Stardust

     Wandering came second nature to you. Returning to your long-gone ship felt like embracing an old friend for the first time in years; you sometimes felt as though its guts were alive beneath you, that you could run your palm over its thrumming underbelly and feel it purr, languid and loving, at your touch.

     Every piece of it evoked a warm tenderness in your chest—the cracked, weathered plastic of the pilot's chair, the clattering, trembling floor panel at the back of the ship that shook every time you turned the engine on, the slight friction gumming up the gearbox when you shifted down and to the right. You had a vague awareness of the impossibility of it all; you knew, on an intellectual level, that your ship was long-dead, that whatever caused it to crash was certainly not a simple problem with the fans, and that its body lay rotting at the bottom of a swamp in another realm entirely.

     Still you were surrounded by it, the metal panels of its walls encircling you with an undeniable sensation of home. Curled up in one of your armchairs, vinyl straps belting you to its cushioned seat, you couldn't help but feel an almost perfect sense of comfort; your clothes lined the walls, undulating gently in zero-gravity, long-lost chests of tools and art supplies were packed onto the shelves, and the spicy-sweet smell of Aston's deodorant lingered on the fabric around you.

     And July was there with you.

     When she first reappeared, you were prepared to assuage her distress at suddenly finding herself floating in mid-air—but the instant you caught her eye, she twisted around and pushed off the wall with ease to float toward the bunk beds. Her ponytail spread out behind her head in a halo as she caught the rail of the top bunk and pulled herself in.

     “You're good at that.” It was the first thing that came out of your mouth, unfortunately. Something about July made it uncharacteristically difficult for you to think before you spoke.

     She was still grasping the top rail as she maneuvered her body around in mid-air, somehow managing to end up upside-down, with her heels against the ceiling. It appeared that she was attempting to execute some sort of complicated tactic to get herself into the bottom bunk, but she paused her task to throw a puzzled glance your way.

     “I thought I'd have to show you how to move around in zero gravity,” you said.

     “Oh! I've been practicing.” With a grunt and a push off her heels, she managed to effectively bundle herself under the top bunk. After another few seconds of zero-grav improv ballet, she was lazily sprawled out mid-air over the mattress, her head and chest over the support bar that ran between two legs of the bunk; it could not be ignored that her face was awfully close to yours as a result. “You haven't been here in a few days.”

     Your cheeks felt hot. Not for the first time, nor the last, you cursed your asynchronous sleep schedules.

     “We'll arrive in—” you shot a glance toward the cockpit, where a readout blinked on the dashboard, “—a couple of minutes.”

     “Arrive?” July craned her neck to look at the cockpit, which sent her swerving over your chair, dangerously close. A whiff of earthy-sweet scent crashed into you as her ponytail floated into your face; you sputtered, spitting out a few strands of hair, and she reeled back, half-laughing. “Sorry!”

     On a whim, you reached out and tugged on one corner of her baggy jacket, reeling her back over your armchair. “Why don't I keep ahold of you til we're planetside?”

     She nodded hastily, still tittering. A curious note rose up in your mind as you noted her ears had turned bright pink—this evoked in you the instinct of a wolf seeing an injured deer loping and stumbling through the forest. For one brief, dizzying moment, you were beset by images of her backed into a corner, wide-eyed and trembling, breath catching in her throat as you oh-so-sweetly asked what she was blushing about, a thumb under her chin—but being who you were, you set that aside and tugged her down by the jacket, careful not to accidentally brush her skin.

     This proved pointless. July brazenly looped one arm around your neck to stabilize herself, pressing her warm little body up against your torso with what seemed like zero hesitation. Your faces were close enough that you could count her freckles, if you were so inclined.

     Before you could second-guess yourself (or, more accurately, fifth-guess yourself), you wrapped an arm around her waist. You then immediately turned your head to the cockpit, avoiding her gaze. If you saw her blush again, you would feel the unbearable urge to bite her neck til she squealed, and that seemed both inappropriate and inadvisable.

     “I set the ship to autopilot,” you said. “It's taking us to… where I came from.”

     July made an interested noise; simultaneously, the ship emitted a loud series of mechanical clunks, and you began to feel an entirely different kind of dizzy.

     “Coming out of orbit might be rough for you,” you managed to get out before the deceleration really hit and your organs decided they, once again, had physical weight.

     The night-dark ground of your planet, endless gray wastes broken by a tiny patch of bright white lights circling the spaceport, hurtled up toward your windshield at incredible speed; you closed your eyes to focus on your breathing: slow and steady, in, hold, out, hold. Gravity-nausea crept in to fill the spaces between your organs and your brain performed a cartwheel routine in your skull, all your senses flipping over themselves—July dropped fully into your lap, and you zeroed in on the pressure of her body on your thighs, the weight of her back against the crook of your arm, to remind yourself where “up” and “down” were.

     The ship continued to thud and whir its way through its landing routine; as the engine rumbled and clattered away, the pressure on your guts began to ease, your heady sense of inertia trickled away, and you opened your eyes to see the colossal doors of the spaceport yawning open through the windshield.

     Your heart twisted painfully in your chest.

     The ship rolled its ponderous way through those massive metal doors, ambient darkness of the planet's surface giving way to the harsh, bright white light of the underground spaceport, where rows of private ships gleamed unpleasantly in the immense, otherwise featureless room. July dragged herself up from your lap, stumbled, and proceeded to fall to her knees and dry-heave over the dingy metal floor.

     You politely ignored her and began unbuckling yourself from the armchair. The ship beeped, a courteous reminder that it was beginning its auto-parking routine. You gave the floor an affectionate pat as you bent down to stretch your legs and back; your spine felt compressed, like you'd been sandwiched vertically in a hydraulic press.

     July composed herself impressively quickly for her first landing. She was already clambering back to her feet, only looking a little green around the gills.

     “That's a very normal reaction,” you offered.

     Her eyes narrowed as if you had said something deeply insulting, then she scoffed, accentuating it with a flounce of her ponytail.

     She did not say much as you powered the ship down, nor as you led her out the hatch and down the ladder to the asphalt; it was only once both her feet were on the ground and she began surveying her surroundings, hands on her hips, that she spoke. “So, is this like, your version of a parking lot?”

     A genuinely joyous laugh bubbled up in your chest; there was something endearingly earnest about her curiosity, something that urged you to spill every bean in your proverbial stash—the same thing that spurred you to tell her about hearths, all those months ago. Although you'd almost never discussed these things in English before, the extra mental effort was worth it to talk to someone genuinely interested. Even Aston, once he'd gotten over his initial hyper-fixation on learning English, was more concerned with moving forward than rehashing long-past memories of Choral life.

     “More like an airport,” you said thoughtfully, setting off toward the far end of the spaceport. July trotted beside you, her gaze intently fixed on your face as the two of you strode down the causeway. “It's not like everyone's going into space all the time, any more than you'd pop down to China in your private jet on a whim.”

     “Oh my God, are you rich?”

     “No!” You giggled again. “Our ship is a junker—Aston bought it secondhand off a cultist for way too cheap. He only had the money because he… we planned on leaving the planet together for years beforehand.”

     You reached the far end of the spaceport long before you should have. That was alright, it didn't need to be an exact to-scale replica—frankly, you were pleasantly surprised your endeavors were working to begin with. You'd begun this journey with nothing but an intention and a vague sense of shape, of call and coax, and while you could not, for the life of you, explain precisely what muscles were being exercised, you were pleased to confirm you could exercise them at all.

     A row of elevators lined the wall, dozens of fingerprint-smudged chrome sliding doors with call buttons set directly into their grimy surfaces; when you called one, it only took a few seconds for the doors to open and reveal a box of mirrored walls bouncing your reflections between one another into infinity. The floor was covered in thin, scratchy, bright pink carpet that made an uncomfortable plastic sound as you stepped in; July's head swiveled around, scanning your recursive lines of reflections with unabashed fascination. The doors slid shut with a smooth hiss and a clunk; their insides were also mirrored, and you realized, with a start, that the designs in your side shave were more than halfway grown out.

     The ride down to street level took a good couple of minutes. You occupied yourself watching July twist around and glance from mirror to mirror with a strange little smile. She leaned in close to the closest mirror, pulling a number of faces in quick succession, eyes squinted nearly shut then blown wide open, brows furrowed then slack, lips pursed then curved in a dimpled grin; then she pulled the tie from her hair, freeing her locks to bounce gaily around her shoulders, and began unashamedly primping.

     The doors slid open. You led July through the spaceport lobby; as you walked, she spun around slowly at your heels, craning her neck to look from side-to-side, up-and-down, everywhere. You did not share her interest. The spaceport lobby was one of the most boring buildings you could have shown her—a purely functional space, despite its pretensions toward luxury such as its mirrored ceiling, the decorative shrubs dripping with blossoms that lined the colorfully-tiled walls, and the massive reception desk in the middle of the floor with its brightly-colored glassy surface. The decor was really only there to make rich ship owners feel more important, in your opinion.

     No, what you truly wanted to see was July's face as you held the orange-tinted opaque glass door open for her and she stepped out into the street. She did not disappoint. A tiny gasp fell from her parted lips and those big, liquid eyes went wide, practically bugging out of her skull.

     “Welcome to Chora,” you said, with a hint of smug satisfaction that you would never in a million years have acknowledged, even to yourself.

     Broadly speaking, you held true that you did not miss your hometown very much. It held no love for you, and you saw no reason to engage in a one-sided relationship. All the same, it was difficult not to feel a pang of longing and affection as you saw it through July's eyes. The street you stepped out onto was empty of life—that was as intentional as anything could be, you preferred isolation to disorienting memory-flashes of faceless crowds—but it burst with color, overflowed with stuff.

     Buildings here were stacked on top of one another, monumental structures towering for dozens of stories overhead, their facades plastered with intricate, multicolored patterns of mosaic tile and striped patterns of siding, brightly-painted trims and colored glass windows. Many of the windows had designs worked into their surfaces; names of shops spelled out with painstakingly-worked glass pieces and leaded cames, coats of arms emblazoned on the buildings of the wealthier hearths.

     The streets were smooth, well-kept asphalt, almost level with the sidewalk, with two tracks running down the middle of the road. In the most accurate manifestation of Chora, there would be trolleys going back-and-forth along the tracks every few minutes at speeds Americans would almost certainly consider leisurely at best, infuriating at worst; as it stood, the empty, silent streets were eerie to your eye, but even the theoretical presence of trolleys must have been exotic and exciting to July.

     The sidewalks were varnished with a clear, extraordinarily hardy resin that protected mosaics embedded into the concrete itself. Every few feet there were raised planter beds of painted stone bursting with flora—all sorts of local flowers, stems drooping heavily with fat, bright orange heads of petals; long spears of tiny purple-and-white blossoms clustered together, their stiff brown stems thick with thorns; your favorite, purple furry-leafed shrubs sprinkled with tightly-folded buds of pink and red. Occasionally, once or twice a block, there was a tree, branches heavy with fruit—most commonly small purple berries, sometimes bright yellow fruits the size of your fist. In reality, there would be people clustered around those trees, usually children loitering in the street to pilfer fruit with their sticky hands, sometimes to eat, sometimes to pelt at passerby before streaking off in paroxysms of laughter. The air was sweet and heavy, fruit and flowers coalescing to coat the inside of your nose.

     It was as if July couldn't pick one thing to look at first. Her gaze whipped wildly up and down the street, her body following half a beat behind; she turned from side to side, took half-steps cautiously in one direction or another before something else would catch her eye and she'd step back again, fingers twitching under her bulky sleeves.

     “July.” You were incapable of quelling the hint of amused affection in your voice.

     She looked back at you over one shoulder, lips parted, eyebrows arched in parallel, and said nothing. Her eyes clung to yours, bright and hot and alive.

     “If you have any questions,” you started, and she cut you off with an abrupt, loud cackle.

     “It's bright,” she said obliquely.

     The only light in Chora came from streetlamps dotting the roads, yellow and green metal constructs that towered higher than the trolley wires and dangled lanterns at varying heights over the streets—some up near the top stories of buildings, some just a few feet above the trolley lines. They did a good enough job at illuminating the city in soft, warm orange light, like a steady version of firelight, but it was never brighter than mid-dusk back on Earth. There was only so much you could do underground.

     Your dissatisfaction with her assessment must have shown on your face. July spun around in a circle to gesture at the scene all around you; “The colors, I mean—there's just so much—it looks like how you dress.”

     “Maybe the way you dress is boring,” you told her. This earned you a friendly slug on the arm which, friendliness notwithstanding, actually hit hard enough to leave you aching. You rubbed at the sore muscle, unable to keep yourself from smirking.

     “You dress like a clown,” she said cheerfully. “Where are we going first?”

     “My old hearth,” you said, and then abruptly, without transition, you were leading her through the mosaic maze of Choral streets. Your surroundings blurred around you in a colorful haze as you kept your eyes fixed firmly to July; she continued to break from your side at random intervals to investigate some mundane object or other, darting out into the street to examine the bright blue metal benches at a trolley stop, pausing to press her face into an orange flower bloom and take a long sniff, pacing circles around street signs as she squinted curiously at their writing.

     It was a much shorter trip than it should have been. Whether this was because the distance you traveled was, quite literally, shorter than in reality, or because you were so captivated with watching July poke and prod at your hometown like she was at a museum, you could not tell.

     Either way, it was only a few short minutes until you found yourself standing in front of your old hearth, chest aflutter.

     It was a fairly small building, as far as hearths went—you were in the heart of the city, after all. Off the top of your head, you recalled it had a mere twenty-three stories. Its lower facade was covered with smooth, curved, iridescent-blue tiles that looked like scales, their thin gold-leaf edges glinting coyly in the lamplight; halfway up the building, the tile facade gave way to the lime-green plaster underneath. Gold trim limned the gutters and windowsills and outlined gables that jut out over glass windows depicting centuries-old scenes, passed down through corrupted scans of paintings and sketches and crumbling old statues—shards of pink and green and blue and purple glass welded into forests of bright hothouse flowers, costumed dancers splashing on the bank of a rusty-red river, lizards swarming over the grain fields, birds and fish and crops and people.

     You held open the door—painted electric blue, brass handles and hinges, both carved with feathers—for July. The front hall punched you in the stomach; it was a literal force that took your breath away momentarily.

     Your chest ached.

     July didn't seem to notice your sudden struggles; she was already shoving past you before the door was even fully open. First, she ran up to the grand staircase dominating the entrance hall and trailed her fingers along its translucent crystalline banisters, as if she couldn't believe they existed; then her awestruck eyes caught on the rainbow glass chandelier dangling from the arched ceiling, and she spun around several times in a row with her head craned all the way back, gaping shamelessly. The wallpaper—patterned with interlocking leaves, vines, and flowers—received some cursory attention, but not much. Once she noticed the complex spiral mosaic covering the floor, she nigh-instantaneously fell into tracing it, carefully stepping heel-to-toe along its knotty twists and turns with her head to the ground.

     It was becoming difficult to remember what to do with your hands. You shoved them into your pockets. “First floor is mostly for show. Entertaining guests and the like. That room—” you jerked your head toward the far right side of the room, where there was a currently-closed set of double doors, “—is like… a ballroom, sort of? It's for hosting. It's got seating, games, space for dancing. The other one—” a head-jerk to the left, where the doors were cracked open a good foot or so, offering a glimpse of long, rectangular tables and bright tapestries on the walls “—is for group meals.”

     You could not tell if July was paying attention. She'd dropped down to kneel on the floor and was tracing the edges of mosaic pieces with her fingers. She did this for several quiet moments before she looked up with a broad grin. “You lived here?”

     “With about sixty other people, yes.”

     Before you could so much as blink, July leapt to her feet, darted over, and grabbed your forearms unashamedly, sending your pulse skyrocketing. Insistently, she tugged your hands out of your pockets and clutched them between her own calloused palms; it was only once she'd captured you in this way that she said, with a very serious expression, “I want to see your room.”

     This did not do anything to calm your rapidly-increasing heart rate. “I left before I was given my own room.”

     Her eyes were bright and insistent. Staring down at her round, pretty little face was starting to make you dizzy.

     “I could show you the dorms,” you found yourself saying.

     The nearly two-dozen stories upstairs were all single rooms; the children's dorm was downstairs, down the pale pink stone steps of the grand staircase. You led July down the three tightly-twisting flights to another pair of double-doors—these ones painted with simple shapes instead of inlaid with mosaics, it wouldn't do to have children chipping the nice tile—which opened out onto a single large room, packed with a good couple dozen canopied beds. Most of the bedclothes were unmade, their surfaces strewn with articles of clothing, books, toys, other such knickknacks. Beside every bed sat a nightstand, and beside every nightstand sat a shelf; the ceiling was rich blue, tiled with a mosaic of birds wheeling through puffy clouds and a fat, bright yellow sun smack in the middle.

     Only half-aware of what you were doing, you wandered over to your old bed and dragged the thick magenta curtains aside. It smelled like dust. Your old blankets were piled up exactly how you'd left them—clothes stuffed under the covers in case a hearthmate decided to check on you overnight, satiny pillowcases rumpled and greasy, a small, pale yellow stuffed lizard thrown haphazardly to one side.

     Beside you, July bent down to touch the stuffed animal.

     “They're a pest around here,” you said quietly. “They like to nest in your showers, where it's hot and damp.”

     “What are they?”

     “Nako.” You frowned. “Or, um… a nak.”

     July's eyes nearly crossed as she brought the toy within a few centimeters of her nose. She squinted at it as if she was conducting unspeakably important research.

     In contrast to the flutter of your chest, your limbs felt practically leaden. You sat on the edge of the bed, unwilling to touch anything. The shelf by your nightstand was sagging under the weight of all the books you'd packed onto it—books on physics and mathematics, on woodworking and metalworking, books of sewing patterns, ship manuals for ships you'd never touched in your life, and of course, scads of sketchbooks crammed in at all angles, resting on top of other books and shoved into tiny crannies with their covers bent back. You did not point them out, nor did you pick them up to flip through them.

     July was looking at the ceiling again. “This looks different. Like, different from everything you've been showing me.” She punctuated this with a jab of her finger toward the yellow glob representing a sun.

     “It's an old design,” you said, still distracted. One hand ran over the dusty, floral brocade of your favorite blanket, dust clinging to the curve of your palm. “It's from before.”

     “Alright,” she said cheerfully. “Be all secretive and shit. See if I care.”

     You pulled your gaze back to her. July was clutching the nak to her chest as she leaned against a post of your bed, a teasing smirk tugging at the edges of her lips. Your cheeks went hot. “Sorry! Sorry. I'm… distracted.”

     “I really don't care.” She tucked her chin over the nak's head, eyeing you.

     “Yes, but—I brought you here to show you this kind of thing.” You stood up and brushed off the front of your pants conscientiously, despite there being absolutely no dust on them. “I'm getting sidetracked.”

     “I'm just happy to be here, and not… you know.” July gestured in the empty air, seemingly toward nothing in particular.

     You did not, in fact, know, but it didn't matter; you were still occupied, unable to entertain more than two trains of thought at once. “We weren't always underground. This planet orbited a sun once, hundreds of years ago. The story goes, we knew it was going to collapse, and we sent our city into the stars for centuries to wait it out. And when we came back to resettle on the surface, our planet was orbiting something long dead and rotting.”

     Her eyes had gone wide again, glued to your face as you talked. It took you conscious effort to keep your breathing even. You reached out to touch her shoulder; the dark green fabric of her jacket was rough and warm under your fingers, and she didn't break eye contact with you.

     “Come back to the surface with me,” you said. “I think it'll be easier to show you.”