Parents Part 2

The hum of the Aetheris was a lullaby to seven-year-old Kael. Curled up in his bunk, he clutched his tablet, its glowing screen displaying a game of shifting constellations. His parents, both engineers, had tucked him in hours ago, promising they’d wake him when the ship completed its faster-than-light transition to the Orion Reach colony. The Aetheris was a marvel of human ingenuity, a vessel designed to fold space itself, and Kael had grown used to the faint vibrations of its engines. He didn’t understand the science, but he trusted his parents’ smiles when they spoke of it.


Then came the jolt. A scream of metal tore through the ship, and Kael’s world flipped upside down. His room—small, cluttered with model ships and star charts—sealed itself shut with a hiss. The walls shimmered, cocooning inward as the emergency protocols kicked in. Every compartment on the Aetheris was a lifeboat, a self-contained pod meant to protect its occupant in a disaster. Kael barely had time to scream before the pod’s gel-like padding enveloped him, muffling the chaos beyond.


The explosion was silent to him, swallowed by the pod’s insulation, but he felt the lurch—a sickening twist as the ship’s FTL drive tore itself apart. Space warped, reality frayed, and the pod was flung like a pebble into a storm. Kael blacked out, his tablet slipping from his hands to float in the zero-gravity cocoon.


When he woke, the pod was still. A soft amber light pulsed along its walls, and the gel receded, leaving him shivering on the floor. His tablet lay beside him, its screen cracked but flickering to life. The air smelled faintly of ozone, and through the pod’s single viewport, he saw stars—unfamiliar stars, sharper and colder than the ones he knew.


The pod had landed somewhere. A planet, judging by the gravity tugging at his limbs. Kael pressed his face to the viewport, fogging it with his breath. Beyond the glass stretched a barren plain, cracked and gray under a violet sky. He was alone, impossibly alone, until the pod’s hatch hissed open, and voices—human voices—reached him.


“Over here! Something’s come down!”


Kael stumbled out, clutching his tablet, and froze. Two figures approached, their silhouettes achingly familiar. The man had his father’s broad shoulders, the woman his mother’s sharp jawline. But their faces were wrong—older, lined with grief instead of the quiet pride he remembered. They stopped a few paces away, staring at him as if he were a ghost.


“Who… who are you?” the woman asked, her voice trembling. It was his mother’s voice, but heavier, worn.


“I’m Kael,” he said, his throat tight. “Kael Renar. Where’s my mom? My dad?”


The man knelt, his eyes—his father’s eyes—searching Kael’s face. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. “We don’t… we never had…”


The woman gripped the man’s arm, her gaze darting between Kael and the pod. “Joran, look at him. He’s—he’s ours. He could’ve been ours.”


They took him to their home, a modest dome on the edge of a mining settlement. The planet was called Elara, they said, a frontier world in a universe that felt both familiar and alien. Kael sat silently as they argued in hushed tones, stealing glances at him. His tablet, propped on the table, had been scanning since they arrived, its cracked screen displaying a stream of data he barely understood.


Finally, the woman—Lira, she’d called herself—sat beside him. “Kael, tell us what happened. Please.”


He told them everything: the Aetheris, the FTL jump, the explosion. His voice broke when he spoke of his parents, and Lira’s hand found his, squeezing tight. Joran paced, muttering about quantum drift and parallel timelines, terms Kael had heard his father use but never grasped.
The tablet chimed, drawing their attention. Its analysis was complete. “Dimensional divergence detected,” it read in flat, mechanical text.


“Current universe diverged from origin point approximately ten years ago. Key variance: subjects Joran and Lira Renar, childless in this timeline.”


Ten years. Kael stared at the words, his chest tightening. In this world, his parents had married, built a life, but never had him. Something—some tiny, cosmic twist—had shifted their path a decade before he was born in his own universe.


Lira read the screen over his shoulder, her breath catching. “Ten years ago… that’s when we lost the funding for the colony project. We stayed here instead of transferring to the Aetheris program.”


Joran stopped pacing, his face pale. “If we’d gone… we might’ve had him. Or someone like him.”


Kael looked between them, these strangers who were and weren’t his parents. They didn’t know his favorite constellation or the way he liked his toast burnt, but their hands were warm, their voices soft. He was a piece of a puzzle they’d never known was missing.


Days turned to weeks. The settlement buzzed with theories about the pod’s arrival, but Joran and Lira kept Kael close, shielding him from prying eyes. They taught him about Elara’s twin suns, its brittle mines, its quiet beauty. He taught them the games on his tablet, the songs his mother used to hum. Slowly, the house filled with something like family—a fragile, borrowed version of it.


One night, under the violet sky, Kael sat between them, tracing unfamiliar stars. “Do you think they’re still out there?” he asked. “My mom and dad?”


Lira pulled him close, her voice steady despite the tears in her eyes. “Maybe in your universe, they’re looking for you. But here… you’ve got us.”


Joran rested a hand on Kael’s shoulder, his grip firm. “And we’re not letting you go.”


The tablet lay silent beside them, its data a bridge to a world he’d lost. Kael didn’t know if he’d ever find his way back—or if he even wanted to. For now, he had this: two people who saw him and chose him, against all the odds of a fractured cosmos.