To the Last Second

The noise arrived before the ships.

It always did, my father used to say. Sound traveled slower than light, but faster than anything I had ever felt in my gut. It was a low rumble that started somewhere on the horizon and grew until it stopped being sound and became something physical — a vibration that climbed through bare feet and settled in the chest like a second heartbeat.

I was seven years old and standing on my tiptoes.

“Are they coming?” I asked, for the fourth time.

“They’re coming,” said my father, for the fourth time, with the same patience.

He stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders — not to hold me still, but to feel me. I lost count of the times I thought about that later. His hands on my shoulders, heavy and warm, while Varen exploded around us.

Because Varen really did explode.

I had never seen the planet like that. The streets of our town were normally wide and sleepy, dusty at the edges, with children playing between the low houses. But that day there were people everywhere — pressed against the observation barriers, hanging from windows, sitting on rooftops with flags I didn’t recognize. Flags from other planets, other races. I had seen my first alien that day: a tall, blue creature with three eyes wearing a completely ordinary hat and eating something that smelled like cinnamon. My father said it was a Vreen, from a system forty light-years away. I stared until he pulled me by the hand.

Everyone had come to watch the final stage.

“Is Kael going to win?” I asked.

“Kael has been in first place since the eighth stage,” said my father. “But in a race, nothing is guaranteed until the ship lands.”

“But he’s going to win.”

He smiled. I didn’t see it, but I felt it — the way you feel things from people you know by heart.

“He probably is.”

Kael Dorn. I knew everything about him. I knew he had grown up on a mining station at the outer rim of the galaxy, that his ship was called the Impulse and was silver with a red stripe along the left flank, that he had won the Great Star Race twice before, and that whenever anyone asked his secret he always said the same thing: the race isn’t won at the finish line — it’s won in every second before it. I had that sentence written on a piece of paper pinned to my bedroom wall, in the crooked handwriting of a child still struggling with her l’s.

The rumble became enormous.

Then the ships appeared.

I can’t properly describe what it’s like to see a racing ship at full speed when you’re seven years old and the fastest thing you’ve ever seen is the school bus. It’s like trying to describe a color to someone who has never seen it. They tore across Varen’s sky in open formation — ten or twelve ships that were simultaneously too fast to follow and too beautiful not to try — and the crowd around me made a collective sound that was half scream and half something that has no name.

I made no sound at all.

I stood there with my mouth open and my eyes burning because I forgot to blink and the wind was cold and I didn’t mind in the slightest.

My father tightened his grip on my shoulders.

“There,” he said, and pointed.

He didn’t need to point. The red stripe was impossible to miss, even at that speed, even with everything else happening at once. The Impulse was out in front with a lead that looked small from down here but that my father had explained was actually kilometers. Kael Dorn was going to win the Great Star Race for the third time, and he was doing it over my planet, and I was watching with my own eyes, and there was something happening inside my chest that wasn’t quite joy but was a close relative.

The ships disappeared over the horizon.

The noise took longer to leave.

The crowd around us began to slowly dissolve, with that soft, deflated energy that follows great things — when everyone knows the moment has passed and nobody wants to be the first to admit it. I stayed where I was. My father kept his hands on my shoulders.

“Well?” he said, eventually.

I took a moment to answer. I was still trying to put into words something that had happened in the last thirty seconds — something that had shifted inside me, something I instinctively knew would never go back to where it had been.

“Dad,” I said.

“Yes.”

“One day I’m going to win the Great Star Race.”

He didn’t laugh. That was what I loved most about him, maybe. He never laughed at the wrong things.

“I know,” he said.

And we stayed there a while longer, the two of us, as Varen slowly went back to being the sleepy, dusty-edged planet I knew, and the sky turned ordinary and blue and completely normal again, with nothing tearing through it.

But I already knew I would never look at it the same way.