Months. Seasons. This girl had spent months here without an answer as to why she was here, or how she even arrived? Reyes could feel a muscle in his jaw tightening, a suddenly strangling strain, the shock of his immediate arrival wearing off and the unfamiliar anxiety beginning to sink in instead. He’d started looking up at the sky while they walked — and the emptiness of that sky, without the moving glimmer of distant ships, no small shuttles taking off and landing constantly at port, was what finally hit him as being different from, well, anything in his galaxy. His boots felt land-bound. He couldn’t even jump-jet across this landscape to make the walk to this village faster. It was an odd kind of anti-vertigo that struck him, then, and Reyes paused, a hand against a tree, as if catching his breath.

“We can’t leave?” he asked.