Chapter 1: The Long Night

On the planet Corvane, the sun never moved. One half of the world burned beneath it forever, the other froze in permanent night, and the only place where people could live was the thin band of twilight between.

Courier Maren Voss ran that band every day. She carried medicine, mail, and messages between settlements strung along the dusk like beads on a thread. It was a lonely, exhausting job, and she did it better than anyone.

On a gray Tuesday, she was handed a small lead box and a sealed order. Deliver to Eastgate Station before the shift. Do not open.

"What is it?" she asked the dispatcher.

"A seed. The last one."

Maren's stomach tightened. Corvane's crops had been failing for years, and the colonists' only hope was a hardy strain developed in secret in the western labs. One seed survived. It needed to reach the experimental greenhouse in Eastgate, three hundred kilometers away, before its dormancy broke.

She had eleven hours.

Halfway there, her rover's engine died. She abandoned it and continued on foot, the lead box strapped to her chest. The twilight stretched silver and cold. To her left, the frozen night loomed, black and endless. To her right, the dayside glared white on the horizon, a wall of light she dared not approach.

At the hundred-and-fiftieth kilometer, a storm of ice rolled in from the dark. She stumbled and fell. When she rose, she had drifted too far toward the sunlight, and the heat pressed against her like an open furnace. Her suit alarm shrieked.

She had seven minutes before the solar exposure would cook her.

Maren did not run toward safety. She ran toward Eastgate, along the burning edge, every step a gamble, her visor darkening, her lungs searing. At minute six, she saw the greenhouse lights flicker in the distance.

At minute seven, she fell through its airlock, and a technician caught the box before it hit the floor.

She lay on the metal grating, gasping, laughing, her suit steaming.

Months later, a single green shoot broke through the soil in the greenhouse, tiny and fragile and impossibly bright.

Maren stood in front of it for a long time. It was the first thing on Corvane she had ever seen grow toward the light.