“After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.”

“Few there were who could change his courses by counsel. None by force.”

“In this land of great opportunity and few roads (in most regions the Alaskan Highway is the only real road), the immense distances can only be reasonably handled by air, in fact, half of all the private aircraft in the world are registered in Alaska. Near any urban center, such as they were, I couldn't look up into the sky without seeing at least one fixed wing clawing itself into the sky.”

“Suspended as we were, with no horizon line or landscape or anything else to draw a separation between the water and the sky, I pictured us up there with the stars. Another story written in tiny lights. We were a constellation put in the sky-- two people holding hands, floating peacefully above everything else, in a beautiful, perfect moment.”

“Sometimes,” he said after a second that lasted a million years, “things get broken. And they can’t be fixed.”

“They also learned that not everything broken could be fixed, and that not everything ruined cold be thrown away. Sometimes the damaged things were all you had to work with.”