A Home along the Way

Before the sanctuary. Before the education. Before the sky ever opened for him, Pierce had only the hill and the sermons. His home was the church but there was time when it was not, a nameless child swaddled with the only thing he had to his name on the doorstep to a family who had more love and coin to their name.

It was in the way light streamed through the stained windows, a washed swirl of hues dancing against stone floors, painful cold in the winters and a soothing chill during the summers, all that was his time her slowly came to him.

He remembered the smell of polished stone floors, the way incense clung to his secondhand tunic, and how Mother Speaker's voice rang clear through the colonnade, always beginning with, "Watchers of the Way, what we remember, we become."

Pierce had remembered everything. The chores, the devotions, the games with the other orphans. The sting of cold water during bath rotations. The fierce pride of delivering memorized scripture without flaw. And the quiet nights, when he and his siblings—seven of them, not one sharing a drop of blood—would curl together like pups beneath the old skylight and trace constellations as if they could own them.

At twelve, he was the second oldest. Stronger than most. Quieter than all. He didn't ask why he was abandoned, because none of them asked. The Mish'ol'iyr did not dwell in the sorrow of origin, only in the honor of purpose.

Then the order came.

"Donations have been greatly reduced once word of our sixth child had reached the city's ear," Father Speaker explained with grief he could not disguise. "You are nearly grown. The Order can no longer sponsor your keep."

There were options: work in the reclamation centers, the ore processors near the outer farms. Pierce had seen what they did to boys who stayed. He didn't hesitate. He refused to be a weight on the family that gave him life.

So he signed up.

The recruiters from the Galilean College of Excellence weren't expecting someone like him. Barely a teenager. No sponsorship. No genetic modification. Just raw, desperate brilliance and a letter from a quiet priest declaring, This child belongs to the stars.

He was accepted under the oldest clause in the admissions charter: merit through labor.

Big Red Station wasn't red. It was silver-gray and smelled like copper blood and oil and the dreams of people who hadn't seen dirt in decades. Pierce worked maintenance cycles, waste reclamation, airlock calibrations. His hands blistered, but he earned his lessons.

By fifteen, he was tutoring older students.

By seventeen, he was offered a provisional slot at the Archimedean Schools—a brutal, accelerated track where students learned to design spatial distortion engines and folded-time relay systems the same way other kids learned fractions.

He was tired. But there was pride in it. He sent credits home every cycle. It wasn't much, but it was always enough for a new roof tile, a heating filament, a little more food for the others.

Then Mother Speaker got sick.

The message came late. By the time it reached him, she was gone.

Pierce nearly lost his scholarship. Missed assessments. Forgot his own name, almost. He was collapsing.

Until Yuri.

She was light and confidence, a Lunarian with hair like obsidian wire and a laugh that belonged in stories. She wasn't enrolled at Galilean out of desperation. She was there because it pleased her family and because she wanted something more than moons and mandates.

She found him—frazzled, half-starved, eyes sunken—and fed him.

Not food. Attention. Understanding.

"You're not a machine, Pierce," she said once, leaning over his crammed data-slate. "You don't always have to fix everything."

He didn't believe her, not really. But he let her say it. Let her mean it.

When he told her about his mother, about the way Father had broken down during his last call home, she didn't offer pity. She suggested something beautiful.

"Send them something alive. A tree. A Luminary sapling. They cost a fortune, but... it could help. Something from Luna. Something that says you remember."

He did.

It arrived in Protea during the first thaw. Father made an event of it. The whole city came. For once, Pierce didn't just help his family. He gave them a moment.

From then on, he returned every year. Short visits. Long hugs. Always with the knowledge that his life was now split: one half orbiting stars, the other rooted in dirt.

Yuri remained his anchor. Their time was limited, but potent. Letters. Voice calls. Fleeting meetups during interplanetary rotations. And always the same question at the end of each cycle:

"What would it be like if this all ended, and it was just us?"

A dream.

A kind, impossible dream she gave him to hold onto when everything else tried to take him apart.

But dreams, Pierce would later learn, are most dangerous when they start to feel like plans.