Stardust

     As expected, bringing Lake back to the Station was an exhausting performance. Aston would have referred to it as a disaster, if his metric for the term hadn't been permanently skewed.

     Fortunately, the whirlwind of questioning and explanations and harassment only lasted for a handful of days, and when Aston said they would move Lake into the room recently left empty by the youngsters who’d disappeared, that was that. Ray conferred with Vellum, Teiddan had a few hasty conversations with Bowie, Aston spent an evening scouring the train tracks for roadkill with Klutz and Pluto and Riot while telling them about Lake, and at the end of it, the consensus was that Lake could stay.

     Everything settled down over the next couple of weeks. Aston left Lake alone to re-situate himself—as much as he was chomping at the bit to wring every drop of information out of the man immediately, Teiddan kindly-but-firmly told him to allow Lake to settle in at his own pace.

     Several months prior, Teiddan had landed an entry-level R&D job engineering designs for stovetops, which he grimly described as “beneath me, but it pays the bills.” He was out of the house five days a week, and on his days off, he split his time between rest and housekeeping. Aston had only found the time to talk the matter of their missing friends over with him a couple of times over the last several weeks, and progress was looking practically unachievable, even given Lake's heartening arrival.

     Which was why one morning, when a knock at the doorframe interrupted Aston's glum reverie over Sage's old workbench, followed by Lake’s head poking through the curtains hung over the empty frame, he became insensibly excited.

     “Pluto just told me Ray is short for ‘Radio Jones,’” Lake said. Secretly, Aston appreciated that he never wasted any time with social niceties.

     “Well, it is,” Aston said. He beckoned for Lake to come inside; the man obliged, looking thoughtful.

     “I guess it’s… fitting,” he finally said.

     It was fitting. Radio Jones was the owner of the Station, a pale, middle-aged man with graying hair and a penchant for HAM radio. He’d bought the house with Vellum a good fifteen years ago, and the two of them lived in the attic alongside a vast array of radio equipment of extremely dubiously legal purposes.

     Ray kept in contact with HAM radio enthusiasts across the country, most of whom had a vested interest in avoiding contact with law enforcement these days; on moving in, Sage had been very excited to learn that not only were there ways to get around stardust's interference with electromagnetic fields, Ray's underground HAM network was more than happy to accept her help improving the techniques. This eventually resulted in Ray and Sage hacking the Chicago police scanners and setting up a permanent desk in the attic that the two of them, along with Vellum, took shifts monitoring. After her disappearance, Teiddan's duties on days off included the occasional shift.

     Aston let himself sag against the back of Sage’s chair, wringing one hand against the other absentmindedly. Lake crouched awkwardly on the bottom bunk—Teiddan’s, which was obvious from its perfectly straight and made-up bedclothes.

     “Was that all?” Aston said, idly spinning the chair from side to side. “I know the kids can be cagey—I’ll trade you info for info.” That was a bit obviously desperate, and Aston knew this as he was saying it. He couldn’t help it, though. It had been over two weeks and he was desperate, desperate for literally anything Lake could tell him.

     Lake had an odd expression on his face, like he urgently needed to pee. His leg bounced as he sat, gaze traveling all over the room—it wasn’t that much different from his own, a wood-paneled division of half the finished basement, but Aston guessed it was still interesting to see it for the first time. It was littered with detritus of Sage’s presence—her workbench by the door, her bed across from the bunk bed he shared with Teid, a trunk at the foot of her bed overflowing with colorful fabric.

     Finally, Lake said “What are we doing here?”

     “That’s a question for a priest,” Aston quipped.

     Lake stared at him joylessly.

     The man clearly had no appreciation for the lighter side of life. Aston allowed himself one pithy, irritated “Well, I live here,” but barreled right on with his sentence before Lake could get annoyed. “But Teid and I are trying to formulate a plan to track down the people who disappeared—everyone who was living here, of course, but now that we know July is alive and was taken only a few weeks after they were, we’re assuming she’s also being held in the same prison.”

     Looking significantly more relaxed, for no reason that Aston could conceive of, Lake swung his legs up onto the bed and stretched out to sit against the headboard. “Sounds good. I’m in.”

     It was Aston’s turn to stare. “I didn’t ask you for anything.”

     “I blinked to Jersey because I wanted to find July and I couldn’t think of anything else.” Lake’s voice took on a subtly condescending edge that sent Aston’s hackles up. “I don’t care if y’all want my help, you’re getting it.”

     “Yet,” Aston said. “I didn’t ask you for anything yet. I was going to—for fuck’s sake, if you’re raring to go, why didn’t you say anything until now?”

     Lake’s eyebrows pulled in toward his nose; he cocked his head to one side slightly. “I’ve been busy. Vellum only got me a fake ID yesterday. And you’ve barely said anything to me since last week.”

     With a theatrical groan, Aston leaned back in the chair til its back creaked. He made a mental note to chastise Teiddan later; his non-interference policy was, for once, not the best option. “Alright. Yes. Please, by all means, help out. We could use teleportation powers.”

     “What do y’all have so far?”

     The truth was embarrassing, but Aston couldn’t justify lying. He began to wring his hands again as he swung around to look back at Sage’s workbench. “A great big, stinking sack of nothing.” He spun around yet again, feeling rather dizzy at this point, and gesticulated frantically for emphasis. “Nada. Zilch. Absolute radio silence from the state, nobody’s reported arresting terrorists, nothing in the papers, not even a single mention. Ray’s been getting us news from other parts of the country—nothing. We have a list of federal prisons that house political prisoners—no clues, nothing to point us to the right one. Can’t even go scout the locations, none of them are nearby, and they’re all heavily locked down—”

     “Why are you so sure they’re in prison?” Lake had his urgently-needing-to-pee face on again.

     Aston snorted. “They’re former TAB members, they burned down the damn White House, and they got arrested. Where else would they be?” (A looming sense of doom poked its head over his shoulder right after he said that—he could think of an answer all too easily. Extrajudicial state-sponsored killings weren’t uncommon even before the Dusties showed up.)

     Lake bounced one foot on the bed, a deep frown creasing his forehead, apparently oblivious to Aston's furious struggle against the doom-and-gloom threatening his already-precarious mental health. “You’re right. They might be in medical, though.”

     That caught Aston’s interest. He immediately discarded his demoralizing train of thought to leap on the shiny new idea with a certain amount of glee. “Medical—that’s where you and Jasper met, yes?” Lake nodded. Aston sat forward in his seat. “None of them talked about it much—I didn’t push it, didn’t think it was important. It’s unlikely, but on the offchance it is relevant—I want you to tell me as much as you can remember.”

     As it turned out, that was not much.

     The two spent a good couple of hours hunched over Sage’s workbench, Aston battering the man with rapid-fire questions and scribbling in a notebook, Lake doodling little diagrams on scraps of loose paper and fiddling—in a way that annoyed Aston to no end—with Sage’s tools. Lake’s memories were infuriatingly vague at best. At worst, he seemed to have had no interest whatsoever in pursuing information about his own captivity, or even about the medical procedures he was subjected to. He described blood draws, regular counseling sessions, and various procedures where he breathed in stardust, or was injected with something, or exercised while the Dusty doctors took various measurements—but he apparently never asked questions, which made Aston want to scream.

     The main purpose of the medical ship, curiously enough, seemed to be to let the human subjects live out their lives in relatively normal, comfortable conditions. Lake described the Dusties overseeing his care as personable and friendly; they gave their subjects all the creature comforts they could desire, they attended to their medical needs, and they even encouraged the subjects to form relationships with one another.

     Lake had no idea where the medical ship was. Aston suspected the answer might be more complicated than pinpointing a set of coordinates in Earth’s orbit. Sage had long theorized that the Dusty fleet was permanently suspended in one of the dimensional “bubbles” they used to travel faster-than-light. Lake took this theory in stride; “I thought the sky looked kinda weird,” he said.

     “It’s a weak lead at best,” Aston said, sitting back in his chair. His shoulders were stiff and sore; his wrist ached and little stabs of pain shot up the tendons on his arm. He let his pencil clatter to the surface of the workbench and used his non-writing hand to rub out the cramps, fingers working in little circles as he stared critically at his poorly-scribbled shorthand. “Prison seems—”

     “When Jas and I left, there were only four of us left on our floor,” Lake cut in. He spoke very fast, fingers tap-tap-tapping anxiously against the bench surface. “There’s cycles—when Jasper got picked up, he said at first there were only the twins, and by the time I got there, there were over thirty of us. They were going to re-stock the floor soon, I’m positive.”

     Aston frowned. “What happened to the ones who left?”

     “Don’t know. They just said they left the program.” Lake’s tapping became even more agitated. “I figured it was weird a while back, most of us didn't have places to… go back to, you know? Pretty sure Jasper's parents thought he died in the car crash, and from what he’s told me, I don’t think they cared that much. I was—I ran away as a minor, went by a different name. Nobody knew me, I worked construction jobs for cash and kept to myself. That kind of thing.”

     Pursing his lips, Aston nodded slowly. That information did make for a slightly more compelling case. Still, it all felt a little like wishful thinking—an attempt at ignoring the existence of places like Guantanamo Bay.

     “Why are you doing this?”

     Lake’s voice was suddenly sharp and controlled. Aston peered at him curiously. “Why wouldn’t I? Sage has been my—”

     “No, I mean,” and Lake’s sharp tone turned frustrated, “you helped TAB because y’all wanted to leave the planet. That didn’t work, so what are you still doing here?”

     “TAB fell apart,” Aston said crisply. “I’ve been living with people I would consider my allies. Several of them were arrested—”

     “I’m not a fucking idiot.” Aston would beg to differ. He didn’t get the chance; Lake stopped tapping, stopped bouncing his leg, and made dead serious eye contact with Aston. The dark shadows under his eyes and early-onset crows’ feet made him look, very suddenly, much older, and Aston was so uncomfortable that he said nothing at all. “Everyone here hates cops. Everyone here hates Dusties. Klutz gets freaked out just seeing them on the street, even if they’re civilians. You sold our country out. Now you’re hacking police scanners and hanging out with anarchists—why?”

     Very suddenly, Aston’s scalp began to itch. He resisted the urge to scratch it by snapping the wrists on both of his hands in one short, sharp motion.

     “I did not,” he said, stiffly and quietly, “sell your country out.”

###

     Years prior, when life was easy and the worst he and Sage had to worry about was wearing colored contacts to work, they lived in a small apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

     Aston worked from home in advertising, which he found moderately unbearable, but easy. He had a knack for coming up with catchy slogans, and he was good enough at separating his home and work lives that he didn’t have to think much about what he was doing, in the epistemic-consequences sense. Sage worked manufacturing battery modules for electric cars, which she also found ethically troubling, but generally finished her long, thoughtful rants with “At least they’re electric.”

     Together, they managed to afford a one-bedroom apartment near the Iron Triangle, close enough to the bay that Sage could afford to take the BART or bus down to the waterfront and get much-needed quiet, contemplative time in a park whenever she got overwhelmed. A bit of their monthly budget went to paying their contact in Nevada to keep their defunct junker of a ship hidden on his land. They didn’t qualify for food stamps—Bay Area cost-of-living bullshit meant they were barely scraping by on objectively impressive salaries—but they did visit a local food bank twice a month.

     It wasn’t lavish—but it was easy, it was comfortable, and Aston was fine with just scraping by until they could get their ship fixed and head to another planet, maybe find one with a population who'd already made it into space—somewhere they wouldn’t have to keep such a low profile.

     That changed abruptly and all at once.

     Aston was in their shared bedroom. They had bunk beds—they’d had the same bunk beds since they’d first arrived on this planet, Sage gangly and gap-toothed, just barely edging into her adolescent years, and Aston only being an adult in the most technical sense of the term, having bought the ship off a shady cultist as his coming-of-age gift to himself. Their bedroom was sunlit and warm, with a wide window that offered a brilliant view of the clear blue sky. Aston’s desk was just under the window. He liked the sun. He didn’t even mind it when it shone directly into his face, which it did every midday.

     Most of why they signed the lease for this apartment was the natural lighting. Well, that and the massive walk-in bedroom closet, which was a steal for the rent they were paying.

     As he slumped over his desk, going through his email inbox—a Sisyphean torture of the cruelest variety—Sage’s voice filtered through the open doorway, strangled and tight.

     “Aston?” The apprehension in her voice sent his pulse immediately skyrocketing. “You should come look at this.”

     Emails could wait. Aston shot to his feet and dashed into the living room. Sage was straddling their ottoman, leaning so far in toward the TV that he had a brief urge to tell her she was going to ruin her eyesight. The news broadcast onscreen put that thought entirely out of his mind. The news ticker scrolling along the bottom of the screen read FIRST CONTACT; the video feed showed a recording of a reptilian face, its structure hauntingly familiar—

     “Fuck,” Aston said. He sat down on the couch just behind Sage, feeling strangely empty. Then: “Fuck. That’s—”

     “Lizards,” Sage said grimly.

     After that day, the news cycle latched on with a fury. It was the biggest thing to happen that century, possibly the biggest story since the industrial revolution. Aston and Sage spent several days debating over what to do. “Nothing” was, of course, an option, but Aston felt like he could use this as an opportunity. Whichever fleet of lizards this was, they didn’t have contact with the cultists back in Aston’s old city—lizards didn’t work like that, their fleets only answered to their imperial core, wherever that was. They would have no idea who Aston was. Probably.

     And he could speak their language. For the most part, at least. Their dialect would be different than the cultists’, but he could understand them at all, and that already gave him an advantage.

     Aston hatched a plan. He began contacting journalists. Sage hated the plan. She was right, of course, but how was he supposed to know that at the time?

###

     “I mean,” Lake said, “I don’t know where this is going, but I agree with her so far.”

     “Shut up,” Aston said.

###

     It didn't take a lot of press attention before Aston was simultaneously contacted by the Dusty ambassador to the USA and multiple employees of the Department of State.

     From there, everything went so quickly, events blurred into each other in his memory til they were nothing but a series of frantic, painful vignettes. He positioned himself as a cultural ambassador from Chora, someone sent to live on Earth and establish a friendly liaison with the country he was living in if and when the population began to venture into the wider world of intergalactic politics. A complete lie, obviously, but there was no way for anyone to fact-check it—not unless they contacted his old hearth via ansible, and Aston's hearth never had one of those. He said his ship broke down, that he and Sage would like transportation off-planet, and they would trade their services as translators and neutral third-party mediators for negotiations between the Dusties and the USA.

     Everyone seemed to swallow it uncritically. It wasn't long before him and Sage found themselves in DC.

     Aston broke their lease and made arrangements for their possessions to be moved down to their ship in Nevada. Money wasn’t an issue anymore; the government was eager to court Aston’s favor. Maybe that should have been a red flag. Aston was too busy being impressed by their hotel suite and its massive bathtub with water jets to pay attention.

     He met with the deputy secretary of state, a charming, funny man with high cheekbones, slicked-back graying hair, and startlingly vivid green eyes. John—as he insisted both Aston and Sage call him—was their main point of contact from the time they got to DC until the moment the bombs dropped.

     Aston did photo ops with Dusty ambassadors and US politicians; he saw himself on the front pages of news sites, of magazines; he saw clips of himself all over the internet, accompanied by vitriolic arguments in the comments; he stumbled across his former coworkers talking about him in interviews; his former landlord wrote a Medium article titled “I Rented to an Alien for Ten Years;” and through all of this, John was by their sides, organizing press conferences, taking them out to dinner at Michelin-starred restaurants, dropping tidbits of advice, greasing palms and lavishing them with anything they asked for.

     After a couple weeks of the press cycle, during dinner in a private room at the back of a high-end Italian restaurant, Aston placed his phone face-up on the table, leaned over his gnocchi, and asked John, very earnestly: “How do you deal with this?”

     John glanced at Aston's phone, which was displaying a Reddit thread where several users were embroiled in a vicious battle over whether Aston was a Russian plant intended to culturally destabilize the United States in preparation for an invasion.

     “Oh, you learn to ignore it,” John said, rather jovially. “The unwashed masses never have anything productive to say.”

     That was near the end. It was the night before the duel, in fact.

###

     “Duel?” Lake said.

     “It's too complicated to explain. Dusty etiquette stuff.” Aston scratched fretfully at the base of his skull, paying no mind to the wreck he was making of his cornrows. “It doesn't actually matter, the point was the duel happened a day before the bombings.”

###

     It was pure luck that Aston wasn’t in front of the Capitol Building when the bombs dropped. He and Sage did not account for the massive amount of traffic in DC during the ceremony—the official marker for Dusty-American relations to begin in earnest, President Rankin shaking hands with the Dusty fleet commander, both of them signing a treaty, high-ranking officials of both governments present, and Aston and Sage there, at the center of it, translating.

     John was supposed to be his point of contact for attending the ceremony. In a stroke of bad luck—or maybe good luck, considering what happened—he didn’t call them that day. He didn’t contact them at all.

     When it became obvious John wasn’t going to reach out, and it was nearing an hour til the ceremony’s start, they finally headed out on their own. They were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic when the ceremony started. The bombs started dropping five minutes in.

     A solid half of the congressmen currently in office died, as did President Rankin, the vice-President, the speaker of the House, and a whole host of other cabinet members. Remus Taner, the actual secretary of state, was the next in line of succession, and he was sworn in hastily. He immediately began collaborating with the Dusties—and in his very first presidential address, he laid the blame for the disaster cleanly at the feet of Aston and Sage.

     They were liars, of course. They had tricked the government into thinking they held actual political office, and they made horrible mistakes as a result of their incompetence—or even their malice. They had cut deals with Dusty officials, deals the US government knew nothing about; they’d made horrifying social gaffes, ones that offended the Dusties, ruined America’s standing with them; they weaseled their way into a place they didn’t belong, and they tried to sell America out for their own personal gain. It was only through Taner’s emergency diplomatic efforts that the US continued to have a relationship with the Dusties at all—that humans and Dusties could still live together, as equals, in this great nation.

     That’s what Taner said, anyway. It was all bullshit, but what was Aston going to do?

     He and Sage went to Nevada. They pulled some strings, in the brief period of time they still had favors they could cash in, and got their ship moved to the outskirts of a trailer park in a rural part of the southwest. They kept low profiles, never speaking to anyone outside of each other beyond what was absolutely necessary. Sage kept fruitlessly working on the faster-than-light drive, but she never got anywhere with the useless piece of cobbled-together Dusty crap.

     They lived off the grid right up until the day Lake and Jasper tried to stow away on their ship.

###

     Aston had told this story to Ray and Teiddan when the group first came to Chicago. He sat in Ray’s dark attic bedroom, boxed in by masses of wires and stacks of audio gadgets, chilly sweat coating his palms and neck, stuttering shamefully through the whole thing. It got easier every time he told the story afterwards, but that was the first time he’d spoken to anyone other than Sage about it since it happened.

     It was grueling. Teiddan held his hand through the whole thing, and Aston couldn’t even find it in himself to be embarrassed about that show of weakness.

     When his story was over, Ray slapped his palm against his own knee and said “Those bastards. I knew it.” This was a great relief to Aston, who instantly sprang to his feet and whooped out loud. That didn’t even phase Radio Jones; the guy’s complete acceptance of every one of Aston and Sage’s quirks was puzzling at first, but over the next year, Aston slowly learned that he was not the weirdest person who lived at the Station. Not by a long shot.

     To Lake’s credit, when Aston finished telling the same story, a year later and with much more confidence, what he said was “Damn. Makes sense.” It wasn’t nearly as vindicating, but it was still a great relief.