"Found any new information?" Tam asks Yara as the five of them head downtown, snow piling up on the streets as the few people still out hurriedly look for shelter.

She shakes her head. "Not really. I've been snooping around as usual, trying to find out about any information Mrs. Rivyet has on the rest of our pursuers and their motives as well as her own - after all, if we can figure them out, it's possible we can stop them - but I've got nothing. And in terms of dealing with the wish, this is still the only lead we've got."

"So if this turns out to be a dead end then we're screwed," Allioni says.

"I... wouldn't exactly put it like that, but well - yes. However, I'm 99 percent certain this lead is, for lack of any better words, legit, so there's that."

"Yippee for us, then," Tam says.

"Yes. So long as none of you mess up, I am sure this will proceed perfectly smoothly."

"Wow, thanks a lot," he grumbles. Beside him, Chia pauses in sticking her tongue out to catch snowflakes to salute.

"Aye-aye, captain! But still... what does this have to do with an orphanage?" she asks, squinting up at the big stone building beyond the iron gate they had stopped at. Somewhere from inside the building, the sounds of children reciting their textbooks aloud float over, mingling with the giggles and shrieks of the children on their break.

"This place. Xanthyor," Yara says as she pushes the iron gate open and heads down the path to the door. "It was the place the Star before Kaya landed, a hundred years ago. This was where they stayed."

"They?" Kaya asks.

"The Star and her Guide," Yara explains.

"And you know that because...?" Tam prompts.

"A Guide has their secrets," she says simply.

"But why exactly are we here anyway?" Allioni frowns. "Since the Star fell here a hundred years ago, I doubt there's anything left to find, is there?"

"No - there is. Logs, records, that sort of thing - this particular orphanage is a family business, I think, and it's been going on for a while now, so they'll still have those," Yara replies.

"But why would we need -"

"To find the previous Guide, of course. Anya of the Shu Orbit, Starsong Miryai. She's been here longer, and because of my -" Yara pauses, shakes her head, "- basically, she knows more than me."

"Wait, hold up -" Tam makes a time-out signal, "- you mean she's still alive?"

"Obviously," Yara says, raising an eyebrow. "What else would we be here for other than to track her down?"

"But shouldn't she be -"

"A hundred and something years old by now? Yes, but in Star years, that's nothing," she waves dismissively. "She would only be in her twenties to thirties were she human."

"Ehhhh?" Chia says. "Wait - then how old are you?"

"Sixteen. And it's rude to ask," Yara sniffs.

"Huh," Tam muses. "With the way you are, I would've assumed you were a stuffy old lady -"

She shoots him a glare cold enough to kill.

He backs off, raising his hands in surrender.

"At any rate," she continues, stopping in front of the door, "just go along with what I say, don't talk unless absolutely needed, and don't mess anything up. Simple?"

She presses the doorbell.

------------------

"What are you kids here for?" says the woman who answers the door, peering down at them suspiciously, grey hair pulled back in a tight bun.

Yara whips out a notebook and a pencil, and then, looking up at the woman in front of them, she transforms.

"Ah...sorry to bother you this early in the morning," she says with a sheepish smile as behind her, Tam and Allioni shoot each other incredulous glances. "We're from the next town over, and we're here on a history project concerning this place. I was wondering if we could ask you several questions, take a look through your records?"

"The nearest town is a two-hour train ride away," the woman says, crossing her arms. "But alright, I'll bite. What's your history project about?"

"We're researching about the two mysterious disappearances from this village that happened last century. It appears they were both staying at this orphanage."

The woman's face darkens. "Sorry, I don't think I'll be able to help you," she says, beginning to close the door. "Wouldn't want the orphanage's reputation to get any worse than this. It's already taken a hit from their disappearances back in my gran's time - digging up the past ain't good for no one."

"Wait," Yara says, stopping the door from closing with her foot. "That's exactly why we're here. We want to help. If we find out what actually happened, then we can clear your name completely."

The woman pauses. Opens the door a crack wider again. Squints at the five of them standing on her doorstep.

"Alright, fine," she sighs, opening the door fully. "Come in."

------------------

"We keep our records in the basement, as well as any things the orphans leave behind when they grow up or are adopted," the woman - who introduced herself as the head of the orphanage, Madam Keistra - says as they follow her through several corridors with flowery wallpaper and polished wooden floors, then down a set of stairs till the reach a door. She pulls out a large golden key from her pocket and unlocks it, pushing open the door to darkness. "We've never cleared anything out in case it can be reused, so all of their things should still be there - if they haven't turned to dust over the years."

She strides into the darkness - moments later, there is a click, and the room is flooded with yellow light, revealing rows and rows of dark wooden shelves holding an assortment of labeled boxes, and a random assortment of cabinets presumably holding the records. "Well," she says, putting her hands on her hips and looking around, "search to your hearts content."

"Thank you so much, this is a really big help," Yara says, then bows, the other four hurriedly following her example ("Do we really have to do this?" Chia whispers. "Just do it, we don't want to seem too ungrateful," Tam whispers back).

Madam Keistra nods in return. "Right - just give a holler if you need me. I'll leave you to it," she says, a hint of amusement in her tone before she turns to disappear back up the stairs, leaving the five of them to look around the room.

"Oh boy," Chia says, shoulders visibly sinking as if the thought of the task ahead of them is physically weighting her down. "There's like a billion boxes in here! I don't see how we could even finish this in a week, much less a few hours!"

"Yes, well, we'd better hurry, then," Yara says, façade lifting right after the woman leaves, walking over to inspect one of the shelves. "You don't have forever, remember? Pretty much everyone who knows about Stars is after Kaya - and their network of informants is probably larger than we could ever imagine. I'd give you two or three days before you're found out - four tops. You need to keep moving. And that means dealing with all of these boxes."

"Well that's disheartening," Allioni mutters under his breath.

"More like downright depressing," Tam grumbles.

"Lighten up a little," Kaya reassures. "It won't take that long, right?" she pauses, glancing at Yara hopefully. "Right?"

Yara shrugs. Tam sighs. Allioni groans.

"Oh no," Chia says. "This really is going to take forever."

"Well, depressing or not, forever or not, we've still gotta do it, so -" Yara says, yanking out the nearest box and inviting a cloud of dust to billow up under the yellow lamplight, "- pick a box, and let's get to work."

------------------

They spend almost three hours digging through the piles of boxes and records (with lots of dust clouds and even more sneezing) before their willpower and resolve starts to break down.

"I can't anymore," Chia says, collapsing against the nearest shelf (albeit maybe a little dramatically). "My back. My arms. Everything hurts."

"Come on, Chia. It's only been three hours," Tam says.

"But I'm dyingggggggggg," she complains as he offers her a hand up, which she takes nonetheless. "We've gone through nearly a third of this room, and we've started from the oldest sections. Shouldn't our chances be better now than they were before, in terms of the mathematics of probability and all that?"

"Technically, yes," he admits. "But considering our luck... well, you know how bad it is."

"Just keep on searching," Yara calls over her shoulder as she rifles through a stack of files. "We'll find it eventually. Probably," she adds.

"You mean we might never find it?" Chia asks, horrified. "Like it's already turned to dust or something?"

"That's... also possible," Yara admits. "Anya might have taken all of their belongings with her to prevent any evidence being left behind."

"Well, isn't that just encouraging," Allioni mutters under his breath, yanking out another box. "I suppose this doesn't mean we can stop?"

"Like they say, never know if you never try," she shrugs. "Although, it isn't likely that - huh," she pauses, pulling out a thin, leatherbound journal from the box. "I think you just jinxed us into finding it."

Chia pauses as well. "Wait, really?"

Yara holds up the journal to show the rest of them before flipping it open. "This was Anya's," she notes, seeing the name written on the inside of the cover as the others slowly put down their respective boxes to come over. "Might show us where she went after the Star she was assigned to was... well, you know."

"It's all... drawings," Kaya says in bewilderment as Yara flips to another page full of doodled swirls.

"Some sort of code hidden in the drawings, maybe?" Allioni suggests. "So no one else would understand it?"

"Not too far off the mark," Yara says. "See these?" She taps on the seemingly random swirls and patterns and symbols, then glances to Kaya. "Seem familiar?"

Kaya hesitates, then nods. "A little. I feel like... I've seen it before. Somewhere in the back of my mind..."

"Let me guess: a language?" Tam asks.

"Correct. This -" Yara gestures at the page, "- this is our language. The language of the Stars."

"Ehhhhh?" Chia leans over Yara's shoulder to get a closer look at the doodles - or rather, the words. "You mean these swirly things are a language?"

"Precisely."

"Seems really difficult... how did you even learn all of this if you arrived like, when you were ten? You came with Kaya, right?"

Yara shrugs flippantly. "Maybe I'm just a genius."

Tam snorts off to her left. "Yeah, right."

She shoots him a glare before continuing, "but anyway, this isn't exactly the Star language. It's a bit more... flowery, arranged to look like a drawing so no one will recognize any patterns in it and decode it as a language - which is quite unlikely, but still possible. So I suppose that in a way, it's a bit like cursive, albeit a lot fancier and more complicated."

"What does it say?" Allioni asks.

"Stuff," Yara says. "Just some observations, contingency plans, some random notes - it's all very vague, so I can't really decipher much..." she flips another page.

"Oh no - it's all ripped out," Chia says. "What now?"

Yara pauses. "I don't know," she admits. "If this is really all there is..."

A heavy silence settles over the room.

"Wait," Tam says after a moment. "Pass that to me - there might still be something we can use or find."

"But you can't even read the language," Yara frowns, passing it to him anyway, then watching as he rifles though the pages and peers closely at the book, then tugs at the cover -

It slips off.

"It's a sleeve," he notes. "And look - there's a paper hidden here." He passes it to Yara.

"Not bad," Yara says.

"Yep! Tam really knows his books!" Chia says.

Yara makes a noncommittal noise, then looks up towards Chia. "Do you have a pencil? And a map? I should probably write this down so the four of you don't forget it."

"Did you find something?" Kaya asks.

"Yes, I did," Yara says as she turns to face them. "It seems the four of you are going to be heading to Orivia."

------------------

She remembers - halls of marble and gilded gold, pillars and arches with elaborate carvings and walkways lit with the cold light of stardust lamps, a dark, boundless sky full of swirling galaxies, spattered with dark blues and purples and speckled with stars high above her.

She remembers the jeering from the other Orbits, the other clans - Shi and Feng and Yu and Shu - the whispers behind hands, the dirty looks shot at her when they didn't think she was watching.

She remembers first meeting Kaya - though that hadn't been her name, not then - remembers thinking that the girl in front of her didn't have any knowledge of what was coming, that she would have her mind wiped and wouldn't know anything about the Stars afterwards, so why not tell her the truth? Because the girl in front of her was going to have to die - so she should, at the very least, know, even if only for a little while.

And maybe it was for her own sake too, for her own peace of mind because she needed, needed someone to tell her she was doing the right thing, needed the person she would eventually have a hand in killing to tell her it was ok, it was what was supposed to happen.

Ultimately, she didn't tell her. And afterwards, standing beside her mother, her too-small hand clasped tightly by her mama's too-large one, she had told her what she had considered doing, and her mama had said: "It's okay, I'm proud of you, you did the right thing. Follow your role as a Guide, follow your fate, follow the rules of destiny. Don't stray off the path, not like our previous Guide - that traitor, did. Follow your duty. Bring honor back to the Hwa Orbit back, to our Orbit."

And maybe her mama's hand had been squeezing hers a bit too tightly, and maybe her tone had been a little too tense and little too angry, but it was okay, because her mama was proud and she'd done the right thing.

That's what she told herself, and that's what she kept telling herself all through those years.

Follow the path, follow your duty, follow the rules. Restore glory, restore pride, restore honor.

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow.

For us, for our sake, for the sake of the Hwa Orbit.

Follow.

Follow.

FOLLOW -

Yara jolts awake to a dark room, panting, her feet tangled in the sheets, sweat plastering her hair to the face.

(or are they tears?)

(had she been crying?)

She shakes her head, stands up, lights the lamps methodically, mechanically. A practiced movement, a habit, something she's sure of.

Comforting, in a world where everything is now uncertain.

She yanks open the curtains, looking up to the night sky above, barely lightening with the first hints of dawn.

Somewhere out there, somewhere up there, is her childhood home. Somewhere up there is the Hwa Orbit, and her mother.

Would you still be proud of me now, mama?