Shaurya told Prashaila to close her eyes, which was already suspicious because Shaurya was not a man who asked people to close their eyes unless he had either planned something extraordinarily beautiful or was about to make them regret trusting him. Prashaila stood in the centre of the observatory with her hands loosely folded behind her back, watching him with that maddeningly passive expression that gave away absolutely nothing. “Should I be concerned?” she asked. “Probably.” “That’s reassuring.” “You trust me?” “Unfortunately.” His mouth curved. “Good.” He reached for her hand. His fingers closed around hers with an ease that suggested he had been waiting for the opportunity, and Prashaila allowed herself to be pulled towards the centre of the room. The great dome above them was already opening, slowly retracting until the Academy’s night sky spilled into view. Then the floor beneath their feet disappeared. Not literally, because Shaurya was irritatingly responsible about structural integrity, but the marble became transparent, then luminous, then seemingly absent altogether, until Prashaila found herself standing on a platform suspended above an ocean of stars. She looked down. “You built this?” “No.” “You stole it?” “Not exactly.” “Borrowed?” “Prashaila.” “I’m establishing the legal situation.” He laughed, and the sound was low enough to make her look at him. “I thought I’d show you the sky.” “I’ve seen the sky.” “Not like this.” He was right.

They rose slowly, the Academy shrinking beneath them until its towers looked like pale teeth against the darkness, and then even those disappeared. The Earth was nowhere to be seen. There was only blackness, enormous and almost offensively beautiful, punctured by stars at distances the human brain was not designed to comprehend. Shaurya pointed towards a cluster of stars. “Orion.” Prashaila followed his hand. “The hunter.” “Yes. Although that depends on who you ask.” He told her that the constellation had been recognised in different forms across ancient cultures. The Greeks imagined Orion the hunter, while ancient Egyptians associated the constellation with Osiris, the god of the afterlife. In parts of Aboriginal Australian astronomical traditions, the stars of Orion were understood through entirely different stories, connected to ancestral beings and seasonal knowledge. The stars had not changed. The stories had. Prashaila watched the constellation quietly. “So the same light becomes a different person depending on who is looking.” “Essentially.” “That’s rather interesting of us.” “Humans?” “Yes. We see a pattern and immediately name it after ourselves.” Shaurya glanced at her. “You just called humanity arrogant while standing in space.” “I’m allowed. I’m human.” “Convenient.” “Very.”

He took her further, past the familiar constellations and into regions of sky where the stars appeared almost impossibly dense. He showed her Sirius, the brightest star in Earth’s night sky, a binary system whose companion is a white dwarf so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh an extraordinary amount on Earth. He showed her Betelgeuse, a red supergiant so enormous that if it occupied the position of our Sun, its outer atmosphere would extend beyond the orbit of Mars. He showed her Polaris, the North Star, and explained that it has been used for navigation because it sits close to the north celestial pole, appearing almost fixed while the rest of the sky seems to rotate around it. “Almost fixed,” Prashaila repeated. “Nothing is actually fixed.” “Astronomically speaking, things can appear fixed.” “That’s not what I said.” He looked at her. She was watching Polaris. “You really can’t help yourself, can you?” “Help myself with what?” “Turning astronomy into philosophy.” “You brought me into space.” “I brought you to a planetarium.” “That stopped being a planetarium approximately three minutes ago.” He smiled. “Fair.”

They passed through the Milky Way, through clouds of gas and dust where new stars were being born, and Shaurya began telling her about the life cycle of stars. Gravity gathers matter. Pressure and temperature rise. Nuclear fusion begins. A star spends most of its life balancing inward gravitational collapse against outward pressure generated by fusion. Eventually, depending on its mass, it becomes something else entirely. A white dwarf. A neutron star. A black hole. A supernova that can briefly outshine an entire galaxy. Prashaila listened with unusual concentration. “So we’re looking at the past,” she said. “Always.” “Because the light takes time to reach us.” “Yes.” “That star could already be dead.” “Yes.” “And we wouldn’t know.” “Not yet.” She turned towards him. “That’s cruel.” “That’s physics.” “Same thing sometimes.” He laughed again, and she caught the sleeve of his jacket as they drifted onwards. “How far away is that one?” she asked. “That light?” “Yes.” “A thousand years.” “So if we’re looking at it now…” “We’re seeing it as it was a thousand years ago.” Prashaila looked back at the star. “Then perhaps the night sky isn’t a view.” She paused. “Perhaps it’s a collection of memories.”

Shaurya went quiet.

Prashaila noticed.

She always noticed.

He moved closer, close enough that the space between them seemed suddenly much smaller than the universe surrounding it. “You know,” he said, “most people would have simply said the stars were beautiful.” “They are beautiful.” “You had to make them existential.” “You took me into space.” “And now I regret it.” “Liar.” His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth. It was only a second, but she saw it. Of course she saw it. She stepped closer, her fingers still loosely curled around his sleeve. “What?” he asked. “Nothing.” “That expression isn’t nothing.” “What expression?” “The one where you’re about to say something that will ruin my evening.” “Your evening was already ruined. You brought me to a planetarium and accidentally showed me eternity.” His smile disappeared into something quieter. “Prashaila.” “Yes?” “You know what I think?” “Occasionally.”

He looked up at the stars again. “I think we’re lucky. We get to see things that happened before we existed.” Prashaila followed his gaze. For a while neither spoke. Then she said, very softly, “Maybe that’s why we fall in love with people too.” Shaurya looked at her. “What do you mean?” She turned towards him. The starlight caught the edge of her face, leaving her expression almost unreadable. “Maybe we don’t always fall in love with who someone is.” His brow furrowed. “Then who do we fall in love with?” She looked back towards the ancient light scattered across the darkness. “Who they were before we arrived. Who they might become after we’re gone. All the versions of them we can never see.”

Something shifted in his expression. For once, he had no immediate answer.

Prashaila smiled faintly. “What?” she asked.

“I was thinking.”

“Dangerous.”

He ignored her. “If that’s true…” He looked towards the stars. “Then what exactly are we looking at when we say we know someone?”

Prashaila’s smile deepened.

“Now you’re asking the right question.”

And somewhere beyond them, a star that had died centuries ago continued to shine.