Banished world

On the night of January 9, 2015 — the night Sri Lanka changed its president and the town of Ratnapura emptied its streets — four strangers boarded the last bus to Palabaddala and never arrived. A failed gem trader carrying the weight of a lost bet. A young doctor finishing her very first shift. A sixteen-year-old fast bowler hiding mud on his shoes from his mother. A butcher with five children at home. Four ordinary lives, on an ordinary road, in the rain. None of them knew the others' names. None of them would ever forget them. When a boulder from the cliffs above the Kalu River destroyed the bus, something intervened. Not luck. Not chance. Something older than both — beings of light whose war in the high places of the island had sent that boulder onto the road in the first place. The four were pulled from the edge of ending. But survival, they quickly learned, came with a cost. Returning to the world they knew was impossible.  What remained was a single path, offered by a being of green light from a solar system whose name none of them knew: a world far beyond their sun. A six-year journey through the dark between stars. And a destination that nobody who had seen it had ever thought to call safe.