Stardust

[…] never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.

—Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

You have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.

—Homestuck, Andrew Hussie

     It was one of those days where July hallucinated her dead twin (may her memory be a blessing) everywhere she went, and she was honestly sick and tired of it.

     At that exact moment, June was perched on the top of a parked subway car, waving occasionally at July excitedly as the latter tried desperately to ignore her. July was at one of the many chipped plastic tables set up on that particular subway station, her back turned to the barricaded stairwell, just trying to eat her afternoon sandwich and ignore the ache in her muscles. Not for the first time, she was idly daydreaming about a warm bubble bath—an impossible fantasy, but one she used to live out as a kid, and she missed those days desperately.

     Her fantasizing was, of course, rudely cut short by the image of June prancing and waving from on top of the subway car in front of her.

     The worst part of these moments wasn’t the simple act of seeing June’s face—no, she had been able to handle that for years. The worst part was the fact that June was, very consistently, the same middle schooler that July remembered. Time went on, but her image didn’t age a day. The more years went by, the more July hated seeing the ghoulish mockery of her childhood parading around like a gangly, poorly-strung puppet.

     “Jules!”

     July started at the sound of Cass’s voice, whipping her head over with enough force to crack her neck.

     “You’re back on duty in five,” her partner reminded her. Cass looked deceptively calm, as always; her body was a dark, thin line in the flickering half-light of the subway station, taut, poised. Her bulletproof vest and thick cargo pants hid how tightly her skin was pulled over her bones; the careful slant of her thick eyebrows and the neutral tilt to her lips disguised the slight tinge of concern July caught in her voice.

     July gave her a thumbs-up and Cass turned back to her position peering through the peepholes in the stairwell barricade.

     She turned back toward the subway car and shoved the rest of her sandwich in her mouth. June’s long blonde hair was dripping fat wet red droplets onto the roof of the car at that point. July’s hand instinctively went to touch her own ponytail—dry, obviously. She shook herself and stood up, brushing crumbs off her own cargo pants.

     Anniversaries always sucked.

###

     The first anniversary was the worst. They barely had more than a few generators and some boarded-up subway stations at that point. The water hadn’t turned back on until a couple of years in, and wet wipes were a currency valued higher than the dollar, so everyone stank like shit and was crammed into a single station, sweating on each other while some asshole tried to talk loud enough for everyone to hear. Simultaneously, everyone was having a fucking panic attack, collectively, about the possibility of some Dusties busting down their barricades while they were all gathered in one station and picking them off like they’d done in the bomb shelters.

     July barely even remembered what the speaker said that year. There was some kind of memorial setup in the station—really just a hastily scrawled “REST IN PEACE” on dingy cardboard and a few family names thrown on as an afterthought—that everyone left halfheartedly scrounged offerings at for a couple of months afterwards, til they inevitably got kicked into the tracks, or decomposed into pathetic heaps of rotting table scraps.

     Luckily, none of the following memorials had been nearly as bad. For one thing, she had Axel to calm her down.

     The first thing he did when he saw her walking down the subway tracks was hop off the platform, crouching to absorb the shock as he hit the train tracks heavily. He unfolded his gangly limbs and popped back upright at an impressive speed, a massive grin on his freckled face, and scooped her up in his arms for a bear hug. July smothered a giggle, squeezing him with only-slightly-exaggerated passion, and drew back for a moment to peck him on the lips.

     “How’s it going?” she asked—shouted, really, over the sound of a couple hundred or so people chattering and milling around on the platform above them.

     He shrugged. “Eh, they’re still setting up.” He knelt down, lacing his hands together above his knee. July stepped up onto the offered boost and launched herself onto the platform, letting out an unladylike grunt when her knees hit the metal of the yellow warning line. Several nearby people automatically stepped back to make room for her not-entirely-graceful entrance. Axel followed a second later, using his deceptively muscular arms and height advantage to scramble up with a tad less power but quite a bit more grace.

     In a moment, he was upright next to her, an arm slung around her shoulder as she took in this year’s anniversary scene. They now had events on multiple platforms, but that didn’t stop any one platform from being less crowded. People were packed into both sides of the station, mostly milling around on foot, the occasional person lounging on the benches that still dotted the platforms. A few people perched on the defunct turnstiles; a few on-duty soldiers hovered by the barricades to keep watch on the stairs up to the street. Someone had clearly made a valiant effort to sweep, judging by the heaps of glittering dust and debris in the corners, but the normal grit and grime was ground so stubbornly into the concrete that July felt it was a lost cause.

     Over in the corner of the platform, a few people were fiddling with a microphone, the wire of which traveled all the way down to speakers fixed to one of the poles in the middle of the subway tracks. Someone that July vaguely recognized was taping the cord against a wall, while someone that July definitely recognized was shifting his weight from foot to foot, occasionally saying something into the microphone, and shaking his head.

     She craned her neck, stood up on her tiptoes to brush her lips just shy of Axel’s ear. “Do we have to go to the one Tyler’s speaking at?”

     Axel shot her a sidelong glance and she could practically see the gears in his head turning to figure out if it was worth it to correct her or not. Bloody hell, can you please call him General Flynn for once?—a sentence she’d heard way too often.

     Apparently, he decided it was not, in fact, worth it this time, because all he said was “He’s family.”

     “Not to me.” July’s tone of voice could, conceivably, be called “bratty.”

     Axel raised his eyes to the ceiling. It was a solid few seconds before he finally replied. “Do you want to be here with me or not?”

     July didn’t bother answering, just huffed and leaned into Axel’s shoulder a bit more. He had a point—she didn’t want to go to these things alone, and Tyler would probably throw a shitfit if Axel wasn’t at the one Tyler specifically was speaking at. But still. She didn’t have to like it.

     Axel and Tyler definitely didn’t look related, much less act like it. Tyler was solid, a 6-foot-something mass of muscle, tattoos that would have gotten him banned from July’s parents’ bookstore (may their memories be a blessing), and the kind of skinhead buzzcut that sent her into fight-or-flight when she first saw him. He had a tendency to look at July like she was a pile of cat puke he found on his pillow just before bed, when he bothered to make eye contact with her at all. July felt very strongly that he should go fuck himself to death with a baseball bat embedded with rusty nails, and may his memory be a fucking curse on anyone who cared enough to think back on it.

     But despite all of that, Axel cared about him, so July had to put up with it. If they weren’t dating, July probably wouldn’t have to talk to the Major General at all—but she cared about Axel, so she had to put up with it. There was a lot she had to put up with, these days.

     Her dismal train of thought was interrupted by a screeching, grating blast of mic feedback, which prompted Axel to let out an animalistic groan and clap his hands over his ears. July skimmed her fingertips lightly over his back in sympathy as Tyler began to speak.

     “Sorry about that.” Nothing, save the Dusties themselves, filled her with more violent intent than Tyler’s calculated gruff salt-of-the-earth schtick. “Thank you for coming. I reckon we’ve got more people here than we’ve had any other year.”

     She rolled her eyes, not even bothering to hide it with the crowd so focused on Tyler. She was already starting to find herself wishing she had gone with Cass, instead. A lot could be communicated silently through the thin line of Cass’s lips, and Axel was both hilariously blind to facial expressions and mulishly dedicated to never making fun of his uncle under any circumstances, which was making July’s disdain awfully boring to express.

     “Our numbers have grown by the hundreds over the years,” Tyler was saying, boringly, “and I believe they’re going to continue to swell. I have faith in our cause and I have faith in our people—together, united, we stand in opposition to the monsters who took our families from us. Took our country from us.”

     It was only a few hundred of them crammed into the subway system, against the entire fucking government. Who did Tyler think he was kidding?

     (Internally, July felt that she would do better than most of these sadsacks simply by virtue of being willing to blow up the Senate—which, technically, would be the second time that building was subject to lethal explosives—with the Dusties in it this time, if it would get rid of them. She chose not to share that thought with anyone other than Cass, who usually responded to it with the blessing that was one of her rare peals of laughter, and in one utterly delightful iteration of this interaction, asked “Who is ‘them,’ the Dusties or the Senators?” to which July simply winked, setting off a delicious full-bodied laughing fit from Cass which she basked in righteously.)

     July was zoning out again. She could tell because she came to with a start when Axel pinched the inside of her wrist. It was a reminder which July appreciated and resented in equal proportions. She pinched his wrist right back.

     “In honor of those we lost on this day,” Tyler was saying, much to July’s dismay, and then he was interrupted by a siren going off.

     In the corner of the station, by the barricade, a propped-up light fed by one of the endless extension cords flashed glaringly red, and the speaker that lay at its base started blaring repetitive, short wails, in sets of three. One of July’s hands automatically shot to her gun; the other hand grabbed Axel’s on instinct. She swallowed, hard, feeling rather giddy; a combination of ecstasy and the feeling of her nerves being scraped over with a bare razor swirled inside her to form… some sort of feeling.

     Within seconds, Tyler was no longer at the microphone. Squads immediately began collecting their members, either hopping down onto the tracks or falling into formation around the captain that was already at this station. On a code red, July was supposed to report to Teiddan—Captain Testa—and technically, Axel was as well, but he immediately started pushing towards where Tyler stood at the front of the station, already in conversation with a woman in glasses and a regulation ponytail.

     “—Tell Kahue I don’t appreciate a goddamn code red over it,” Tyler was saying. The woman—July glanced at her armband, red, lieutenant—nodded. He tossed a glance at Axel and gave him a brief head-jerk that, in his mind, was probably respectful. “Dismissed,” he said, and the woman scurried off, then: “Ax. Why aren’t you reporting to Captain Testa?”

     “What’s the news?” Axel didn’t bother adding a “sir.” He never did. Trying to understand his thought processes would be the death of July.

     “Ship crash on the surface, few miles out south.”

     “Dusty?” Axel’s grip was suddenly crushing her smaller hand bones. She intentionally did not wince.

     “Unsure.” Tyler’s gaze skittered fretfully over the mostly-dispersed crowd “Kahue called a code red over it. Dumbass decision, if you ask me, it’s not on top of us. No reason to make the sheep panic.”

     July’s heartbeat was slowing, very slightly. It wasn’t a raid.

     “Probably want to get out there before the Dusties do,” Axel was saying. “If it’s one of theirs, we could use the tech, and if it’s not…”

     Tyler waved dismissively. “Go report to Teiddan. You can go check it out. I’ll batten down the hatches here for the rest of the day, make an announcement or two to calm things down.”

     “Thanks.” Tyler was already starting to fix his gaze on someone across the room; meanwhile, July’s palms were itchy and leaking sweat, and June’s blood-soaked mop of hair was bobbing pleasantly behind Tyler’s back, and July felt very, very queasy. She was fairly sure she wouldn’t get another chance at going aboveground for the next few months.

     “Sir,” she started, but he immediately cut her off.

     “Yeah, you go with them. Axel, you watch her.” With that, the Major General strode off, leaving June to grin with her sharp red teeth only a foot or two from July’s face.

     She snuck a glance at Axel’s face, which was looking notably paler than normal. The veins on his neck and forehead, already too-visible under his paper-thin skin at the best of times, stood out in angrily vibrant blues. As soon as he met her eyes, his jaw loosened and he offered a weak grin. “I need my headphones,” he said, and dropped her hand to hop down onto the tracks without further comment.

     July stuck her tongue out at her dead twin before following suit.