The observatory sat on the highest point of the Beauregard estate, a squat stone tower with a brass dome that had once been polished to a mirror shine before the rain began its patient work of rusting it away. Margaret stood at the base of the tower stairs, barefoot in the四月 grass, and looked up at the lens darkened by a decade of neglect.

From here, on clear nights, she could see the flash of rocket launches from Cape Canadal, orange pinpricks in the Florida sky, small as the candles her mother used to light in the church window on Good Friday. Each launch sent a ripple through the town of Beaure Springs. Some called it progress. Others called it the death of something older, something that lived in the red clay and the magnolia trees and the bones of the men buried on this land since the war that split the world in two.

Margaret called it nothing. She called nothing to anyone. She was twenty-six, unmarried, and the last Beauregard to draw breath in this house. Her brothers were dead—one in the war, one in a riding accident—and her sisters had married men from other states and moved to cities where the air didn't taste of magnolia pollen and decay.

She climbed the tower stairs. The steps were worn concave by the feet of generations of Beauregards who had looked at the same stars and seen nothing different from what their ancestors had seen. At the top, she pushed open the dome's observation door and climbed the spiral ladder to the telescope platform.

The lens was cloudy, but it still worked. She adjusted the focus, her hands moving with a muscle memory that had not faded despite years of disuse, and pointed the telescope toward Florida.

Another launch. This one silent from Mississippi, but she could feel the vibration in the floorboards, a tremor that traveled through the earth like a heartbeat. She watched the rocket climb, a thin white line against the deep blue, and thought about the men inside it, strapped into their chairs, looking down at the earth growing smaller and smaller, and wondered if any of them thought about the people left behind, the ones whose lives had not changed even as the world beyond the sky did.

Her grandmother had told her, on her deathbed, in a voice so weak it was almost sound: 'The stars don't care about us, child. They never have. But we care about each other, and that has to be enough.'

It wasn't enough. Nothing was enough. But it was what she had.

Margaret lowered the telescope and sat in the dust of the observation platform, surrounded by the ghosts of her family, and watched the rocket disappear into the upper atmosphere, leaving a trail of contrail that slowly dissolved into nothing.

--- OTMES-v2-8D2F5A-101-M2-260-8R5870-C0D7 E_total: 10.1 | Dominant: M2 | Angle: 260-deg | Rank: 8 M_vector: [5, 4, 6, 5, 4, 6, 4, 1, 5, 7] | N: [0.5, 0.5] | K: [0.5, 0.5]