Stardust

     July went through her morning watch shift with a strange, heady feeling. She’d seen so little of Axel over the past few days, even before he’d left the city, that it was starting to feel easy to go about her routine without him.

     After the trauma of the first forty-eight hours, she began to settle into an oddly radical acceptance—Axel would come back, of course, there wasn’t another realistic option as far as she was concerned, so the only thing she needed to worry about was what she would say when he did. And if she was being honest, she’d rather cross that bridge when she came to it.

     This newfound mindset gave July the clarity she needed to tune out June’s presence (instead of disappearing overnight, she was cuddled up to July’s side when she woke up that morning, and for the rest of the day continued to follow a half-step behind her like a pubescent shadow) and focus all her energy on getting to know the new arrivals.

     “You seem wretchedly cheerful today,” Cass said. They were standing side-by-side in line for lunch and Cass was looking slightly off-kilter, scanning along the platform repeatedly for no reason that July could conceive of. Her fly was also undone. July was seeing how long it would take her to notice. “Have you taken my advice to heart?”

     “Nope,” July said brightly.

     This got Cass to cut her gaze directly back over to July, corners of her eyes wrinkling disdainfully as she made eye contact. They both held it for a second, during which July flashed a peace sign and grinned, then Cass said “Your demeanor is starting to concern me. Are you psychotic?”

     She relented. “I’m joking. Don’t get a stick up your ass.”

     Cass displayed an irritating lack of response to this. She kept staring at July silently even as the line stepped forward, still sporting a look that July knew to read as mixed scorn and concern, despite it mostly coming across as if she had to poop.

     July rolled her eyes. “Yes, I thought about your stupid advice. It’s whatever, we don’t get new people down here much and when we do they’re old as balls, so I might as well hang around the rare person my own age who doesn’t violently hate me yet.”

     “I don’t violently hate you.”

     “Yeah, well, you’re one of about five,” July said with an air of finality. She stepped forward to receive her lunch, attempting a friendly smile towards the person across the table from her—a vaguely familiar face with a long, dark braid. They gave her a tight-lipped smile, handed her a foil-wrapped object, and shooed her out of line. She stepped to the side, shooting Cass a look to say See?

     Cass also came out of line bearing a square of foil (it was definitely sandwiches again, unfortunately). “She smiled at you,” Cass said.

     The pair fell into an easy amble parallel to one another, heading to their normal spot by the tracks. “It was a polite smile,” July said, gesturing with her sandwich emphatically. “A ‘get-out-of-line’ smile.”

     “To be fair, it is a long line.”

     “Whatever.” July huffed. “My point was that your advice was fine, I’d have come to the same conclusion by myself.”

     “Of course,” Cass said mildly, which filled July with such instant rage that she instinctively opened her mouth to deliver a scathing insult about how Cass didn’t have any other friends, either. Before she could unleash this trump card, she caught sight of the new boys sitting on the platform’s edge, right where they all sat the other day, and all petty jabs flew out of her mind instantly.

     “Hey,” she said, which was much less smooth than the conversational opener she’d been practicing since getting out of bed that morning. June giggled right over her shoulder.

     “Hey!” Jasper perked up, puppylike, as they approached.

     Lake gave them a casual half-wave, then pointed at Cass. “Your zipper’s undone.”

     Cass’s hand shot to the front of her pants and she made a loud, undignified noise that sounded something like “Nnngh.”

     July cackled as she squatted down on her heels, arms draped over her knees. She nodded casually towards Jasper. “What’s up?”

     “I’m suffering,” he said with a deadpan air. “Some guy asked me if that shit in the swamp was fun.”

     There were actually two sandwiches per foil parcel, which July discovered as she opened hers. They were both peanut butter, which was better than nothing, but still incredibly unsatisfying compared to yesterday’s stew. “Fun? I mean, it was exciting, but I wouldn’t call getting shot at ‘fun.’”

     “Yeah, it’s not my kind of excitement to watch a bunch of people die,” Jasper said, surprisingly bitter.

     July furrowed her eyebrows. “I didn’t think anyone died.”

     That moment was when Cass chose to make her social recovery and sit next to July, legs crossed primly. “I’m still feeling rather jealous that you had the opportunity to go aboveground, regardless of how poorly it went.”

     A flicker passed over Jasper’s face while they were talking, but even watching him closely, July couldn’t tell what it meant. He began picking at his sandwiches with a fidgety air, not eating them, but instead breaking off little pieces of crust and rolling them into balls, which he flicked onto the train tracks.

     “What’s up with that?” Lake was saying. “Are y’all not allowed to go aboveground without permission?”

     “Nah,” July said, tearing her attention away from Jasper’s blatant food waste. “You’ve gotta get special permission from your squad leader, or like, be assigned to an aboveground mission or something.”

     The corners of Lake’s mouth tilted down ever-so-slightly. “What if you don’t want to be part of a squad?”

     This stumped July. She took a very large bite of sandwich to compensate.

     Luckily, Cass could never resist the urge to jump in with a piece of useless information. “Non-combat members still answer to squadron leaders, albeit their hierarchy is organized a bit differently. I’m afraid I don’t know an awful lot about the food and technology workers, as I’ve been in a combat role since we first formed, but I think it will generally depend on why you want to leave.”

     “I need cigs,” Jasper said.

     July swallowed her mouthful of peanut butter and managed a thick “Do you have cash?”

     “What? No. Do you think the Dusties gave us cash?”

     “Geeze, sorry.” She rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “You can probably buy cigarettes off someone down here, that’s all. Or if you have something to trade, you could find someone willing to do that.”

     This seemed to disappoint him. Jasper returned to rolling up little balls of crust.

     “July,” Lake said. Once he had her attention, he leaned in slightly, dropping his voice. “You’re close with the general, right?”

     “Uh. I wouldn’t say ‘close.’”

     Cass sighed. “She’s dating his nephew, who may as well be his son, quite frankly. I have found the connection… lucrative.”

     July swatted Cass lightly on the side of her head. “Can’t believe you’ve been using me this whole time.” Her tone was jovial, but she tried to put an edge of actual warning into it. She didn’t want her first potential friends in years thinking she was some kind of nepo baby.

     “I only meant that I get more opportunities than the average member, what with General Flynn knowing me by name,” Cass said, narrowing her eyes at July.

     “Okay,” Lake said. “I didn’t mean to start anything. I just wanted to ask if you could… get us aboveground somehow.”

     This was interesting. July chewed a bite of sandwich thoughtfully. “I… don’t know. Tyler isn’t my biggest fan, and like, the feeling’s pretty mutual. I’m guessing this isn’t just about cigarettes?”

     His eyes flit around the platform before he answered. “No, it’s not.”

     “This would be an easier conversation if you told me what you’re trying to do.”

     They stared into each other’s eyes for a few silent beats. July kept her gaze cool and level, using an objectively impressive amount of willpower to ignore June’s sudden wolf-whistle directly in her ear. Lake’s jaw twitched.

     “We don’t know if we want to be down here,” he finally said, his voice so quiet she had to lean in til her face was only a few inches from his to hear. Beside her, Cass leaned in, too. “It doesn’t feel… safe.”

     “You think it’s safe up there, with the Dusties?”

     “No.”

     It didn’t seem like he was going to elaborate. Jasper tapped her on the shoulder, startling her slightly.

     “I just want to choose,” he said. “For myself.”

     Something in July’s gut wrenched. On impulse, she grabbed Jasper’s hand and squeezed it briefly—he looked at their hands, then looked at her face, then looked back at their hands. She pulled hers back, her face suddenly hot.

     “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

###

     Tyler shared a barracks car with his two lieutenant generals, which presented some issues with catching him alone. Fortunately, July reported to Kahue at the end of her shift and found her extraordinarily busy trying to fix some kind of wiring issue several tunnels down. She wouldn’t be done for several hours. General Argent was a wild card, but his work so frequently sent him aboveground that it was safe to bank on him not being there until late that night.

     The early evening found her shifting from foot to foot awkwardly in front of the steps up to Tyler’s barracks, ignoring June’s tuneless humming just a foot or two from her ear. She glanced up and down the subway tunnel; everything was painfully normal. Lights flickered dimly, air filters hummed, the occasional soldier sat on the steps of their barracks smoking or sipping a drink. A solid ten cars down, a small group was gathered in front of their car, laughing and talking loudly. Nobody paid July any mind.

     With a deep breath, July strode up the steps and knocked firmly on the metal by the curtains covering Tyler’s barracks entrance. There were a few seconds of silence, during which July’s pulse jacked up so suddenly it made her feel dizzy and sick, and then he said “Come in.”

     She lifted the curtains and stepped through. The barracks weren’t anything to write home about; even she had to give Tyler credit for not taking advantage of his position as major general, as easy as it would be. There was a bunk like she and Cass had, a twin-sized cot slightly farther down at its head, three lockers, and a folding table sagging under the weight of thick three-ring binders and messy stacks of loose papers, but no luxuries to be seen.

     Tyler was sitting cross-legged on the cot with his back against the wall, one of the binders open in front of him. He looked unhappy to see July, which was normal.

     She saluted.

     “At ease, Wright,” he said. His voice was throaty and low like he’d been smoking, a habit he didn’t have, as far as she knew.

     She suddenly realized she hadn’t practiced this conversation at all. June giggled behind her. “I, um—I was wondering if—respectfully, I mean, I wanted to ask you—“

     “You want to know when Axel will be back.” It wasn’t a question.

     This wasn’t, strictly speaking, false, but it wasn’t why she came. She decided not to correct him anyway.

     Tyler ran his fingers over his temples in a way that reminded her suddenly and viscerally of Teiddan. “Yesterday evening,” he said, his voice weighty.

     It was a confession. It dropped from his lips like a stone and slammed into July’s skull like a baseball bat. Tyler’s eyes met hers, his gaze pleading—for what, she didn’t know. June walked up to him and waved her hand in front of his face, then looked back at July with blacked-out eyes and a wide grin.

     “This is fun,” she said. “You haven’t done this in a while.”

     July’s head felt very light. The world seemed awfully small—she was struck with a strange kind of receding vision, where everything stayed its normal size and position, but simultaneously felt very, very far away and tiny, as if she was looking at the world through a long tunnel.

     “Maybe they got held up somewhere,” she found herself saying, lamely. June snorted.

     Tyler dropped his eyes back to his binder. “Maybe.”

     “Are you just going to ignore me?” June said.

     She looked down at her boots, which looked like children’s shoes. Scuffs of swamp mud still clung stubbornly to their toes. The feeling of Axel’s hand in hers as they traipsed through the mud suddenly assaulted her, skin-to-skin, mud sucking at her feet, but flickered and died as soon as it came.

     “I know you can hear me, dipshit,” June said. She was making circles around July, poking and prodding at her periodically. “Hello?”

     This wasn’t what she came here for. She could process later.

     “I would—” July swallowed, yanked a strand of her hair sharply, twisted it around one finger, and started again. “I’d like to go aboveground.”

     “No.”

     She pressed on doggedly. “For Lake and Jas—Micah. They need to know what the field is like—“

     “For fucks sake, July.” The sound of her first name out of Tyler’s mouth stopped her train of thought outright, sending it careening off the tracks into a smoking wreck. “Don’t do this to me right now. I—“

     Something extremely awful happened just then, worse than the Dusty invasion, worse than the possibility of Axel dying: Tyler’s face collapsed on itself, wrung into an ugly crumpled expression, and his shoulders jerked in what could only be a repressed sob.

     Everything felt smaller than ever, Tyler on his bed shrinking to a pinprick, an image of him as a child, sobbing for his parents after a bad dream, overlaid onto the white-knuckled, hulking man with snot streaming down his face that was sitting in front of her. She was outside her body somewhere, maybe off to the side where June stood, maybe much farther.

     “Teid was my best man,” Tyler was saying, thick-voiced. “He was like a brother to me and Clo—and Axel is—was—is—God, don’t make me lose you, too. Don’t.”

     “I’m sorry,” she said, lightheaded and breathless.

     There was a shift in perspective, a break in the endless tunnel, and suddenly she was back in her body with Tyler’s hand gripping her shoulder firmly. His broad fingers gripped her so tight she could feel them bruise. Abruptly hyper-aware of how fast and short her breath was, she tilted her head back, made eye contact with him again.

     His face nearly undid her. There was a thick layer of salt-and-pepper stubble on his normally clean-shaven jaw; the skin of his eyelids looked pale and fragile, like rice candy wrappers about to peel from the surface of his lids. His eye shadows were so deep and purple they looked bruised.

     “After Clo died--” he began. His lips moved soundlessly, his eyebrows drawn, like he couldn’t force the words from his throat. “I promised her. I said I’d take care of him.”

     His fingers felt red-hot, burning her even through her jacket. Deep thuds resonated through her entire body in a rhythm that took her several moments to recognize as her heart slamming against her ribcage.

     “You’re all I have left,” he said, to July’s horror. With that, he laid a curse on her, doomed her, condemned her to a Hell that hadn’t existed until that moment, and drew her into a crushingly tight hug with her face suffocating against his chest.

     “Aw, that’s cute,” June said. “He’s like your dad!”

     For the first time in her life, July began halfheartedly contemplating suicide.