Summer’s fading, but Subamara can’t sleep in the oppressive heat. Tonight she wants to run away, but knows she won’t, so the closest compromise is to look to the stars. She escapes from heat to heat, to the bright clear emptiness of her asteroid. The dry dust shifts under her feet as she repositions herself in the still-strange environment. The arcades of dead trees tower around her as they did on her last visit, many months ago, but the shape of the hills is different. She’s arrived in another place.

This time she heads away from the ancient rows of coffee trees, hiking towards the nearest hill and what she hopes will be the edges of the farm. The air is just as hot as the night she’s left, but the sunlight is pleasant. The season hasn’t changed, she thinks - or maybe it’s changed all the way back. She wonders how big the asteroid really is. Smaller than Earth, smaller than Mars. It’s not a planet, after all. Moon-sized? She hasn’t been back to the Moon. Maybe she should.

It’s the first time she’s been able to think that without the accompanying thoughts of helplessness and death. There have been so many massacres, and she wants it to stop. She wants to clear all the bad air that’s choked her up. Pull all the bad memories out of her head like old files, replace them with something brighter. She wants to be something brighter.

The Subamaran landscape slopes steadily upwards into dusty red-brown hills. As the sun slowly shifts, they offer her a protection from the heat that the trees couldn’t. Subamara steps gratefully into their shadows, pausing to let her eyes adjust. Slowly, the stones take on shapes, curves and hollows gracing the surface of the hillside like lace, some shallow as bowls edged by the light, others deep chasms of inky black. She pulls off her glove to run her fingers over the rock, and is surprised to find it smooth. It’s not a wall as such, but it’s not entirely natural. A little more examination reveals a series of steps carved into the face of the hill, leading down under a large low ledge. They can’t reach me here, she thinks, and follows the path down.

Under the ledge is darker still, but pinpoints of sunlight draw bright lines at regular intervals into the large cavern area. The holes in the hill above must be skylights, she guesses. Here, things are certainly manmade. A carved column holds up either end of the entry ledge, and door-sized squares open along one of the walls. The space is thick with blown dust and more of the skeletal coffee-leaves, but it’s been sheltered from the worst of the wind. Subamara explores further, picking a path through the least-covered areas to step into one of the doors, holding her breath against the dust and what she might discover.

An image, a memory comes to her, and she sees the little room in bright colours, neatly swept, with swathes of sheer fabric curtained around the doorframe and a fire in the grate. A woman, maybe her age, is singing to the water as it boils, and a child is laying out plates and cups of red-glazed pottery, with a pattern of brown beans and white flowers.

But then it’s just a little round room, dust and rubble. A slab-shaped lump in the middle that might have been the wooden table. An alcove that could feasibly have been the stove. A surprisingly bright shard of red pottery, flower broken at the edge. Subamara lays it back down in its place, stepping back.

People lived here once. Died here, more than likely. She felt sad for the distant ghosts, for the dust blowing over their stories, erasing their treasures, planetary amnesia.

“I won’t forget,” she says. The words are surprisingly loud within the ancient walls.