Stardust

     After July and Lake stumbled crassly upstairs, displaying nary a whit of good judgment, Cass found herself profoundly, inextricably vexed.

     She sat back on the floor and wrapped the massive flannel overshirt she’d retrieved from upstairs tighter around her body; it imparted on her an odd sense of calm, perhaps due in part to how it obscured her gawky frame.

     Across from her, from his place sprawled lengthwise on the couch, Jasper’s gaze trailed after the pair long after their awkward ascent. Slowly, one of his wrists rose to drape itself over his forehead, exposing the tender flesh of its underside to the air. His eyes drifted shut, then opened again, and he looked over at Cass.

     “Mind if I smoke?” he said.

     Cass looked down at her cup, which was empty. “I do.” At this, he made a gruff noise and moved as if he was about to rise from the couch—she hastily added, “I mind you going outside and being spotted more. Do what you’d like.”

     With that, she groped around blindly behind her until her fingers closed on the glass neck of the rum bottle, upon which she busied herself pouring another sorely-needed drink.

     The click-and-hiss of a lighter was soon followed by the smell of cigarettes permeating the living room. Jasper tilted his head back, Adam’s apple bobbing, and released a cloud of smoke into the air above him. The image was reminiscent of old paintings; the sunlight spearing through the smoke-cloud in shifting patterns and hues, the elegant sweep of his neck and edge of his jaw delineating a classically beautiful profile.

     He caught her staring and tossed her an easygoing smirk, his cigarette loosely dangling from two fingers. “You seem stressed.”

     Cass hummed in assent, sipping slowly from her plastic cup. Then: “I do not understand why she has to… act like this.”

     “Huh.” He took another thoughtful drag. “You don’t think they should fuck?”

     Despite herself, Cass felt a gnawing discomfort in her stomach at such blunt language. “They only met a few days ago,” she said, sounding rather plaintive and prudish even to her own ears.

     “They’re adults. They can do what they want.” Hot shame flooded Cass’s belly and cheeks at this proclamation. She knew Jasper was right; still, she raised her cup to her lips and drank with ignominious abandon to cover her embarrassment. Jasper observed this quietly, and once she finished, added “Something else is bugging you, huh?”

     This was an accurate assessment, but for the life of her, Cass could not connect the dots in her mind to ascertain exactly what the issue was.

     Jasper’s wrist returned to its epicine drape over his head, a delicate line of smoke curling into the air from his cigarette’s ashy end. “I’m gonna be real with you. I don’t like her very much.”

     “What? Why?” That was a stupid question; most people did not like July very much. But then again, most people who did not like July had that opinion because she was practically joined at the hip to Axel, who Cass would be the first to admit was a righteous asshole. Others simply resented her access to General Flynn. Neither applied in this case.

     “She said some shit the other day, I don’t know…” He exhaled another cloud of smoke; it swirled and shimmered, cut straight through the middle by a sunbeam. “Look, the first time I saw her, she was blowing heads off like it was normal. And later, she didn’t even care. Didn’t even seem to recognize she’d killed anyone.”

     The shame heating Cass’s body grew til it felt like she was about to spontaneously combust. Her thoughts were rather fuzzy around the edges; in her substance-addled state, Cass had a difficult time determining what she should say next, which was probably why the next sentence from her lips was a piteous, half-mumbled “I’ve killed people, too.”

     His dark eyes cut over to her; he turned on his side to regard her more directly, half-propped-up by one elbow. “You admit it, though?”

     She stayed silent, her guts replaced temporarily by a writhing orb of snakes.

     “She said she didn’t kill anyone,” Jasper continued. “Said nobody died, in those words.”

     “She probably didn’t understand you,” Cass said.

     He snorted. Twin streams of smoke jetted from his nostrils.

     “Things are different for us,” Cass said, forcing down the squirming nausea. She held tenaciously onto the hope that, despite the way her thoughts blurred, she could articulate the clash in worldviews she perceived—the sheer breadth and depth of the chasm between the life she lived, and the one Jasper hinted at when he talked about his past. “There aren’t choices for us. We don’t get the luxury of… deciding how we live.”

     “I get that.”

     “Do you? Do you actually?” Awkwardly, Cass lurched to her feet, holding her cup above her head as she did in a measured attempt to minimize its axis of motion. As she looked down on Jasper, she offered him a hand. “Come show me how to use the washing machine. We can discuss as I work.”

     “It’s not that hard,” he said, but he took her hand and clambered to his feet anyway. He also, without her so much as asking, scooped their trash bag of filthy clothing off the floor and followed her to the basement with it, which she regarded as rather gentlemanly of him.

     Stairs were not particularly difficult to navigate. Either July was over-exaggerating her inebriated state, or Cass wasn’t very susceptible to alcohol. Her bare feet snagged on the chipped wood of the basement stairs, and Cass could feel the filth building up on her soles as she went.

     The basement was lit only by bare bulbs and featured a great number of exposed beams and wads of cobwebs. Cass did not mind much. Grit and grime reminded her of home, frankly.

     “We were children when General Flynn picked us up,” Cass said, gripping the railing tightly on her descent. “I was barely in middle school when I was orphaned.”

     “That sucks,” Jasper said. He dropped the bag on the floor by the washing machine and opened the top-loading lid, which he patiently held for her as she padded over the bare concrete floor.

     “It was awful, but that is not my point.” Cass had to squat down to wrap her arms fully around the laundry bag. Still speaking, she began the unwieldy process of shaking its contents into the machine. “This may as well be all we’ve known. I don’t know how normal children are raised. I have to imagine it isn’t by doing military exercises at age twelve. I can’t imagine you were promoted to active combat duty at fourteen.”

     Jasper was quiet. He was fiddling with a lavender bottle sitting on the dryer; as she let the laundry bag fall to the floor, he unscrewed the cap and poured a little of its contents into the cap. “Pour this in the hole on the left,” he said, handing it to her.

     Cass obliged. The liquid in the cap was a dark purple gel, slow-moving and smelling sickeningly sweet and chemical. “I saw Axel reprimanded once. I learned very quickly to keep my head down, shut up, and follow orders.”

     “What, all ‘cause he got scolded?” Jasper leaned over the machine and moved the dial on its top panel in some inscrutable way; something beeped, he pressed a few buttons, and the machine began making a low rumbling sound. This seemed to satisfy him.

     Cass didn’t move toward the stairs; she leaned her hip against the washing machine (the vibrations felt surprisingly pleasant) and regarded Jasper with no small amount of pause. She was certainly not a whiner or a complainer, and she did not want to give him an impression otherwise.

     Still, he did ask. Cass swirled her drink around in her cup as she answered, careful to keep her voice even and her eyes casually averted. “Pistol-whipped and put on half rations for a month, actually.”

     “Jesus,” Jasper said. His hand froze halfway to his mouth, the cigarette still burning almost down to his knuckles at this point. His eyes scanned her face, ran up and down every inch of her, but what he was searching for, she couldn’t tell—and then the embers burned all the way down to his knuckles and he flinched and swore, stubbing the butt out on the dryer behind him.

     “For real?” he finally said. “How old was he?”

     She cocked her head to one side and took a long sip of her drink. It burned the back of her throat in a rather enjoyable fashion. “Fifteen, maybe sixteen—it’s difficult to remember. Is it really so surprising?”

     “Is beating a kid with a fucking gun surprising?” Jasper’s eyes swept over her again, a strange expression on his face—something between shock and pity, something that made Cass feel slightly ill again. “Christ. You know that’s abuse, right?”

     Cass couldn’t help it; she laughed, genuinely and brightly. Jasper’s face reflected something very like horror, which only served to further her amusement at his (frankly, endearing) ignorance.

     After a moment, she calmed herself, holding her hand delicately in front of her mouth in a futile attempt at hiding her smile. “I’m sorry,” she said, as earnestly as she could. “This is what I mean—we’re soldiers, Jasper. We stopped being children when the Resistance took us in.”

     “Fucking hell,” Jasper said, his voice distant, brimming with vacancy. In one smooth motion, he reached out and plucked Cass’s drink from her hand, took a generous swig, and handed it back to her. Its contents were greatly depleted.

     With very little apparent effort, he cantilevered himself up on his arms and set himself to sit on the dryer; he crossed his legs over one another and turned to face her, propping his chin up with one hand. Reflexively, Cass mirrored him, scooting to sit on the washer and face him, her solo cup resting in the pit between her legs.

     “Okay,” he said. “Alright. You shared, we’ll share too.”

     “Pardon?” Cass said.

     He did not acknowledge this, either in word or in action. In fact, his eyes were fixed on something far beyond Cass, possibly beyond anything in the physical world whatsoever. “Do you know anything about, like… multiple personalities?”

     Cass’s shoulders tensed. Suddenly, the way her stolen boxers left her hairy legs exposed to the air, the thinness of the cotton t-shirt under her flannel, it all felt awfully flimsy and nonprotective. She flicked her tongue out to wet her lips. “Not particularly.”

     “Oh, God, you’re already freaking out,” Jasper groaned. He rubbed his palms into his eyes theatrically, then heaved a heavy breath and dropped his hands to properly make eye contact with her. His brows were furrowed, his mouth twisted slightly at the corners, and he had such an air of abject resignation and helplessness that Cass immediately felt guilty for letting her anxiety show.

     “Okay,” he said. “Look, I don’t know how to explain this, so I’m just going for it. My name is Rhea. I’m a girl. And I’m not Jasper, or Micah, but they’re here--” a tap on the side of the head with one finger—“too.”

     That was… interesting.

     It was also not something she’d expected out of this, or any, conversation.

     Cass scanned his—their—her face for any sign of jest, any hint at a smirk or giggle, but the earnest, anxious helplessness continued unbroken.

     With a deep breath, Cass tilted her cup back, letting the rest of the rum hit the back of her throat in one overwhelmingly bitter and burning swallow, and tossed the cup to the floor in an uncharacteristic show of carelessness. She made sure to make direct, serious eye contact with Rhea as she said “Okay.”

     Rhea looked blank. “Okay? That’s it?”

     “I presume you have more to tell me? I can reserve judgment until you finish. That is basic respect.” Her vowels felt fat in her mouth. She was proud of herself for cohering sentences.

     From an informed lens, the differences in Rhea’s demeanor were glaringly obvious, to the point that Cass immediately wondered why she hadn’t picked up on this before. The girl moved her—their—body in a languid, effeminate manner, curving gentle arcs in the air with her hands, touching her face in expressive motions that would have been ample ground to call her slurs at Cass’s old middle school. When she spoke, her voice was lilting and high, filled with subtle vocal fry and upturns at the ends of her sentences.

     “I mean… there’s not much to tell, I guess. When Micah got picked up by the Dusties—we got in a bad car accident right after graduation, and first we went to a hospital, but then we woke up on some ship or whatever. It really fucked him up, you know? He couldn’t handle it. And then one morning, we woke up, and Jasper just… knew he wasn’t Micah. He hadn’t picked a name out or anything, he just knew that he wasn’t Micah, he felt totally different. And then I showed up not long after.”

     There was a lot to process, particularly while Cass’s head was abnormally fuzzy and warm. The entire matter, as best as she could tell, was nonthreatening and probably entirely harmless. Perhaps it was acceptable to leave the bulk of processing to a sober version of herself. “So… Micah was the…”

     “Original? Yeah.” Rhea began to visibly relax, a small smile playing on her face. She had a nice smile—it was endearingly crooked. “Micah’s the one you first met, and you guys were talking in the car on the way here.”

     “I see.” And it wasn’t entirely a lie—retrospectively, their mood swings made complete sense.

     Rhea tugged on one of her earlobes in an oblique gesture—a fidget, Cass guessed. “Do you want me to grab him?”

     “Can you… just do that?”

     “Oh, yeah, it’s no big deal. Hang on.” Rhea looked away from Cass again, seemingly at nothing in particular. Cass watched, enthralled, as their face slowly slid into a blank mask.

     Once again, the process and its ensuing differences registered as ridiculously conspicuous now that Cass was looking for them—their shoulders squared up, their jaw jutted out, a certain energy descended over them that gave Cass an altogether different impression.

     She laughed, half in amazement, half out of her anomalous lack of filter. “This is fascinating.”

     Micah’s voice must have been an octave deeper than Rhea’s; at the same time, Cass recognized that gravelly, sardonic tone from earlier. “I love being studied like a lab rat. It’s great. Doesn’t make me feel weird at all.”

     That was fair. “I apologize,” Cass said contritely. “This is not something I’ve encountered before.”

     “I figured.” He sighed. “Try not to be too weird about it, ok?”

     “Of course,” Cass said, about to launch into a monologue regarding the topic of her intentions and how she only had good ones, but at that moment the washing machine beeped loudly and its vibrations died under her.

     Micah motioned with one hand. “Scoot.” He scooted off the dryer himself, and as she followed him, he opened the dryer lid—this one front-loading—and pulled a mesh screen from somewhere in the bowels of the device. He began picking chunks of dark gray fluff from the surface of the screen and letting them fall to the already-dirty floor of the basement. She watched this process intently.

     He bent down and slotted the mesh screen back into the machine. On standing, he held his hand out and looked at her expectantly; when she failed to move, he said “Hand me the wet clothes.”

     She nodded and promptly began digging around in the washer, a rather painful process where she hung half-upside-down in the metal inside chamber and the edge of the machine dug into the space just below her ribs, and popped back up to hand bundles of sodden clothing to Micah one by one.

     As they worked, he said “Have you really never used a washing machine before?”

     “I’m not on laundry,” Cass said, pressing a dripping wad of denim into his hands. “That’s the last of it.”

     He shut the dryer door and hit a couple of buttons on the top panel; the machine slowly rumbled and clunked to life. “Okay, but what about before the Resistance?”

     Cass was expecting to sit back down, but Micah began walking back toward the stairs, so she trailed after him, deep in thought. “I don’t believe we had one at our apartment. I suppose Mom must have gone to a laundromat.”

     “I was doing my own laundry at ten.” Micah held the basement door open for her.

     The ground floor felt painfully bright, after the blessed cool darkness of the basement; Cass squinted into the piercing beams, the beginnings of a headache advancing on her threateningly. She followed Micah into the living room blindly and collapsed on one of the couches.

     Micah sat down next to her and, in a move that sent Cass reeling, pulled her sidelong to lie in his lap.

     “This okay?” he said.

     She gave it some thought. Her heart beat wildly against her ribs, but as she lay there, curled slightly into a fetal position, a heady warmth seeped into her chest and limbs. She brought her hand up to rest on his knee. “It’s okay.”

     The warm feeling grew, seeping into every crack of Cass’s body, even her skull. Micah’s fingers slowly ran over the fuzz of her close-cropped hair; with a slight pang, Cass thought of her mother braiding her hair before school, and the way she’d shout if she saw how her daughter chopped off those beautiful loose curls. But Micah’s fingers on her scalp felt nice, and as Cass drifted off to sleep, she managed to not think of anything else at all.

###

     It was rather striking that, even aboveground, Cass’s relationship to the night-day cycle had no correlation to that of the wider world. “Dawning” continued to be an irrelevant concept in her life.

     Cass awoke to a darkened room, the sun already long since set, the scene draped in shadow like a thick woolen coat thrown over the furniture, softening every edge.

     The doorway glowed with soft orange light, a square of illumination cast through the kitchen doorway onto the hardwood flooring. Cass wrapped her flannel tightly around her body and hoisted herself upright, her temples sending a brief stab of pain through her frontal lobe as she moved. Her mouth felt as though it was covered in fur, and it tasted as though something had died inside of it while she slept.

     Cass dragged herself into the kitchen, where either Jasper or someone using Jasper’s body stood at the stove, humming tunelessly as he hovered over a pan. He cast a glance behind him, face breaking into a brilliant grin upon seeing her hunched in the doorway.

     “Hey!” he said. She could hear the exclamation point.

     With great care, Cass examined his face before replying—the symmetrical, whole-face grin that crinkled his eyes up at the corners, the way he cocked a hip against the counter. Despite putting in that effort, the first thing out of her mouth was “Are you Jasper right now?”

     “The one and only,” he said, just as a hand bore down on her shoulder from behind. Cass’s spine stiffened instinctively, but Lake’s drawl was already in her ears.

     “You know?” Cass tilted her head upwards to nod at him as he stood behind her; the man loomed. He chuckled casually. “God bless. It’s been so annoying trying to cover for them.”

     “I can only imagine,” Cass managed, suddenly filled with a deep and primal discomfort. Lake did not seem to pay any mind; he was already walking into the kitchen and peering over Jasper’s shoulder at the hot pan.

     “What’s cooking?”

     “Spam and beans and rice, baby.” Jasper reached out with his spatula and touched it once against Lake’s nose, who mimed gagging. Jasper rolled his eyes. “You try making something tasty in these conditions. You’re lucky I took the time to make rice.”

     “Where is July?” Cass said, a bit louder than she’d intended.

     “Probably still in bed,” Lake said, now trying to dodge Jasper’s spatula, the motions of which were rapidly leaving “poking” territory and approaching that of “wildly slapping.”

     “Probably,” Cass repeated flatly.

     Lake swatted the spatula away as it approached his gut; he held up one finger in Jasper’s direction. Surprisingly, Jasper ceased all attempts at violence and politely turned back to the stove.

     “She snores,” Lake said, and somewhat to his credit, he did look rather sheepish. “I went to sleep in the bathtub. She was fine, though, she didn’t pass out or anything.”

     “I should check on her nonetheless,” Cass said. Lake shrugged, then dropped into a defensive crouch and launched himself at Jasper in a manner Cass found entirely inadvisable over a hot stove.

     She left the boys to their tussling and tramped up the stairs with trepidation, twisting the cold ends of her fingers in the ends of her flannel as she went. What she would find in the upstairs bedroom, she did not know. Why her gut felt like a thousand snakes had crawled inside her, she also did not know, but she could chalk that one up to indigestion from the alcohol.

     When Cass poked her head into the bedroom, she was greeted by a formless black mass of covers and not much else. Flicking the light switch on gave her a better view of the carved wooden headboard and the thick quilt and comforter that made up the mass, but the lumpy morass of blankets still did not move.

     She sat on the bed beside the largest lump and put one hand on it; the lump was warm and gently rose and fell under her palm. “Jules. Wake up.”

     “I’m awake.” There were a few moments of silence, then, as if she was resigned to a terrible fate, July drew the covers down from over her head. She squinted at the onslaught of light. Her hair was a matted wreck, sticking out from her head at all angles, and the few inches of shoulder and collarbone that peeked out from under the blankets were entirely bare.

     “Big day today. We’ll be in DC before sunrise.” In a petty, vindictive rush, Cass added, “You will probably see Axel again.”

     July stared up at her with puffy red eyes. The skin around her eyelids looked practically raw. Cass suddenly felt very bad; the snakes took up squirming again with a vengeance.

     “Yeah,” July said finally. She drew one hand out of the covers and placed it over Cass’s own; her fingers were small and warm against Cass’s skin. She swallowed heavily.

     “Do you want breakfast?” Cass twisted her hand around and pressed it to July’s palm-to-palm, a peace offering of sorts. The two sat there for a moment, fingers interlaced, Cass’s stomach threatening to crawl out of her mouth and make a home for itself on the quilt.

     “Sure,” July said.

     Cass had a sinking sort of feeling about that monotone, but it was best to not examine it, for the moment. They had more immediate problems to worry about.