When Forever Ends (Part 1: A Game of Chess)

I

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O n e

Ugh. I hate math. It's just a bunch of numbers to me.

Look on the bright side, I reminded myself. It's the last class of the day. You can go home after this. I sighed and glared once more at the hopeless jumble of polynomials scrawled on the blackboard.

"Simplify the expression 5x + 9(x - 1) - 6."

E equals m c squared, I thought. How should I know?

"Alright, class," the teacher's voice cut in. "School's over." As everyone began rushing around, packing up to go home, I heard someone mutter, "I can't believe he made us learn stuff on the last day of school. We're supposed to watch films all day."

"I'm outta here," I said, to no one in particular, and scurried from the room.

I couldn't wait to see my friends after school. We were trying to find out more about human history. We had heard that humans hadn't always lived here on Magnus (which apparently means "great" in some ancient language), but that may just be a legend. Our town's library claimed that it didn't have anything more than two millennia old. But we wanted more. There were hints here and there, in older books, that the residents of Magnus weren't the only humans out there.

But I'll go into that later. Right now, I needed to get to the local library.

•••

"Hi, guys, sorry I'm late," I huffed as I slid into a seat at the library next to my friend Maya. "I just ran five blocks from school. I'm kinda out of breath right now."

"S'okay," Sofie assured me. She and Maya both went to a school that was only two blocks from the library, so they hadn't had to walk far.

She was a very slim girl with slightly tanned skin and flaming red hair that never seemed to lay flat like she wanted it to. Her eyes were the color of emeralds and her smile was almost blinding, though she rarely cracked a grin around anyone other than us. She was the kind of person who would never turn down the offer of a good book and so always kept a small green book bag with her containing two or three books from whatever genre she was into at the moment.

Maya was similar. She was also slender, but had straight black hair, always in a long braid down her left shoulder. She also had a stunning smile, like Sofie, but used it more often. Maya's passion was art. She loved using watercolors homemade from things like the dark blue riverflowers and the sparkling, metallic green seablades that grew by the ocean. I had seen her room a few times and it was filled with astonishing landscape paintings and portraits of each one of her friends.

"Thanks, Sophie," I replied. "By the way, where's Will?"

"Right here," Will said, waving his hand in my face.

He was mostly a quiet boy with short, black hair, dark eyes and a taste for the color black. It wouldn't have been hard for him to enter the library and pull up a chair without our noticing. Contrasting with his shadowlike appearance, however, he loved food. He'd already eaten a little bit of almost every kind of food available and I'd seen him get into arguments over which of two foods was better.

Maya pushed her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. "Oh, good. Everyone's here. Now we can begin."

•••

For the next few hours, we searched through page after page, book after book, shelf after shelf, for anything about Earth. We found nothing. Either all records of the planet were destroyed in whatever caused us to leave, which was highly unlikely, or someone wanted to destroy all evidence of our former home. I guessed it was the latter.