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When I was a child, I lived with my father on a farm 10 kilometers northeast of Praxis. There was a wheat field I watched grow tall each year from my window. Year after year, I anticipated their long stalks grow to heights seemingly shorter than years before, turning golden-brown and then being cut down with my father’s sharp blade.

On warm nights in the summer, I’d open my window and step out onto the straw roof of our barnhouse. If I looked over my shoulder, I could see the thick fog from Praxian reactors breathing light from the Zentrum. If I really squinted, I could see tiny points of moving light above the Earth’s surface, skittering along in skewed lines like marching ants.

The story I’m about to tell you began on the day the lights stopped glowing, and the ants scattered in all directions. The reactor fog stopped flowing in straight plumes toward the sky and started to be pulled in all directions like an angry spider’s web. That year, the wheat didn’t grow at all, but my father found another use for his blade.

I knew something had gone wrong when I approached the house one afternoon to see my father standing in the doorframe. With his cell in one hand and the TV remote in another, his eyebrows tilted up like the pitch of the barn’s shingles. That night, the absence of light from Praxis darkened the sky, sucking out its amber haze. The fog, too, was nearly gone, and the sky had reacquired some rightful dominance. My father peered out the window over the kitchen sink at the sky.

We had stayed up in the night to listen for news. The TV channels stopped broadcasting, so my father unearthed a radio from the attic. Sometimes we heard voices weaving in and out of the static.

What I couldn’t understand was the magnitude of the sky’s brightness. With the Praxis light extinguished, I could see more stars than I had ever imagined seeing with my own eyes. Images I’d only seen from orbital telescopes were passing through my eyes—images of a thousand, million, glowing points of light in all directions, a spinning shaft of bright clouds jutting out from the horizon. The sight was more amazing than any building in Praxis, any rocket launch or anything like that. I had seen the sky for the first time—the real sky.