Stardust

     When she woke up the next morning, July was alone.

     Immediately she groped blindly around the bedding for June; when she didn’t find her, July’s head helpfully supplied her with flashes of the previous night—June there, with her, alive, curled up in bed, her fingers slotted in the indent of July's waist, alternating between giddy tears and laughing til their ribs hurt, for hours and hours, long past lights-out, long past the lock on her door clicking shut—and followed this up with the thought that, maybe, she imagined all of that.

     A wisp of smoke curled around July’s nostrils, just to underline the point.

     Somehow, the thought didn’t fill July with immediate, unassailable despair; instead, it spurred her to get ready for her day in a hurry, heart pounding urgently in her throat. In a wild stroke of luck, when July rushed into the common room (only halfway through pulling a sweatshirt over her head), Cas was the only other person there. They were seated at the kitchen table with a book open in front of them, a plate with a handful of untouched apple slices to their side.

     July, too amped-up to hesitate, sat across from Cas, yanked her hair out of the collar of her sweatshirt, and said “Hey. Weird question.”

     Cas raised their eyes from their book and inclined their head to one side, very slightly.

     “Last night—” July paused, unsure of what to say. Cas didn't offer any assistance, just kept looking at her as if they were waiting for her to do something interesting. Eventually, she landed on “Did you come to my room last night?”

     “Yes,” Cas said, and with an oblique twist of their mouth, added “And yes, June was with me.”

     They were saying something else, but July stopped listening.

     June was alive. June was alive, and she was there, with July.

     Her skin buzzed. Her chest felt light. She felt like she could run ten miles, right then and there, with no warm-up.

     It took effort to pull her thoughts away from the memory of June’s perfume—flowery and vaguely metallic—and visceral sense-memories of her laughing, slowly combing her fingers through July’s hair, recounting details of their childhood in a conspiratorial undertone, but July managed to force her attention back to the here and now.

     “Thank you,” she said, making very intent eye contact with Cas. “I mean it. Thank you.”

     They looked… not particularly happy, but that wasn’t a surprise with Cas. They gave her a slow, deliberate nod before returning their attention to their book without further comment. Considering who she was talking to, that basically counted as an unqualified victory; she was really on a roll with the whole “making amends” thing.

     Giddy as she was, July made a snap judgment.

     “I need to go talk to Axel,” she announced, pushing her chair back and shooting to her feet in one smooth motion.

     “Good luck,” Cas said dryly, but July barely registered the comment, already bounding away. Her head spun—her stomach growled—but she sternly told it to wait, there were more important matters to take care of before considering the herculean task that was breakfast.

     The names of patients, July had noticed yesterday, were printed on thin white stickers by the black boxes on their cell doors. She prowled down the hallway, peering intently at labels, until she came to one labeled AXEL FLYNN down near the very end of the hall. It had some sort of band poster up on the door—an iridescent square picturing a crow tangled up in red thread. It made her heart stutter erratically against her ribs for no reason she could think of; then she realized she’d seen that image before, on the screen of Axel’s mp3 player while they split a pair of earbuds, and she felt dizzy.

     July knocked on the door.

     It opened almost immediately. Axel stood in the doorway, wearing only a pair of baggy plaid boxers, displaying an impressive amount of pale red-gold chest hair and an abundance of freckles clustered on his shoulders and torso; she automatically averted her eyes from his chest, a white-hot vice of anxiety squeezing around her heart. He didn’t exactly look pleased to see July, but he didn’t look upset, either—he rested one one hand casually against the doorframe and said “What’s up?”

     “I want to talk,” July said. As far as openers went, it was pretty lame, but Axel stepped back and gestured for her to come in. He closed the door behind her as she did.

     Axel’s room was much more lived-in than July’s. There was a large, fluffy shag rug on the floor, which felt like the height of luxury on her calloused feet. His bed was piled high with colorful pillows and rumpled plaid blankets; multiple mismatched mugs and a rainbow-striped plastic tray were clustered on the nightstand at its head. The tray held several small books of rolling papers, a few opaque black baggies, and a little bowl with a handful of cheap lighters. The wall over his bed was plastered with thin papery posters for bands July didn't recognize at all; in the middle of it, a violin hung proudly, dark wood buffed shiny and clean. A pile of beanbags was stuffed awkwardly in a corner, next to an empty record player.

     On the other side of the room, Axel's desk was piled with techy items July barely recognized—there was a keyboard synthesizer, that was straightforward enough, as were the multiple pairs of chunky over-ear headphones, but as for the metal boxes with dials and cords coming out of every square inch and the pedal-like implements with even more dials affixed, she didn’t have the faintest clue.

     “How long have you been here?” July found herself saying. It wasn’t how she’d planned to open the conversation, but the thought wouldn’t stop nagging her.

     Axel flopped back onto his bed; the ridiculous pile of pillows kept him sitting straight up. He had not yet put on a shirt. “If I’m remembering the calendar right? About a month.”

     “There’s a calendar?”

     “To the left when you go in the common room from the hall,” he said. “On the opposite wall from the TV.”

     “Oh.” Digesting this, July made her way over to the desk and gingerly pulled the chair out from in front of it, careful not to disturb the precarious mess of audio equipment. She sat down and spun around to face the uncharacteristically-relaxed Axel. He was still shirtless. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with that; in the entire time they'd dated, July had never once seen his chest except under the cover of darkness, and honestly, she usually pretended it didn't exist at all, for politeness's sake.

     “So,” he said, “what did you wanna talk about?”

     July wrapped a strand of hair around her finger, looking down at the floor. “I wanted to… apologize. For last year.”

     “Forgiven and forgotten,” Axel said easily.

     “I—what?” July’s gaze snapped back up to him. Axel didn’t look like he was joking at all; he was smiling, sure, but it was an easy, gentle smile, not the expression of someone trying to mock her. “I broke your nose,” was the only thing she could think to say.

     “Yeah, you were a right cunt.” He reached down to grab his toes in a leg stretch. “Took me a while to stop being mad at you, but…” A heavy sigh fell from his lips; he sounded almost absentminded, like he was talking to himself. “I don’t know. I’ve met a lot of people like us over the last year. Y’know—weirdos, queers. People with fucked-up lives. Taught me enough to realize that first relationships never work out.”

     She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she just stared at him. Everything he was saying sounded ridiculous. It was absolute clown shit.

     “Besides, you were right about some things. I still love Tyler, but he fucked me up good.” Axel released his feet to switch over to stretching his arms, grabbing one wrist with the opposite hand and pulling it to one side over his head.

     July still couldn’t think of anything to say. She wrapped the strand of hair around her finger so tightly, the tip turned purple, then she released it.

     Axel finished his stretches and settled back against the pillow pile. “And I’m sorry for calling you a crazy bitch,” he said. “I didn’t need to get misogynistic about it.”

     That did it; July laughed, slightly hysterically. “I cheated on you,” she said, strangled.

     He shrugged. “Are you gonna do it again?”

     Anxiety flared in her chest. Her shoulders tensed. “Are you—”

     “Not with me,” Axel said hastily. “Christ on a bike, I’m past that. I just meant—the circumstances were weird, you had your reasons.”

     “Bad ones.”

     “Maybe, maybe not. Are you even monogamous?”

     Something in July’s brain ground to a halt. She wanted to ask him what he meant by that. What came out of her mouth instead was “Can you stop psychoanalyzing me?”

     Axel held his hands up in front of his chest in a faux-defensive gesture, chuckling. “Sorry. Shouldn’t stick my nose in it. I was just trying to say that…” His face scrunched up slightly, nose wrinkling as he thought. July remembered kissing it and flushed hot. “You were right, we don’t work together. How it failed doesn't matter to me, it was always going to.”

     They both sat with that for a few long, silent moments. July eyed him thoughtfully; he just sat there, eventually tilting his head back and closing his eyes.

     After a while, she said “You’ve changed.”

     He grinned, eyes still closed. “I sure hope so.”

     She glanced around the room again. “You smoke now?”

     He cracked his eyelids open to squint at her; July gestured toward the tray of rolling papers on his nightstand. Axel laughed. “You still notice the weirdest shit. Yeah, I talked Matt into getting me weed. You should join us for a smoke sesh sometime.”

     “Matt, like—the Dusty?” July was unable to stop her face from twisting with disgust.

     “I mean, weed doesn’t do anything for him, but we shoot the shit.” He raised his eyebrows. “He’s not half bad. Ophelia’s got a stick up her ass, but she’s not awful, either. They’ve just got shitty jobs.”

     That was too much for July to process, so she moved on. “And you’re playing again?” This time, she gestured toward the violin on the wall. It wasn’t Axel’s old one—the one he kept in the back of his locker back in the Resistance, the one he’d only taken out of its case once in the entire time she’d known him, and that was only to show her his initials carved on the bridge—this one had to be brand-new.

     “Sometimes,” he said. “I’ve been giving Cas lessons. They’re absolute garbage.”

     “Bet that drives them up the wall,” she murmured. As her gaze drifted back toward Axel, she swallowed down a rising wave of anxiety. With a deep, grounding breath, she began “And you said about Tyler—”

     “I don’t want to talk about him.” Axel's voice was suddenly sharp.

     July shrank back in her seat, hot shame creeping up the back of her neck.

     Silence hung over them again, this time leaving a slimy residue as it crawled over July's skin. She squirmed in her chair, gnawing on her lower lip til she pulled a thin layer of dry skin off with her teeth.

     When Axel spoke up again, it was subdued but serious. “Sorry. Look, Jules,” her heart skipped at her nickname, “I… I’m glad you’re alive, I’m not mad at you. But we can’t jump right back into the serious shit. You’ve gotta give it time.”

     July swallowed heavily. Her lip stung where she’d peeled it. “Give it time. Got it.”

###

     June was not in the garden.

     This was not especially troubling. Sometimes she was, sometimes she was not. Still, a certain disappointment tugged at your heartstrings—your sister’s visage would have been a comfort, grounded you in the reality that was her presence in the waking world.

     For lack of anything better to do, you shimmied up a tree to clamber onto the top of the garden wall and tumble down to the other side in a hurry; June had said you were free to wander, after all. The meadow was different than you remembered—the sky was still vast and brilliantly blue, the gentle hills were still verdant and dotted with bright clusters of wildflowers, but the meadow ended after only the length of a couple of football fields, where it faded into a massive sea, much larger than the lake you’d previously seen.

     You hiked up to the shore of the sea; the sun felt like the embrace of an old friend, and the air felt fresh and light in your lungs. Instead of a sudden juxtaposition between grass and water, like at the lake, the grass at this shore transitioned into fine, crunchy sand and pebbles. Large formations of rock jutted out from the beach, forming flat, craggy jetties like walkways into the ocean.

     The water was unnaturally still, given its size. It pooled in a single flat, silver-blue sheet; it reflected the sky perfectly, down to the details of clouds drifting overhead.

     At the very edge of the horizon, so far out over the sea you had to squint to make it out, you caught the hazy suggestion of a city skyline.

     There was an oblong shape partially sunk into the sand at the very edge of the water; an old television, one of the squat, chunky models from your childhood, chrome and gray surface dull and marred by greasy finger-smudges. You dropped to squat on your heels, leaning in closer to its dead screen. Transfixed by its perfect smoothness, you reached one finger out to gently brush against the cool glass; an immediate disturbance rippled through it, colors and shapes radiating out from your fingertip to undulate in strange, hypnotic movements.

     As you watched, the mayhem of colors and motion resolved into a swirling, hazy picture—two girls, no older than four or five, with baby-soft round limbs and unbrushed, ratty tangles of blonde hair, sitting on the floor, a pile of small plastic dolls between them. A woman, mid-size with dirty blonde hair pulled into a disheveled bun and an upturned nose, sat on the couch directly behind them, legs curled up under herself as she tapped away at a laptop. The entire scene glowed with a curious silver light; shapes were ever-so-slightly diffused, like you'd turned the bloom up too far.

     The girls were chattering nigh-unintelligibly as they passed dolls between each other with tight, grubby fists—then one of them got suddenly extremely high and pitchy, babbling something very fast as she swept the vast majority of the pile into her clumsy arms. The other grabbed at her arms, pulling ineffectually. After a few seconds of this, she screwed up her face and hit the offending child over the head with a doll.

     The injured girl burst promptly into a loud, violent wail. The pile of dolls dropped from her arms to scatter on the carpet, forgotten.

     In an exhausted voice, without looking away from the screen of her laptop, the woman said “June, don’t hit your sister.”

     “She stole!” June shouted over the ambulance-siren quality of her sister’s wailing.

     The woman tilted down the screen of her laptop to look directly at the girls, mouth set in a thin line. “Does that mean you get to hit?”

     June made her own high-pitched shrieking noise. It was utterly devoid of linguistic meaning.

     “Apologize,” the woman said firmly, returning her attention back to her work. This prompted June to shriek again; the child-July in the water clapped her hands over her ears and continued to wail, her face screwed-up and impressively red.

     June stopped screeching. She watched her sister cry for a few long moments, a strange, thoughtful expression on her face—then she leaned over to pull her into an ungainly embrace, and almost immediately, July's wails trailed off with the air of a balloon deflating.

     “I’m sorry,” June said contritely. Child-July’s face went placid as she clung to June, wrapping her awkward limbs around her sister and squeezing.

     Their mother began typing again, but not before an obligatory “What do you say?”

     “It’s okay,” July said, voice still thick with snot. “I still love you.”

     “Fascinating,” Sage said.

     You looked up; a dark silhouette loomed over you, features shadowed and barely visible against the neon-azure sky. You scrambled to your feet.

     “That was our mom,” you said. A strange rushing sound came from behind you; a glance over your shoulder showed that water was pouring from the vents on the back of the television, gallons of multicolored streams jetting from its grayish-black plastic slits as the colors onscreen devolved into senseless chaos. When the streams hit the surface of the ocean, their colors flowed out into the sea and dispersed like ink; there was a sad little tug at your heart as you watched them sink into the depths.

     Sage hummed softly. “Not a particularly stellar example of parenting.”

     A hot flush crept up your spine. You turned back to sneer at her. “How would you know? You didn’t even have parents.”

     She did not rise to your bait; instead, she shaded her brow with one hand and peered out over the sea. Squinting at the skyline, hair tucked up under a floral-patterned bandanna, she struck a vivid profile, her features no longer obscured by the violent sun. Long magenta lashes pooled over the dips of her eye sockets, laugh-lines carved themselves into the corners of her eyes; as you watched, she hummed thoughtfully again, a satisfied half-smile tugging at her lips.

     Somewhere out at sea, gulls cawed, distant and lonely. You felt rather petulant.

     “Why are you here?” It was embarrassing, how thin and childish your voice sounded.

     Sage tore her gaze away from the sea. Meeting her golden eyes irritated you, slid a sheet of sandpaper just under your first layer of skin and rubbed your insides raw, but you stubbornly held her gaze anyway.

     “I hoped I’d run into you, so I did,” she said. “You know how it works here.”

     Despite your dabblings, you did not, in fact, have a thorough understanding of the mechanics of the setting you found yourself in—your understanding of the world was painfully limited, bounded by the permeable membrane of your universe.

     What you perceived as dreams could not be explained within the bounds of your reality, so you simply did not explain them. Even after you moved to the void between worlds, shoved yourself into the corrupted gut-bacteria farm you called a fleet, you did not perceive the machines holding firm the boundaries of your reality, you did not understand the artifice in its construct. Your sway over the viscous soap-fluid pooling in bubbles on the surface of your universe was just that—sway, not understanding, and certainly not expertise. You did not even know of the source of the raw material you played with—that great, jagged, bleeding crack in reality and that foaming, violent river that rushed from its maw, pooled in the heart of the shining-white spires of civilization and powered its great machines.

     Since you did not know any of this, you presumed Sage’s statement to be correct. You begrudgingly gave her a nod, and as if in response, she held her hand out to you.

     You grasped it. Her palm was warm and dry, covered in thick callouses. Wordlessly, she tugged at your wrist and set off briskly walking in a direction that, to your eyes, seemed entirely random.

     The pair of you trotted over the warm sand and back into the meadow; as the beach transitioned back into crisp, crunchy grass, you caught sight of a blocky shape looming on the horizon. Sage made a beeline for it, practically yanking your hand off your wrist in her haste.

     The indistinct mass of rectangles came into focus as you approached, resolving into a large, neon-yellow structure—definitely a spaceship of some sort. Its aerodynamics looked horribly ineffective; it was at least the size of a bus, perhaps larger, built entirely from massive, clunky rectangular prisms welded and screwed together at odd angles. There was a large windshield on the frontmost segment, the ship's inside obscured by the sun's sharp glare refracting off the tinted glass; the back featured spiky attachments that looked like fins, the middle segment had a ladder folded up against its side next to a hatch with a locking wheel, and the entire contraption was suspended a good two feet off the ground on knobbly-looking metal stilts.

     Sage turned to you and grasped both your hands in her own, a wide grin plastered on her face. “Fix it with me?” she said, eyes glittering.

     You cast a look over to the ship; it was like nothing you had ever seen before. (You had, of course, seen the very same ship a year ago—but in your weak defense, it was buried almost entirely in mud and swampwater.) You looked back at Sage, and her eyes sparkled so brightly, her expression rang so hopeful, that you could not bring yourself to wholeheartedly reject her. “I don’t know how.”

     “I’ll teach you,” she said excitedly, and without even waiting for an answer, she tugged you over to the ship and began unzipping pouches on the utility belt at her waist.

     Sage pried off a metal panel on the underside of the ship and encouraged you to scoot underneath and examine its most intimate parts with her. You found yourself not only eager to learn, but able to understand her with surprising ease; you'd never thought of yourself as mechanically inclined, but watching her practiced hands dancing in and out of the gears and wires of the cooling system, listening to her patient, detailed explanations, it all seemed quite simple.

     The two of you dismantled the rear fans and dragged each blade—easily the length of your arm—out into the sunny meadow, where you began hand-cleaning them, scrubbing away what seemed like endless layers of caked-on dirt and mud and debris. You quickly became sore and damp, mud flaking from your skin and clothes and sweat pooling under your breasts, but you didn’t mind much. It felt good.

     After you'd spat wet, clinging strands of hair out of your mouth for what felt like the dozenth time in a row, Sage beckoned you over and pulled a ribbon out of her pocket. With steady, practiced fingers, she tied your hair back in a high ponytail, then patted you on the shoulder and shooed you off to return to work. It made you feel dizzy.

     Time passed, but the sun continued to beat down overhead, uncompromisingly eternal. Because of this, it was difficult to tell how long you worked in the heat, but eventually—around the time a knot started developing between your shoulderblades—the blades were free of muck, and you and Sage set about reassembling the fan system inside the ship. You held parts in place and operated a flashlight for her as she began the finicky business of operating on the ship’s guts; to your delight, at several points she let you screw parts into place, and even quizzed you on where they went and why before she would place them correctly.

     When the job was finished, you were both mud-streaked and soaked in sweat, and Sage’s hands were stained with bright yellow coolant. She was sporting a wide, proud grin—one which you couldn’t help but mirror as you stood, hands on your hips, examining your work. The ship’s panel was replaced, its body whole and well.

     Sage pulled the ladder down from the side of the ship and began clambering up. When she reached the hatch, she gave the locking wheel a heavy slap and began turning it with a laborious grunt. She paused to give you a quick jerk of the head, indicating you should follow her, before disappearing into the ship.

     You were tired, but that was irrelevant in the face of another invitation from Sage—and besides, brain-breaking Dusty medical facilities notwithstanding, you had never seen the inside of a spaceship before, and you were extremely curious. Clambering up the ladder was another mild workout; your shirt was, at that point, visibly dark with sweat under the bodice and pits. The hatch clanged heavily as it shut behind you.

     The inside of the ship was surprisingly homey—mechanical and ramshackle, yes, but to your eye, it barely looked alien at all. The room you entered was crowded with racks and racks of clothing folded and crammed into tight stacks, racks bolted to the wall up to the very ceiling, everything in eye-searingly bright colors, masses of taffeta and organza and lace and velvet in contrasting patterns. A set of bunk beds was built into the wall across from the entrance, their mattresses stacked with thick pillows and comforters. Chunky chests sat strapped to shelves; a couple of overstuffed armchairs sat by the beds, bolted to the floor.

     To your right, through a low archway in the metal-plated walls, was something you assumed was a kitchen—it was all metal, full of futuristic-looking appliances that were nevertheless clearly rusty and beat-up, and there was a table that was—just like the rest of the furniture—screwed into the floor. Besides the rickety sink, the most familiar thing you caught sight of was a massive pump bottle of hand sanitizer strapped to a cabinet.

     A similar arch on the opposite side of the room showed off the pilot’s cockpit; a massive windshield dominated the scene, sunlight streaming through it onto the neon-yellow vinyl dashboard peppered with various buttons and knobs and dials. Sage stretched out in the comfortable, full-backed chair, languidly flipping switches and turning knobs, sunbeams playing over the curves of her face and catching her hair aflame; as you gawked at the ship’s interior, she threw you a cheerful grin.

     “You might want to sit down for takeoff,” she said.

     You obliged, collapsing into one of the thick armchairs. It felt wonderful to go limp, to let your damp, sore body relax into the indulgent cushions. The ship moved forward slightly—groaned, stuttered, then shifted forward more—and your heart did a series of flips.

     You had never so much as been on an airplane before.

     Leaning forward to peer through the windshield, you saw the meadow whipping by at a much faster pace than you’d expected. It did not feel as though you were moving very fast at all—but as you watched, it continued to accelerate—then, ever-so-slightly, the view began to tilt up.

     It was your stomach’s turn to join in on the organ gymnastics. It did so with gusto.

     Sage’s profile, just barely visible around the corner of the pilot’s seat, looked completely relaxed—her eyebrows slack, a tiny smile tugging at the very corner of her mouth, her eyes bright and alive. “Once we get into orbit, I can put it on autopilot and come back there with you,” she said.

     You did not know what to say. Your breathing came in quick, sharp bursts—not from fear, but from a queer sort of excitement, a tension that knotted your guts almost pleasantly. The windshield showed nothing but sky at that point—a bright, unbroken field, impossible to tell how far you’d come or how far you still had to go.

     “July?” Sage’s voice brought your attention sharply back to her. She threw a glance over her shoulder at you—short in duration but lingering nonetheless, her eyes dragging over your face even as she turned her body back to the windshield. She bit her lip before she spoke again, briefly, but hard enough to turn the dark skin pink.

     “Try to remember this when you wake up this time, okay?” she said.