In the first weeks, Ieva still counted the days.
Later, she realized days had no meaning on the ship.
The chronometers showed different times.
One of them fell exactly seven minutes behind every morning. Another sometimes skipped whole hours, as if lost in thought.
Aronas was never once concerned about it.
“Time here is only trying to catch up with us,” he said once, without even lifting his eyes from the front window.
Ieva laughed.
A few days later, she no longer knew whether that laugh had really been hers.
The deeper they pushed into the Sea of the Void, the harder it grew to tell what belonged to the ship, and what belonged to space itself.
Sometimes the corridors seemed longer than yesterday.
Doors would close a moment too early.
And the silences between words began to stretch longer than reason allowed.
One morning, Ieva woke unusually light.
Breathing was so easy, it was as if the air itself sought out her lungs.
Even the hum of the ship’s engines sounded softer.
In the galley, Aronas was calmly brewing coffee.
He nodded to her and, for the first time, told a story about a planet where rain only fell when someone told a lie.
Ieva listened, marveling at how easily the conversation could flow.
That day, even the stars beyond the porthole looked brighter.
But another time, she woke to a strange pressure in her chest.
The air was the same.
The sensors read normal.
Yet every breath demanded effort.
The same lamps burned in the corridors, but their light no longer reached the floor.
It was as if an invisible layer had formed between the light and the metal.
That day, Aronas barely spoke at all.
He stood for hours at the front window, staring into the dark.
Several times, Ieva wanted to ask him what had happened.
Every time, she changed her mind.
That evening she checked all the systems.
The oxygen generators ran flawlessly.
The gravity stabilizers showed not the slightest fluctuation.
The energy reserves were full.
The ship was healthy.
Only she wasn’t.
After that, such days came more and more often.
Ieva began to notice a strange pattern, though she forbade herself to believe it.
When Aronas was talkative, even the longest routes passed easily.
When he withdrew into himself, the whole journey seemed to grow heavier.
Not the engines.
Not the structure.
Something else.
She no longer knew what.
One evening, updating the navigation log, she caught herself pausing at his cabin door.
Not a sound came from inside.
She didn’t go in.
She only stood and listened to the silence.
Then she returned to her post.
In that moment, for the first time, she realized she was watching the stars less and less.
Far more often, she was watching Aronas.
And, for some reason, tomorrow’s journey seemed to depend on it.