The Inheritance

He left me his charts. All four hundred routes, the life's work, in the bound vellum books cartographers still use because vellum survives a hull breach better than any screen. I spent the mourning month doing what apprentices do, cataloguing the inheritance, checking each route against the public registry so the guild could confirm them. Three hundred and ninety-nine matched the registry exactly. The four-hundredth did not. The four-hundredth route was in Velo's hand, dated nine years ago, the year he took me on, and it described a jump from a charted system to a destination that the registry did not list and the star catalogues did not contain. A route to nowhere. Except Velo did not draw routes to nowhere. Every line in those four hundred books had been flown. And this route had a return leg drawn in, which meant Velo had not only jumped to the impossible place, he had come back, and in nine years had never once spoken of it.