Stardust

     The contraption on the dashboard beeped again.

     “I heard you the first time,” Aston snapped. The device, a block of gray plastic with an impressive array of bits and bobs sticking out of various ports on its underside, several joysticks cannibalized from Xbox controllers, and a screen displaying a readout in Chorn, continued to beep resolutely.

     It was ridiculous to get tetchy with an inanimate object, but Aston had been driving up and down the tri-state area for nearly fifteen hours, and he was exhausted.

     And he was alone.

     Being alone did strange things to Aston’s head. He kept half-expecting Sage to pop up from the backseat and start fiddling with her device—she’d be able to efficiently narrow down the data on the readout, she’d probably even poke fun at him for his sloppy math—and after the fifth hour on the road, he found himself slipping up and speaking out loud whenever he got particularly frustrated, as if she could offer advice or a sympathetic shoulder-pat.

     He even found himself wishing he’d taken Teiddan up on his offer to come along. But Aston didn’t even know what he was looking for—he’d feel endlessly stupid and guilty if he stumbled across something—or someone—dangerous, and Teiddan got caught up in it. Besides, the man damn well knew he couldn’t afford the time off work.

     The beeping, in combination with the thrice-blasted sunglasses Aston submitted himself to wearing in public, was giving him a headache. He stared resolutely out at the sun slowly rising over the highway, back molars grinding against each other.

     He would endure.

###

     A couple more hours into the drive, Aston began to get a sneaking suspicion which he tried to avoid, both mentally and physically. He drove down back roads and took turnoffs that looked vaguely like they could go in the right direction; he went in the opposite direction for a while, hoping the roads would loop around and reveal somewhere he’d missed on the maps; finally, after two hours of pussyfooting around, he was forced to face the facts.

     The readout was pointing him toward the Jersey state park he’d crashed in a year ago—where he’d lost what little scraps of a normal life he still had in the waters of that stinking, horrible swamp.

     It was an absolutely terrible idea to go back there. There was no firm evidence tying Aston to the attempted assassination of the President, sure, but “no firm evidence” didn’t preclude the political movers and shakers in America damn well knowing him and Sage were involved. He would be shocked if they didn’t have security up at the crash site, even a year later, just in case he and Sage ever returned to retrieve their ship.

     But it was where the readout was pointing. And Aston felt obligated to finish what Sage had started—it was the least he could do.

     Aston dug a plain mask and a dingy black beanie out of the glove box and pulled them on before climbing out of the car; he’d gone full normie for this trip, simple jeans and a coat, and unfortunately, he’d ruin the effect if he showed off his fire-engine-red cornrows. Something about this swamp was dead-set on ruining his image.

     Once he was out, he did a few stretches in the warm sun of the parking lot. It wasn’t stalling. He’d been in the car since the previous night; he needed to stretch.

     After going through his routine, he plugged a pair of earbuds into a headphone jack on the bottom of the device—which was beeping much more urgently now—and took a quick inventory of his messenger bag. He had a few disposable water bottles and a few power bars left, but overall, Aston was running low on supplies and would have to stop somewhere and use his very limited cash to buy food on the way back.

     He wrinkled his nose. It was going to be a very long and wet hike, and his tennis shoes were not built for traversing a swamp.

     Whenever he found her again, he ruminated, Sage had better be both impressed and grateful.

     He didn’t bother with a map—not only did he not want to enter the visitors’ center and risk being recognized, however minuscule the chances of that were, he was perfectly capable of navigating by the device’s readouts and the ebb and flow of its beeping. With one earbud in, the other dangling around his neck, Aston strode past the visitors' center and into the thick of the woods.

     Other passerby didn’t give him a second glance; it was another frigid winter, and even in the mid-morning sun, nearly everyone else also sported thick scarves and hats as well as their masks. As he progressed through the woods, well-trod paths giving way to muddy, overgrown trails riddled with loose stones and exposed roots, other hikers became few and far between. He allowed himself to enter a flow state as he picked his way through the trails, adjusting his direction automatically as the beeping accelerated and slowed in infinitesimal measures.

     The sun traveled further and further into the cloudless blue sky til it hung directly overhead, beaming down relentlessly on Aston, who was beginning to sweat under his coat. He paused his hike to strip it off and stuff it awkwardly into his messenger bag; as the brisk air hit his sweaty back and armpits, he tilted his head back and lifted his arms to the sky for a few moments, basking in blissful relief.

     The beeping eventually led him off-trail, down into the thick of the swamp. Mud sucked at his tennis shoes and soaked them thoroughly; Aston cursed the very concept of swamps. Whoever came up with this biome needed to be taken out behind the woodshed and shot. For the good of the planet.

     As he trudged through endless acres of mud, the beeping escalated until it was a continuous, high-pitched whine in his ear. The trees thinned out; at their edge, the forest opened out into a proper patch of swamp, sunlit swirls of mud-clogged water filled with tall, brittle reeds. Aston hung back, scanning the treeline, his palms slick and his fingers tapping restlessly against his thighs.

     Caution tape hung along the bank of the swamp, neon-yellow jarring against the otherwise untouched wilderness. Beyond the tape, a lone chunk of metal, streaked with mud and flaking paint and rust, poked up from the surface of the water. Closer to Aston, a couple of trees sported small black-and-white signs stapled to their surfaces, reading NO TRESPASSING without further elaboration. But he didn’t see any cops.

     The crash site was, as far as he could tell, devoid of life.

     The whining in Aston’s earbud grew more insistent. He turned in a slow circle, listening for fluctuations in its pitch and intensity; carefully, he made his way in the direction the pitch was the highest, head on a constant swivel, scanning the trees, the ground, even the sky, for… something. He didn’t know what, and that was the problem.

     Something shifted in the periphery of Aston’s vision. He swung around; a large black shape was crumpled at the base of a tree a couple dozen yards into the woods. As he watched, the shape moved again, dragging itself into a sitting position—it was a man. Human, leaned up against the tree like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

     “Ho!” Aston shouted, marching through the muck toward him. Mud splashed up onto the cuffs of Aston’s jeans. It was that kind of day.

     As he got closer, he realized the man looked familiar—he was very pale, with wavy dark hair in a veritable bird’s nest on his scalp and cheekbones so sharp you could use them to slice cheese. The device screeched in Aston’s ear as he got close; he turned it off with more than a little irritation.

     “You’re the guy,” Aston said once he got within earshot, snapping his fingers impatiently. “The, uh—Lake! You’re Lake.”

     Lake stared up at him uncomprehendingly. His face looked slick and shiny and slightly green around the gills.

     Aston looked around briefly, more out of habit than anything else, before lowering his sunglasses to let the man get a glimpse at his eyes. “It’s me. From last year?”

     Lake continued to display zero signs of comprehension.

     With a world-weary, put-upon sigh, Aston replaced his shades on his nose and put his hands on his hips, looking down on Lake with a mixture of scorn and satisfaction. “You know, from the White House thing? Oh, whatever,” and although he did see something resembling recognition start to bloom on Lake’s face, he felt the need to address more immediately relevant topics before tackling that one. “It’s a three hour hike back to the car. Think you can get yourself together enough to come with me?”

     The sound of wind rustled through the leaves overhead and tossed some aside, sending a sunbeam down to pass over Lake’s face; sweat shimmered over his cheekbones as he tilted his head to one side mutely. Finally, just as Aston started wringing his hands impatiently, Lake said “Probably.”

###

     It took twenty more minutes, one of Aston’s precious water bottles, two power bars, and a mysterious pill procured from Lake’s jacket pocket, but he did eventually gather up the wherewithal to make the arduous trek back to the parking lot.

     The man was oddly silent for the entire hike. Aston occasionally babbled in his direction, trying to elicit some kind of response, but Lake was inscrutable. It was fairly irritating.

     It was only when they got back into the car, after the doors finally slammed shut and Aston slumped, exhausted and sore and sweaty, over the steering wheel, that Lake (who was now so sweaty his shaggy hair hung down in lank strips) said anything of substance.

     “Where are you going?” he asked.

     That was something Aston, if he were in a similar situation, would have asked long before embarking on a three-hour hike with someone he’d met a grand total of twice. He privately decided Lake must be rather simple. “A miserably long way away. We’re going to be on the road for twelve hours, so buckle up. Took me even longer to get out here, so you should be—”

     “Where exactly,” Lake said, which was fair.

     “We set up camp with some punks in Chicago,” Aston said. “You knew Cas, yes? And Jasper, of course, he said you—”

     At that, Lake showed the first sign of emotion since Aston found him; his head whipped around to face Aston directly, his eyes bright and intense, and he said “Jasper? He’s with you?”

     Aston broke eye contact to rummage around in his pockets for the car keys. He busied himself with starting the engine; as it roared to life, he cleared his throat several times, pressing his palms flat against the steering wheel, which was suddenly the most interesting thing in the car he could possibly look at. “Well. He was. A few of us were… indisposed, on a trip to New York.” Hastily, swinging one arm over the back of his seat to look out the back windshield, he added “Not dead, as far as we know—we think they were, uh… arrested.”

     The car slowly backed out of its parking space. Aston turned back to face the front and yanked his sunglasses off his face before exiting the parking lot. They clattered carelessly into the center console.

     After a moment, Lake, a slight tremble in his voice, said “July—”

     “Ah, that girl the humans won’t shut up about?” He immediately winced and added, contritely, “May she rest in peace and so forth.”

     “No, she’s alive. No thanks to y’all.” This made Aston bristle somewhat, but before he could snap a retort, Lake continued: “She was taken, too. Our house—I got home yesterday and our house was a wreck, doors kicked down, boot prints everywhere. Garden beds trampled.” He sounded particularly annoyed at that last one.

     Aston considered this as he merged onto the mostly-empty interstate; he was so lost in thought, he almost let his mirror get clipped by a semi edging into his lane. He yanked the wheel to the right at the last minute and flipped the bird at the back of the truck quickly disappearing into the rapidly-dwindling, stardust-choked evening light. Night would fall soon enough, and the dust cover was descending, making visibility a real bitch.

     “How’d you find me, anyway?” Lake said. Yet another example of something Aston would have asked several hours ago.

     He jerked his thumb in the direction of the device, which was perched back on the dashboard, earbuds neatly wrapped around its blocky form. “Sage made that before she got… taken. She was trying to trace the residue your dimensional folding leaves behind—got really fixated on all that after you left, I couldn’t get her to talk about anything else. She thought it’d be useful to get our hands on anyone else the Dusties experimented on, try to figure out why they’re giving people superpowers—doesn’t seem like a great plan on the surface, give the population you’re colonizing the tech you’re using to suppress them, eh?”

     “And you just happened to be using it when I blinked out here?”

     “Well.” Aston’s hands felt clammy on the steering wheel. He brought one hand down to wipe it on his pants, something he immediately regretted when his palm came away streaked with mud. “I… was keeping it on all the time whenever I was at home. I thought Sage would… want me to use it, if she couldn’t. And last night, it picked up a trace somewhere in the tri-state area—it was barely anything from so far away, but—” Frustrated, he rubbed his muddy palm against the wheel, leaving a smear on the dark plastic. “I don’t know, I have to keep myself occupied somehow.”

     Lake made a low noise, somewhere between a grunt and a hum.

     Something was bothering Aston. “Did you sleep all night in the mud?”

     A sidelong glance revealed Lake's shoulders hunched up around his ears, eyebrows pulled up and lips twisted in a humorless half-smile. “I blinked pretty far.”

     The highway was quiet and dim, the sun having just dipped below the horizon; everything was lit in dusty purplish blue. Aston let his shoulders drop slightly, let his head relax against the back of his seat. In the distance, low hills rolled up into the skyline; they’d be driving through mountain country in a few hours, which Aston almost looked forward to. At least the Appalachians were somewhat interesting, on account of not being endless flat pavement.

     After several minutes of blessed, relaxing silence, Lake spoke again, voice low and calm this time. “It sounds like they’re collecting people who were involved in the White House thing.”

     “Doesn't make a lot of sense,” Aston said. “Why wouldn’t they publicize the arrests?”

     “They never reported anything about the assassination attempt to begin with.”

     That was technically true—the White House fire had been reported as a failed terrorist attack, with zero casualties, and the executive branch now claimed to work remotely from their private residences, to prevent future vulnerabilities. No outlet mentioned the White House had, to Aston’s eye at least, been abandoned for years by the time they'd entered. “They’d get a lot of mileage out of arresting terrorists, though. Especially if they could connect them to the White House fire, which they absolutely could—for Sage, at least.”

     Lake made another low, thoughtful noise. Aston gave him another quick glance out of the corner of his eye; the man was leaning to one side, his forehead pressed against the car window, apparently watching the forested scenery as it rushed past. The lull in conversation lasted for a long while, until Lake finally said “Shit’s fucked.”

     Aston couldn’t help himself; he laughed at that.

     It would be a long twelve hours. Once he got back to Teiddan (and Vellum and Ray and everyone else), he would have to explain Lake—which would be a whole ordeal, given that not only was Lake apparently alive, but so was that irritating blonde woman. On top of the humans' maudlin emotional fixation on her, Sage had become practically obsessed as well, constantly venting to Aston about her dreams that featured the girl—she was convinced they were something more than dreams, but refused to say anything to the humans for fear of misleading them. And given the sudden arrival of a living, breathing piece of evidence in favor of that hypothesis, Aston would have to explain all of that to Teiddan, as well.

     In short, the next couple of days were going to be exhausting, and the arduous drive might be the least of his problems.

     “Yeah,” Aston said. “Shit is, indeed, fucked.”