Stardust

     Speaking in broad terms, Cas did not participate in drug-centered social rituals. They found the experience of blunting their mental functions quite disturbing—while they took their singular experience with alcohol in stride, cannabis was another matter entirely, and overall Cas was not particularly keen to continue experimenting in that realm. Stimulants were quite enough for them, thank you very much.

     Over the latter several months of living at the Station, however, Axel had developed a weekly ritual with Cas, Mels, Pluto, and Klutz wherein he passed out hand-rolled joints and they took turns choosing albums to listen to. It was a delightful bonding experience, and Cas had a rather academic interest in watching their friends interact while stoned—it was like watching a wildlife documentary.

     Despite the absence of Pluto and Klutz, Axel began this tradition again as soon as he regained access to his drug of choice. It was different, certainly, and they’d spent one session doing nothing but lamenting the absence of their friends (Mels directing her effusive expressions of anguish toward Cas, who felt rather awkward as she’d known the Station residents far, far longer and more intimately than they had any claim to), but regardless, Cas appreciated the slivers of normality they were able to carve out together.

     Those slivers of normality came with caveats, the most notable being the presence of a Dusty during their ritual. Axel seemed to authentically enjoy Matt’s company, and if Cas was being honest, they found him socially unobjectionable. Even Mels seemed to like him; the two chatted gaily about theater nearly every time they saw one another.

     The second caveat, introduced mere days after Caspian's world was upended for the nth time, was July’s presence.

     It should not have been a surprise that Axel invited her. It was inevitable, of course, that the two of them repaired their relationship somewhat. Cas had no right to veto her participation, so when Axel approached to inform them of the development, they said nothing—still, they nursed a sore spot in their heart, and when they arrived in his chambers to find July already there, hanging upside-down off the bed with her heels planted against the wall, that sore feeling swelled to the brim.

     July tapped her feet against the wall and offered a wiggle of her fingers that could, conceivably, be referred to as a wave. Her cheeks were flushed a delicate pink, her eyes crinkled up as if mid-laughing-fit; her hair was strewn about the floor beneath her dangling head and her shirt hung loosely from her torso, a thick strip of belly skin exposed by gravity.

     Cas only had a split second to take this image in before they were accosted by Axel—he leapt from his desk chair, slung an elbow around their neck, and yanked down violently, forcing Cas to bend double. Cas jammed their palm against his thigh, just above the knee, halting their downward momentum. In a few short, sharp motions, they used their other hand to shove Axel’s face upward and away, breaking his hold, and twisted out of the headlock.

     Axel cackled playfully; Caspian, feeling rather cheerfully petulant, used the hand still on his shoulder to shove directly on his joint while using their other to yank his arm down. Axel went to the floor easily, still snickering. They gave him a sharp, toothy grin as they straightened up.

     “Inelegant,” they said, offering him a hand.

     Axel took it, dimples cratering his freckled cheeks as he clambered to his feet. Once standing, he gave them a light punch on the arm. “Always a critic.”

     At some point during their friendly tussle, July had re-positioned herself to sit upright on the bed, knees gaping apart. Her shirt was, thankfully, back in its correct position. She was eyeing the scene with an uncomfortable amount of interest. “Hey, Cas.”

     “Hello,” Cas said stiffly. Fortunately, the arrival of Mels and Matt saved them from having to elaborate; the pair burst through the door already chattering and laughing, Matt in one of his florid, attention-grabbing outfits, this one featuring a top hat and vest. Mels had stripes of glitter painted over her cheeks and her hair done up in a high ponytail that bounced cheerfully as she swung into the room. There was a band-aid on the crook of her left elbow—she must have come straight from a blood draw.

     The swung shut behind them. Matt issued an enthusiastic “Ahoy!”

     Over the next few minutes, Axel bustled intently around the room, flitting from task to task as everyone settled in. Mels, after collapsing into Axel’s desk chair, zeroed in on July and began chatting up a storm; Cas, having very little interest in the details of their conversation, simply sat on the bed beside July and watched events unfold.

     Matt followed Axel around the room with the air of a puppy trotting at his heels, peering with massively dilated pupils over Axel's shoulder as he fiddled with various machines—first he switched on the fairy lights strung around the edges of his ceiling, then he began a much more complicated process involving the record player and connected speaker setup. While he was bent over the record player, carefully maneuvering the needle into its proper place, he murmured something inaudible to Matt, who broke off to drag the beanbags out of Axel’s closet.

     The dreamlike, folksy strains of Fleetwood Mac filled the room; Axel retreated to a beanbag by the door, picking up his rolling tray and associated memorabilia along the way, and hunched over to begin rolling joints. Cas found the process rather fascinating. He was uncharacteristically meticulous in his movements; after grinding fat buds of flower to a chunky powder, he portioned them out neatly with a little scoop, one precise, almost-entirely-even line down the middle of each thin scrap of paper. His eyes narrowed, shaggy red-gold curls falling into his face as he worked, glimmering under the staccato twinkling pattern of the lights.

     With practiced ease, Axel rolled each paper up into a small tube, licked the strip of adhesive at the edge, and sealed the ends with a press and a twist. He proffered the first one to Mels, who ceased her conversational fixation on July to turn back toward the group as a whole.

     She leaned down to pluck the joint from Axel’s hand and blew him a kiss as she drew a lighter out of her pocket. Leaning back in his desk chair, so far back its gears creaked and she nearly went parallel to the floor, she lit up and took a massive drag. Her exhalation came with a euphoric sound, high and breathy, a massive cloud of smoke riding on its back. “God, that’s the good shit. Anyone need a light?”

     Beside Cas, July gave another wave, as if to say “Me;” Cas frowned. They leaned in to murmur an expression of concern in her ear, but July was already moving to accept the lighter and a joint from Axel, and as her lips wrapped around the accordion-folded cardboard filter and she breathed deep, Cas sat back against the wall, practicing the art of “letting it go.”

     Smoke undulated through the air in the windowless room, adding a gentle bloom to the fairy lights. It dissipated softly throughout the space, gently blurring the edges of shapes, the thick smell of weed settling over everything. Cas found it oddly comforting.

     Axel tipped his head back, eyes half-closed, and began idly making shapes of chords with his free hand as he smoked, in sync with the music. After a time, he said “July chose the album this time. Everyone say thanks.”

     Matt, who was sprawled lengthily over the beanbag at Axel’s side—to say he was in the chair would be vastly stretching the truth, as he was reclining sidelong, all of his overly-long limbs spilling over the seat—chose to take this literally. “Much obliged, Wright.” He followed this up by tapping two fingers to the brim of his outrageous hat.

     “Oh, that’s weird,” July said. Her voice was low and husky, drawling with such weight, every syllable seemed physical. She dropped back against the wall next to Cas, her arm gently brushing up against theirs—her scar tissue grazed the curve of their bicep and they had to quickly bite down on the inside of their cheek to keep from flinching. She didn’t seem to notice—her eyes were half-lidded and her lips spread in a hazy grin. “I don’t use my last name much.”

     “You could start,” Matt said brightly. “It’s a noble moniker—did you know, the first aeroplanes were—”

     “Old news, buddy,” July said. “No relation, either. Mom’s family was English Jews, came over in the forties, can’t imagine why.” Mels guffawed, which prompted July’s sleazy grin to widen as she brought the joint back to her lips. Its ashy tip had burnt almost down to the nub, and as she took a massive draw, it glowed cherry-red and burnt down the rest of the way. July released her final cloud of smoke ecstatically, then coughed a couple of times as she stubbed it out on the wall behind her.

     “Bitch,” Axel said affectionately, “use an ashtray.” He passed her one over Caspian's lap; she leaned shamelessly over their body to grab it, giving them a fleeting faceful of her ridiculous mop of sweet-smelling hair.

     Cas was awfully tense.

     This was not helped when July, after putting the ashtray aside on the bed, collapsed sidelong to drape her head on Cas’s shoulder, wrapping her fingers around the thin shape of their arm. “God, my head’s, like, shutting up,” she crooned.

     “Hell yeah,” Mels said cheerfully. “Weed does that for me, too. Shuts my psychosis right down.”

     July brought her head back up, squinting at Mels with what would have been an amusing level of confusion, in a less uncomfortable situation. “You?”

     That single word did not adequately convey meaning. It barely even qualified as a sentence. Mels, somehow, seemed to understand regardless. “Yeah, man, I was trying to tell you the other day—I’m bipolar, I’m not gonna judge you for weird brain shit.”

     Cas felt the need to interject. “I do not suggest you smoke—”

     “Yeah, okay, mom,” July grumbled. Cas bristled, drawing themself further upright, but before they could say something cutting and incisive, Matt jumped back into the conversation, as blithely chipper as ever.

     “I’ll make sure you’re all right as rain, don’t worry. If you shouldn’t be smoking, I’ll tell you.” He gazed at July with disconcertingly eager, focused energy, pupils so dilated, Cas could see them from across the room. “Are you a bit touched in the head, then?”

     “Rude!” Mels squealed, just as Axel languidly reached a hand over to cuff Matt on the back of his head. His bright pink crest spasmed briefly, bolting upright in a manner reminiscent of a startled cat’s fur standing on-end, before settling back down against his neck; this caused his outlandish headgear to momentarily pop up from his skull. July dissolved into cackles.

     Axel’s tone was easygoing. “Remember what I said about phrasing?”

     “I was trying to be polite,” Matt said defensively. “Should I call her crazy, instead?”

     While they bickered, July, no longer giggling, let her body fall prone over Caspian's lap, legs stretched out lengthwise on the bed and her hot cheek pressed into their thigh. It felt like it would burn a hole in their jeans.

     “Yeah, I hallucinate all the time,” she finally said, fingers playing along their kneecap in some mindless, senseless pattern. They had to bite down on the inside of their cheek, hard, to resist the urge to jerk their leg away. “It sucks.”

     “See, I can’t understand that,” Matt said. “You—humans, I mean—you act like just because something isn’t happening here, it can’t be happening at all. But when the water rises elsewhere, it echoes where you are—when I see the waterfall, I don’t kick against it, I know it’s running somewhere else—like tomorrow.”

     Cas could make neither heads nor tails of this statement. Neither, apparently, could Axel, who gave Matt a look of abject exasperation.

     “You’re talking crazy-talk again,” he said.

     Matt waved his long, thin fingers in the air helplessly, his crest wiggling. “You’re all so limited,” he said despairingly. “I wish you could speak—” and here he made a series of hissing noises broken up by dissonant consonants Cas could not quite follow; it was over much too quickly for them to fix in their memory.

     “This is why I like talking to you, though,” Axel said. He plucked a second joint from the rolling tray beside him and lit up once more, face lit starkly for a moment by the glow of the lighter flame. Once he exhaled, he finished: “You’re weird. It’s good craic.”

     “Ooh,” Matt said, perking up immediately, “tell me what that one means.”

     “Like—conversation, good vibes.” Axel waved ineffectually at the smoke in front of his face. “But don’t say it to Americans, they’ll think you mean drugs—learned that one my first week at school here. Gave my mum a heart attack when they called and said I was trying to sell coke to the other ten-year-olds.”

     July and Mels laughed in unison at that one. For some reason, which they could not pin down and did not particularly want to examine, this made Cas feel all the more sullen. July’s warm face continued to press up against their thigh like a hot iron; as they cast a glance down at her, the pink apple of her cheek sent the tender feeling from earlier swelling up and up, til it spilled over the brim of their heart.

     “How are you coping with the appearance of your sister?” Cas said. It came out very fast, and very sharp—left them shaken the second the words fell from their lips.

     Axel’s head snapped up, quick on the draw despite his inebriation. “Sister?” His voice dropped almost to a whisper, like he was afraid someone would overhear— “June?”

     July’s easy grin slid off her face, her expression turning baleful. Cas raised their eyebrows down at her. “You didn’t tell him?” Not waiting for an answer, they turned their attention back to Axel. “June is alive, apparently. She is being held in this very facility, on one of the other floors. She quite generously paid me a visit recently, before revealing herself to July.”

     Axel’s face was drawn, his brows furrowed and his jaw set firmly. He sat back in his beanbag til he was near fully recumbent, staring at the ceiling. “I’m too high for this.”

     “I didn’t know how to bring it up,” July said plaintively. She disentangled herself from Caspian's lap and sat up; the corners of her mouth tilted downward as she leaned back against the wall, wrapping a strand of hair around one finger.

     “Excuse me,” Matt said, propping himself up on one arm and craning his head around toward July. “June is not a patient here.”

     Everyone swiveled around to look at him, even Mels, who could not possibly understand what was being discussed but was nevertheless rubbernecking with intense fascination.

     “June—well, we’re supposed to call her Mary, but she hates that.” Matt’s fingers danced through the air for emphasis. “She’s around here often—bit of a jade, but who wouldn’t be, in her shoes? She’s Marcus’s daughter. One of them, at least. June was her name before she was adopted, she likes it when we use it, long as he’s not around.”

     A thick silence descended over the room. Caspian's shoulders felt as though they would snap under their own tension.

     They snuck a look at July; her face was blank as she huddled up against the wall, chewing on the thumb she’d wrapped a lock of hair around. Her eyes were still red and unfocused, staring at nothing in particular.

     “I need some air,” Cas said suddenly, and without sparing either a look or another word, they sprung from the bed and stalked out of the room, letting the door slam shut behind them.

###

     It was nearly an hour before Axel came to find them.

     They were crouched on a queer little patch of roof, a square of dingy and battered metal grate a bare few feet in surface area, protruding out from the side of the ramshackle structure their holding cells were located in. The platform was not unlike a fire escape; it had a railing of thin, grimy bars spaced far enough apart to stick one’s hands through the gaps, and a rickety staircase of rattling bars and bolts leading down below—the staircase, however, was blocked off by a gate wrapped with swathes of thick, rusting chains and padlocked firmly shut.

     Far below them, the staircase opened out onto a maze of open-air pathways; if Cas pressed their face to the mesh of the floor to peer through a hole, they could make out the shapes of Dusties traversing the labyrinth dozens of floors below. Above, their building towered over them, looming high til it disappeared into the fuliginous void; not many of the alien skyscrapers went as high as this one, and as a result, Caspian’s view of the endless dead-black sky was interrupted only by bursts and sprays of cables strung far over their head.

     Axel’s arrival was punctuated by the click-thunk and slide of the window opening behind them. The window in the gym was, as best as they could tell, the only window accessible to patients on their floor whatsoever. It was quite small, to the point that it was a tight squeeze even for Cas; Sage and Jasper could not fit through it at all. Axel shimmied through with surprising grace—or perhaps not that surprising, given he'd always had fairly impressive upper-body strength.

     “She’s fine,” he said without preamble. “Just needs to talk to June, clear a few things up.”

     Cas snorted, fixing their gaze on some distant point on the murky black horizon.

     Various rustling noises and gentle metallic reverberations filled the air as Axel settled beside them, crossing his legs. The sole of one boot rested gently against their kneecap, which they allowed, albeit begrudgingly. He heaved a deep sigh. “I’m not mad at her for not telling me. It was only a couple days ago, Cas, I haven’t seen her in a year, I’m not gonna—”

     “You are entitled to your own feelings.” Caspian's voice, even to their own ears, sounded particularly thin and cold.

     They were both silent for a long moment. The knot in Caspian's shoulders continued to throb, such that they fantasized, briefly but vividly, about ripping their neck open at the nape and clawing threads of muscles apart with their bare fingers.

     It did not help much. Their fingers curled in the grate below, weaving through holes to grip the metal tight. “Do you think it is wise to trust Matt?”

     Axel hissed a sharp breath in through his teeth. “I don’t know. I’m still feeling it out.”

     “June lied to me.” Cas leaned their forehead against the cool bars of the railing, still determinedly looking far off into the horizon, away from Axel. Some vague shape shifted in the distance, wavered like a mirage. “She lied to my face.”

     The silence stretched on. Cas let their gaze drift down, down into the labyrinth below, following perplexing tangles of paths with their eyes. Idly, they wished they'd had the common sense to visit their chambers before retreating to the balcony; they could have brought their sketchbook and been adding to their maps of the area below this whole time. It would have been more productive than sulking.

     Eventually, Axel clapped them on the shoulder and wished them well before slipping back through the window feet-first. They did not bother reciprocating—he was aware they were in a mood, he would not be offended.

     Cas continued to stare down at the walkways below them. The wavering effect on the horizon seemed to have some sort of corollary at great vertical distances—a slight wiggle around the edges of the lowest walkways, a ripple interrupting their architectural forms. They zeroed in on the phenomenon immediately, fascinated—and with a start, they realized it was fluid—water, or something very like water, but pitch-black, lapping hungrily at the paths, blurring their edges.

     Dusties continued to pass through, apparently not taking any notice of the water rising at their feet. And it was rising—as Cas watched, mesmerized, the ripples grew, evolved into choppy waves that swallowed layers of cool gray-brown metal, enveloped them in yawning black. The water began to surge and fall in rhythms—swooping up to cover a layer of overpasses, falling back briefly, surging again with even greater force—like the tide. Like the breathing of some stupendously massive thing, the waterlogged lungs of a creature whose breadth spanned cities—

     Cas realized they were clutching the grate so hard, their fingers sang with pain. Their heart threw itself around their chest ferociously, beating against the bars of its cage, violently pleading for escape.

     The water was getting closer.

     Abruptly, without even consciously registering they were moving, Cas unhanded the grate and dove for the still-open window.

     In their fugue, they dove head-first, squirming and kicking through the aperture until they hung halfway inside, the sill jammed into their gut. Frigid waves slapped at the bare soles of their feet—they really should have stopped by their room, they needed their shoes—they shoved against the now-glacial metal of the grate and heaved themself over the sill with a gasp. Cas tumbled head-over-heels onto the floor of the gym and landed on their back in a heavy thud that knocked the air out of their lungs.

     There was no time to recover—breathless, reeling, they scrambled to their feet and stumbled to claw at the window sash, their badly-shaking fingers missing it once—twice—freezing black liquid splattering against their hands—then the Stygian torrent drew back, they could see it rearing back and up, like the tide had gone out all at once and drew itself into one massive, horrifying wave leering above them—

     Their fingers found purchase on the sash. Cas slammed the window shut—and the tsunami hit.

     It splattered itself against the glass with a violent, all-consuming roar, pitch-black liquid blotting out the entire fleet. Cas clapped their hands over their ears and dropped to their knees—it hurt, it pierced their eardrums and rattled their bones, a thunderclap that went on—and the room was plunged into absolute, pure blackness, a continuous and total darkness that sent Cas back to the tunnels, back to the blackouts, robbed of their senses and trembling like a child—

     It fell silent.

     It took them several minutes to uncurl from the fetal position. Their muscles screamed in protest; when they lifted their head from its position tucked against their knees, the knot in the back of their neck sent a cruel shot of pain through their shoulders and spine. They winced.

     The gym looked normal. There was no water on the floor; Caspian's feet were perfectly dry. As they stiffly rose to their feet, a tremor in their hands, they looked to the window.

     It showed the buildings of the fleet, seemingly unchanged. Tiny figures still moved through the distant towers and walkways. Cables draped and fell in the exact same configurations they always had. There was no water.

     Cas reached one shaking hand out to press against the glass.

     It was chilly against their palm.