The sky wasn't supposed to move.
On Virex-9, the sky was one of the few things people trusted. Not because it was beautiful—it wasn't—but because it was constant. A dull sheet of bruised violet stretching endlessly above a dying mining world. No shimmering nebulae. No blazing star clusters. Just a thin scattering of distant lights, faint and tired, like they had given up shining long ago.
Kael had spent his entire life under that sky.
He knew its patterns the way miners knew fault lines. Where the twin stars dipped below the western ridge. Where the faint red giant lingered just above the horizon before dawn. Where the long belt of pale lights cut across the darkness like a scar.
Nothing ever changed.
Until tonight.
He noticed it on the ridge above the colony, where the scrap haulers dumped twisted metal too broken to reuse. The ground there was uneven and sharp, a graveyard of collapsed machinery and rusted support beams that groaned softly when the wind pushed through them. The air smelled like oxidized iron and hot dust, thick enough to taste with every breath.
Kael adjusted the sling across his shoulder and dropped the bundle of stripped wiring at his feet. The metal clattered louder than he expected, echoing across the empty slope.
He should have gone back immediately. Shift alarms would sound soon. Overseers didn't like workers lingering alone beyond the perimeter lights.
But something made him look up.
At first, he didn't understand what he was seeing.
A cluster of stars—nothing special, just a faint grouping near the edge of the sky—seemed… wrong. Not brighter. Not closer.
Just misplaced.
Kael frowned and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. Exhaustion, he told himself. The lower pits had been running double shifts for weeks, and fatigue did strange things to the mind. Men claimed they saw shapes moving in rock walls. Heard voices in drilling echoes. Swore the ground breathed when the machines shut off.
Still, he looked again.
The stars moved.
Not fast. Not dramatically. They didn't streak like meteors or flare like collapsing satellites. They simply slid, slow and deliberate, shifting a fraction of an inch across the dark.
Like pieces being rearranged on an invisible board.
Kael's breath caught halfway into his chest.
"No," he whispered aloud, the word barely escaping his lips.
Behind him, the colony droned on, oblivious. Generators coughed smoke into the air. Cargo walkers clanked along reinforced rails. A distant siren wailed and then died abruptly, as if embarrassed for interrupting the endless monotony.
Everything was normal.
Everything except the sky.
Kael felt a strange pressure build behind his ribs—not fear exactly, but something close. A tightness that spread outward, warming his chest despite the cold wind dragging down from the upper atmosphere.
He had the sudden, irrational feeling that he wasn't just seeing the sky.
He was being seen by it.
The thought should have been absurd. Childish. The kind of thing people said in stories told to pass time during outages.
But the feeling didn't leave.
If anything, it deepened.
The stars shifted again—just slightly—and Kael felt the air around him grow unnaturally still. The wind that had been threading through the scrap heaps moments ago vanished completely. Even the distant machinery seemed to soften, its constant growl fading into something muted and far away.
For a single heartbeat, the world felt paused.
Waiting.
Kael's pulse began to race. He took a step backward without realizing it, boots crunching against brittle metal shards.
"This isn't real," he muttered, louder now, as if saying it might anchor him. "It's just light distortion. Atmosphere interference."
But Virex-9 didn't have atmospheric interference.
It barely had an atmosphere at all.
The realization hit him like cold water.
He'd grown up here. He knew the science drilled into every worker since childhood. The planet's magnetic field was fractured, its skies thin and unstable. There were no natural phenomena that could bend starlight like that.
Nothing except—
Kael stopped the thought before it formed.
He didn't want to finish it.
Because finishing it meant admitting something impossible.
Another shift alarm echoed faintly from the colony below, a hollow metallic tone bouncing off the canyon walls. The sound snapped the moment in half. The world rushed back in—wind scraping across metal, engines roaring louder again, distant voices shouting over comm static.
Everything resumed.
Everything except Kael.
He stood frozen on the ridge, staring upward, heart hammering so hard it hurt.
The stars were still now. Perfectly still. Locked back into their usual indifferent pattern, as if nothing had happened.
As if they had never moved at all.
Kael swallowed hard, suddenly aware of how alone he was.
The ridge stretched empty in both directions, a jagged silhouette against the horizon. No patrol lights. No other workers. Just endless scrap and a sky that looked far too innocent.
A cold thought crept into his mind, quiet and unwelcome.
What if it wasn't the stars that moved?
What if it was him?
He shook his head immediately, trying to dislodge the idea. Lack of sleep. Overwork. That was all this was. The colony was full of stories about people who cracked under the strain. Saw things. Believed things. Eventually disappeared into reassignment logs no one ever read.
Kael had always promised himself he wouldn't become one of them.
And yet, standing there beneath that silent sky, he felt something inside him shift—something small but permanent, like a hairline fracture in glass.
A knowing.
Not understanding. Not yet.
Just the certainty that something had changed.
And deep down, beneath the fear and confusion, another feeling stirred.
Something quieter.
Something dangerous.
A pull.
As if somewhere in the vast dark above Virex-9, beyond the dying stars and the empty cold between them, something ancient had just opened its eyes—
And noticed him.
Kael stood there for a long time after the alarm faded, unable to look away from the sky.
Because whether he understood it or not…
He knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Nothing in his life would ever be ordinary again.