Stardust

     For the last several years, the world had been bathed in a constant, low-level reddish-orange hue, and that day was no different. Aston was long past finding it immediately troubling, but hiking for miles in that environment was guaranteed to perturb him, between stardust irritating his eyes and the constant reminder of the cavalcade of misadventures that led him to this moment to begin with.

     After several hours of hiking, Aston’s face itched and sweat underneath his protective mask. He refused the bulky plastic contraptions the humans favored, opting instead for a lightweight polymer mask that was flexible enough to be mistaken for cloth, but he wasn’t used to this amount of physical activity and sweat quickly pooled around the bridge of his lips and on the base of his chin.

     While traveling off-grid was, admittedly, probably the best option to avoid running into law enforcement, it was also stunningly boring in a way that had Aston’s teeth permanently on edge. When he first came to this planet, the sky was a brilliant blue, the sun was shockingly bright, and the amount of greenery was refreshing and a never-ending source of fascination for him and Sage alike. Now, with the air clogged with stardust, the sun was always at least half-hidden and the aforementioned omnipresent dull orange hue sucked the color from nearly everything. Even the ecologically awe-inspiring range of tree species wasn’t as interesting in that light.

     Starting almost the instant they clambered from a maintenance tunnel into the streets of New York, the pale human (Aston hadn’t caught his name, and so just mentally referred to him as “the pale one”) had been wearing a pair of earbuds, which Aston could hear leaking tinny rock music from several feet away. He had to imagine this wasn’t technically allowed, but Testa—who Aston refused to refer to as “Captain” anything—hadn’t said a peep about it, not even when they ditched their car and started hiking in earnest.

     This permissiveness toward the teen was especially irritating because neither Aston nor Sage had gotten much of a choice about what they wore—their normal clothes being covered in swamp muck, and the rest of their wardrobes stuck somewhere at the bottom of the swamp along with that steaming sack of crap that called itself a spaceship, they were forced to pick from spare clothes in lame utilitarian grays and browns. Aston found the bulletproof vest underneath his windbreaker particularly chafing. Quite literally: the edges were cutting into the flesh of his damp armpits, even through his long-sleeved shirt.

     Both of the humans stopped walking very quickly; lost in thought and walking entirely on autopilot, Aston almost bashed his nose into the pale one from behind. “Excuse me,” he said, without a hint of politeness.

     Testa mimed pulling a pair of earbuds out, which the pale one did with a heavy sigh.

     “We’re breaking. I’ll brief you once we get settled,” Testa said shortly. He unbuttoned his wool coat, letting it hang open to reveal his own bulletproof vest, and fanned the exposed skin of his lean neck briefly. Then he squatted on the ground by a tree and began going through his backpack.

     Aston glanced over at Sage; she was following suit, unsurprisingly, sitting against a tree while she fished a bottle of water out of her pack. Seeing his look, she gestured with the bottle questioningly, but he shook his head and sat down by her. He made an attempt to roll his eyes theatrically in the direction of the humans, but Sage had already stopped paying attention to him. Rude.

     The pale human sprawled with legs akimbo across from the pair, the ridiculous plastic contraption strapped to his face now pulled down to hang from his neck, chugging water with gusto. “Hey, Teiddan. Got any snacks?”

     Testa wordlessly tossed him a plastic-wrapped rectangle and glanced over at Aston and Sage. “Want a power bar?”

     “No, sir,” Sage said, driving Aston to even greater heights of irritation.

     To his surprise, the human said “No need for that. You can call me Teiddan, outside the base at least.”

     Aston had to afford the man a crumb of begrudging respect for that one.

     Teiddan continued to carefully withdraw items from his pack, notably a large folded rectangle of paper and a fat marker, the latter of which he tucked into the front chest pocket of his vest. “Axel, you should mask back up,” he told the pale one, who looked more than a little mulish at the idea.

     “Dust’s not too bad.”

     The two looked at each other silently for a bit, Axel clenching his jaw and keeping his violently red eyebrows raised, Teiddan furrowing his thick brows into a look that was probably meant to communicate concern, but only succeeded in looking exhausted.

     “It’s your body,” Teiddan finally said mildly. He turned his attention away from Axel and pulled a case out of his backpack, withdrew a pair of circular eyeglasses with gold rims, put them on, and adjusted them with one finger to the bridge. Clearing his throat, he unfolded the square of paper he withdrew earlier.

     “Alright.” He smoothed the paper down over the dirt in the middle of the lopsided circle they were sitting in and weighed it down with a couple of spare power bars and water bottles at the corners. It was a map of New Jersey, which Aston deduced from the shape of the borders and the fact that Trenton was labeled and circled with a thick red line. “According to your intel, there should be a bend in the Dusty high-speed rail tracks about ten miles outside of Trenton, here.” He pointed to a large green patch on the map, which was labeled as a county park. “This map is over a decade old, unfortunately, so we’ll have to do some guesswork.”

     “It isn’t technically guesswork if I’m not guessing,” Aston pointed out.

     “Your mom isn’t technically—“ Axel said, but was quickly cut off by Sage saying “Let Teiddan talk, please” at the exact same time that Teiddan said “Yes, well;” the two of them exchanged some awkwardly apologetic noises while Aston glared at the offending redhead.

     “We appreciate your contributions and trust that your information is accurate,” Teiddan finally said, giving a brief nod in Sage’s direction. “The terrain is, for the most part, flat, but this bend in the tracks,” he traced an invisible line on the map with one finger, “navigates around a large hill. The train will be comparatively slow at this point; we should be able to wait at the hill's summit and hop it from there. Aston will brief us on how to enter a cargo car. After that, the train should be in DC within ninety minutes. The DC station is on the outskirts of the city; we’ll discretely disembark there, travel to our safehouse, and re-brief once we are secure. Aston?”

     All eyes immediately turned to Aston. His nose and chin started to itch even more profoundly. He stuck his fingers under his mask to scratch his chin, huffed in exasperation, and yanked his mask down around his neck, relishing the chilly burst of air on his damp face.

     “Yes. The train.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a cargo train, mostly automated, no driver, no passengers. There’s only crew on board during loading and unloading. They’ll be stopping in Philadelphia for a cargo exchange—that’ll add another twenty minutes onto our trip, by the way. We’ll need to exit, hide while they’re swapping cargo, and get back on the train. Shouldn’t be too hard, security should be pretty low since this line is just transporting dust, they know nobody else on this planet views it as valuable. Would probably be another story if we wanted to take another line.”

     Teiddan nodded. “What will our entry and exit strategy be?”

     His palms were sweating now, too. He gave a cheerful, easy grin. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sage leaning forward slightly, which unknotted something in his chest.

     “Entry is fairly straightforward,” she said, her tone low and steady. She picked the map up, shedding the makeshift paperweights as she did, flipped it to its blank side, and gestured at the marker in Teiddan’s vest pocket. He handed it over without question. Sage uncapped it with her teeth and began drawing neat, detailed little diagrams as she spoke. “I’ve looked at these trains recently; their designs have a surprising number of security failure points. Each cargo car has two doors, one accessible from the ground when the train is stopped, and one accessible from between cars, typically used for emergency maintenance. There are walkways open to the air between cars—they have a joint on the floor and the railings, they use a sort of high-density flexible plastic, it’s really fascinating stuff chemically—“

     Aston lightly touched her shoulder. “The doors.”

     “The doors.” Sage frowned down at her diagram, a rough outline of a sleek train car with little high-railed balconies on the front and back ends. “This door—“ she circled the side of the car “—is only unlockable via keycard. The other door, though, it’s assumed you’ll only access it from within the train, so it’s a sliding panel. We can drop down to the balcony from the top, provided we hit the roof of the train without too much trouble.”

     “I don’t see why we’re not just driving,” Axel said.

     “Tyler and I discussed the pros and cons, and we decided driving wasn’t worth losing one of the Resistance’s few cars,” Teiddan said, a stern edge to his voice. “The rail is much faster, we won’t go through any tolls or checkpoints, and if we fail and lose an entire car out of state, we'll—”

     “The whole point is to not fail.” Axel squinted at Teiddan, his mouth set in a way Aston was nowhere near familiar with either of the humans enough to read.

     “It would be irresponsible to not plan for the worst.” Teiddan leaned over the diagram. “What about the exit?”

     “They don’t start unloading until the train’s been in the station for a few minutes,” Aston said, with more than a fair amount of relief at being able to contribute again. “There’s safety checks, written logs, all that bureaucratic nonsense—we should have an easy five, ten minutes to sneak out the maintenance door before the crew’s in sight. Same with re-entering—they’re operated remotely, nobody will be around when the train starts up again. We’ll have to move fast, but it’ll work.”

     That last part was said with an incredibly convincing air of confidence. Aston was proud of himself. He grabbed Sage’s water bottle from her lap and sat back against the tree while the humans began an animated discussion about travel routes.

###

     If it weren’t for the break in the treeline, the tracks would be almost invisible, even from the crest of the wooded hill.

     This wasn’t just because it was—Aston checked his wristwatch—almost eleven at night, nor was it solely because of the cloud of dust that descended in a swirling fog as the sun faded and the temperature dropped. It could have been the case for the humans, but Aston had much better night vision than that; he struggled to see the tracks because they were incredibly thin—barely-visible silver slivers in the short grass, gossamer compared to equivalent human constructions.

     Clouds of particulate refracted the party’s flashlight beams into a diffuse glow, mixing with soft moonlight that barely escaped the dense, menacing cloud cover. Sage’s hair caught the edge of a ray and practically glowed neon; when she caught Aston watching her profile, she gave him a reassuring thumbs-up.

     The wind hissed. A low, moaning noise built in the distance. Aston checked his watch again.

     “Two minutes,” he said, pulling his mask down to flash a cheeky grin he wasn’t even certain the humans could see. “Better aim right. If you hit the side, you’ll go splat, and we’ll have to clean your guts up off the hillside.”

     “If you’re on the train, you won’t be around to clean up the guts,” Axel pointed out with an incredibly irritating amount of common sense.

     Before Aston could retort, Sage interjected, in a disproportionately noncommittal tone, “You’re right. Coyotes would take care of your body long before we got back.”

     The deep, sonorous moan built in volume. It wasn’t exactly loud; it was deep and resonant, and it crawled inside Aston’s chest and rubbed against his teeth in a decidedly unpleasant way. A large black mass was barely visible on the horizon; his teeth rattled against one another as it grew.

     To calm his nerves, but also for dramatic effect, he pursed his lips and whistled a few bars of Beethoven’s Storm (from pastoral symphony number six) over the growing dissonance.

     The pads of Sage’s fingers brushed the back of his hand, and then it all hit at once, very fast and very hard. A harsh updraft whipped up the hill towards them; the heavy groan filled Aston’s head and resonated through his chest cavity—all of a sudden, he could hear the shrieking and wheezing and squealing the monotone groan covered from a distance, and it grated inside of his head violently.

     Aston jumped without thinking, without reason or sight, he gave in to the pure animal instinct of his body that screamed Leave! He leapt and for one brilliant moment, he felt suspended in the air above the train, like the updrafts could send him flying into the sky, buoyed on the wind in an Icarian feat that would send him up, up, into the atmosphere, back home, sucked into the dreadful grave looming over the skies of his childhood—

     —and he was brought forcefully back to earth when the entirety of his body slammed sidelong into a sheet of metal. He frantically and blindly grasped above him—his hands found purchase on metal cylinders—a dazzlingly sharp burst of pain radiated from his kneecaps, and he let a raw, throaty, incoherent yell. His face pressed against the metal of the train side, his nose smashed painfully into the unyielding panel; desperately, he twisted back and forth, trying to swing his feet up to lock into the balcony by his hands, but the centrifugal force of the train foiled his efforts, pushing his body wholly against the train side.

     Hands suddenly wrapped around Aston’s upper arms, just above his elbows, and hauled him bodily upwards. In one massive heave, they yanked him under the armpits, and Aston only got a hasty glimpse of the balcony before he was hauled over the railing and fell onto his rescuer in an agonizing heap.

     Dizzying and fast, his rescuer rolled the two of them into the train car, a confusing matter that ended with Aston sprawled on his back, his rescuer's weight pressing his entire body down. Then the weight lifted; the door slammed behind them with a horrendous clang, and Aston was suddenly assaulted by comparative silence. His ears rang.

     Aston opened his eyes to be greeted by the ceiling of the train car, dark metal with low lights set into deep recesses in the ceiling edges, haloing Teiddan’s face above him.

     Teiddan pulled the awkward plastic gadget off his face and fell back to slump against the door; Aston propped himself up on one elbow to stare disbelievingly at the captain, who gave him a tired smile and pursed his lips.

     The captain whistled the next few bars of Beethoven's symphony.

     “You’re bleeding.” Aston whipped his head back around to see Sage right beside him. She fussily dabbed at his nose with her sleeve, which came away dark red. Her eyes met his and she frowned, slipping into Chorn for a moment. “You’re a fucking idiot. We never should have done this.”

     He decided to not deal with that at the moment, instead looking back at Teiddan, whose craggy face was shiny and slick with sweat, but who was somehow still smiling at Aston. “What are you grinning about?” he finally said.

     “That was fun,” Teiddan said.

     “Hypocrite!” Axel called. Aston craned his neck; the redheaded human was a half dozen feet behind Sage, leaning against a metal shelf crammed with boxes of cargo. “If I pulled that stunt, you’d be on my ass for the next week.”

     “Yes, well,” Teiddan said, wiping inelegantly at his face with one sleeve, “the Beethoven was a nice touch.”

     “Don’t encourage him,” Sage said firmly, in English this time. The glance she gave Aston, though, made it extremely clear she was going to pick this topic back up with him later, in private. Tenderly, she prodded his nose with the pads of her thumbs, sending a starbust of pain radiating through his skull.

     “Ow!” He slapped her hand away.

     “Broken,” she announced, to no-one in particular. “And it’s probably going to set wrong, too.” Sage sounded altogether too satisfied about this outcome.

     “Anyone else hurt?” Teiddan asked. The other two shook their heads. “Good. I’m a bit bruised, I almost yanked my wrist out of my socket, but nothing a bit of rest won’t fix. I need to nap. Half an hour til Philadelphia, yeah?”

     Aston nodded. “You all can sleep. We’re not on the same circadian rhythm.” This was technically true, but Aston normally slept at least one twelve-hour shift every three or four days, and he was creeping up on his fifth without a nap now. This, he decided, was pretty much irrelevant, because there was no way he’d sleep in the next twenty minutes with the amount of adrenaline pumping through his system.

     “Sweet,” Axel said.

     The humans settled down for their naps. They slept sprawled on the floor next to each other, each with one hand hovering mere centimeters away from their firearms. Sage attempted to get his attention again, but Aston was dead-set on staring into the distance in a dissociative haze, the repetitive throbbing in his head oddly lulling. She finally settled for fussing over his nose for a minute, packing it with rolled-up cotton balls that forced him to breathe through his mouth, followed by rolling up his pants legs to get a look at his skin, which bloomed brilliantly with all sorts of colors of bruises but otherwise seemed fine.

     After a while, she let him be and curled up in her own corner of the train car. She probably needed to nap as well, after the sort of day she’d been having. If Aston wasn’t doing all of this for both of their sakes, he’d probably feel bad about what he was putting her through. But Sage wanted to leave this planet just as much as he did, and she knew what she was getting into from the start…

     Fuzzy blackness began to creep in from the back of Aston’s head. He closed his eyes for a moment. It was starting to hurt to see.

###

     When you opened your eyes again, you were still on a train, but in a passenger car, one with floor-to-ceiling windows that let sunlight stream through in a brilliant curtain. The train was passing through a beautiful meadow; rolling hills of grass and wildflowers, a sky so thickly, richly blue it felt viscous on your eyes. Your seat was soft and velvety, red upholstery and deep mahogany.

     In front of you sat a table, and on it sat a gorgeous brass and china chess set, gold and white offset elegantly against the dark wood of the table.

     You realized it was awfully stupid of you to let yourself fall asleep.