Patina

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I know that they’re wrong. I have heard the cosmic scream. I have seen the coming cruelty. It is here. But as we race frantically across Thingvellir, my mind persists, not here, not here, not here anyway.

Aster presses her palm against mine and yanks. My heart is thudding against my chest, a bloodied panicked bird. The sky is still, black & cloudless, but we are nowhere near the trees. We need to keep running but Aster has stopped, and I could never leave without her.

I tug us towards the forest.

“Aurora—wait!” She’s trying to do something with our entwined hands, trying to work her magic, but time is running out and I have no patience and I have never understood how her magic works, anyway.

“Aster—we have to go,” I plead breathlessly. But she is looking at my hand like she doesn’t understand – like go means something other than safety, other than us. My hand burns beneath hers and then I understand. Not here, not here, please please not here. The heat creeps up past my wrist bones, trails through my veins until it reaches my chest. I almost cry out—I think I do—but then, without warning, the sky erupts. There’s a sparking conflagration in the sky that is at once natural and unnatural. Unearthly. Spectacular. Perilous.

They are here.

“Close your eyes!” Aster demands, letting go of my hand to slap her palms against my brow. I claw at her fingers until I can see her again and we wrestle viciously like this for a moment, her trying to save me, and I, the failure, trying only to see her one last time.

Aster kisses me hard. I lose myself in her warmth and her breath and her sorrow. “Aurora. Please.”

My hands give up the fight. Blind, I raise them towards the cleft of her brow bone to cover her eyes, too, even though, of course they were already closed. I want to stare and stare but Aster wouldn’t look and so neither can I. I already know what I would see—my great, abundant love backlit by comets streaking; blazing rays of golds and greens and purples and oranges dancing; the stars winking down at us as if they are a million blinking eyes – judging; sentencing; condemning.

My sob is heavy and ragged in my chest and I do everything I can to shove it down. “They’re calling. I can hear them.”

“Stay,” she whispers, and my body burns again. My hands buzz but I can’t tell if it’s her doing or theirs. If I had any choice at all I’d stay. Of course I’d stay.

I kiss her again, pour every bit of myself that I can into her.

“I love—”

But I don’t even get that. A vicious jerk from behind my navel yanks me backwards into the fiery night sky. Aster tries valiantly to hold onto me but her palms are sweaty and her magic didn’t work against theirs and our frantic grasp begins to slip and slip and fail.

Aster screams as if the sky has ripped away a piece of her instead of all of me. I open my eyes. Everything is ablaze and there, small and frail and so terribly human, is Aster. On her face I can see all of her rage and all of her helplessness and how sudden I have made her into some kind of failure, too. I’ve never seen her cry before. As my body deteriorates and joins the flowing colors of my namesake, Aster’s shoulders crumple in that way that shoulders do sometimes, as if all along they were made of flimsy paper tissues.

Even so, the night is breathtaking. A blazing heartbreak befitting our love. For years to come the scientists will ponder the sheer magnificence of my homecoming.

And they will never know a thing.

1

I wake with a scream on my lips. I bite down on my tongue until only a whimper forces its way through. I count and recount the rungs on the bunk above me until my heartbeats match my counting pace. Fourteen, fifteen, one, two…

“Another dream, then?”

I sit up in my bunk slowly and face Gazer. She means well, I think, but I hate how she watches me. How she catalogues my dreams and how often I have them.

“This time I drown in one of the oceans,” I lie, shuffling off my bunk and out of my whites. I once made the mistake of going to the toilet in my whites, which are strictly for sleep and before Wake Hours, and a few days later I was cited for ‘inappropriate articles’ by the page doyens. I can’t prove it was Gazer who told but I slip into my grays every day, nonetheless.

“Which one?” Gazer drums her fingers against our shiny white table. Her deep black eyes watch and watch me dress.

I try to recall any of my intel from Vale but draw a blank. There is a continent holding a country named Italy…it borders what they call a sea…My lips tremble in place of the lie I know I should give her. I’m ten days from my from my first trip to Vale and I’m scared shitless and Gazer knows it. Let her fill in the blanks my silence awards.

Our room door slips quietly open as I turn towards it and leave towards my day’s assignment. The hallways of our Cluster are always busy. Everyone in their uni’s, burgundy if they belong in the Muni, green if they’re going to Agro. Medics in their deep blues and the keepers in royal purples with their guns. I keep my head down as I pass them, though they have no reason to look my way. Guilty conscience, maybe.

For twelve days, I’ve dreamt of something bright green and half-alive. Sometimes I am snarled by the wind before reaching it. Sometimes I am it. It is common knowledge that Vale contains grass, much like what we grow for the animals in Agro but not artificial. Real and spiky and everywhere. Am I dreaming of the grass? Leaving Patina and visiting Vale should be an honor for any page. As an Aurora I’ve known this was my duty since I could walk. Why does it make me scream every morning now?

I shuffle through the crowd and into Sequence Room 4. Here, the other pages, dressed in their various occupation colors, are just settling in at their desks, arranged four by five across the room. There is a pink folder on my desk. My palms itch.

I don’t touch it.

But I want to.

Our briefing is led by two of the doyens. One medic and one agro. They talk about the medical advancements on the Vale and how hospitals are similar to our system but far less advanced and more prone to guesswork. They talk about how the overconsumption of meat on Vale leads to many illnesses and environmental stressors. I tune out. I have heard this lecture before. I will be on Vale – on Earth, as I needed to remember to call it – in slightly less than ten days. I don’t know my exact assignment but—

“Please open your folders, now, to find your access points.”

I hold my hands against the desk for an extra ten seconds. There are Gazers in the class and they notice everything. If I seem too eager or if I seem not eager enough I will be sent for evaluation.

Eight, nine, ten…

I’m startled by her eyes, first. Like a Gazer, right through the depths of me, but hazel and friendly. Her skin, a shade darker than her eyes but complementary. Her hair is pulled up in an intricate braided pattern that I’ve never seen. She seems ordinary and human and beautiful in that way that humans can be sometimes in their strangeness.

OBSERVE is printed in bold at the bottom of the photo.

ASTER WHELAN is beneath it.

She is only my access point to the larger mission.

When I look into her eyes my head begins to swim with the faint green from my nightmares. I count my heartbeats. Slow my breathing. Close the folder. Look up.