The ship flew a long while on its new trajectory.
The black hole didn’t shrink.
It didn’t chase them either.
It simply stayed where it had always been — immeasurable, silent, indifferent.
Every so often, Ieva glanced at the rear screen.
On it was a black dot, around which a tiny light slowly circled.
At first she thought it was one of countless asteroids.
Zooming in, she understood.
It was Aronas’s ship.
It no longer changed course.
It simply drifted calmly along the same orbit, as if it had found the place it had been searching for from the very beginning.
Ieva never once tried to open a channel.
Not because she couldn’t.
She simply understood that some signals don’t fail to reach their addressee because of distance.
They fail to arrive because no one is waiting for them anymore.
A few days later, the black hole passed beyond sight.
The stars became ordinary stars again.
Their light no longer seemed brighter or dimmer.
It simply was.
Silence hung over the ship.
But it no longer weighed on her.
It resembled the morning before the world wakes.
Ieva went to her cabin.
On the shelf still lay the old pencil.
She took it in her hand.
Turned it over between her fingers for a long time.
This time she remembered.
She didn’t remember the drawings.
She remembered the feeling.
That strange calm, when a blank page doesn’t yet demand anything of you.
She sat down at the table.
For the first time in many months, she drew a single line.
Then another.
Without trying to copy anything.
Without trying to trace the right path.
Only watching where her hand led.
When she returned to the bridge, not a single familiar lighthouse remained ahead.
Not a single colony.
Not a single station.
Only immeasurable space.
She switched on the navigation system.
The screen flickered briefly.
The old routes vanished.
The waypoints vanished.
The markers they’d followed since the first day of the journey vanished.
Only a black background remained, and scattered stars.
Ieva waited for the system to choose a course.
It suggested nothing.
Only, in the bottom corner of the screen, a line slowly appeared.
TRAJECTORY BEING CREATED DURING FLIGHT
She smiled.
Not because she finally knew where she was flying.
But because, for the first time, she didn’t need to.
The ship quietly turned toward where no marked route led.
Beyond the porthole, new stars were born, one after another.
Or perhaps they had been there all along.
Simply, until now, no one had looked at them.