Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every pioneer who left home — and found one.

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Kai's parents told them over dinner, between the salad and the main course, as if the timing would cushion the impact.

"We've been accepted as pioneers," Mom said. "We're moving to Mongolia."

The fork stopped halfway to Kai's mouth. Layla, who was seventeen and dramatic on her best days, knocked over her water glass. Dad caught it with the reflexes of a man who had anticipated this reaction.

"Mongolia," Kai repeated. The word felt foreign in their mouth, which was ironic given that foreignness was the whole point.

"Ulaanbaatar," Dad clarified, as if the specific city would make it better. "There's a small Bahá'í community there that needs support. A family with experience. The National Assembly asked, and we prayed about it, and..."

"And you said yes," Layla finished. "Without asking us."

The silence that followed was the kind that has weight — you could feel it pressing on the ceiling, the walls, the four people sitting at a table that suddenly felt too small for the conversation happening around it.

Mom spoke carefully. "We didn't say yes without thinking about you. We said yes because we thought about you. About the kind of people we want you to become. About the kind of world we want you to help build."

"I don't want to build a world in Mongolia," Layla said. "I want to finish junior year at Lincoln. I want to go to prom. I want my life."

"Your life comes with you," Dad said.

"My friends don't."

Mongolia. A country they couldn't find on a map without Google.

Later, after Layla had stormed to her room and slammed the door with the force of someone who wanted the whole house to know she was angry, Kai sat on the back porch and looked at the stars.

"You're quiet," Mom said, sitting beside them.

"I'm thinking."

"About Mongolia?"

"About pioneering. About what it actually means to leave everything for something you believe in."

Mom was quiet for a moment. "It means exactly that. Leaving. Not because the leaving is easy, but because the believing is stronger."

"Do you believe it's stronger?"

"I do. But I also know that believing something doesn't mean it doesn't hurt."

"When do we leave?" they asked.

"August."

Four months. Sixteen weeks. One hundred and twelve days to say goodbye to everything.

Mom put her arm around them. The stars were bright. Somewhere very far away, a city called Ulaanbaatar was waiting for a family it didn't know it needed yet.

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The hardest part wasn't packing. The hardest part was the goodbye with Jesse.

Jesse Chen had been Kai's best friend since fourth grade, when they'd bonded over a shared obsession with graphic novels and an inability to throw a football. Seven years of friendship compressed into boxes and memories and the particular ache of knowing that someone you love is about to become a face on a screen.

"Mongolia," Jesse said, for possibly the hundredth time.

"Mongolia."

"Do they have Wi-Fi?"

"Yes, Jesse. They have Wi-Fi."

"Do they have good ramen?"

"They have khushuur. Fried dumplings."

"Is that good?"

"I'll let you know."

Jesse pulled his knees to his chest. In the streetlight, he looked younger than sixteen — or maybe older, the way people look when they're trying not to cry and the effort ages them.

"I know why your parents are doing this," he said. "I respect it. The whole pioneering thing — going somewhere people need you — that's noble. But it sucks for the people you leave behind."

"I know."

"I'm going to miss you so much that it'll be physically annoying."

"Same."

"Don't say 'same.' Say something real."

Kai turned to face him. "Jesse. You're my best friend. You've been my best friend for seven years. Moving to Mongolia doesn't change that. Distance doesn't end friendship. It just changes its shape."

"That's a very Bahá'í thing to say."

"It's a very true thing to say."

Jesse wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, the way boys do when they're pretending they're not crying. "Send me drawings. Of Mongolia. I want to see it through your eyes."

"Every week."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

They sat on the roof until midnight. They didn't say goodbye because goodbye implies an ending, and this wasn't an ending. It was a stretching — the distance between two stars increasing, but the light still connecting them across the dark.

The plane rose. San Francisco shrank. The Pacific expanded below them like a blue infinity.

They would send it to Jesse from Ulaanbaatar. The first of many.

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Ulaanbaatar was wind.

Here, the land went on forever. The sky was so big it made you dizzy.

The Bahá'í community was small — twelve people, including their family. They met in someone's living room for devotionals and study circles. The twelve consisted of a Mongolian couple (Batu and Anu), their three children, an elderly woman named Oyunaa who had been a Bahá'í for thirty years, a young university student named Temuulen, and now the Morrison family.

Twelve people. In a city of 1.5 million.

"It's smaller than I expected," Mom said at their first devotional gathering, looking at the circle of faces in Anu's living room.

They drew Oyunaa's hands — weathered and beautiful, always holding prayer beads. They drew Temuulen's face — young, eager, perpetually reading. They drew the steppe outside the city — endless, gold, wind-swept, impossible.

Layla, meanwhile, was undergoing her own transformation, though she would have denied it furiously. She started teaching English to Anu's children — reluctantly at first, then with increasing investment, then with a creativity that surprised everyone, including herself. She invented games, wrote songs, and discovered that she had a gift for making complicated things simple.

"I don't like Mongolia," she told Kai one evening.

"I know."

"But I like Anu's kids. And I like Oyunaa. And the sunsets here are insane."

"Does that count as liking Mongolia?"

"It counts as liking parts of Mongolia. Don't push it."

Kai smiled. The distance between who Layla had been and who she was becoming was closing, slowly, like a star drifting toward a constellation it didn't know it belonged to.

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Six months in, on a Tuesday that was so cold the air itself seemed to crystallize, Kai had a realization.

They were sitting in Oyunaa's kitchen, drinking suutei tsai — Mongolian salt tea, which Kai had despised on first taste and now craved daily — when Oyunaa said something that rearranged everything.

"Kai, do you know why I became a Bahá'í?"

"No."

"Because a pioneer came. Thirty years ago. A woman from America — young, scared, alone. She came to Mongolia because she believed that every person on earth deserved to hear about unity and justice and the oneness of humanity. She didn't speak Mongolian. She didn't know anyone. She had nothing except her faith and her willingness to be uncomfortable."

"What happened to her?"

"She stayed for three years. She taught us. She learned from us. She cried every week because she missed her family. And she changed my life."

Oyunaa paused. Her prayer beads clicked softly.

Kai felt the words settle into them like stones dropped into deep water.

Same stars. Different angle.

Kai looked out the window at Ulaanbaatar — vast, cold, wind-swept, strange, and increasingly beloved. They thought about the pioneer who had come thirty years ago and changed Oyunaa's life. They thought about their parents, who had left everything comfortable to be here. They thought about Layla, who was becoming a teacher despite herself.

And they thought about the distance between stars — the space that looked empty but was actually full of light, full of connection, full of the invisible threads that bind people across oceans and continents and cultures.

Home, Kai decided, was not where you started. Home was where you chose to be. And choosing — that was the bravest, most beautiful, most terrifying thing a person could do.

They picked up their pencil and started a new drawing.

THE END

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Crimson Ark Publishing creates fiction about the courage to cross borders. The Distance Between Stars is for anyone who has ever left everything familiar for something they believed in.