The climb wasn't difficult. Just long enough to feel deliberate.
The high ground turned out to be a ridge — not dramatic, not jagged, just the planet's terrain finally deciding it had been flat long enough and rising gently for about twenty minutes of walking before leveling into a wide wind-swept plateau of pale grass and dark stone.
They came over the last rise and stopped.
Below them: everything.
The river caught the late afternoon light and turned it gold all the way to the horizon. The pollen clearing they'd walked through an hour ago was visible from up here — a soft amber smudge in the treeline, small and glowing. The waterfall was a thread of white they could still faintly hear. The savanna rolled in every direction, vast and unhurried, the bioluminescent grazers moving in slow clusters like living punctuation across the grass.
Above it all — the lavender sky deepening toward evening, the first suggestion of auroras at the edges, the pale disk of the system's moon clearing the horizon.
It was genuinely stunning.
It was also, somehow, slightly too much. Too open. Too visible. The wind up here had opinions — not violent, just persistent. The kind that reminds you there's nothing between you and the sky.
Lynn turned slowly, taking all of it in. "You can see everything from here."
"Mm," Tiger said.
"That's — a lot of everything."
"It's the same amount of everything. Just arranged differently."
Lily wasn't saying anything. She was standing at the edge of the plateau, looking out, one hand shielding her eyes from the low sun. Not performing anything. Just looking.
Tiger noticed.
Lynn noticed Tiger noticing.
Nobody said anything for a moment. The wind moved through the pale grass in slow waves.
"I used to have a view," Lily said finally. Not loudly. Just out into the open air. "On Kelper-9. Level eight. There was a viewport in the maintenance corridor nobody used. You could see the transit lanes from there — all those ships moving, all those people going somewhere." She paused. "I used to go there when things got loud. Just to watch things move."
Lynn came to stand beside her.
"Did it help?" she asked.
"Sometimes." Lily looked at the river below. "Sometimes it just made the loud feel louder by contrast." She smiled, but it was the smaller one. The one with less teeth. "The viewport got sealed when they upgraded the corridor insulation. Six months before the station closed anyway." She shrugged. "I never found another one like it."
Lynn was quiet for a moment. Then:
"I had something like that. A place." She looked at the horizon. "Somewhere I used to go when things felt — large. It was—" She paused. "Quiet. Open. Somewhere you could see a long way." She stopped. "I don't know if it's still there."
Lily looked at her.
Lynn smiled. Warm and immediate.
Lily held the look for just a half second longer than usual. Then she looked at Tiger.
Tiger was standing slightly back from the edge, hands in his pockets, looking at the savanna with the expression of someone who had decided to be interested in the middle distance.
"Tiger," Lily said.
"The grazers are further north today," he said.
"Tiger."
"The herd was near the river this morning."
"I know you heard me."
"The migration pattern might be—"
"Tiger." Not sharp. Just clear. The way you speak to someone who is very deliberately not listening. "You don't have to say anything. Just be here."
A beat.
"I'm here," he said.
"You're nearby. There's a difference."
Tiger looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes that didn't reach his face.
Then he came and stood at the edge with them.
The three of them looked out at Regret Island spread below. The wind moved steadily. Somewhere far off a grazer made its low resonant sound.
Tiger looked at the river.
He thought about the research outpost and immediately stopped thinking about it, which was its own kind of thinking about it.
Lily glanced at him sideways. She knew. He could tell she knew. She didn't push.
Instead she said: "New game."
Lynn turned. "Already?"
"One person describes a feeling. No names. The others guess the word."
Lynn considered. "Like describe it without saying what it is?"
"Describe it like you're explaining it to someone who has never had it."
"Has anyone here never had a feeling?"
They both looked at Tiger.
"I have feelings," Tiger said.
"Name one," Lily said.
"I'm playing the game."
"Prove it. You go first."
Tiger looked at the view. Thought for a moment. Then:
"When something is about to change and you know it and you haven't decided yet whether you want it to."
Lily tilted her head. "That's anticipation."
"Anticipation implies wanting. This doesn't."
"Dread then."
"Dread implies not wanting. This doesn't either."
Lynn frowned. "Is it suspension? The floating feeling?"
"Similar. But floating has no direction. This has direction. You just haven't picked one yet."
Lily looked at him. "Suspension with stakes."
"Something like that."
"We don't have a word for that."
"No."
"Add it to the list."
Tiger almost smiled. "Your turn."
Lily thought for exactly two seconds. "When you're in the middle of something good and you already know you'll miss it later. Not sad. Not happy. Both at the same time, running parallel."
"Bittersweet," Lynn said immediately.
"Too simple. Bittersweet implies the good and the sad are mixed together. This keeps them separate. You feel the good fully and the future missing of it fully. Simultaneously. Without them bleeding into each other."
Lynn frowned deeply. "That's very specific."
"It's a very specific feeling."
"Do you feel that a lot?" Lynn asked.
Lily looked at the pollen clearing below, small and golden in the late light.
"Getting more practice," she said.
Tiger looked at her.
Then looked away.
"Lynn," Lily said. "Your turn."
Lynn straightened slightly. Looked at the horizon. She was quiet for longer than either of them had been — not thoughtful quiet, more like searching quiet. Like someone looking through drawers for something they weren't sure they'd put there.
"When you are surrounded by everything that is supposed to feel like enough," she said finally, carefully, "and you are performing the experience of it being enough, and somewhere the performance and the actual experience have gotten — confused. So you cannot tell anymore which is which."
The wind moved through the grass.
Lily looked at her.
Tiger looked at her.
Lynn kept her eyes on the horizon.
"Contentment?" Lily tried, quietly.
"No."
"Dissociation?"
"Warmer."
"Numbness?"
Lynn considered. "The kind that smiles," she said.
Nobody guessed after that.
The word sat between them unnamed, which felt correct somehow — the way some things are more honest without a label.
Lily put her arm through Lynn's again, the way she had in the clearing.
Lynn looked down at it. The warmth in her expression arrived half a second after it should have.
Tiger was still looking at the view.
"Beautiful," he said, to no one specifically.
"Vast," Lily said.
"Exposed," Lynn said.
They stood with all three words in the air and the wind moving through the grass and Regret Island spread below them in the last of the afternoon light, small and golden and theirs.
Somewhere above the ridge, something that was not a cloud held very still.
The evening came the way evenings did on Regret Island — without asking, without apology. Just the slow inevitable shift from one kind of light to another.
They stayed until the auroras started.
Nobody suggested leaving first.