The Unraveling

The cabin perched on the crystalline ridge like a tumor of human ambition. Its bio-glass walls refracted the light of three dying suns into prismatic fragments. These fragments danced across Helen’s weathered face. Twenty years. Christ, had it really been twenty years since they’d first pressed their thumbs to the marriage registry? Their genetic patterns were locked in the central databank like prisoners in adjacent cells.

Marcus emerged from the kitchen alcove, carrying two glasses of synthetic wine that glowed faintly purple in the alien twilight. The wine was made from local fruit—if you could call those pulsing, crystalline growths on the hillside fruit. Everything on Kepler-442c seemed to pulse with its own inner light. It was as if the planet itself were some vast organism. It breathed in cosmic rhythms that Helen couldn’t quite grasp.

“To us,” Marcus said, raising his glass. The gesture was perfect. It was precisely the way he’d always done it. This included the slight tremor in his left hand. He developed this tremor after the mining accident on Europa seven years back.

“To us,” Helen echoed, but the words felt strange in her mouth, like speaking through water.

Outside, the wind carved impossible melodies through the singing stones. They jutted from the hillside like the ribs of some buried leviathan. The sound should have been beautiful. Instead, it made Helen’s teeth ache. The frequency seemed to bypass her ears entirely and burrow straight into her brainstem.

Marcus set down his wine and moved to the viewport, his silhouette sharp against the alien landscape. “Remember when we first saw this place in the tourism vids? I said it looked like God’s fever dream.”

Helen laughed, but it sounded wrong to her—too bright, too easy. “You said it looked like what would happen if Salvador Dalí had been a planet designer.”

“Did I?” Marcus turned, and for just a moment—just a microsecond—his face seemed to flicker like a hologram with reception problems. “I don’t remember that.”

The wine turned to acid in Helen’s throat. Of course he’d said that. She remembered because she’d laughed so hard. She’d snorted wine through her nose. Marcus had kissed her forehead and called her his beautiful disaster. But now, she looked at him standing there. He had that expression of mild confusion. She felt the first cold finger of doubt trace its way down her spine.

“The sunset’s beautiful tonight,” Marcus said, moving back to the couch. When he sat, the cushions compressed in exactly the right pattern. Marcus had always been heavier on his left side. This was a legacy of the childhood accident that had left his left leg slightly shorter than his right.

But Helen found herself studying the way he moved, analyzing it like a xenobiologist examining an unfamiliar species. Everything was correct, but somehow too correct. It was like a performance by an actor who’d memorized every gesture but couldn’t quite capture the soul behind them.

“Do you remember,” Helen said carefully, “what you whispered to me on our wedding night?”

Marcus smiled—that crooked smile she’d fallen in love with all those years ago on the asteroid mining station. “I said I’d love you until the last star burned out and space itself grew cold.”

Helen’s blood crystallized in her veins. Because that wasn’t what he’d said at all. He’d whispered, “I’m going to love you so hard it’ll rewrite the laws of physics.” She remembered because it had been so ridiculous, so perfectly Marcus, that she’d laughed until she cried.

The Marcus sitting across from her took a sip of wine, and Helen watched his throat work as he swallowed. Everything seemed perfect, just as it should be. But there was one crucial detail that no observer could have known. No matter how skilled, they needed to have been in that small cabin on the transport ship, twenty years ago. That’s when the real Marcus had pressed his lips to her ear and made her believe in impossible things.

“Helen?” The thing wearing Marcus’s face looked at her with concern that seemed genuine enough to fool God himself. “You look pale. Are you feeling alright?”

She forced a smile, her hand moving casually to the quantum communicator on her belt. A terrible thought struck her. If the Marcus sitting across from her wasn’t Marcus, where was the real Marcus? And more importantly—if this creature could impersonate her husband so perfectly, what did that say about her own authenticity?

The thought hit her like a meteor strike: when had she last looked in a mirror?

Outside, the singing stones crescendoed into a harmony. This made the cabin’s walls vibrate. Helen felt something fundamental shift in the space between heartbeats. The creature across from her smiled Marcus’s smile. Its eyes held depths that had never seen Earth’s sun. They had never walked beneath familiar stars. These eyes had never loved anything human at all.

“To us,” it said again, raising its glass.

Helen studied her own hands as if seeing them for the first time. She wondered whose memories were filing through her mind like borrowed clothes. She whispered back: “To us.”

In the distance, something that might have been laughter echoed across the alien landscape. Two things that had once been human sat in a cabin made for lovers. Each was perfectly convinced they were sharing their anniversary with an imposter. Neither was quite certain who they themselves had been before the stars went wrong. Love became just another form of camouflage in the endless dark.

The three suns set in sequence. The singing stones fell silent. In that silence, Helen heard the sound of her own heart. It was beating a rhythm she was no longer sure belonged to her.

Twenty years. Twenty years of perfect love with perfect strangers. They wore faces like masks in a play. Everyone had forgotten their lines but kept performing anyway. The alternative was too terrible to speak aloud. It was possible they were all just echoes of echoes. They were reflections in mirrors that had never held real light.

Outside, something moved in the crystal darkness. Helen wondered if it was coming to join them. Was it simply another anniversary couple, wandering the night in search of whoever they used to be?