Stardust

     Nothing was ever simple or easy in the Resistance. Even prompted by a code red, even with direct orders from the General, getting aboveground was a massive ordeal of suiting up, finding a maintenance tunnel entrance that wasn’t currently overrun with normal city traffic, and slipping out before anyone came by.

     July didn’t particularly enjoy wearing her respirator and goggles, but she liked the sunlight, so all in all she felt it was worth it. She felt especially warm and cozy snuggled into the oversized coat that hid her bulletproof vest and hip holster from prying eyes, and holding Axel’s hand as they ambled down the city street added to the experience. It was almost like being a normal couple, she had to imagine. Like they were indistinguishable from any of the other masked, bedraggled figures that strode hurriedly past them.

     It was bright, despite the ever-present layer of stardust swirling through the air in an oppressive orange fog. Sunrays filtered through to catch the red-gold in Axel’s hair when it caught the light in just the right way, which was maybe the prettiest he ever looked to July.

     “We’re lucky that it’s down in Jersey, actually,” he said. “If it was in the city, there’s no way the Dusties wouldn’t get to it before us.”

     She nodded absently, too distracted to bother telling him that he’d already said as much to Tyler and she wasn’t deaf. Above them, tops of buildings faded into clouds of stardust. It struck her, not for the first time, that it was an awfully pretty name for an awfully ugly substance.

     A couple of alley entrances later, a minivan sat idling, nestled among the contents of an overflowing dumpster and piles of pigeon shit. July gave a cursory glance at the license plate before opening the back door. “Afternoon, sir.”

     Teiddan raised a hand in acknowledgment.

     Axel clambered into the front passenger seat while July busied herself with checking her pockets, for the fifth time since they’d breached the surface. For the fifth time, she confirmed that she did, in fact, have everything she’d grabbed in her hasty once-over of her locker back at base. Protein bars, water bottle, wallet with fake ID, lighter, flashlight, first aid kit, ammo bag. She unclipped her respirator straps and yanked it down around her neck as soon as all the doors were closed, wincing as the plastic edges unstuck themselves from her cheeks. The bridge of her nose felt raw.

     “—didn’t care, but I talked to Kahue and I think she was right to put us on alert,” Teiddan was saying as he draped an arm around Axel’s seat and craned back to look out the rear window. The car started reversing. July’s stomach did a single flip.

     “You think it’s dangerous?” Axel no longer sounded wan and overstimulated; July even caught a hint of excitement in his voice. About time. She’d been at that point for several hours.

     “No.” Teiddan tossed a look back at July; she cocked her head at him before he turned back around. There was a hint of wryness around the corners of his mouth. “Private Wright, what do you think?”

     She swallowed. Flicked her tongue out briefly to wet suddenly-dry lips. “Um… Well, General Flynn said he didn’t know if it was Dusty, which means it’s gotta look different than the Dusty ships we’ve seen, right?”

     With Teiddan’s eyes now on the road, all July could see of him was a slice of oak-dark cheekbone and the slightest edge of the circle lenses he wore to drive. “If one crashed, it would have the fallout radius of an aircraft carrier dropping to Earth from orbit. The crash was small enough that we only picked up on it because we’re monitoring the skies in the general area.”

     “So are the Dusties,” Axel interjected. “Probably better than us.”

     July pressed her forehead to the cool of the car window, staring blatantly at the smatterings of masked and goggled pedestrians that slid past. They were beginning to pick up speed and she was slightly nauseated.

     “Our systems aren’t that bad.” Teiddan’s tone was slightly defensive.

     The banter in the front seat quickly faded into white noise; July didn’t care much for Axel’s regular dick-measuring contests, which he regularly blustered his way into as compensation for his lack of dick to measure. Instead, she focused on the glimpses of aboveground pedestrians; a woman with an afro squashed flat in the middle by her respirator straps, laughing, her head thrown back to expose the expansive curve of her throat; someone with waist-length hair braided into a smooth rope, not bothering with a mask (idiot), walking the smallest dog July had seen in years; a woman sitting on the sidewalk in front of a construction site, respirator pulled down as she chugged water, biceps glistening with sweat that July could see even at a brief glance; at a stoplight, a blonde girl scrawling something with chalk on the walk up to an apartment building.

     She turned her head to make direct eye contact with July through the car window. Her mouth opened, revealing a toothless maw, black-red sludge bubbling up through her gums and spilling over her chin. June waved gaily, paying no attention to the globs of slime dripping onto her shirt.

     The car started moving again. Axel and Teiddan were still talking about nothing in particular. July raised her eyes to the horizon, focusing on the stardust billowing in oppressive clouds. If she unfocused her eyes, she could see shadowy, biological figures moving around in the clouds, giant mouths speaking in tongues she could almost lip-read. As ways to keep herself occupied went, it was definitely better than people-watching.

###

     The coordinates turned out to be smack in the middle of a swampy wildlife refuge just over the border; a couple hours’ worth of hiking was a welcome distraction from the shapes tugging at the corners of July’s vision. Her calves burned pleasantly. The mud gave a little extra suck to her boots with every step she took; they’d gone off-trail a while ago, so she found herself occasionally having to clamber over a fallen tree or perform a controlled skid down a steep, sludgy hill. Her breathing was a little ragged—that was par for the course when exercising in a respirator, not to mention she was now loaded down with gear. The air out here was clear enough that she considered pulling her respirator down, but it was the middle of winter and she couldn’t shake Cass’s constant nagging about thermal cycles and particulate concentrations from the back of her head.

     As the trees thinned, the mud grew thicker and wetter with every step, til July was struggling not to give away their location just by hoisting her foot out of the sludge. Axel moved just in front of her and held his arm out in front of her chest; she slowed accordingly. He pointed at the sky. There was a noticeable concentration of something just over the treeline; stardust, possibly, but equally possibly smoke or ordinary dust and debris. Through the foliage, she could just barely make out a large, unnatural shape jutting out of the ground. Even from a distance, she could hear voices—at least one male and one female, but it was hard to discern, with how everyone overlapped with one another. It sounded like an argument.

     Teiddan gestured to Lock and load; July obligingly broke off from the trio and squelched her way down to a large tree off to the side, where she slung her bag off her shoulder and crouched low in the mud. Gross. Shit conditions for shooting, but it wasn’t like she could do anything about that.

     July unzipped the case and withdrew her semi-automatic—embarrassingly enough, she couldn’t refrain from smiling a little bit at the sight. At least she refrained from giving the barrel a gay little kiss, instead opting to affix her scope and get right into position so she could take stock of the situation.

     The forest gave way to a sunny patch of swamp, with patches of reeds and overgrown grassy shoals fading into swirling brown-blue eddies of water. Looming over the scene was a massive, twisted, smoking hulk of bright-yellow metal, contorted beyond all recognition of whatever vehicle it once was. It jutted half-out the water, leaking an ominously electric-yellow fluid into the water around it and letting out the occasional mechanical belch.

     There were three figures perched on the wrecked ship, clinging with clear desperation to whatever hull shards they could get ahold of, and one waist-deep in the swamp. The one in the water was facing away from July (he was yelling something lengthy and confusing to the others), but she felt like she recognized his jacket—it was orange tweed with neon green elbow patches, something extremely identifiable that she could not for the life of her place.

     The three on the ship weren’t wearing masks. One of them had a shock of brilliantly, offensively pink hair that stood out sharply against the neon-yellow of the ship—her head swiveled around as July eyed her, and it immediately became obvious that she saw Axel and Teiddan approaching the waterline. She quickly alerted her companions with a couple of nudges; the one in the water kept yelling obliviously.

     “—are not coming along!” The figure projected a stunning amount of confidence considering the sopping-wet state of its tweed jacket. “And furthermore--”

     The pink-haired one made a loud sound, one that could have potentially resolved into a full word if she hadn’t been immediately cut off by the wet terrier of a man again.

     “No! I refuse! They’re not our res--”

     “BEHIND YOU,” she bellowed over his tirade. To his credit, the man immediately whipped around to face the approaching soldiers, and to his even further credit, he neither started shouting again nor did he attempt to pull out any type of weapon.

     July made an undignified, choked-off noise in the back of her throat; at the sight of his face, a few mental pieces clicked and she remembered the news broadcast she recognized him from—Aston Martin and his pink-haired companion. Girlfriend? Maybe? She wasn’t clear on that, or on the identities of the other two.

     Teiddan was talking. “—Martin?”

     “Who do you represent?” Aston’s hands were over his head. Smart decision, considering the guns pointed at him.

     “I am going to have to ask you to come with us.” Teiddan was using a short, clipped tone of voice that he typically reserved for correcting July’s form in hand-to-hand, or talking Tyler out of a particularly shitty directive.

     “Not until I know who you represent,” Aston responded. “That’s reasonable, isn’t it? I got shafted by your government years ago, I’m not exactly keen to--”

     “I’m not going,” announced one of the figures clinging to the hull. His voice was deep and melodic; as July turned her attention towards him, she realized he probably had at least eighty pounds of pure muscle over her, and he wasn’t even half as large as the pink-haired one. Shit. On the off-chance this escalated, she was suddenly extremely glad that she was dozens of yards away. Also that she had firepower.

     One of Teiddan’s hands flashed a signal; without wasting a beat, July squeezed the trigger, the heel jerked her respirator deliciously hard into her cheekbone with a recoil that felt practically erotic, and she sent a warning shot whizzing a handful of inches past Aston’s head.

     In the moments that followed, three different things happened at once.

     Firstly, the pink-haired woman launched herself off the ship and tackled Aston into the water before July’s ears even stopped faintly ringing. Simultaneously and secondly, both of the people still on the ship started yelling at once, which Teiddan probably should have expected, but it wasn’t her job to criticize him at the moment.

     Thirdly, as July’s eyes roved over the swamp water, trying to get a gauge on where Aston and his girlfriend were going to surface, she caught sight of movement on the farther shore. She peered through her scope—fuck. Fuck. Inhumanly spindly, black-clad and helmeted bodies were climbing through the trees directly opposite the ship.

     In absence of a way to communicate this development to Teiddan, pure, raw instinct took over. A roaring sound rose in July’s ears—she ignored it, pressing the whole of her face against her gun’s heel, her blood singing brilliantly in tune with the mechanical song whirring through its body in clicks and bangs. She sent one bullet through a Dusty’s shoulder, another through its neighbor’s helmet visor—that one disintegrated into a sagging bag of stardust, its uniform collapsing in on itself like a deflating balloon. There was a loud noise and a squelch, and July dove back behind the tree, hauling her rifle behind her, as the mud directly in front of her exploded, splattering with her hot muck and leaving behind a hissing, steaming wound in the earth.

     The roaring in July’s ears was quickly becoming hard to ignore. She had the presence of mind to flick her rifle’s safety back on before scrambling to her feet, throwing a hand back against the tree to stop herself from sliding back down in a muddy heap. Her job was now to provide cover fire. There was hot air rushing around her ears. The Dusties had seen her—another cauterizing bullet hit the ground a few feet to her left, and she scraped her nails into the tree bark. Fuck. Her job was to provide cover fire. Her vision flickered orange. Her job—

     July hoisted her rifle under one arm and started running deeper into the woods, ignoring the snap-crackle-snap-ROAR of fire in her ears, not now. Not fucking now. It’s not the time. The forest was not on fire. She was in combat. Her job was to—

     A lick of flame wound its way up her leg, gently caressed her thigh, and July screamed in pain. She fell to her knees, hit the ground, and started hyperventilating into her respirator.

     It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. The forest wasn’t on fire. Her job—

     July clawed at her respirator. As soon as she yanked it off her face, the overwhelming chill of nausea overcame her and she started gagging and heaving; the feeling of her throat closing sent her panic to new, dizzying heights, and her leg screamed and shrieked and twisted itself into noneuclidean geometries of bone and flesh, and a few feet away, June laughed and laughed…

     A hand grabbed her shoulder and she jackknifed upright with the intent to smash her skull into the face of whoever grabbed her, but they pulled back as soon as she reacted. Some remaining logical part of her brain parsed that it was a human figure before she could move again.

     One of the guys from the ship was crouched in front of her—not the one who spoke earlier. He was a long, lean slash in space, an androgynous mess of angles and too-skinny limbs, one of those guys whose cheekbones matched his collarbones and whose clothes clung to every inch of his frame.

     “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

     July stared at him uncomprehendingly. The fire retreated behind him, slowly melting back into the depths of the woods. He wasn’t wearing a mask. That was all she could focus on in her pain-addled haze.

     “Do you have a gun,” he repeated, somehow more insistent and irritated than desperate. Without waiting for an answer this time, he started patting her waist and hips. Upon encountering her holster, he withdrew her pistol and stood up. And up. July tilted her head back to look at him; he towered above her, head directly in front of the hazy sun so his features were obscured by shadow. He held a hand out; unthinkingly, she grabbed it and hoisted herself to her feet, where her right leg promptly shot a lance of pain through her entire body.

     “My leg—“ she gasped, nearly falling against him briefly before she grabbed at his forearms to keep balance.

     He looked down. “You’re bleeding,” he noted mildly.

     “For real?” she said, and then she giggled, which sounded weird and high even to her own ears. “Sorry. Of course it’s real. You said it. Fuck—“ she shook her head. Most of her weight leaned against his forearms, which he was taking surprisingly well. “Sorry.”

     The guy cast a brief look behind her. “It’s alright. I think your friends are distracting them. Let’s get you down—“

     A sequence of sudden movements made July nauseous again and sent her into another coughing fit, and by the time her head stopped spinning, she was leaned up against a tree trunk and her right pant leg was hoisted up to reveal a gnarly hunk of bloody, burned flesh on her calf. She sighed in relief. “It’s fine, I just got grazed by a caut.”

     He looked at her in silence for a few beats with an expression she couldn’t parse, then in a couple of smooth motions shrugged his jacket off and yanked his shirt over his head. July was suddenly confronted with a smooth, pale expanse of bare skin, a thin trail of dark hair curling up his stomach, and surprisingly toned arms.

     “You’ll freeze,” was all she could manage.

     He didn’t even bother to dignify that with a response, just started wrapping his shirt tightly around her shin. She wasn’t sure if there was much of a point to that, since the bullet cauterized most of her wound on contact, but raising objections seemed like a lot of effort at the moment. After securing the makeshift bandage, he put his jacket back on, zipped it, and picked her pistol back up off the ground where he’d left it.

     “Look at me.” She was struck again by how confident he seemed, for someone who was presumably not a soldier, and decided to comply. His eyes were cool and dark, enough that she couldn’t see a distinction between iris and pupil. Barely-curled locks of messy dark hair lay wetly against the knives of his cheekbones, which practically glowed with sweat. She immediately felt extremely uncomfortable, but didn’t look away.

     “Your friends are pinned behind the ship,” he said. “Sage and Aston are out here. I’m going to run in and grab Jasper. I need you to cover me while I do, and your friends are going to take that chance to retreat.”

     This was enough to pull July full-force back into reality—and to realize her ass was fucked if she didn’t salvage the mission. Her shoulders straightened; she hoisted her rifle by its strap over her shoulder and into her lap. “You’re coming with us. After, I mean.”

     He cocked his head at her, his expression still unreadable. Whatever he was thinking, he seemed to come to the conclusion that he didn’t have time to argue, because he left her with a vaguely affirmative head-jerk before dashing back towards the edge of the woods.

     July’s strange, heady clarity persisted as she threw herself flat on her stomach in the mud and rolled both herself and her rifle into position. As she peered through her scope, she barely felt her leg anymore—everything was narrowing down to the clean circle of her scope, the cool press of her cheekbone against her gun’s butt, and her fingers slotted so neatly into its parts she couldn’t quite tell where her hands ended and the metal began.

     There were three Dusties wading through the water toward the ship, and another two hanging back in the far treeline. Clouds of alien debris and dense swirling smoke hung heavily over the scene, stinging July’s eyes and obscuring her view, but she was still able to lay down a spray of bullets across the Dusties approaching the ship. They jolted at the splashes against their knees; two of them started whipping around, guns up, looking for the sniper, but the third got clipped in the shoulder and stumbled, falling into the water.

     The scene felt like the inside of a snowglobe—smoke and stardust drifting across the scene in slow-motion, July’s shots ringing out cartoonishly slowly, everything crystallized into a bullet-time vignette. She cracked the helmet visor of one of the Dusties still upright, sent the third one collapsing into a pile of stardust that bloomed across the surface of the water, its uniform swirling in the muddy eddy. Two shots, and one of the ones on the shore was kneecapped, reduced to clutching itself in agony in the fetal position. The other one on the shore was sufficiently distracted by this—dropped to its knees beside its companion and started shuffling through its gear.

     She turned her attention back to the two left in the water, only to find them retreating hastily. She fired off a few more shots after them, slinging swamp muck up around their shins.

     “Wright,” an urgent voice said—she jolted, pulled herself back behind the tree, and the full force of the pain in her leg slammed back into her with a vengeance. She hissed a breath in through her teeth as she glanced around for the source of the voice. A few yards away, Teiddan was gesturing at her from the back of a group of people—everyone but the Dusties, it looked like. Axel was bringing up the rear, a wild look in his eyes, his pistol up.

     July locked her rifle and, with great effort, pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the urge to shriek in pain as she put her weight on her injured leg. She took a couple of steps, gasped in pain, and promptly fell into a choking, coughing fit—put your respirator back on, you fucking moron!

     The damage was already done, though. July stumbled haphazardly forward, hacking her lungs up and trying desperately not to puke. Tears blurred her vision and the edges of her sight flickered with black. Still, she doggedly lurched towards the group as fast as she could, even as the forest spun around her dizzily.

     Suddenly, she felt hands grab her waist. Without acknowledgment or fanfare, someone awfully strong hoisted her into the air; July retched briefly, unfortunately maintaining the presence of mind to immediately feel embarrassed. At the end of the vertigo-inducing flurry of movement, her face was pressed against her rescuer’s chest and her knees and torso were supported in a bridal carry.

     “You’ve got her?” That sounded like Teiddan.

     “She’s not heavy,” her rescuer said, and to her further humiliation, it sounded like the guy who’d bandaged her leg and stolen her pistol. She could tell by his accent—he spoke with long, open vowels and a slight drawl.

     “Car’s about five miles out,” Axel’s voice rang. “We’ll need to book it—”

     Someone pressed her mask against her mouth. July gratefully sipped a few short breaths of clean air through it as best she could while being jostled at what felt like a breakneck pace through the woods.

     “—claiming asylum as victims,” someone else was saying. “We were being chased—”

     “Why were they after you?” Axel shouted. July winced. She was pretty sure everyone could hear him just fine.

     “We’re from the facility,” the one who was holding her said. When he spoke, his voice rumbled deep in his chest against her cheek, providing a brief point of contact for her head to temporarily slow its endless spinning. “Medical. I got us offboard when their ship got close enough to—”

     “Oh, that’s why you showed up,” Aston said. “I didn’t sign up to ferry these two out of the line of fire, let me say—“

     “I think you should take a nap,” June said, and July finally succumbed to her vertigo and exhaustion and oxygen deprivation, slipping obligingly into unconsciousness. Anything for her sister.