Stardust

     Cass had no compunctions about forcibly hauling her best friend out of bed at the best of times. As such, she felt zero remorse when July, upon having the blankets yanked from her sleeping body and being struck once firmly across the face, emerged from her slumber by leaping on Cass violently and letting out a primal yell in a sleep-addled stupor.

     Cass slammed her friend bodily back onto the bed and gripped her cheeks tight with one hand. As recognition dawned over July’s face, she ceased struggling, pupils blown out in the dim half-light as she stared at Cass mutely.

     “Listen to me and do not argue,” Cass said. “Get your handgun. Get a go-bag. There are Dusties in the base. We need to leave.”

     Inarticulate, animal fear began spreading across July’s face, but that wouldn’t do at the moment. Cass snapped her fingers beside July’s ear a couple of times, maintaining eye contact.

     “Think later. Act now.” As a wild sort of appeal to her base nature, Cass added, “That’s an order, soldier,” which somehow seemed to get through to her. A glassy calm descended over July’s face; Cass released her to hastily go shove her boots on and sweep piles from her locker into her open backpack.

     The two were packed and ready in only a handful of wordless minutes. Gunfire pattered and echoed in the distance as they worked. Cass ignored it resolutely; she planned to be out of the sector long before those lines of defense gave out.

     July crouched by the door, hair stuffed into a disheveled bun, jacket gaping open over her bulletproof vest, and eyes wide as she watched Cass zip up her bag and hoist it onto her shoulders. Cass knelt by her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

     “The gunfire woke me up,” she said. “I went out to see where it was coming from—I ran into Powell, he was on his way to respond. Dusties breached 14th-Union and are working inwards.”

     She couldn’t tell if July was comprehending anything she said. There was no recognition on her face, no acknowledgment in the lines of her body or the angle of her head; she just stared at Cass, silent and waiting.

     “We need to get out. We’re penned in down here.”

     July nodded. Her face swam, ghostlike, in the half-light, disconnected from her body melting into the darkness around them. When she finally spoke, her voice was a raspy whisper that evoked childhood memories of branches scraping over the glass of Cass’s bedroom window.

     “I’m going to grab the boys.”

     “They aren’t—” Cass was about to elucidate the ways in which Jasper and Lake were not their responsibility, and in fact, this was something they would almost certainly be reprimanded for upon their eventual return to the base. The look in July’s eyes stopped her. She was still blank, still floating in her wide-eyed glassy calm, but something in her expression looked like iron underneath it all. Cass did not have time to argue.

     “Alright,” she said.

     The pair made their way through flickering tunnels. The lights were on, despite the fact that it was still—Cass double-checked her watch—one in the morning, but as they scampered down the tracks, she saw entire sectors blacked out, and others flickering threateningly.      Shouts and gunfire echoed emptily through the darkened sectors, accompanied by distant, shifting flashes of light. Cass moved past those hurriedly.

     Lake and Jasper’s train car was much further into the heart of the base; as they trudged down the tracks, the shooting faded into the background. Empty cars transitioned into half-empty cars, lights on and scattered clusters of soldiers awake, sloppily pulling on uniforms, loading pistols, and rubbing sleep grit from their eyes. It was a grim and silent tableau, broken only by an occasional murmur. Here and there, a passing soldier gave the girls a nod of acknowledgment, but everyone was largely focused on matters other than questioning two young girls on their positions at the moment.

     Cass didn’t remember the exact placement of the train car the boys had been assigned to, only that it was up by the Amsterdam station, but fortunately this proved a nonissue. They found Jasper hunched over on the steps up to a car, furiously sucking down smoke with an intensity she could not find it in herself to judge at the moment. The ground around him was littered with cigarette stubs, some of which were obviously fresh.

     “Hey.” A cloud of smoke puffed out of his mouth as he spoke. He raised one hand in a half-hearted sort of gesture that was presumably supposed to be a wave; out of the corner of her eye, she saw July perk up slightly. “Thank fuck you’re here. What’s going on?”

     “We’re under attack,” she said shortly. It wasn’t the time to pause and exchange pleasantries. She strode past him up the stairs to shove her head into their train car. “Lake! We’re leaving.”

     Lake was the only one left in their car; he was sprawled on the rightmost bottom bunk, his long limbs looking rather cramped and out of place in the small interior. When he looked up at Cass, he had a bewildered air that reminded her of a puppy who was just told, for the first time, that he was not to piss on the floor.

     “Um.” He angled himself up on one elbow; the blankets fell away, revealing that he was in a state of undress. Cass found this unbearable.

     “Dusties,” she said, and immediately left.

     Outside, July was crouched by Jasper on the grit-ridden tracks, a lit cigarette clutched between grubby, oddly steady fingers. She saw Cass exiting and, with a fantastically unsubtle amount of intent, wrapped her lips around the cigarette to take a painfully slow draw, half-lidding her eyes obscenely as she did. After a second, she pursed her lips and blew a large plume of smoke directly at Cass’s face.

     “Gotta get myself sharp,” July said, voice dripping with vocal fry.

     “I feel you,” Jasper said, sorely oblivious. “I need coffee.”

     “You don’t want to have to piss in the middle of a firefight.” July’s voice was deceptively casual. She took another drag, waggling her eyebrows at Cass, who was already planning blow-for-blow exactly how she would fistfight the girl as soon as this was over.

     From back in the train car, Lake’s strangled tones rang out. “Jas, where’s my shoes?”

     “Check under the bed,” Jasper bellowed back. He then stubbed the smoldering butt of his cigarette out on the tracks beside him and rose to his feet, brushing off his pants as he stood. He won points in Cass’s book for already being fully dressed.

     Cass made her way down from the doorway to lean against the cool metal side of the train car. She began to repetitively tap her fingers on the flaking graffiti behind her, watching as Jasper offered July a hand up from her squat. “We’ll get out through a maintenance tunnel. They haven’t hit this sector yet; we should, in all likelihood, be able to find a way aboveground out here.”

     “Aren’t you guys going to get…” Jasper’s face screwed up. He made a couple of incoherent gestures in the air, starting words with guttural single sounds before immediately aborting them, and finally landed on: “Don’t you have to fight?”

     “Our squadron leader is out of town, and Captain Kahue is…” It was Cass’s turn to struggle for words.

     “She doesn’t give a shit what we do,” July interjected.

     “Yes, thank you,” Cass said dryly. “It would be in our best interests to get out of the line of fire. Particularly yours.”

     “Has anybody seen my left shoe?” Lake called.

     A throbbing pain began to build around Cass’s temples. Without acknowledging Lake’s plight (if she did, she would explode), she closed her eyes briefly while rubbing her forehead in small circles with the pads of her fingers. This did not help. She returned her beleaguered gaze to her comrades.

     Abruptly, with neither fanfare nor forewarning, all of the lights went out.

     Jasper made a deep, guttural noise that was most likely the start of a curse word; it was cut off by a slap of flesh-on-flesh and a barely-audible hiss from July.

     It only took a bare second or two from the initial shock for Cass to begin running scenarios mentally. The tunnel had been empty for a couple of minutes; the soldiers had all but entirely filtered out while they stood waiting for Lake. She blindly groped about in the dark for the railing up to the train car. Upon finding it, she maneuvered herself away from the wall of the car, closer to where she’d last seen her friends.

     The tunnels, when not lit, conveyed upon their inhabitants a sort of cave-blindness. Cass was aware that she could not physically see anything, but she still saw pale, shifting afterimages in the space where she’d last seen human bodies. If her ears didn’t deceive her, Jasper was beginning to hyperventilate, which she could not blame him for. She had been terrified during her first outage—robbed of her main sense, stumbling around like a lame foal in the darkness.

     “July,” she whispered, sotto voce. “Flashlight?”

     “Got it.”

     Unsettling noises began to echo in the very distant peripheries of Cass’s hearing—rumbles and thuds and the popcorn-kernel staccato of gunfire, only audible to her because she knew what to listen for.

     The flare of the flashlight switching on was startling, even with July (quite considerately) pointing it at the ground til their eyes adjusted. The pallid wash of light revealed her to have one hand still clapped firmly over Jasper’s mouth.

     “I still can’t find—” Lake started to yell once again, but unfortunately for him, this proved to be one step too far for the tenuous thread of Cass’s patience. Something in her snapped.

     “NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR FUCKING SHOE,” she barked, full-volume.

     July and Jasper both gaped at her, wide-eyed—July dropped her hand from Jasper’s mouth, either thoughtlessly or because she thought he had something productive to contribute to the conversation, Cass did not know and did not particularly care.

     “We have to leave,” she said firmly. Her point was immediately proven unimpeachable by the ear-splitting crack! of a bullet hitting a train car only a few dozen yards away.

     The nice thing about one’s best friend being a trained military operative was that one could quite reasonably trust her to do the right thing in a combat scenario. Cass didn’t bother to cover for July, trusting that she could handle both herself and Jasper; instead, she threw herself up the couple of steps and through the curtained doorway of the train car. She pressed herself to the inside wall and drew her pistol.

     “Was that a gunshot?” Lake asked, his voice oddly calm.

     “Yes.”

     “Should probably leave without my shoes, then?”

     “Yes.”

     “Understood.” There was some shuffling and rustling of clothes, the rattle of a few dozen small objects inside some sort of container, and a couple of soft plaps of bare feet on metal. A second later, she could feel warmth radiating from his looming form the barest centimeter away from her skin.

     There hadn’t been another gunshot—yet. She grabbed him and pulled him out of the car and down the steps; Lake was being surprisingly obliging, following along without any resistance. He sucked in a pained hiss of breath as his feet hit the ground—understandable, riddled as it was with cigarette butts and broken glass, and with the freezing metal of the tracks themselves jutting up from the ground sharply—but he didn’t complain.

     The sounds of combat drew closer. She could hear a human voice in the distance, barking some kind of order. It wasn’t close enough to determine who it was, much less what they were saying.

     Luckily, Cass’s memory didn’t fail her. She pulled Lake into a maintenance tunnel just across from their train car. As they stumbled into the hall, July switched on the flashlight again. She was leaning against the wall just inside, expressionless and still. Jasper leaned next to her, no longer hyperventilating.

     In lieu of greeting, he said “Give me a gun.”

     “You’re more of a liability with one than without,” Cass said.

     “No, that’s—” He huffed, rolling his eyes so dramatically it was visible even by the dim flicker of the flashlight. “It’s too complicated to explain, just—”

     A loud crash reverberated through the hall, so loud it sounded almost on top of them; it struck Cass’s ears and rang through her bones painfully. The sound of gunfire followed instantly, ricochets so loud Cass could feel them in her teeth, metallic sparks flickering in the darkness outside the maintenance door.

     “MOVE,” Cass bellowed over the din. July shoved her aside, palming the flashlight into Cass’s hand as she did. There wasn’t any time to think or negotiate; she ran down the hall, and the boys ran with her.

     “July—” Lake started to say, but Cass cut him off.

     “She’s covering.”

     It was, admittedly, a major oversight for them to not stop by munitions before leaving. July’s skill as a sniper was nerfed wholeheartedly by forcing her to rely only on a small pistol. Still, Cass had the presence of mind to muse as her feet pounded the pavement and she fumbled to attach the straps of her respirator around her head, it was by far not the most egregious oversight that had occurred that night.

     “Six!” July’s voice rang out from behind them, just before bullets started pinging the floor at their heels.

     Everything was going horribly, terribly wrong. This did not need to be said, but it was the only thought Cass could form.

     “Weave!” Her voice cracked as she shouted over the din. Sparks flew from the concrete floor, briefly illuminating flashes of limbs—boots, a dark hand, a pale bare foot. Sweat pooled in the plastic underneath her chin. She brushed someone’s sleeve as she wove back-and-forth in the narrow hall; she veered away sharply, skidding directly into the rough concrete wall. A jolt of pain shot through her arm as it dragged cruelly over the cement; she felt fabric tearing.

     Somewhere just ahead, someone shouted, an animal pharyngeal scream that set Cass’s teeth on edge. She launched herself off the wall, stumbling blindly toward the sound. All around them, a low rumbling built, overtaking her hearing til it thrummed inside her skull. It was unidentifiable. Alien, even.

     A hand grabbed her arm and pulled; she fell into a press of bodies holed up against the opposite wall. The hand was sweat-slick and clammy.

     “Stay close,” a deep, resonant voice said. Lips brushed against the shell of her ear as he spoke; despite herself, Cass was present enough to shiver slightly. That had to have been Jasper.

     Another hand grabbed her own, this one smaller and calloused. It twined its fingers through hers and squeezed as if to reassure her.

     The floor shook. The air resonated with a monumental crack! Something very large and very heavy fell close by. Cass jerked away, only to be held in place by large hands gripping her shoulders.

     “You got her?”

     “Yeah.”

     July’s voice shrieked “Let—” just in time to be drowned out by another series of earth-shaking thuds. The small, calloused hand ripped away from Cass’s grip. Something hit her on the shoulder, heavy enough to jar her bone right down to the socket and draw a strangled croak from her lips. Hands grasped at her body from every angle.

     Everything went quiet.

###

     When Cass became cognizant of her surroundings once again, she found herself staring at rain-splattered pavement reflecting distant prisms of lamplight. She was vaguely aware that she’d spent some time being buffeted around and handled, but she could not, for the life of her, put the pieces together to create a coherent timeline.

     One second, she was screaming in agonized fear while Dusties bore down on them. The next, she was leaned up against a filthy brick wall, hazily peering into an oil-slick puddle reflecting a distant streetlight.

     With some difficulty, she dragged her head up to assess the situation. They were in a disgusting alleyway, dimly-lit but a far cry better than the pitch darkness of the unlit base. She was propped up directly next to a dumpster. Across from her, July stood upright, wild-eyed and dangerous, bearing down on the pair of boys—Jasper leaning against the alley wall coolly, Lake curled up at his feet, clutching his own head as if in excruciating pain.

     “Where are we?” July said, much louder than Cass would advise at the moment.

     “Dunno,” Jasper said shortly.

     “What do you—”

     “Please shut up,” Lake groaned.

     “No!” July still had her gun out. There was blood trickling down her face. The whole picture was actually rather aesthetically pleasing, but that wasn’t relevant at the moment. “Don’t fuck with me right now, I swear to—how did we get here?”

     Even from a few feet away, Cass could see Lake wince into his hands.

     Jasper carefully stepped around Lake’s fetal posture and extended his hands; coolly, with a shocking amount of poise, he folded his hands over July’s on her gun and looked her dead in the eye. “Just be grateful we dragged you both out of there alive.”

     Everything was very quiet and tense for a second, then Lake moaned “Jesus fucking Christ, Micah—” and Jasper said “Not now,” and July said “Cass?” and Cass said “We should leave the city.”

     All three of them turned to stare at her. Cass did not blame them.

     “Put that gun away, soldier, you’re going to get the cops called on us,” she snapped at July, who obliged swiftly. Ignoring the screaming from her muscles and the burning in her lungs, Cass dragged herself upright against the wall, smearing her clothes with mud and whatever other unmentionable substances were present in the process. Her right arm, on examination, was fine; the sleeves on her jacket and undershirt were ripped, and underneath them broken blood vessels bloomed angrily, along with a healthy amount of gravel ground into the scrape, but overall it was quite bearable. Experimentally, she gave her left shoulder a prod—the one some sort of debris hit her on—and hissed at the shot of pain that speared through her entire arm.

     “Dislocated,” she managed. July immediately crouched down to the balls of her feet to peer at Cass’s fingers.

     “Move,” she instructed. Cass made a vague attempt at wiggling her extremities, but quickly recognized the futility of this exercise in face of the numbness overtaking her arm.

     July nodded and gave a quick glance up and down the alleyway. “Lie down,” she said.

     Cass lay on her back, doing her best not to think about the slime seeping into her clothes as she did. She gazed stoically at the night sky above, casting it mentally as a blank canvas on which she could organize her agenda. Beside her, July knelt down and began slowly manipulating her arm outwards.

     The function of pain, of course, is to pass messages along the nervous system in the event of injury. Cass already knew she was injured, so she instructed her nervous system to leave a message, or perhaps to call back later.

     “They might not know who we are, but they’ll be watching for refugees from the attacks,” Cass said. “The base is compromised. We can try to return, but—”

     A sudden burst of pain accosted her senses; a slow build of tension, a few initial scrapes, and all at once a horrid, grinding crunch inside her shoulder and a pop! A flood of agony and endorphins alike raced through her entire body as her vision blazed crimson.

     Before she could stop it, a low moan fell from Cass’s lips. She closed her eyes briefly, dizzily, until the world stopped spinning and the neon-red pulse faded from her vision.

     “We don’t know if the Resistance will successfully reclaim that ground,” she finished, opening her eyes.

     July stooped over her, proffering a hand. She grabbed July’s hand with her uninjured one and hoisted herself back up off the ground with minimal difficulty. After a couple of painful shoulder-rolls to make sure her left arm was, at the very least, functional, she gave July a nod of thanks.

     Off to the side, Lake had also clambered to his feet, swaying slightly with one hand against the wall, his fingers splayed out like a paper-white starfish stuck to the brick. A sheen of sweat stood out sharply on his forehead. “I’m on board. I hate New York.”

     “Of course you do,” Jasper said.

     “We need to find Axel,” July said.

     It was Cass’s turn to look askance at her friend.

     July’s voice was tight and steely. “You said the base is compromised. They can’t come back. I have the DC safehouse address—”

     “How—” Cass started.

     “I’m cool and sexy and know everything, that’s how.” July’s eyes cut over to Lake and Jasper; Cass couldn’t read her expression behind her mask. “You coming?”

     “Don’t see a lot of other options,” Jasper said. He seemed almost condescendingly placid. Perhaps it was shock.

     “I’m going to steal a car,” Cass said, feeling rather giddy at the prospect.

     Surprisingly, both Lake and July gave her a simultaneous thumbs-up. They then exchanged a glance, July wrinkled her forehead, and she shook her hand out rather aggressively as if to purge it of contamination.

     “Better get moving,” she snapped, and shoved past them to begin walking down the alleyway, shoulders hunched and hair clinging damply to her scalp. As the rain began to pour down in earnest, the other three followed suit.