Stardust

     Sage was having her sixth in a series of absolutely terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad days.

     Riding in cars made her nauseous. The physical motion made her feel horribly physically ill, and the psychological weight of the concept of “highways” made her actively want to throw up.

     Riding in that car made her want to throw up, collect herself, and then proceed to strangle every single person in it until they shut up and listened to her. She was still privately fuming even after they ditched it to hike to their campsite, even while she quietly unpacked their tent from Teiddan’s bag and set it up, even as she began sweeping dead leaves and other detritus out of a small perimeter a few yards away.

     Most of her rancor was, as far as she was concerned, entirely justified. Axel sat and sulked with his earbuds in the entire time she was working. Aston had already been in a temper the entire car ride, and continued to stalk around making catty comments and being utterly unhelpful at the campsite. At least Teiddan had the good sense to hold tent poles for her while she hammered in stakes; still, it had been an extremely suboptimal work environment so far, and things were not looking optimistic for the next twenty-four hours either.

     “Axel,” Teiddan said, very loudly, startling Sage out of her leaf-sweeping reverie. It was the first thing he’d said in several hours, other than to make the occasional logistical comment on hiking routes and tent setups.

     The teenager did not respond, but he did unhook one earbud from his ear. Teiddan didn’t seem bothered.

     “Would you go and gather firewood for me?”

     This seemed to Sage to be a weak and transparent attempt at getting rid of Axel. To her surprise, he smiled at Teiddan. It was quick and crooked, and could almost be taken as sarcastic, but it was a genuine smile—and it was followed up by Axel scrambling to his feet and disappearing off into the woods without a word.

     Teiddan went over to where Aston was sitting (with his back to Sage—unsurprisingly, he hadn’t spoken directly to her once since the previous night, which admittedly could have been due to her very pointedly taking a nap after Teiddan’s briefing, before he could approach her privately). After a muffled exchange, the two of them came over, Aston very carefully staring at a spot somewhere several feet to her right.

     “I’d like a word with the two of you.” Teiddan sat cross-legged on the forest floor in a way that brooked no argument. Sage followed suit, with Aston trailing behind only by a few seconds.

     Teiddan pressed sepia fingertips together in front of his face, the lines on his forehead and cheekbones even more pronounced than normal. He’d appeared sleep-deprived since the moment she’d met him, and the impression was only intensifying as time went on. “I want to apologize for Axel’s behavior. He’s… having a difficult time.”

     “He’s a brat,” Aston said shortly. “I don’t know why the general put him on this mission. He’s a child—“

     “Axel is an adult.” Teiddan’s voice was strikingly gentle. It was strange that someone so quiet and reserved could cut Aston off mid-sentence, but whatever he was doing, it worked. “He looks young, but he’s in his twenties. He has as much right to be here as you or I.”

     Aston’s face twitched. “Fine. He’s acting like a child, and if I knew someone who acted like this, I wouldn’t—“

     “Axel is the closest thing Tyler has to a son.” Teiddan began idly swirling one finger through the dirt as he spoke, his voice taking on a gentle lilt, like he was telling a story. Sage couldn’t help herself—she leaned in slightly as he spoke. “Axel’s mother—Tyler’s sister—she was like a sister to me, too. Clodagh died only a couple of years before the invasion, and I don’t think either of us ever recovered. He wants to raise Axel right, in her memory.”

     “I don’t think the assassination of a world leader is the right place to work out sentimental family drama,” Aston said dryly.

     At this point, Sage tamped down on her urge to jump in and redirect him. She was tired; too tired to care about whatever hole he was digging for himself.

     Surprisingly, Teiddan didn’t snap at his petty comment—just regarded him quietly for a couple of silent seconds before speaking again. “He wants Axel to be a man’s man—to leave a legacy he can be proud of. I think he’s always found Axel somewhat… lacking, in that regard. I think it clouds his decision-making sometimes. But I… clean up after him.”

     “You’d rather be able to keep an eye on Axel,” Sage said.

     At that, he looked over toward her and broke into a delighted smile. “Yes, precisely.”

     “I understand.” She purposefully did not look at Aston. “You don’t have the rank to question the general’s actions—“

     “Oh, I could,” he said airily. “Tyler and I have been friends for much longer than Axel’s been alive. Him and Clo saved my life when I was kicked out of the military—rank is just a pretense between us. But Tyler and I have a vast array of ideological disagreements, and I find myself having to choose my battles carefully in times like these.”

     Sage nodded slowly. The impression she’d initially gotten of the captain’s priorities was slowly unraveling. If she was being honest, she was beginning to rather like the guy.

     “I don’t want to give the impression that I expect either of you to put up with his behavior without complaint. I’ll be talking to him myself later as well.” One hand drifted up to rub his temple. “I think he’s been having problems with his girlfriend lately, and I need to have a word with him about not letting that affect the mission.”

     “The blonde girl? From the platform?” Sage recalled them being particularly touchy-feely, but the girl had seemed much friendlier to Sage, a complete stranger, than she was to Axel even while he was clinging to her like a limpet. This did not paint a very flattering picture.

     “July, yes,” Teiddan said.

     An image of the girl’s freckled face, quiet and still and warm in the sunlight, burst into Sage’s mind. She’d liked her style. She’d also liked the way her hips curved out and the boxy seam of her pants clung to them, and the nimble arcs her small hands carved through the air as she talked, and how full and soft her lips looked even from a good few feet away. If Sage dreamed about every woman she had those types of thoughts about, though, she’d be dreaming about two-thirds of the women she saw on the street, and not only did that not happen, it was extremely strange for her to be dreaming about a stranger at all. But maybe it was entirely meaningless.

     “I hope you get the teenage drama worked out,” Aston said, still with an edge of haughtiness to his voice, but toned down significantly from a few minutes ago. “If you’ll excuse me, I have actually important things to handle, like planning a heist in a Dusty facility that I have never been to in my life.”

     With that, he sprung to his feet and loped off without another word. Teiddan watched him walk away with a strange expression on his face.

     “Am I putting too much on you?” he finally said. “The both of you, I mean. Aston sounds overwhelmed.”

     “He’s just moping because I think your plan is insanely risky and possibly deadly.”

     That smile came back. Having Teiddan smile directly at her felt like a beam of sun washing over her skin; she understood, briefly, why Axel took so much direction from him without complaint. “I appreciate the honesty.”

     Without thinking about it, she smiled back, lips tight and cracked from holding her face painfully still all day. “While I’m being honest, he’s probably excited about being smarter than everyone else. He just starts pouting when I don’t support him. He’ll get over it.”

     Teiddan made a noncommittal noise, gaze trailing back over to where Aston left.

     Sage sat there for a minute, rubbing the palms of her hands over the sturdy canvas of her pants as she thought. The hole that constantly yawned in the back of her mind tugged insistently at her thoughts. It twisted them into a circle that funneled them all into one place—something very abstract, something that she didn’t quite grasp the boundaries of yet, but it kept drawing her in all the same.

     “I’d like to try talking to Axel before you do,” she found herself saying.

     Teiddan looked surprised by this. She couldn’t blame him. She was surprised by this.

     “I’d like to be able to get along.” Sage ran her palms over her knees forcefully one more time. “I feel like we should come to… some sort of understanding.”

     He made a vague and dismissive gesture in the air between them. “Do whatever you want. You don’t need my permission to talk to your teammates.”

###

     When she found him, Axel was laid out on the ground with his back against a tree stump, headphones in as usual and staring up at the sky. A small pile of sticks sat beside him, and he was waving a stick in the air in front of him idly, bobbing it to an unheard rhythm.

     He did not acknowledge her when she sat down across from him. This didn’t bother Sage much—she could be patient.

     It was a nice day; the air was a bit crisper than Sage liked, and it stung the very tip of her nose, but sunlight streamed through the foliage and dappled the ground in overlapping complex patterns, and wind rustled the leaves softly and musically, and overall Sage found it easy to appreciate the life quietly going about itself around her.

     She leaned back against a tree, one hand pressed back against its rough bark, and closed her eyes.

     It didn’t take very long for Axel to speak up. “Do you want something?”

     “I was hoping we could chat.”

     This earned her a strangled noise, somewhere between a laugh and a cough. She cracked one eye open to gauge his response. His face was twisted up into something reminiscent of disbelief and condescension, but his headphones were all the way off and dangling around his neck, which she chose to take as a positive sign.

     “I don’t like being stuck here any more than you do,” she said. “I want to get our job done with as little friction as possible.”

     He bobbed his stick a little in response to that. “Maybe you could get your boyfriend to back off, then?”

     “My—Aston isn’t my boyfriend.” Sage had to choke back a giggle. “I’ve been trying. Once he gets an idea in his head, he’s like a dog with a rabbit. He sinks his teeth in and wrings its neck til it stops moving.”

     Axel made a noncommittal noise.

     The bark felt nice against her palm. She gave it a little rub, for the sake of grounding herself. “The captain believes his plan is the best idea. I’m angry with Aston for getting us in this situation in the first place,” an understatement, more than either of the humans would ever know, “but I don’t want to challenge Teiddan’s decisions. I have to… pick my battles.”

     Sage was very proud of that little speech. It would take an incredibly unreasonable person to take issue with it.

     A beam of sun filtered through the trees to hit Axel’s face, which was so pale it practically glowed in the light. He tilted his face up towards the sun. After a moment, he said “So what is he?”

     “Pardon?”

     “Aston. If he’s not your boyfriend, what is he?”

     This was a thorny question. The real answer, that Aston was heartkin, that he was haunted just like her, that they were maybe the only people on this planet or any other that could possibly understand each other, involved explaining a good deal of things that Sage had absolutely no interest in explaining at the moment. She looked down at her lap and began fidgeting with a button on one of her pants pockets as she thought.

     “He’s like family,” she finally decided.

     Silence ensued for a few minutes. The scattered sunlight shifted over Axel’s hair, playing hues of red and gold in glinting patterns. His eyes scanned slowly over the forest roof, seemingly at random.

     Sage may have been content to sit with him and watch the forest’s play of shadow and sunlight for another hour or more, but the void that made its home in her head was not, and it insistently pulled her thoughts back around itself after a couple of quiet minutes. She still couldn’t quite figure out what the thread tying everything together was—what the rule behind its gravity was—but there was something about what happened on the train platform, something that made her keep picturing that girl’s face.

     “Teiddan said you were having relationship troubles,” she finally said, which was probably the wrong thing to say, but she couldn’t think of a slicker way to start the conversation.

     To her surprise, he didn’t seem offended—not by her, at least. He tossed the stick he’d been fidgeting with to one side, pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, and groaned theatrically. “Teiddan’s always sticking his nose in my business.”

     “I think he’s worried.”

     “Yeah, I mean. So am I.” Axel let his hands fall to the dirt.

     “The girl on the platform. July. She’s your girlfriend?”

     His face was still turned up towards the sky, and Sage suspected that at this point he was intentionally not looking in her direction. One hand felt around blindly on the dirt beside him until he grasped the stick again and began bobbing it in the air rather violently. It took him a good few seconds to reply. “Maybe? She was, at least. We had a fight before I left, but it was… It wouldn’t have been that bad a year ago.”

     Sage made a noise that could have meant anything. It seemed like he was preparing to go off on a ramble that had more to do with him than with anything she said.

     “She’s been getting mad at me for normal shit lately, you know? Starting fights over shit that’s just… me watching out for her. Or dumb stuff, like if she should double-knot her boots. I keep wondering if she’s about to break up with me, all the time.”

     Now he looked at her. His face was drawn, but calm, no quivers in his lips or his chin, no furrows in his brow.

     “We’ve been together basically since we met,” he said. “We were kids back then. I don’t think I can lose that, too.”

     They looked at each other for a couple of beats. Sage tapped thoughtfully against the bark of her tree, tilting her head as she regarded the human. He leaned forward, elbows on his bent knees, his back arced over in a deep curve.

     Eventually, she said “Aston and I met when I was a kid. We… we understood each other when most people didn’t.”

     Axel looked like he was turning this over in his brain very carefully. After a moment, he nodded and sat back, holding up one of his earbuds.

     “Wanna listen with me?” he asked. “I made a playlist about her that slaps.”

     Sage was thrown by that one. It seemed to be an olive branch of sorts, though, and she wasn’t about to turn that down. “Sure.”

###

     Finding yourself back in the meadow wasn’t much of a surprise, for you. On waking, you might come to question why your brain chose to conjure this setting again, but in the moment, you felt perfectly content in the sun-warmed grass.

     What was surprising to you—even in the moment—was that July was still there. She was still lying in the grass where you left her the previous night, hair spread out in a blinding golden halo around her head, surrounded by clover and dandelions and little purple star-shaped flowers. They were beginning to grow over her face.

     For the time being, you decided not to pay any attention to her. Instead, you stood up and squinted over the hills that rolled out into the distant horizon, covered in wildflowers and impossibly bright. In the distance, you could see a treeline—a hazy strip of dark against the overexposed azure sky.

     Experimentally, you rocked back-and-forth on your feet. Your boots crunched in the crisp grass pleasantly. Looking down, you saw they were your favorite pair—the ones you’d laced with thick satiny pink ribbon, the ones you ruined in the swamp. And your pants—they were the pair you’d sewn lace onto in a fit of boredom, now at the bottom of the swamp with the rest of your hard-won wardrobe. It was nice to feel pretty again, even if it wasn’t real.

     “You’re back.”

     The sound of her voice jolted you out of your reverie. You turned around to see July sitting up, one hand shading her eyes from the sun as she peered at you. Flower buds cascaded from her head and shoulders into the grass around her.

     “Sage, right?” she said.

     You nodded.

     “This is my place,” she said, clambering to her feet. You couldn’t remember if she had been so short in real life, or if your mind was exaggerating things in retrospect, but even drawing herself up to her full height with the air of a lizard puffing its frill to appear bigger, she barely came up to your shoulder.

     “Sorry. I don’t know where else to go.”

     Her eyes narrowed. A cloud drifted through the sky directly behind her, swirling in eddies reminiscent of tidal pools.

     “Let me show you the doors,” she said, abruptly, brilliantly, with so much force you couldn’t possibly say no, and then she bounded to her feet and was off, sprinting over the grass with the stumbling imperfect grace of a fawn.

     There was nothing to be done about it. You had to run after her. She veered and swayed as you went, staggering at every hill, arms splayed out for balance, but never once fell over. She seemed to keep herself upright through sheer momentum.

     Just as your lungs started to burn, a shimmering lake swam into view, only a few dozen yards away—like it was conjured from the ether just then. It stretched off into the distance, the far shore butting up against the murky, indistinct line of trees. She gave a whoop, not showing any signs of slowing down.

     Until the moment she did trip, arms and legs flailing wildly and gracelessly, and you reflexively reached out to grab the back of her shirt, and she hovered over the water’s edge for one timeless second until you yanked her back upright into your arms.

     There was no clean transition from your perspective, but suddenly you were on your back, gasping breathlessly as something just under your spine screamed in pain. July squatted over you, hair falling around her face, lips twisted into a sneer, and fisted one hand in your hair, the other gripping your neck.

     She stopped moving when her eyes met yours. You were grateful for this, and attempted to convey it through your wide-eyed stare while you gaped and gasped for breath. She did not look away. She did not even blink.

     After a heady minute, where the jade knife of her gaze repeatedly stabbed you in the gut while you struggled to take in slow sips of air, you finally found your voice again. “You tripped. I was trying to help.”

     “I was jumping in.” Her voice could not have been more condescending. “You want to see the doors, right?”

     There was no pause. One second, her body was centimeters from yours, tense and muscular and radiating heat like a banked fire, and the next second she was up again, her hands gone from your body and your scalp feeling tender. A breeze swelled, tossing her hair across her face—then she flung herself into the lake and the water swirled around where she disappeared in unnaturally blue currents.

     You crawled to the bank of the lake, staring into its depths—which were nonexistent. The water reflected the perfect blue of the sky and nothing else. It was like a fluid, shifting mirror. Mercury in the sunlight.

     You threw yourself in without a second thought.

     Everything went black. You opened your mouth to call out, only to realize you didn’t remember her name. Cold fluid filled your mouth, crawled inside of your throat and began to soak your organs in that senseless void—not quite water, something older, something that lived before the first stars caught aflame in their heat-packed nurseries. Something that lived.

     As suddenly as it began, it all stopped, leaving you gasping for breath on your back once again. You coughed violently, clutching your spasming chest, tears forming at the corners of your burning eyes.

     “Pussy,” July said.

     You dragged yourself to your feet, peering at her blearily. She stood with her hands on her hips and a wide grin on her face; all around her, a corridor stretched off farther than you could see. Doors lined the hall, all different shapes and sizes and materials—not just ones you would see on Earth.

     “The doors,” you said, dumbly.

     “Yeah!” She whirled around—her skirt spun with her, flying up to show her bare feet, and you suddenly weren’t sure if she was wearing a skirt before—and began walking from door to door, trailing her fingers along their surfaces as she went. You stumbled in your haste to keep up. “I come here when I get bored of a place. Except sometimes I don’t need to, sometimes I can just walk somewhere else. Like from June’s garden.”

     None of this made any impression on you whatsoever. You reached out to touch a doorknob, a thick cherry-wood door with a bronze handle intricately carved into a lion’s head, but it was icy-cold and you drew your finger back immediately with a hiss.

     July was still babbling. “I don’t know where any of these go. I just—“

     Abruptly, she was gone. The hall was suddenly deafeningly, ringingly quiet. Her voice had been taking up a frequency that was now occupied with a silence so thick and full it clung damply to your skin.

     The floor where she had been started to ooze blood. You felt very sick.