Stardust

     Delirium served to bury the darkness eating away at your gut. The saccharine-smelling kaleidoscope of Chora sent you into a giddy, ecstatic haze that bordered on intoxication; every time you leaned into Sage, her spicy-sweet scent hit you like a two-by-four to the skull and left your head spinning.

     She led you through the chaotic jumble of city streets, down alleyways strung with multicolored lanterns and along side streets with tiny garden beds crammed in-between houses, past stained-glass windows overlooking little sill-top planters of orange flowers and flights of stairs decorated with mismatched patterned tiles, until you came to a massive, towering building, taller than the spaceport; it loomed higher than anything else you'd seen in Chora so far, higher than the tallest streetlight, so tall it fully disappeared into the overhead darkness.

     Like so much of the city, this building was covered in intricate mosaics, but it was perhaps ten times more densely-layered than the others; Sage dragged you through the front doors so quickly, you couldn't make out any of the scenes depicted—just the quick impression of strange reptilian faces, a blue sky, a sun like the one in her old home.

     She continued to pull you through the lobby at top speed—you had the rushed, dizzy impression of a smooth and shiny floor that squeaked beneath your boot heels, scatterings of potted plants, empty queues of velvet ropes and brass supports, a mirrored ceiling like the one in the spaceport—then you were blinking at your frizzy-haired, wide-eyed reflection as a pair of elevator doors clunked shut behind you.

     “We'd normally need spacesuits on the surface,” she said, one hand grasping the brass bar affixed to the elevator wall at hip height, “but I don't think that's relevant here.”

     This felt true. Your stomach lurched as the elevator accelerated sharply upward, leaving your head a few paces below your body. Pressure quickly built in your ears.

     While the walls of this elevator were also mirrored, it boasted much less square footage than the one in the spaceport. Feigning vanity, you looked into the mirror closest to you and began combing your fingers through your hair; as you drew unkempt, greasy locks forward to cover your face, you snuck glances at Sage in the mirror. She looked on edge—lips turned slightly downward, shadows under her eyes—but there was a manic glint in her eye you'd never seen before.

     Deceleration made your stomach do several more backflips. The elevator dragged, slowed, then clunked to a stop so abruptly that you stumbled in place and your hands flew out to grab the bar for stability.

     The doors slid open to reveal yet another large, empty hall; this one was dimly lit and oddly devoid of color, dotted with more of those queue-ropes from downstairs—thick velvet snakes held up by brassy supports, like something you would wait in at a movie theater on Earth. A row of tall, tinted glass doors loomed at the end of the chamber, further solidifying the theater comparisons in your mind. Sage hurried you out of the elevator and along the mazelike pathway of ropes without a word, silence only broken by the squeaking echoes of your boots in the cavernous room.

     It did not take a very long time to cross the room, but in the strange, colorless silence, it felt like an eternity. You were relieved when you finally arrived at the row of doors and Sage reached over your head to open one. A wash of chilly air swept over you, stinging your nose.

     It was dark outside.

     “It's night,” you said, surprised. Your boots hit the ground with a jarring crunch—the substance beneath your feet was gray and gritty, and it puffed up in a little cloud where your soles hit it.

     The landscape before you was empty. Not the colloquial emptiness of a desert or a tundra or a rocky shore, somewhere devoid of humanity, but teeming with life regardless—this was true empty waste, utterly featureless, nothing but stone and gravel and gritty dirt in shades of dull grey, nothing moving, not even the wind. And it was freezing—your skin prickled, breaking out in goosebumps under your jacket, and your breath hung in the air in visible clouds of vapor.

     Out over the distant horizon, the angular silhouettes of rock formations jutted out to loom dark against the sky—the sky.

     The sky.

     It reeled, it sang—it sparkled. It spilled over with a flood of stars, more than you had ever seen at once in your life, even in photos; the sky glowed deep purple and indigo, subtle reds and pinks swelling up in luminescent clouds around sprawling, gaseous splotches of darkness. Multicolored light coalesced to outline a clear galaxy's arm rippling over your head, its core hot and white-pink just over the distant hills.

     “There isn't any night,” Sage said. Her voice was low and rough; you dragged your eyes from the overhead splendor to see her staring at the horizon, herself, her face slack and her hands shoved in her pockets. “No day, either. Just… this.”

     Slowly, aimlessly, she began walking across the endless grey wasteland, a puff of grit rising around her feet with every meandering step. Tiny pops of green appeared in the bootprints she left; you hurried to follow at her heels, squinting curiously at the ground. The green dots unfurled into stems, first sprouting tall and proud, then drooping under the weight of fat green buds bursting along their bodies.

     “Pre-exodus history is… difficult to study. The historical record suffered from the exodus—they couldn't digitize everything they had in time. But everyone knows the basic story—we lived on the surface, under the light of the Sun. Our city was a center for trade worldwide.”

     There was no water nearby, but your ears filled with the rush of the river nonetheless. Ghosts of sunbeams rippled over your skin, afterimages of light that conveyed no warmth. Thick grass began to sprout under your soles faster than you were walking.

     “That was what we were known for—trade, travel, exploration. We built the first planes—we had high-speed rail, naval networks—we built the first space station. So when we learned about the collapse—obviously, we built more ships.”

     The air went still again. Your ears rang in the abrupt silence.

     “The Sun was collapsing in on itself. There was nothing we could do but run.” Sage came to a standstill, her gaze still fixed on the horizon. “We ran to the stars… we weren't the only ones. All over the world, people took to the stars… the lucky ones, at least.”

     The starlight shuddered, dimmed ever-so-briefly, then convalesced with gusto, casting everything in a flash of saturation and light as though the god in the machine had yanked the “bloom” setting to full throttle. A breeze gently kissed your skin and rustled through the grass, which dissolved into puffs of grey dust at its touch until all that was left of the greenery was a trail of ashy lumps. Feathers of light slowly faded away; the landscape was plunged back into complete desolation.

     “We stayed in space for over three hundred years.” Cold, sterile void yawned just below the surface of Sage's voice. It hummed with a thin, empty engine-whine and echoed with the ring of metal. Starlight framed the silhouette of her profile as you looked up at her, ringing the round edge of her cheek with dim blue light.

     It took you a second to find your voice. “Were you—I mean—was this why you came to Earth?”

     “No.” A wry smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. “This was all long before I was born—a good couple of centuries. We came back to the planet once the radiation had died down… but it was like this, a husk of its former self, and it orbited… Ora.”

     Now she looked down at you, finally—her golden eyes were drawn, her lids drooping, but as they met yours, that manic glimmer rose up again, something hard and sharp moving deep in their depths. Your heart skittered.

     “It's a word for… a grave, or something that's left behind. The site and mechanism of a death, the corpse once all soul has gone out of it. Ora is a grave larger than I have ever—ever—been able to comprehend—” there her expression did change; she flinched, and your fingers twitched with the urge to reach out and grab her hand. She took a breath in through her nose, then: “And it's all that's left of our Sun.”

     “What is it?” Her gaze did not move an inch from yours. Something itched and squirmed underneath your skin. You swallowed before clarifying: “The thing the sun turned into.”

     Her eyebrows drew in slightly, as if confused. “A black hole.”

     With that, Sage turned from you and squatted down on the ground; as your gaze trailed her, you realized the two of you were standing on a soft, pale pink blanket laid out over the gray dirt. This did not strike you as strange. Once Sage had arranged herself comfortably on the blanket, leaned back with her legs stretched out and her arms propping up her weight, she jerked her head to one side, indicating you should join her; you sat beside her, close enough that goosebumps rose on your forearm as your jacket brushed against her warm body, and tilted your head back to look at the star-strewn sky.

     “Even with the planet's surface nuclear-blasted of all life, you can't live in space forever. We settled underground. Other cities came back over time, of course. But Ora—Ora is why I brought you here.” You snuck another glance at her profile; her jaw was clenched, a muscle in the hollow of her neck twitching subtly. “Every few cycles, you can see it pass over the arm of our galaxy. My hearth took the children to see it when I was—oh, I don't know—I was very young, I wasn't even reading yet.”

     The sky was the same, a sea of starlight slowly creeping across the black plane, but Sage's eyes were fixed on it as if something truly horrendous was happening somewhere in its gaseous depths.

     “I don't blame them—transversal years are a sort of holiday, everyone comes to the surface to see it. The other children were fine. My reaction isn't… common.”

     Something shifted. Your eyes were drawn to the very edge of the horizon, just above the distant stark outline of the hills; the light behind them was… rippling, somehow, as if the stars themselves were being nudged out of place.

     “There are some people who see Ora's passage and can't…” Sage's voice wavered, then rallied. “It's like you can't get away from it, like—like it crawls under your skin, all your thoughts orbit around it… I can't describe how… afraid I was.”

     The starlight continued to bend and twist as the uncannily pristine rim of a pure black circle rose up over the mountains, a slice of void that seemed to shape the stars around itself like putty; it crept over the horizon, exposing more of itself, a perfectly circular raw wound in the sky. Your bile began to rise; the deep purples and blues of space twisted as if pressed down with a thumb, an image that scraped against your nerves, made them sing Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

     “They couldn't calm me down til I was back underground.” You could feel the tension vibrating under Sage's skin without even touching her; her voice was two razors scraping over one another, trembling heat radiating from the bare skin of her arm and burning a hole in your jacket sleeve. “There's a word for it—Aston translates it to being 'haunted.' No matter how far or how fast you run, you can't get away from Ora.”

     The hole in reality rose higher and higher, warping fields of stars and gas into pliant ooze. As it approached the galaxy's luminescent heart, the space packed white-pink-hot with clusters of stars so numerous they blurred into one glimmering mass, Ora haloed itself with pink-gold in a refracted inversion of the core—the hole drew upwards and the core drew around it, stretching into an upside-down grin, light dripping from it in thick globules.

     “Nasty, isn't it?” Disgust drooled from every syllable. “Aston was haunted on the same day. We didn't find each other until later, when I got into ship mechanics—we met at a workshop, he paid me to do his homework. He ended up dropping the subject, but I kept following him around anyway. Nobody else… understood.”

     Your eyes were locked to the center of Ora. Its absolute blackness pulled at you inescapably; your heart raced, your head reeled, and something in your gut pulled as it leered down at you. Around the radiant edges of the hole, little teeth poked through the darkness, sharp and white.

     “That's why we left,” Sage said. “Aston thought—maybe on another planet, another galaxy entirely—but, well. You can't outrun a haunting.”

     The teeth multiplied, lengthened, waved languidly in place like a ring of seaweed undulating in an unseen current. Ora contorted—its edges wavered, briefly—then it grew, the horrid circle of nothingness extending a few centimeters, the stars around it oozing sickly into place.

     The ground groaned.

     “July?” Sage's voice was suddenly alert and bright. Her hand was on yours; you barely registered the pressure.

     “I don't like it.” Your voice was thin and weak. The teeth wiggled mockingly.

     As if in response, the ground trembled. Your stomach flipped over itself—your fingers retracted from the dirt—a low, grating rumble rose in outermost periphery of your hearing, and Sage, worry in her voice, said “This isn't how it's supposed to happen.”

     Ora grinned. Its teeth gnashed against one another, the galaxy around it warping violently into a linear curve—

     —and then it yawned open again, larger than ever, and the ground convulsed, the air rang with scrapes of stone-on-stone and powerful cracks, and Sage said something loud and terrified you didn't understand.

     Then her arms were around you. It was like the air returned to your lungs all at once, like the vice Ora had clamped around your abdomen suddenly fell open—your line of sight finally broken, you gasped, clenched your eyes shut, buried your face in her jacket as the planet quivered in agony. Dust and grit flew through the air as the earth bucked—shrieked—and Sage's lips were against your ear, saying “That's not me—this is you, July, please—”

     Waves of heat rolled over your body, sweaty and nauseating. The background roar had risen to a torturous volume. You risked a glance up—a flash of Sage's cheek, her twists falling into your face and wafting spice into your skull, and through the pink haze, Ora, now twice as large, looming in the sky, drooling hunks of space from its teeth—and the pressure in your head was unbearable. You buried yourself in Sage again, clutching your fists in the sweat-damp fabric of her jacket.

     She was still talking, almost inaudible beneath the all-consuming roar—“Find a door. You need to find a door.”

     The doors—you had forgotten about the doors. Sage was peeling you off her torso, but you didn't need the encouragement—you pushed off her and fell to your hands and knees on the shaking ground. Everything felt oddly light—as you crawled forward, it was like you were dragging yourself through water, every motion sending you bobbing a few centimeters into the air—the planet screamed and you screamed with it, scrabbling at stone til grit ground beneath the crevices of your fingernails.

     The corridor was far from your mind. You could not feel the doors—you did not understand where they were—you did not understand where you were.

     Until you ran directly into one.

     Your head butted up against a wooden surface, hard—you looked up and there, smack in the middle of the wasteland, leading to absolutely nowhere and connected to absolutely nothing, was a dark red door.

     Heart banging in the hollow of your throat, you dragged yourself upright against the door's wooden slats, grappling helplessly at the doorknob—your sweat-slick palms slid over it ineffectually, failing to gain purchase on the slippery metal—then it turned under its own power and the latch clicked of its own accord. The door cracked open, letting a sweet note of birdsong spill through.

     You stumbled—fell back—Sage gasped as your weight collided with her chest. Her arms wrapped around you as you instinctively thrashed, cringing from the light that spilled from the open door and stung your skin.

     June's silhouette loomed in the doorway, ringed in a corona of golden light that melded with her blazing hair, obscuring her features. You felt like crying.

     “Come on,” she said.

     Before you could react, Sage was bundling you over the threshold; you sagged in her embrace and allowed this to happen, a dull ache rising in your muscles as the roar of Ora faded into the background. The metal gate swung shut behind you with a distinctive clang and sweet, silent heat of the garden enveloped you.

     Sage let you stagger free of her support and sway, slowly, to kneel in the grass. It was warm and soft to the touch, the dark soil loose and pillowy; you plunged your hands into it, palms-down, fingers spread wide, and breathed.

     “—what you were calling,” June was saying, agitated, “but if it was one of those, I don't even—look, don't fuck with that, okay?”

     “It wasn't me.” Sage sounded shockingly stoic.

     “Of course it wasn't.”

     You looked up. June was a few feet away, pacing back-and-forth with her hands clasped behind her back; Sage knelt a foot or two away from you, hands folded peaceably in her lap. The second you looked in her direction, she hastily pulled her eyes away from you and back over toward your sister.

     June ceased pacing to meet your gaze. She looked grim, black eyes flinty and jaw set firmly. “Hey. Don't do that again.”

     “I won't,” you said immediately.

     She cackled once, morbid and sarcastic, and the line of her shoulders relaxed visibly.

     “Do you know this is real yet?”

     You whipped your head back around to Sage; her eyes flickered like the hot yellow core of a flame encased in amber, the set of her mouth quiet and serious. The garden's humidity was suddenly thick in your chest, slowing your breathing.

     “Obviously she doesn't,” June said. It was rather snide of her. You bristled.

     Sage, on the other hand, did not react. She reached out and plucked a wet strand of hair from where it lay plastered against your sweaty face; in a smooth motion, she tucked it behind your ear, and your heart, having only just recovered from your latest adrenaline rush, managed a sickly couple of skips.

     “I'll come and get you in the morning,” Sage said, a warm smile spreading across her broad, freckled face.

     “Gag,” June said loudly, but she was being immature, so you did not grace her with a response.