"I thought I'd find you here."

Bru sighed at the contralto voice rising over the fountain's quiet burble. "I'm studying, Hunibi." She kept her head tilted toward the book spread atop her lap, hoping the woman would take the hint.

As she traced her fingertip over the line of calligraphy she'd just read, her heart warmed at the ornate curls and flourishes.

No gilt scroll could match the artistry of a handmade book.

Maybe she'd ask the Legacists for paper-making lessons. Then she'd find a storyteller to spin a tale, and she'd do the calligraphy and illustrations herself.

Surely others would love this old-fashioned pleasure of reading a bound book in the Perudiis luxury deck's sugar-rose garden, a fountain bubbling beside them, the stars stretched above in splendor. She, the papermaker, and the storyteller could sell the book, split the Hours they earned, and--

Something sailed over her shoulder and thudded in her lap.

"You old hag," she grumbled, lifting the sketchbook the woman had tossed at her and setting it aside with care on the fountain's rim. She smoothed the pages of Dry and Low: Agriculture with Cold-Hardy and Drought-Tolerant Crops, then glared up at her guardian.

Hunibi Vlemij smirked down at her, ice-blue eyes sparkling beneath a side-swept wave of spiky auburn locks. She wore one of Bru's designs today, with billowy trousers gathered at the ankles and a high-collared blouse the color of her eyes. Like Bru, she bore a glittering gilt tattoo on one cheek, though hers featured three stars instead of the comet marking the time of Bru's emergence from the Womb. "One day, Kid, you too will reach the ripe old age of thirty. Then you'll look back and laugh at how absurd you just sounded."

Bru held up the textbook and glared. "This is an antique. You could have damaged it."

Hunibi shook her head and leaned over to tap the sketchbook's midnight-blue cover. "You'll find way more of value in here than in there. You ready?"

"I'm not going today." Bru set her jaw as Hunibi's brows furrowed. "You heard what they said tonight. Or didn't say." She swallowed. "I'm not good at anything. I need to study."

Hunibi crossed her arms. "They said you're good at calligraphy, and they're right." She cast the sketchbook a pointed look. "Should've mentioned your drawings, too. Those fools always forget about the arts."

Bru shook her head. "Calligraphy and drawing aren't good enough, Hunibi. I need to study."

Her guardian's pale eyes glittered. "No, you don't. But I know what you do need." And she yanked the textbook from Bru's hand and tossed it into the fountain.

Bru jerked to her feet, gaping from the bubbling water to the smirking woman and back again. "You... You just--"

Hunibi shrugged. "You'll never find yourself in those pages." She snatched up the sketchbook and began flipping through the charcoal drawings. "These ones, though..." Her brow arched as, yanking it back, Bru cradled it protectively against her chest and glared. "Ah, so you want to go draw after all."

Bru shook her head, jaw clenching. Her fingernails dug into the sketchbook's hard cover until they ached as the temptation to strike Hunibi flooded her veins like fire.

Then cooling shame washed through her at her violent thoughts. This was Hunibi. The woman who had taken her in and given her a home after the Helm had bounced her around between different caregivers for the first four years of her life.

She sighed, wondering--not for the first time--why Hunibi had done something so irrational and frustrating. Maybe she should chuck the woman into the fountain and see how Hunibi liked the treatment she'd given the poor book.

Bah, she'd probably like it too much. Bru rolled her eyes and fished the textbook out of the water. She hoped her gilt could dry it out without too much damage. "I swear, you act more and more like a Renunciate every day." She and Hunibi were both Generationists, still committed to the Great Mission, just not exclusively so like the Legacists. But one wouldn't know it sometimes with the way Hunibi behaved.

Her guardian shrugged. "They've got one or two things right." She wrapped an arm around Bru's shoulders and tugged her along. "Let's go."

"But we're reaching Journey's End soon." Bru was not about to tell the exasperating woman that she enjoyed the affectionate touch. Would a real mother feel so warm against her side? A father? "I need to--"

"Exactly," Hunibi said, tone airy as she marched them along the path through the crimson and white sugar-rose garden toward the tower in the center of the deck. The Gates of Perudiis flickered with moving gilt images: the artwork of Uld Irt. "This may be our last chance to record the ship's history for future generations, eh?"

As they walked toward the Artist's Quarter stretched in the tower's shadow, the Gates of Perudiis lit the deck with the wonders of Irt: two fingertips, brushing. A starry blue sky beneath a black tower. A torchbearer in draped robes.

"Gilt, capture that image," Bru said. The nanites made no reply, but she knew they obeyed. They always did. "Save it with my other ideas for raiment designs."

"That's more like the Bru I know," Hunibi said as they passed a koi pond and walked through the empty pavilion where the Void Dancers usually trained their apprentices. Applause rose from the Dessert Hall across the way, and a man began to sing in a low bass. Her guardian glanced from the hall, to Bru, and back again. "Want a sweet? To celebrate your Walk?"

"No."

"Let's get you a sweet."

Bru was still licking cardamom-spiced crumbs from her fingers as Hunibi led her up the lift to Irt Deck's maglev station and ordered a private carriage. A young couple glared at them, but Hunibi ignored them, and Bru strove to do likewise. The next carriage would arrive in less than five minutes, and they could enjoy a ten minute walk if they preferred not to wait.

"Take us to Wasijtun," Hunibi said as the bronze-paneled silver doors slid closed behind them.

Bru plopped down on a plush cushion and felt its gilt smooth beneath her palm like old-fashioned silk. She patted it. "Gilt, make my raiment have the same texture as this," she said and grinned as her dress seemed to flow against her skin like real water. "Nice."

"Wasijtun Village is sealed," the Voice said.

Hunibi cleared her throat. "I have a Shipwright Task Key."

"State your Key."

" 'Hunibi is a pain in my backside.' " The redhead winked as Bru snorted.

"Approved." The carriage rose a few inches into the air and shot away from the station.

"You harassed poor Ekinas again, I see," Bru said as they passed through the first of the deck's fifty-three village sectors. Outside, people--most of them from the slit-pupiled Belbirnel Family--returned to their homes after their post-Walk festivities, and a little boy waved at the carriage as it passed. Bru waved back.

Hunibi offered a languorous shrug. "You didn't have to suffer through that boring error code he asked me to translate. One measly Key isn't enough payment for the pain I went through."

Bru's lip twitched. "Hasn't he given you, like twenty of the Keys we've used?"

"Thirty. I'll consider his debt paid off when we've visited all thirty-eight of the sealed villages."

Darkness swallowed the maglev as they reached the deck's outermost sectors. Ice crackled against the carriage's decorative bronze panel as the doors slid open. In an instant, Bru's raiment snapped from a silky dress to a snug body suit, enveloping her in protective warmth. Around her, the air inside the carriage turned to rolling fog, stopping at the invisible edge of the thin layer of gilt protecting her face.

She patted the scarf covering her head. "The binding on my sketchbook cracked last week," she told Hunibi as they stepped out of the carriage. Without gilt, negative forty-five degrees Fahrenheit was survivable for a time and wouldn't harm anything in this area of the ship, but it made adhesives brittle.

"Did you command your gilt to protect it this time?" Hunibi asked, murmuring something under her breath a moment later. A bubble of gilt flowed away from her raiment, casting warm light into the abandoned village's station.

"Yes. It's automatic now." She had told the gilt to think of the sketchbook as a part of her and protect it accordingly.

She followed Hunibi out of the station and into the round commons area between the apartment towers. Some of the stained glass windows had been removed, no doubt taken by their owners to decorate their new homes long ago.

"It's so weird," she murmured as she followed Hunibi toward the first tower.

"What?" Her guardian boosted her up onto the open windowsill so Bru could slide through on her rear, and then followed with the light.

Bru nodded at the wooden table resting beside the wall. "They took some stuff, like the stained glass, but left others."

All the room's decorative bronze panels had been removed from the walls, along with the stained glass behind it, revealing the room's original painted walls. Faded pink flowers and a yellow bird with black and white striped wings stretched from ceiling to floor.

"Why'd they abandon all this stuff? It wasn't an emergency evacuation." Sure, underpopulation had been a problem after the Generationists damaged the Womb in their foolish attempt to restore natural reproduction. But it had taken almost three hundred years for the population to drop so low that it became too wasteful to heat barely-used areas. There'd been plenty of time to relocate their belongings to their new homes in the central villages. "They ditched so much."

Hunibi strode past her and nudged the table, which rocked precariously on three legs. She arched her brows.

Bru blushed. "Oh. Well, I mean in other homes we've seen. Remember that one last week?" They'd found an oven and a full pantry of frozen foods, dating before the creation of gilt. Bru still could not get over the fact that everyone, not just Legacists, had once needed to cook every meal by hand.

Hunibi sighed. "Most folks left willingly and had plenty of time to take their belongings with them to their new villages." She slid one of the table's shriveled drawers open and peeked inside. "But others thought it was fine and dandy for the ship to waste tons of energy lighting and heating an entire village just for them. When the Helm's orders to relocate came down, the stragglers were given... less time to get their things and go."

"Well, let's go to one of those homes," Bru said. "That's where all the good stuff is." She glanced around the room in distaste. "This place is cleaned out."

"Not quite." Hunibi carefully placed something atop the table. "Here, you can draw this."

"This?" Bru joined her and frowned down at the small jar. A lavender powder glittered inside. "Gilt?"

Hunibi shook her head. "They didn't have gilt back then. Not any that wasn't in the engines, shield, and such, anyway." She smirked. "This is what they used to paint their faces before gilt."

Bru glanced from her sketchbook to the jar, then up at Hunibi. "You want me to draw someone's abandoned cosmetics?" she asked doubtfully.

"Draw everything," Hunibi said. "We need to catalog this ship's forgotten past."

"Can't you just have your gilt save an image?" She waved her charcoal. "Art supplies are expensive, you know!"

"History is human, Kid. I want you to draw it with all the emotions it evokes."

Bru crossed her arms. "Seriously?" She offered a teasing smile. "I'm not sure any future generations will care how I felt about the stuff people used to smear on their faces to look pretty, Hunibi. Maybe you should just stick to being the ship's Speaker, like your Legacy made you, and stop playing around at being an amateur Archivist. "

Hunibi ignored the jab, as she'd ignored Bru and everyone who tried over the years to get her to attend to her duties translating the ship's ancient Voice. "Soon, we won't be able to catalog anything anymore. We'll have to move along just like the people who lived here did, right?"

Bru's heart began to pound in her chest. "Yes."

Hunibi nodded. "So document everything. Let the future generations be the ones to decide what's valuable to them, and what's not."

And so they cataloged everything. Bru drew in her sketchbook, and Hunibi took meticulous notes, each ordering her gilt to preserve every page for posterity. They cataloged the old-style ceilings, with their stained glass backgrounds under the bronze grate instead of the current style of restored paintings of Uld Irt. They cataloged the old sonic showers and broken robot cleaners from the time before gilt. They cataloged the wire-filled dream machines and the exoskeleton suits people used to need to wear outside the ship.

Heart aching, Bru even sketched the tapestry they found of blue and green Harbor, their people's destination for so long. They had a new destination now, a new Journey's End, but maybe future generations would want to remember the original one. The lost one.

"Let's take this one to Pluto Deck and call it a night," Hunibi murmured as Bru closed her sketchbook with a sigh. "People might want it, later."

If there is a later, Bru thought. If Patron lets us have a future. She kept her fears to herself, not ready to hear the quick reassurances Hunibi always liked to give that their Mission would be successful.

They rolled the tapestry as carefully as the frozen fabric allowed and took it with them on the maglev and down the lift all the way to the Pluto storage deck. The yeoman in charge of stowage frowned in consternation but accepted the tapestry with a grunt. Like many Legacists, he didn't value the journey, only Uld Irt and Journey's End, and Bru hoped that he'd store the tapestry with care even though the ship had a new destination now.

As they left, Hunibi tucked Bru under her arm again. "Good work today, Kiddo."

Bru hummed and tried to ignore the warmth flowing through her. None of what they'd done would help with the Mission. Still, it felt good to know at least one person was proud of her no matter what she did.

Outside one of Pluto Deck's windows, landers zipped to and fro against a backdrop of stars, practicing maneuvers. Hunibi had grudgingly translated the Ancient Injlis in which the landers, like the ship, had been programmed so that the Flyers could pilot the crafts with voice commands.

"Look," the redhead said, and something in her voice--a sort of tense awe--made Bru's gaze jerk up to her. Hunibi jabbed a finger at the window. "Bru, look!"

She turned, and the air stilled in her chest.

A shining red star hung in the blackness of space.

Trepiskun, home of the Four Sisters.

Home, hopefully, of the last scattered remnant of humanity.

"Gilt," she breathed. "Enlarge the image. Show me the Four Sisters."

"Two planets are hidden behind the star and cannot be seen from our current position," the Voice of the ship murmured in her ear as the star system expanded in her sight.

The other two planets hovered as tiny specks before the filtered light of the red dwarf star. Like marbles resting on shining crimson silk, they hung in the silence of space.

"Are they really alive?" she asked Hunibi, unable to tear her eyes from the planets.

"Yes," Hunibi said.

"How?"

"Patron says red dwarf systems tend to be like this. These stars are cranky when they're babies. Their solar flares wipe out just about anything that evolves, and super-hardy spores tend to be all that manage to survive." She gestured at the star framed in the bronze-rimmed oval window. "With planets in these systems often squashed close together, those tough little buggers can drift back and forth. By the time the star grows up and stops acting out, the spores tend to have started... networking."

Bru nodded, swallowing hard. The Four Sisters were alive, Patron said. Sentient. But Patron also said that they were isolationists who preferred to be alone.

Had they welcomed humanity once? And if humanity was as violent as Patron claimed, would the Four Sisters welcome them again?