Valeria sat at the window of her apartment, looking out on the skyline of the Radix colony bathed in Mir’s perpetual sun. Having grown up on the Dayside of a tidally-locked planet, Valeria often wondered what a night sky looked like. Her father had described his childhood on Earth, how he looked up when the night sky was clear and saw an endless blackness sprinkled with light from stars. As a child, Valeria had difficulty with the concept. “Imagine a black tarp,” her father had said. “Imagine a black tarp full of little holes. That’s what a night sky looks like.” Valeria had nodded her head in wonder. She longed to see the real thing but going to the Nightside was forbidden.

Valeria shuddered, trying to shake her father’s memory away but then her eye caught a young family in the park twenty stories down. From this height, their features were blurry but their bond was clear: a young girl, maybe six or seven, was doing cartwheels on the terraformed grass while her parents watched. She then ran into her father’s arms. He picked her up and put her on his shoulders. The mother slid an arm around her husband and the three continued their stroll. 

Valeria’s fist tightened and banged against the window frame. It wasn’t the mother she yearned to be, but the daughter. 

The doorbell rang. Valeria was grateful for distraction. She pressed the button of the intercom. “Yes? Who is it?”

A woman in uniform appeared on the screen. She was accompanied by two other officials. Valeria’s heart jumped. It was General Hu, the head of security forces in Radix. 

“Doctor Ramirez?” General Hu’s voice was deep, resounded with authority. 

“Speaking,” Valeria confirmed, hoping her voice’s tremble did not reach through the audio. 

“We are here on official business and would appreciate a word with you.”

Valeria’s pulse quickened. “With regard to what?” The last time she saw General Hu on the hologram was about missing items from the armory a few weeks ago. “You must have a warrant to search my apartment.” 

General Hu’s lips tightened with impatience. “I can assure you we are not here to search your apartment. You are under no suspicion. The matter is of a delicate nature and is not appropriate to discuss over an intercom. Please come with us to Headquarters.”

“Then I request a lawyer.”

“Doctor Ramirez! That will not be necessary. We simply need your help. If you do not come willingly then we will have no other choice than to remove you from your apartment by force.”

Valeria hesitated. Why would the head of security need her? Especially now, so soon after her mother’s death? Valeria ignored the goosebumps as she thought about her family’s past. The agents behind the general stood without weapons. “Fine.” 

After an awkward craft ride in which General Hu refused to answer any questions, they arrived at Security Headquarters, where Valeria was ushered into General Hu’s office that was just as colorless and sterile as the rest of the building. 

“Now that we’re alone, can you tell me what this is all about?” Valeria asked, taking a seat in a chair opposite of the glass desk in the middle of the room. “It’s not every day a citizen is taken to Security Headquarters without reason. You are violating a dozen of my inalienable rights.”

General Hu’s lips pursed. “Do you swear allegiance to the Federation?”

Valeria repressed her flinch. The question weighed with family history. So the general knew. “Of course,” Valeria answered. 

The general held Valeria’s eyes for a moment, evaluating. Valeria did her best to maintain the gaze. “Earlier today,” General Hu finally began, “a patrol squad responded to an emergency at Gate G-57. A man was found. Unconscious but alive.”

Valeria’s eyebrows creased. “And you need me to evaluate him? Any doctor can do that.” It was not the first time a Radix resident spent too long outside of the city’s geodome where the oxygen levels were lower but still survivable. Sometimes a scientist studying the geology of Mir would get lost. Other times it was a drunk miner who lost a bet. 

“There’s more,” the general said haltingly. “Once we revived him, he asked to see you.”

“Me?”

The general nodded. “We believe the man is your father.” 

She’s seven in Earth years. She sits in her blue overcoat in an arena, a single pixel among thousands. The air is taut with something intangible, something that she cannot quite identify, something that still scares her. She sits only knowing that she has to sit there, that there’s an important reason why she has to sit there, and that that reason has to do with her father. For weeks, she and her mother have come to this place, sat in silence while the proceedings went on below them. All the while Valeria had the urge to ask her mother questions, so many questions. Why is daddy sitting down there? Why can’t I hug him? Why is that woman asking daddy all those questions? Why is she angry? Why are so many people here angry? 

From where she sits Valeria can only make out the side of her father’s face. He barely moves, facing forward. She can’t see but she wonders if his eyes are still happy like they always are. He sits with a group of people all wearing orange jumpsuits, hands behind their backs.      She can only recognize a few. As faces of people she saw only briefly in her home. Many times when she was supposed to be asleep. 

Finally, the judge addresses a woman who sits with eleven other people. The woman’s voice is picked up by a microphone, her words reverberate against the walls. She says people’s names and words like guilty and Nightsided. Valeria’s heart races at this last one. Though young, she understands that only bad people go there. That there’s no sun there. That it’s freezing. That humans can’t survive there. 

“Anastasius Ramirez,” the booming voice announces. Valeria’s breath catches in her throat. She leans forward in her chair. Her mother’s fingers clasp her shoulder. 

“On the count of attempted terrorism, you are found guilty. On the count of treason against the United Federation of Ore Mining and Manufacturing of Earth and Its Colonies, you are found guilty. You are hereby Nightsided without delay.”

“No!” Valeria screams, ignoring her mother’s warnings. “Daddy!”

Hundreds of voices begin to echo in the chamber. The thousand pixels shift. People turn in her direction. Just as she catches a glimpse of her father’s surprised face, his eyes wide, her mother’s hand closes over her mouth, forces her back into her chair while her mother’s hot breath scorches her ear, “Quiet Valeria! Quiet!”

She barely remembers watching her father’s figure shuffle in single file out of the tribunal. At home, she cries into her mother’s chest. As her mother strokes her hair, her words stab like breaths of liquid nitrogen, “Shh, shh. Your daddy did something very bad. You shouldn’t cry for traitors.”

 “That’s impossible,” Valeria said. 

The general’s face did not flicker a reaction. “We need you to confirm that it is your father.”

“This is some cruel joke,” Valeria objected. “You should know my father cannot be alive. Everyone knows that. Why do you even need me anyway? What about his fingerprints? DNA? Surely those tests will show you this man— this sicko— is not my father. An imposter!”

The general’s eyes were sharp and steady. 

Valeria’s voice lowered. “You’ve already done the tests…”

“Yes,” the general said.      

Valeria’s heart pounded. “But how…?” She brought her hands to her cheeks, shook her head. Without wanting to, she began to sob. “No, no, no, this cannot be true…”

Valeria flinched when the General walked over, reached out and placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “I cannot begin to fathom what you’re feeling right now, Doctor Ramirez. But we need you to confirm what science cannot, what only a bond between a father and daughter can. You must understand that we do not know what we are dealing with here.” 

Valeria looked up slowly, wiped away the tears. “What do you mean?”

The general’s lips squeezed into a line. “Centuries of space travel and humans have yet to encounter intelligent life forms. When this colony was founded one hundred years ago, the first settlers reported hearing things, calling out to them from the Nightside.”

“But those are just stories. Surely—”

The general shook her head. She clicked on her wristband. A hologram appeared. Video footage unraveled, images of Radix as a fledgling settlement: scaffolding and tarps, the geodome only a cracked shell. “A few dozen Earthborn disappeared in those first few years. Last seen heading into Twilight.”

Valeria shook her head. “How is this—?”

“The Federation was able to keep the disappearances under wraps at the time, not wanting to cause panic or discourage further colonization. It seems that the disappearances have decreased as the human population on Mir has grown.” The general clicked her wristband and the hologram’s last image of a figure walking into darkness fizzled away. “According to the tests, that man is your father. Which means that everything we thought we knew about the Nightside is wrong.” She paused. “Or, that man could be someone—something—else. And we need to know what it wants.”

She’s five years old, her small hand wrapped in the warmth and firmness of her father’s hand. They stand gazing up at the organisms slithering in a tank of the Radix Aquarium. Sharks, turtles, fish. The hall is dimly lit, the patrons wander in an aqua glow. 

“Close your mouth, Valeria,” her father says with a smile. “You’re not a fish.”

She looks up at him and giggles when he imitates a fish’s mouth. Despite the darkness, her father’s eyes glow with warmth. 

“Are there fish on Earth, daddy?” she asks.  

“Yes. They live in the ocean.”

“What’s an ocean?” She had never seen a body of water larger than the man-made lake in Radix’s park. Mir has several seas but they are miles away. 

“Well, you see this tank? Now imagine it’s larger than Radix, that it stretches from here to Twilight!”

“That’s so big!”

“And they’re deep!”

“How deep? Can you reach the bottom?”

Her father shakes his head. “Humans can’t reach the bottom. Not without special vehicles called submarines. Only some fish and other animals can reach the bottom. The ocean is so deep that on the ocean floor you can’t see the sun!”

Valeria’s eyes widen. “Like the Nightside?”

“That’s right! It’s always night down there.”

“But how can the fish live down there?”

Her father smiles. “Life can be found anywhere, Valeria. Anywhere.” His smile wanes like it usually does when he talks about Earth. Valeria is sure he misses it but he won’t admit it. He refused to take her there that one time she asked. At times, she’s overheard him say things about Earth to her mom when they thought she wasn’t listening, things that sound so harshly different than the world he’s told her. Something about hurricanes and wildfires, people starving and living in bunkers. Crawling like cockroaches. That last image always makes her shiver.

“Hey, you two,” her mother says, returning from the bathroom. “What are you talking about? You know I feel left out when you speak in your secret language.”

“Oh, Fatima, don’t be jealous,” her father says in Omnilingua. Her mother smiles, punches him lightly in the shoulder. His face twists in mock pain, rubs his shoulder. 

Valeria giggles, relishing the privilege she shares with her father. It is a language he calls English, an ancient language that no one speaks anymore but one that he learned while he studied linguistics. Whenever she hears the words dipped in her father’s baritone voice, she feels home. 

Valeria wraps her arms around her mother’s waist. “Don’t worry, Mommy,” she says. “Daddy and I will never leave you out.” Her mother returns the embrace. Her father squeezes them both. They stand there for a few moments, three silhouettes haloed in a turquoise glow, swaddled in darkness. 

Valeria’s eyes widened. She shook her head. “No! No! I don’t want to see him! Don’t you understand? I can’t see him!”

“You are the only one left on Mir who knew Anastasius Ramirez intimately. Only you can determine whether he is who he says he is. From a memory, a mannerism, something that a non-human entity could not replicate.”

“Non-human entity” rang through Valeria’s head. How did she find herself in an urban legend? And in an instant a whole future flashed through her imagination. One with her father. One in which they enacted the moments they missed. One in which she says goodbye to him again but this time at his bedside, soothing him, this time giving him permission to go. “What will you do if it’s him?” 

General Hu averted her gaze. “There is no precedent for this.” 

They walked through a maze of corridors awash in light. They entered a room with a glass wall behind which, at a metallic table with hands bound behind his back, sat a man. A man with his face. But a face unaltered since their eyes met for that last time across a horde of scorners. 

“Daddy?” Valeria did not notice how the word seeped out of her throat, a quivering, breathy supplication that was barely audible. As if he had heard it, the man looked up in her direction despite the one-way window. His face lit up like when she would run into his arms when he came home from work. “Valeria!” 

She’s seven in Earth years. She’s awake even though it’s way past her bedtime, reading one more chapter on her tablet under the covers. A story in English her father recommended. She hears her parents in the living room. The conversation is muffled, but the exchanges sound more like sword thrusts. 

Valeria slips out of bed, tiptoes into the hallway and stops just short of the living room doorway.

“So that’s where you’ve been!” her mother says. “It was never the research that kept you at the university! How could you be one of those people? They’re crazy!”

“They’re right!” 

“How can you do this? To me? To Valeria!”

“Do this to you? I’m doing this for you!”

“It’s criminal! A spaceliner? All those inno–” 

“It’s the only way.”

“Don’t you understand you’ll destroy our family!”

“I’m saving us. Why should we cower to the Federation? Here, lightyears away? We have a new beginning. We can be free!”

Valeria almost doesn’t recognize her father. It’s his voice, but his words drip with such loathing that she wonders if he has been bodysnatched by one of those Nightside monsters. 

“But we are free, Anastasius. Don’t you see? Why can’t you be happy? So what if the Federation is corrupt? Of course it is! It’s run by humans! But what does that matter? Radix has given us everything. I was the daughter of miners who became a doctor. You’re a respected linguist. And you have a family that loves you. Isn’t that enough?” 

There is a pause. In that endless interval, Valeria feels like she’s plummeting, hoping the next thing she hears her parents say will be the safety net to cushion her landing, to soften this reality. And she wants to burst, to scream, but a frigid hand grips her windpipe, shackles her to the spot.

“I thought you’d understand, Fatima.”

There is shuffling, the hiss of bags rustling.

“Walk out that door, Anastasius, and don’t you dare come back.”

Mumbling and stomping of footsteps. When the front door hydraulics swoosh and click, he’s gone. Valeria understands that this departure is not like the times she kisses her father goodbye when he goes to work. And the difference hurts. And she wants the hurt to stop. Her heart pounds as she peeks into the living room. Her mother sits on an ottoman, her shoulders quivering. Valeria stands in the doorway, not sure if she wants to find out what her mother has to say. “Mommy?”

Her mother looks up, startled. She quickly wipes tears away. “Valeria, what are you doing up?” Valeria knows her mother is trying to control the tremble in her voice.

An avalanche of questions mutes her tongue. She wants to know what her father could have done that could make her mother so angry but all she says is, “Where’s daddy?”

 Her mother opens her arms and Valeria nestles into the embrace. “Your daddy has made a decision. And now so have I.” 

The next thing she remembered was opening her eyes in General Hu’s office. She was lying down on a couch. General Hu gave her a glass of water. Valeria suspected it might have a sedative or other drug. She didn’t care. Not after what she saw.      

They sat in the office for a while, the General asking Valeria if she was ready to go back. Valeria begged to spare her this task but the General insisted. “This is for the colony’s security.”

When Valeria finally nodded, they wound their way through Headquarters. The General gave her an earpiece, offered some perceptive and probing questions, some carefully worded talking points. The phrases entered Valeria’s ears but were strangled by the colossal question pounding in her head: Was it really him?

They arrived at the interrogation room. Valeria paused at the door, gasped when it opened and she saw him again. She stiffly walked in, barely breathing. 

“Valeria!” She flinched as he jolted, trying to stand up but the chains forced him back down. Valeria avoided his watering eyes as he kept repeating her name. “Oh, it’s you! It’s you! My girl! You’re all grown up!” His blubbering paused when she did not respond. “Valeria, why…why don’t you say anything? It’s me. It’s your father. Can’t you see it’s me?”

She sat in a chair opposite the man who was supposedly her father. How could he not be? Those eyes. All the formalities the general coached her to say swam in her mind. But his hopeful face erased them all. “Is it you?” she squeaked. 

“Of course it’s me. You recognize your own father, don’t you?” He asked the question in English, words she had not heard in years. Father. A word she always thought steeped in strength. Warmth, like a cloud. Father. She did not know to scream in horror or cry with joy. What other proof did she need? But could another lifeform, an intelligent being, imitate human language? Dead or living?

“Tell him to speak Omni.”

As if he could hear the general, he spoke in the Federation’s language, “Tell them it’s me. Tell them to let me go.” 

Valeria shook her head slowly. A tear leaked from her eye, betrayed the storm inside her. That familiar face was so close. Was an embrace so criminal? It crushed her to see the hope in his eyes dissipate, replaced with sobering understanding. They sat for a moment in silence. Then, in a hushed voice, he asked, “Where is Fatima?”

“Gone,” Valeria croaked. “Taken by the miners’ disease.”

He looked down, nodded. “Like her parents.” 

They fell into silence again. 

“Ask him why he’s here.”

Somehow, Valeria felt calmer. She studied him studying her. “Why did you come back? Now? Surely you must have known what your return would mean. For the colony. For me.”

He shrugged as if the question were absurd, insensitive. “I needed to see my daughter.”

“I’m not your daughter.” The growl even surprised Valeria. And she wished she could take back those words when he winced. “It’s been a long time,” she said as a means to soften the blow, though she could not fully stifle the bitterness boiling in her throat. “It’s a little late to come back.”

“Please don’t say that,” he said almost in a whisper. 

His dejection pained her. It took all her strength not to scream her forgiveness, to demand they unlock his cuffs, to take him into her arms. She choked her voice away instead, imposed a silence on the conversation. She searched for a reason to keep up the battlements of her suspicions, to reinterpret his heartbreaking figure. 

“How are you here?” she asked. “All these years I was sure you were dead. And now you’re back, looking not a day older than when I last saw you. How?”

He shook his head. “I wish I could tell you. It must have something to do with the Nightside.”

“Ask him how he survived.”

“Impossible. No human can live on the Nightside for so long. The temperatures alone would have killed you. And what about food and water?”

He shook his head. “No, Valeria. No. Lies! The Nightside is nothing like what they’ve told us. Nothing!” His eyes glazed over, looking at something she could not see. He described how the exile pod crashed, how he stepped out into a world of night, its sky without sun but full of stars and three moons: one blue, one purple, one silver. How the moons cast a beautiful light over the terrain. How it was cold, but not unbearable. He found a river, a shore of glowing vines and flowers, entire forests of bioluminescent flora. And he found a cave, where he had been living since.

“Rubbish.”

Valeria kept silent, struggling to maintain the mask of detachment she hoped had settled over her face. Like he always did, he painted a vivid picture, one in which she could easily insert herself. And for a moment, she had allowed his voice to cocoon her, transport her to all those bedtime stories. But it was too beautiful to be trusted, a depiction lifted from one of those ancient Earth novels labeled sci-fi, completely contrary to what all colonists learned in school. And then the question she had longed to ask for decades crystalized in her raging mind. “Was it worth it?”

His glazed eyes sharpened into understanding. He looked away. 

“Because of you, mom and I became pariahs. Radix hated us. Still hates us. You robbed us. Of time. Of being together. Was it worth it?”

“Yes,” he hissed. “My only regret is that you’ve had to live under the Fed’s control for so long.”

“Always a traitor.”

Any remorse in his eyes faded away and his face solidified into a stony landscape. He leaned in, lips in a snarl, voice rumbling, “Ask yourself: what good has the Federation done? For you? For us?”

His question, the violence of his tone, gripped her. What scared her more was how much his words made sense. What had the Federation done besides obliterate her family? Consume worlds? 

“Doctor Ramirez, focus! Ignore his anarchist propaganda. Ask him what he wants.”

Somewhere outside something boomed. A soft rumble, distant, but sudden and out of place. Through the earpiece, the general’s voice was muffled, giving orders, but the concern was clear. 

“Come with me, Valeria,” he said, his voice more tinny this time, stretched thin like a chain of emotion about to snap. “Leave Radix. There’s still time. Live with us on the Nightside.”

 “Us?” she whispered. There’s still time? Something in his tone alarmed her. There was another explosion, closer this time. Commotion in the earpiece sizzled on. 

 Valeria stood up, looked over at the one-way window, the door. 

“Come home.”

“No,” Valeria cried, whiteknuckling reality, as if thrashing away from the riptide of a dream. “Nothing can live on the Nightside.”

He smiled. “Don’t you remember? Life can be found anywhere, Valeria.”

Valeria stepped back, a wave of realization, both welcome and nauseating, washing over her. Language could be copied. Mannerisms. But memories? 

Thunder, unnatural and bloodthirsty, bludgeoned the walls, demanded to enter. An alarm rang. An agent burst through the door and unlocked Anastasius’ chains. Valeria only had a moment to realize the agent was not in Federation uniform, to see through the doorway streaks of red across the observation room floor. Only a moment and then she was thrown off her feet. Looking up through half-shut eyes, the world heaved, immersed in flame and a piercing peal.  

It is difficult to breathe here but not impossible. He says she’ll get used to it. Somewhere, miles behind them, Radix burns, its smoke billowing up into the copper skies of the Dayside as the last ashen breath connecting the survivors to Earth. 

There had been others surviving, just like him, for years. Many more than she could have imagined. And now they all forge ahead, crossing the wastes of Twilight to a Nightside utopia. 

Coldness descends with each step. When she looks up, her vision blurs from tears. They are all there like he said they would be: countless flecks bejeweling a canvas. Like pinpricks in a tarp. Tiny glimmers of other worlds, life, made all the more precious by the vast darkness surrounding them. Constant light was nothing but a blindness.

 No sign of a bioluminescent oasis yet. Night thickens and she can barely make out his silhouette, only feel his warm hand guiding her in the dark.

——————

Eric Odynocki is a first-generation American writer whose parents come from Mexico and Ukraine. Eric’s work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in Jabberwock Review, The Brooklyn Review, PANK, and elsewhere. When not teaching Spanish or Italian, Eric is an MFA student at Stony Brook Southampton.