The green nebula tugs Mateo's rocket out of orbit and it crashes upside down in a field where the cracked saffron crocuses hang gray and wilted. He drags himself along with his helmet tucked under one arm and spots a tiny, broken cloud dripping a thin thread of water that vanishes before it can touch the ground. "Oh, dear," he thinks, and runs off to fetch his dented tin watering can.
On the second planet, the sun hangs so low that the river boils and glows. Ice crystals the size of coins slide down the mountainside and melt against the hot stone. Mateo kneels, catches one in his fingers — already warm, already shrinking in his palm — and slips it into his pocket before it disappears.
No, no, no, he whispers, weaving a net from the shoreline vines to catch the last crystals on their way to the frozen lake. His fingers pull the net taut, thread by thread, with urgent care, while the crystals hover just centimeters from slipping down the slope into the icy water that would wash them away with a single breath.
On the third, the oaks bow under thousands of leaves that refuse to let go, their veins red and trembling in short, cold gusts. The air smells of sap and old wood, and every little leaf crackles like wet paper squeezed between two fingers.
Mateo wraps his arms around a trunk and shakes it. The leaves tumble down in a waterfall and bury him to the knees in orange and gold. For a moment he just stands there, covered, blinking, a leaf shaped like a smiling face stuck to his forehead. He peels it off, laughs, and goes on to shake the next tree.
The fourth planet is silence: a world of blue-white ice where every river is locked mid-flow and a crack splits the ground pole to pole, creaking, widening another finger's width with each tremor. Nothing stirs except the light, which breaks into two long bands of shadow across the slick.
Mateo crawls on his knees across the ice and presses the star crystal — warm, kept safe since the first planet — against the edge of the crack. His boots skid, the crystal sways over the nothing below, and he doesn't think: he nudge it with two fingers and it drops with a clear, bell-like chime.
The crack shuts with a dull thud, and the rocket — patched up and decorated with a saffron crocus, a pressed sun, a curled oak leaf, and a single snowflake — starts to hum again. Outside, the four planet-stars shine in a neat row: green, gold, ochre, white. And between them, his home blinks, still, waiting for him.