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Sedna’s gravity could tell they were in trouble far before her eyes confirmed it.
The void around them lacked any distinct pull or tug besides the inherent gravity that fed into everything in the universe. There was no solar wind (even if she’d only felt a whisper of it, Sedna knew what it felt like), no tidal pressure from anything large enough to register, no fading trace of Sol’s influence.
Not even the ghost of it she’d feel at her post on the Oort Cloud’s edge.
It was… eerie.
But at least (an admittance she’d never reveal) she had the gravitational signatures of others near enough to hold onto and focus on. Half of them were familiar to her: Orcus, watchful at the edge of her awareness; Quaoar, wheat stalk working between his teeth and amusement radiating off him like low-level heat in the static-y cold of empty space; Gonggong, red-haired and gap-toothed and broadcasting his emotions through the gravity repeatedly brushing against hers. She could pick them apart without looking.
The other four she was still learning to tell apart by gravity alone, and it bothered her more than she’d expected. Sedna liked knowing things and these four were still strangers. Pluto tugged heavier than his size should have allowed, and Charon’s signature was so tightly wound into his that isolating one from the other felt like trying to hear a single instrument inside a chord (yes, she knew some Earthling things). Eris registered cool and weirdly more distant than the cluster required. Makemake was easy in how his gravity fidgeted, pushing and pulling and tugging at everyone around him like he was constantly on the edge of trying to get their attention. Haumea was the one she kept losing, with how quiet he was and the way his gravity turned around him.
“Did anyone catch which direction he went?"
Sedna knocked herself out of her own thoughts and refocused. Quaoar shifted his wheat stalk from one side of his mouth to the other, turning in a circle as he spoke, eyes darting around as he likely came to the same conclusion she had. His sheepskin-lined jacket hung open even here, because all of them were so used to the cold they saw no use to bundling up against it like the other dwarf planets were (with Charon nearly plastered against Pluto's side, like he'd miraculously start becoming a source of heat in the emptiness around them. “And I want it noted that I told Orcus this would happen. I told him. Two separate times.”
“You told me once.” Orcus didn’t look at him, though he looked a second from rolling his eyes as he kept his arms folded, coat buttoned to the collar, gray eyes fixed on the empty space Wise had been occupying three Earthling minutes ago. “And you said it ‘seemed suspicious.’ That’s not a warning.”
“It is absolutely—”
“Quiet.”
Sedna didn’t raise her voice. (She never needed to, because why wouldn't they listen?) Quaoar’s mouth closed and Orcus turned to face her and Gonggong drifted half a rotation to her left, spiky brick-red hair catching no light at all, letting out a low “Gong” that she barely reacted to, just frowned a little harder before her hand went to her hair without thinking, tightening the pin at her crown. They knew when she needed the quiet to think. It was all she had most of the time, after all.
The other five took longer to settle.
Eris glanced at Pluto from under her hood, pale eyes catching nothing and shimmering darker than even the rest of theirs did, the lack of sunlight damning them to the empty eyes all rogues wore. Makemake looked up from the notepad he’d somehow already pulled out, pencil frozen mid-scratch. Haumea kept spinning slightly in a slow circle, chin sunk beneath the collar of his thick jacket. Pluto’s hand found Charon’s arm (or hers found his, considering they both closed the gap before either of them seemed to consciously reach).Sedna watched it happen from the corner of her eye and felt a specific, stupid ache in her core that she pushed under and kept moving past.
(She always pushed it under. She was very good at it.)
They went quiet too, eventually. Thankfully.
Sedna scanned the stars and knew that all of them were wrong. Not the stars themselves, but their positions relative to each other, the angles between them, the relative brightnesses she’d spent millennia memorizing from the Oort Cloud during her long, solitary orbits. She knew what Sol looked like from a handful of distances, from her far-off orbit to those of the other dwarfs. She knew how it dimmed, became just another yellow dot by far enough out, indistinguishable from any other G-type unless you’d been staring at it for your entire existence. She could pick the Sun out of a crowd of ten thousand stars at her aphelion, half-asleep.
Luckily there was not a crowd of ten thousand stars clustered around them, but the amount crammed into every corner of the universe was impossible to even consider counting. And none of the stars around them matched anything she recognized, which was... just perfect.
Wise had spiraled them through that faster than light transit until Gonggong’s route measurements were useless enough, then dropped them in a stretch of interstellar space Sedna had never seen before.
She’d been right about him from the beginning, from the moment she’d watched him whispering with SIMP at the Kingdom’s threshold and felt her suspicion settle into certainty. She’d had them track the route, after all. She’d assigned Gonggong to count and measure through the trip. So, she’d prepared for exactly this.
And Wise had somehow prepared for her preparation.
Stars, that was smart. She hated that it was smart.
“We’re not in the Oort Cloud,” she said. "Or..."
They likely weren’t anywhere near it.
Pluto drifted closer, and behind him Charon followed, somehow never more than a body-width away. Sedna had been watching them do this for such a long time now and kept waiting for the observation to stop producing that pull in her core. It hadn’t. “How far out are we?” His accent thickened, the drawl going so thick she could have mapped it. Whatever was underneath, he was trying to keep it there. He wasn’t succeeding. (Pluto hid things like an asteroid behind a comet’s tail; technically possible, practically see-through.)
“I don’t know yet.” She didn’t like saying that. “Wise scrambled Gonggong’s measurements, and I can’t orient.”
“Gong,” Gonggong confirmed, grimacing.
“Then we’re lost.” Eris stared at them with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, hood pulled up to shade her head. “We’re lost, and the planets are about to get scattered across the galaxy, and we’re floating here.”
Nobody answered. In the quiet, Quaoar’s wheat stalk started working faster and Makemake’s pencil tapped against his notepad and Haumea’s spin picked up speed. Sedna’s people on one side, Pluto’s on the other.
Pluto was the one who broke it. “Now what, guys?” His voice cracked on the second word, the Southern drawl gone thick, whatever he’d been performing dropped clean out of it. He looked around at all nine of them with those wide, dimming hazel eyes. “I mean—we gotta do somethin’, right?”
Sedna had watched him do this at the Kingdom, back when he’d tried to reason with Wise, tried to make the case for trust even after Sedna had warned him there was nothing to trust. It was generous. It was also, right now, not going to get them home.
“We find the Sun,” Sedna said.
Her sentinels knew that tone. On the other side of the invisible line, Pluto blinked. Makemake pushed his glasses up his nose.
“Sure.” Quaoar’s drawl was pitched for the metaphorical room around them. “Let me just pull up the coordinates I definitely have. Oh wait—those are destroyed.” He glanced sideways at Gonggong. “What were the final numbers?”
“Gong gong gong.” Gonggong shook his head.
“Exactly.”
Makemake’s pencil stopped. “Wait—what measurements? You were measuring the route? During FTL? How did you—”
“We tracked angle and speed on the way in, and Gonggong counted time.” Sedna cut him off. She’d done it every time he’d started one of his question barrages since they met (the first time she’d met him at the Kingdom’s gates, she’d had to repeat herself “like twenty times,” per his own sheepish count). She still hadn’t figured out a way to cut him off that didn’t make him look like a kicked puppy, all wide pink eyes and slipping glasses and chalk-smudged hurt. “Wise wrecked all of it.”
“Ooh.” He chirped it, the kicked-puppy look gone, replaced by fascination, his pencil moving again, his whole body leaning forward like the destruction of their only navigational dataset was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all week. “That’s smart. Counting in Gong during faster-than-light transit to preserve—”
“Makemake.” Eris’s voice cut through, stripped of everything but the consonants. His mouth closed. She didn’t look at him; just said his name, and it worked.
“I need to find Sol,” she said. “Give me time.”
Time turned out to mean more than she was comfortable with.
She spent the first several Earthling hours rotating in place, mapping every star she could see against the charts she’d memorized from her aphelion. Brightness, color, position relative to the galactic plane. She’d done this kind of work for millennia at her post, alone, with nothing but icy Oort Cloud fragments for company and the fading yellow point of Sol for orientation, and none of the results matched yet. This was what she was good at. Eleven thousand years per orbit with no one to distract her, and she’d memorized the sky.
(Useful because alone. That was the equation, and she’d made peace with it a long time ago, or she’d told herself she had.)
The two groups drifted apart. They always did, whenever they stopped moving. Sentinels to one side, Pluto’s people to the other. Orcus and Quaoar settled at the edge of Sedna’s cluster, Orcus buttoned and watchful, Quaoar with his wheat stalk working and one eye on Gonggong. Across the gap, Pluto rested with Charon in their locked rotation. Charon’s white-and-brown hair bounced every time she turned to check on someone, and she never stopped checking; Sedna had noticed this about her early on. It looked effortless. It wasn’t.
(Or she hadn’t used to.)
Haumea spun at the edge of Pluto’s group, buttoned all the way up in his soft cream layers, white eyes on Sedna. Eris drifted between the two clusters, hood up.
The breach came from the direction Sedna expected.
She heard Makemake before she saw him, pencil scratching, glasses sliding, the rustle of that perpetually chalk-smudged puffy vest. He drifted across the gap with the subtlety of an asteroid on a collision course and stopped in front of Gonggong, and the brightness of his “Hey!” was so complete, so unguarded, that Gonggong’s head came up and the gap-toothed grin appeared for the first time since Wise had dumped them.
“Okay—the counting thing.” Makemake settled cross-legged in zero gravity, notepad balanced on one knee, pencil poised. “I have questions. What unit were you using? Fixed interval or relative? Does the Gong language have numerical—”
“Gong gong,” Gonggong offered.
Makemake’s whole body jolted. His glasses slid fully off the bridge of his nose. “Was that—was that two? Is ‘gong gong’ two?”
Quaoar studied him for a moment, the disheveled red hair, the chalk-smudged sweater, the notepad already covered in scribbled calculations, and the wheat stalk shifted to the other side of his mouth. His dark gray eyes were doing a reassessment Sedna hadn’t expected. “You want to learn Gong?”
“I want to learn everything.”
Quaoar glanced at Gonggong with a half-grin, mouth quirked up in one corner. It had taken the sentinels months to learn Gonggong’s inflections. Makemake was asking for the lesson without any hesitation.
“Sure. Pull up a rock,” Quaoar said, gesturing at the empty around them. “Figuratively.”
Gonggong drifted closer, careful and patient. He’d never had an audience outside his own unit and didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with one. He started counting as Makemake eagerly stared, pencil at the ready.
“Gong.”
“One,” Makemake whispered, writing.
“Gong gong.”
“Two.”
“Gong gong gong.”
“Three—oh, the stress falls on the last syllable for—?!”
“Gong.” Quaoar translated: “He says you’re overthinking it.”
(And stars above, he was right.)
But the corner of Quaoar’s mouth had gone even softer, an expression Sedna had never seen on him in the field, and she watched it happen and felt her grip on Gonggong’s gravity tighten for a half-second before she caught herself and let go. Makemake was doing in a single Earthling hour what the sentinels had taken months to learn, cross-legged and delighted and showing no sign he knew he was the first person outside their unit to ever try.
She wasn’t sure if what she was feeling was gratitude or if it stung.
Both, probably.
She turned back to the stars.
Sirius saved them.
Too bright to miss even at distance, its white-dwarf companion creating a paired signature she recognized the instant she locked onto it. 8.6 light-years from Sol. She could start narrowing.
Her core pulsed, and she rotated until she found Procyon, 11.5 light-years from Sol, displaced below the ecliptic plane. Wise had spiraled them downward during transit, a disorientation tactic she would have caught if Gonggong’s counting hadn’t been scrambled. She could work with that.
She searched for Alpha Centauri and didn’t find it right away.
Her core went cold. She didn’t let it reach her face.
At this distance, the 4.3 light-years between Alpha Centauri and Sol would collapse to nearly nothing in her visual field. The two systems would look like one point, maybe two if she squinted, and she needed someone who’d seen Sol from closer in to help her separate them. She’d spent her existence watching the Sun from nine hundred AU. She knew what it looked like as a distant yellow speck that kept her company without keeping her warm. What she needed right now was someone who’d seen it from forty.
“Pluto.”
She caught herself on the name. She’d never asked any of them for anything. (Quaoar called this “Sedna’s law.” She hadn’t found that funny.)
But she needed him.
Pluto drifted over without hesitation. Charon followed at the precise lag their lock demanded, and the brightness on her face when someone asked her for something, any something, was so immediate that Sedna blinked.
“Hey!” Charon’s brown eyes went wide and warm. “What do you need?”
Sedna pointed at the field. “Stars. I’ve found Sirius and Procyon and I need Alpha Centauri. I know what Sol looks like from the far edge and you know what it looks like from the Belt. Help me.”
Pluto studied the sky while Charon tilted her head next to him, white-and-brown hair swinging. They scanned together, and Sedna watched how they did it, Pluto searching with his whole body tilted towards the right quadrant before his eyes got there, while Charon eliminated wrong answers with quick sweeps. Sedna’s core ached for one bad second, watching two people do together what she had always done alone.
“There.” Pluto lifted one arm, pointing towards a cluster of yellow-orange stars. “Third from the left, that’s a G-type, and the two next to it are a binary—if that’s Alpha Centauri A and B—”
“Sol.”
Sedna locked onto it and her gravity stuttered so hard that Gonggong, ten meters away, went silent mid-gong.
It was... dim. A yellow pinprick.
Sedna had never been warm. Fourteen Kelvin at best, even at her closest approach; the Sun was just a bright dot that kept her company without giving her heat. He’d probably never known she was there.
“I found it,” she said.
“Oh, stars—!” Charon’s grip tightened on Pluto’s arm, her brown eyes going wide and wet. “You found it—?”
“We found it,” Pluto corrected, glancing at Sedna, and the gratitude in his expression was too big for the gesture. Too generous. (She didn’t know what to do with generous.)
Sedna turned back to Sol's tiny dot in the distance before she had to figure out exactly what her face was doing.
No one asked if she was certain.
“So we just go towards it.” Eris had her hood down. She was paying attention. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And the distance?”
“Gonggong.” Sedna turned to face him. “How long was the FTL leg getting here compared to the trip from the Solar System to the Kingdom?”
“Gong gong gong gong gong.”
Quaoar translated, wheat stalk shifting. “Way shorter. Maybe a quarter.”
“Then Wise didn’t take us far. He wanted to scramble our measurements, not exile us to the far side of the galaxy. He’s a Y-type brown dwarf, coldest spectral class, limited energy reserves. He wouldn’t have burned them on distance when all he needed was disorientation. If the FTL was a quarter of the original trip, we’re a fraction of the distance from the Solar System that the Kingdom is.”
“Then we might be within tens of light-years,” Makemake said, looking up from his notepad with his glasses catching the dim galactic light. “The Oort Cloud extends one and a half light-years from Sol in every direction, and if we’re inside twenty—”
“We’re close.”
“I need a new count,” she told Gonggong. “Not the route. I need you to track our speed as we move, and count at intervals. You’re our odometer.”
Gonggong paused. His gap-toothed expression shifted from grim to something more grounded. “Gong.”
“We should go.” Charon’s voice cut through, and the group went still. It was the first time she’d addressed all of them rather than just Pluto, and she wasn’t looking at the stars. She was looking at Eris with her hood down, at Haumea spinning faster, at Makemake’s pencil tapping. She’d read the room before Sedna had.
“While we still have the will,” Charon said.
“She’s right,” Pluto said, quieter now. “Let’s go.”
Sedna set the heading, and they moved.
Sedna kept Sol fixed at twelve o’clock and made corrections as the surrounding stars shifted with their motion. Gonggong counted (“Gong,” then a pause, “Gong gong,” then another, “Gong gong gong”) and the rhythm of it anchored her, the most reliable clock any of them carried. He’d been her timekeeper since the early days of the sentinel unit, back when Quaoar had first explained to her that the “Gong” variations weren’t noise but language, that Gonggong was counting and commenting and expressing himself through tonal shifts the rest of them needed to learn to hear. She’d learned. It had taken months. It had been worth it.
Somewhere behind her, the groups were mixing.
She could feel it in her gravity field, the two clusters dissolving at the edges. Makemake drifted out of Pluto’s cluster and into the sentinel formation without seeming to notice he’d crossed the gap, settling next to Gonggong with his notepad and counting along under his breath, asking Quaoar questions in a whispered rapid-fire that Quaoar answered with a laid-back ease that was, underneath all of it, kind of enjoying itself. She’d never seen Quaoar look like that with anyone outside the unit. The wheat stalk kept moving but his posture had shifted, his (studied, she knew) casualness easing into something that he wasn't really emulating so much as doing, and Sedna watched it happen and didn't care to mention it out loud.
Charon followed. Not to Quaoar, but to Gonggong, sitting near him in silence for a while before she started testing his inflections with a stubborn, cheerful insistence that reminded Sedna of a body trying to learn a gravitational frequency by feel. Getting it wrong. Trying again. Getting it wrong. Trying again. Refusing to quit. Sedna had heard the stories during the weeks they’d traveled together, told in fragments between star-checks and Gonggong’s counts: Pluto’s lies about being a planet, the board game that had gone sideways, the fight that had nearly broken him and Charon apart. Ceres’s asteroids. The Moon Revolution.
“That one sounded worried,” she said to Gonggong after a particular gong. “Was that worried?”
“Gong.”
“Annoyed?”
“GONG.”
“That was a yes! I’m getting the hang of this.”
Gonggong’s gap-toothed grin came back, and his shoulders dropped into something looser, some tension she hadn’t realized he’d been carrying because he’d been carrying it for so long it had looked like the shape of him. She’d known Gonggong longer than almost anyone. She’d assigned him tasks and trusted his counting and understood his speech. She had not, she realized, ever made him look like that. (And she’d had centuries to try.)
(And that stung. That one stung in a place she didn’t want to look at.)
Haumea drifted closer too, gravitating towards the sentinels’ side of things, and ended up near Orcus. He spun quietly for a while, his egg-shaped body wobbling in its 3.9-hour rotation as it always did, the neatly buttoned cream layers doing their best to present an orderly exterior over the shape he couldn’t control. Then, in that stammering, nasally voice of his:
“I—is it always this cold? Where you’re from?”
Orcus glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Oh.” Haumea’s spinning wobbled once, then steadied. “I—I think I could get used to it. Maybe.”
He hopefully wouldn’t have to, but Sedna didn’t say that or make any indication she was listening.
Orcus looked at him for another moment, gray eyes assessing as they always did—and then he turned back to the dark without comment, but he didn’t move away. And Haumea’s spinning slowly settled into something calmer beside him, even if he stayed hunched in his jacket. Eris was the last to move, drifting out of the no-man’s-land between the clusters and settling near Sedna without acknowledging that she’d done it. Her arms were still crossed, and neither of them spoke or even looked at the other.
They were alike in that way.
Eris could have cared about being the reason Pluto got demoted. She didn’t. Eris had mentioned it once, during one of the quiet stretches between stars, that she’d said to Pluto a long time ago that the dwarf planets were “just as good.” Sedna respected that. She also envied it.
“You’re staring.” Eris didn’t look at her when she said it.
Sedna looked away.
The first sign of real progress came when Alpha Centauri separated from Sol in her visual field. At great distances the two systems collapsed into a single point, and as the dwarf planets closed, the angular separation widened until she could distinguish three discrete stars: Alpha Centauri A and B in their binary orbit, and Sol, separate from them, distinct, hers.
“We’re inside twenty light-years,” she announced.
“¡Vámonos!” Makemake shouted, punching the air with his pencil, and the sheer volume of it in the cold, in the dark, in the middle of nothing, startled a laugh out of Charon, who startled one out of Pluto, who startled one out of Quaoar. That last one was a sound Sedna had never heard from Quaoar in the field, lower than she’d expected, caught between surprise and warmth, and the laughter rippled through the group’s gravity like a wave.
She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t stop theirs either, and the sound of it stayed with her.
They kept moving as the cold pressed in. The silence between Gonggong’s counts was less awkward than before, nothing pulling on her except the other eight, their collective mass so negligible it wouldn’t have registered on an instrument (or to any of the solar system's planets, probably) but she could feel them when they drifted close, small warm pressures against her field.
She envied Pluto despite the fact that it'd been less than an Earthling month. And the fact that she still barely knew him.
But she’d already caught herself watching him and Charon more than she should have, how they moved together without deciding to, Charon’s hand always finding Pluto’s arm. He looked used to having someone else’s gravity that close, comfortable with it in a way Sedna had never been with anyone. She was only good at this, this star-finding, this navigation, because she’d been alone. All her years at the edge of the Solar System with nothing to do but memorize the stars and patrol the border of everything she knew and occasionally meet with the other outer dwarf planets; that solitude was the only reason she could find Sol right now.
She had lived with it for longer than most probably could, and it had never once bothered her before. She’d had her post. Her telescope. Her sentinels, who were a team, not a family, and the distinction had always mattered to her because teams you could command and families you couldn’t. And now she was looking at Pluto’s hand on Charon’s arm and wondering what it would feel like to have someone close enough to tell her that her eyes were changing color.
“Sedna.”
Pluto’s voice, close. Closer than she’d expected, because she’d been drifting and he’d moved in without tripping her awareness. Charon was behind him as she always was.
“You haven’t rested.”
She opened her mouth to dismiss it. The words were right there (I don’t need rest, I’m fine, the heading requires constant correction) and then she looked at him and they stuck in her mouth, because Pluto wasn’t even trying to take over or shove her out of the way. He was just standing there with his gravity open and reaching to hers, hazel-going-dark eyes steady, doing nothing more than... noticing?
Her gravity clenched around her own core, pulling in against her.
She’d spent longer than she could count making sure nobody needed to look at her that closely, and having this half-stranger do it anyway made her want to look somewhere else. “Gonggong can keep the count,” Pluto said. “Orcus can keep the heading. You need to rest at least a little.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, flannel-lined sleeves bunched at his wrists, too big for him. “Just to be safe? You know?”
“Five intervals,” she said. “Five of Gonggong’s counts.”
Pluto’s mouth turned up at the corners. "Okay! You get your rest."
Sedna huffed, turning and heading away even against the distant urge to stay where she was and ignore Pluto's request completely. The formation’s edge was the farthest she could get from all of them without leaving, and she drifted there and let her focus go for the first time since Wise had ejected them, and the stars blurred and Sol vanished into the field. For five counts she floated and thought about the Sun, a star that had never spoken her name, out at the edge doing the work of paying attention. She’d watched Planet X leave and known what it meant. She’d summoned the sentinels and briefed them and prepared contingencies and tracked the route to the Kingdom and she'd somehow confronted Wise to his face (“What were you gossiping about with your little QUEEN?”) and been right about everything, every single assessment, and it'd hadn't even mattered.
At all.
And the Sun had never once looked at the Oort Cloud’s edge and thought: someone is keeping watch. He might look at nine dwarf planets showing up at his doorstep and see nothing but cosmic clutter, or maybe something else to control and she'd regret it all. She was going to find him anyway, and maybe then he'd acknowledge what they did for him.
(Stars above, she was petty.)
Why was she doing this? The Solar System had never noticed her, and it wasn’t because it was the right thing to do. She was angry, had been angry for longer than she’d let herself admit. She was still going back to it. She couldn’t let it go. It was the only home she'd ever known, the only one she wanted to know if she was being honest.
Stars, she was tired.
“Gong?” The fifth count roused her from her thoughts, her own internal counter reminding her that her rest was over. Sedna opened her eyes and found Sol, brighter, perceptibly brighter, starting to separate itself from the background, and locked on.
“Status?”
“Heading’s good,” Orcus reported, glancing at her. “How far?”
“Gong gong gong,” Gonggong added, and Quaoar looked over at Makemake, who was sitting next to Gonggong with his notepad, and raised an eyebrow. “‘Noticeably,’” he translated, pushing his glasses up with a scrunch of his nose. Then he caught himself, and looked at Quaoar with a brilliant, surprised smile, and Quaoar looked back at him with an expression Sedna had never seen on him in all the years she’d known him.
She couldn’t name it. Quaoar probably couldn’t either.
(It looked like pride, or something like it, or...)
“Stay with me,” she said, and pushed forward.
The Oort Cloud announced itself through her gravity.
A tug, distant and spread out, not the pull of one body but the collective haze of trillions of icy fragments scattered across a sphere one and a half light-years wide. Each one too small to matter. All of them together forming the outer edge, and Sedna had patrolled it for so long that feeling it in her field again was like hearing a frequency she’d been straining for without realizing her ears were searching.
She stopped, and the others stopped with her.
They didn’t stop in two groups.
Quaoar was beside Makemake, the two of them trading quiet observations about stellar drift in a mix of drawl and rapid-fire that had become, somewhere in the crossing, a single conversation. Orcus had drifted into Pluto’s gravity, and Pluto hadn’t flinched from it. Charon was next to Gonggong, humming something low while he counted along. Eris was near Sedna, hood down, present.
Haumea spun between them all, and Sedna still couldn’t figure out how he managed to keep the whole group together without trying. Pluto had told her what Haumea had said to him once, back in the Kuiper Belt. “I’m sorry the planets took you out of their club for being different.” Haumea just offered. (She envied that too, if she was counting. She was trying not to count.)
“That’s it,” Makemake whispered, glasses catching the Cloud’s dim scatter. “Isn’t it?”
Sedna felt it. The distribution. The density gradient. Sol’s pull, weak and present. She knew it like she knew her own gravity, buried deep and unbreakable in her core.
“We’re home,” Pluto said, sounding completely relieved, breath rushing out of him like he'd been holding it this entire time. Charon pressed into his side. Gonggong let out a long trembling “Goooong” that Sedna felt in her gravity before she heard it. Quaoar took the wheat stalk out of his mouth and just held it.
“Home,” Eris repeated, shoulders relaxing a fraction. “Joy.”
Sedna’s core ached.
Because the Oort Cloud was exactly where she’d left it, and it didn’t care that she’d been gone. But eight other people’s gravity was pressed up against hers and the whole thing felt different anyway, and Sedna couldn’t look at any of it head-on without her gravity doing something embarrassing.
(It hadn’t even been that long.)
“Gonggong,” she said, when she could. “Start a new count.”
“Gong,” he said, and grinned, the gap in his teeth catching the first edge of Sol’s light from one and a half light-years away.
Sedna set her heading inward.
She set the pace, and they kept up.