. She had come because the work was good and the plant was bigger and she wanted to run her own operation. That was true. It was not the only thing that was true, but it was enough.
She took the shuttle down. She stepped onto the surface. She breathed the air. It smelled like rain.