Veston
New member
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2026
- Messages
- 4
The North Wind came in low over red rock, following the coast of one of Zoon's long snake-backs of land, and Veston watched the terrain scroll past the viewport and thought about the kind of person who'd end up here.
Not end up here by accident. End up here and stay.
Zoon pressed down on everything. He'd felt it the moment he crossed the atmosphere — a weight that settled into the shoulders and the knees and didn't negotiate, a constant reminder that the planet itself was measuring you. At a hundred times standard gravity, even landing the ship had been a conversation between the engines and the ground, and walking away from it had been a choice he'd had to make with his legs before his head finished agreeing. He'd had that fight every morning since.
The signal had been clean enough to tell him someone was alive, and too weak to tell him where. He'd spent the first day quartering the coastline on foot, moving inland where the rock flattened out enough to cover ground, watching the receiver and getting nothing useful back. The second day he'd gone south along a ridge of exposed stone that ran eight kilometers above the treeline, following a spike in the readings that turned out to be interference from mineral deposits in the rock face. He'd stood at the end of that ridge in the late afternoon with the red dust coming in off the sea and the receiver quiet, and he'd looked at the terrain spread out in front of him and made a new plan.
The third day he went slower. Stopped trying to cover distance and started reading the ground instead, looking for sheltered approaches, natural overhangs, the places someone with sense would go if they needed to disappear. Zoon wasn't a hostile planet, not exactly, but it pressed, and anything that wanted to stay alive here long-term needed something to press back against. He was looking for that kind of decision-making in the landscape. He found the cave system on the fourth afternoon, following a dry channel between two rock formations that angled away from the coast wind, and the receiver climbed as he went in.
She was at the back of the main chamber, near a fire that had been burning controlled and small for a long time.
Names came out. Enough basics to know who they were to each other — she was Saiyan-Human, from Earth, had been on Zoon close to a year. He was Human, had a ship, had come because the signal asked him to. That was enough for now. The rest was already waiting in the conversation they were moving toward.
He looked at her across the fire, at the fighting gi patched so many times it was more patches than gi, at the cloak in the same condition, at the tail wrapped close and held there, and the count ran fast.
Toughened. Months, almost a year, of this gravity, solo, with nothing. Still moving, still sharp. Not broken. Not even close.
He'd been crouched with his forearms on his knees since she finished saying her name, close enough that the firelight reached both of them, leaning forward the way he always leaned, toward whoever was talking, toward whatever came next.
"Corsetta." He said it once, the way he said every name the first time, like he was putting it somewhere he wouldn't lose it. "You've been here eleven months. Hundred times normal gravity, no ship, no backup, nothing but what you walked out of that facility carrying."
He let that settle for one breath.
"And you're still here. That means something."
The question that followed had been sitting in his chest since the North Wind's receiver first picked up the signal. He let it out straight, because she'd been through enough that soft sounded like condescension to his ears:
"Who did this to you, and are they still on this planet?"
Not end up here by accident. End up here and stay.
Zoon pressed down on everything. He'd felt it the moment he crossed the atmosphere — a weight that settled into the shoulders and the knees and didn't negotiate, a constant reminder that the planet itself was measuring you. At a hundred times standard gravity, even landing the ship had been a conversation between the engines and the ground, and walking away from it had been a choice he'd had to make with his legs before his head finished agreeing. He'd had that fight every morning since.
The signal had been clean enough to tell him someone was alive, and too weak to tell him where. He'd spent the first day quartering the coastline on foot, moving inland where the rock flattened out enough to cover ground, watching the receiver and getting nothing useful back. The second day he'd gone south along a ridge of exposed stone that ran eight kilometers above the treeline, following a spike in the readings that turned out to be interference from mineral deposits in the rock face. He'd stood at the end of that ridge in the late afternoon with the red dust coming in off the sea and the receiver quiet, and he'd looked at the terrain spread out in front of him and made a new plan.
The third day he went slower. Stopped trying to cover distance and started reading the ground instead, looking for sheltered approaches, natural overhangs, the places someone with sense would go if they needed to disappear. Zoon wasn't a hostile planet, not exactly, but it pressed, and anything that wanted to stay alive here long-term needed something to press back against. He was looking for that kind of decision-making in the landscape. He found the cave system on the fourth afternoon, following a dry channel between two rock formations that angled away from the coast wind, and the receiver climbed as he went in.
She was at the back of the main chamber, near a fire that had been burning controlled and small for a long time.
Names came out. Enough basics to know who they were to each other — she was Saiyan-Human, from Earth, had been on Zoon close to a year. He was Human, had a ship, had come because the signal asked him to. That was enough for now. The rest was already waiting in the conversation they were moving toward.
He looked at her across the fire, at the fighting gi patched so many times it was more patches than gi, at the cloak in the same condition, at the tail wrapped close and held there, and the count ran fast.
Toughened. Months, almost a year, of this gravity, solo, with nothing. Still moving, still sharp. Not broken. Not even close.
He'd been crouched with his forearms on his knees since she finished saying her name, close enough that the firelight reached both of them, leaning forward the way he always leaned, toward whoever was talking, toward whatever came next.
"Corsetta." He said it once, the way he said every name the first time, like he was putting it somewhere he wouldn't lose it. "You've been here eleven months. Hundred times normal gravity, no ship, no backup, nothing but what you walked out of that facility carrying."
He let that settle for one breath.
"And you're still here. That means something."
The question that followed had been sitting in his chest since the North Wind's receiver first picked up the signal. He let it out straight, because she'd been through enough that soft sounded like condescension to his ears:
"Who did this to you, and are they still on this planet?"
