Phoebe North - Starbreak

I drew in a slow breath, pulling my legs up to my chest. Our bodies were so different—his legs so much longer and leaner than my own. But somehow I managed to sit in a perfect mirror of him, my arms hugging my knees, my shoulders high.

“I didn’t expect you either,” I said. “But I’ve been dreaming about you for months and months.”

“Me too, since the night Velsa left me,” he admitted. “An animal girl, with a wild swirl of hair. Wrong, I thought it was wrong. I thought I was a freak.”

I smiled despite the heavy weight of the night. For all those months he’d felt just as strange and broken as I had. He let his violet tongue wet his full lips and went on.

“Then, after, every night since, without fail. There you are. Animal girl, hair the color of morning. I think, maybe this is what happens to lousku . They go mad. But here with you, I do not feel mad. I feel—what is the word?”

I reached out, wrapping my fingers around his.

Sane?

Yes, this, he agreed. He drew my hand against his chest. I could feel the laughter there, weak but growing. Not all sane. But a little sane.

I wanted to tell him that I felt that way too. Better when I was beside him. Less crazy. Less wrong. But I didn’t have to say it. As he pressed his lips to mine, a thousand blossoms turned their faces toward the light inside my mind.

Will you still do it?

The night had passed its darkest hour. Now the sky was turning dull gray at the corners. Soon the light would go green, then gold again, and the night would be over. There were so many stones still left unturned, so much about him I still didn’t know. I wanted more than a night. I was selfish. I wanted a lifetime.

“Taot?”

Vadix had tucked an arm over his head and gone still, utterly still. Without breath or heartbeat his sleep seemed as deep as death. It wasn’t until he jerked himself awake and turned toward me, black eyes shining, that I was at all reassured.

Will you still do it? Will you still go to the funerary fields?

I felt his cool body stiffen beside me. Though his long legs still touched mine, it felt like he was halfway across the galaxy. He spoke aloud, lonely words.

“It is my nature , Terra. This is how new life is made for my people. We live all our days together, sleep our winters away with our bodies tangled around the same stem. And then we return to the dreamforests, hand in hand.”

I felt my stomach clench. What crashed through me like white-licked waves wasn’t jealousy, though there might have been some shade of that. Mostly what I felt was the stormy churning of my own desperate loneliness. I’d traveled so far, over hundreds of kilometers of cold, frozen ground. All on account of him, on account of the promise his body offered. My dreams had told me I wouldn’t be alone anymore, that I would be safe. My dreams told me that this strange boy could love me like I needed.

“Here,” he said, mistaking my silence for something else—a sullen protest maybe. He lifted a spindly arm, wrapping it around my shoulder and drawing me close. “I will show you.”

I pressed my head against his unbreathing chest. At first there was nothing, only the gray light all around us, the stars fading overhead, my breath. But then I felt his mind nudge mine open. I felt a jolt of heat, saw a vomitous flash of color. This should have been a perfect moment, as sweet as those high spring afternoons when the scent of clover was all around and Rachel had laced dandelion chains through my hair. It wasn’t. His mind was jumbled, as fractured as broken ice. I could see the fissure at the bottom of it, and it was shaped like a shadow of her—Velsa.

He wanted to tear his skin apart. This urge to join her, to end himself, wasn’t about me. It was a compulsion, like hunger or thirst, only worse. It formed the very core of his being. And if he dug deep enough, he’d finally uncover it.

Lousk.

I wanted to draw away, to fold my body in on itself and hold myself tight. But I couldn’t bring myself to move. After everything I’d been through, I was going to lose him. Like I’d once lost Momma. Like I’d lost Abba, too.

Abba . That’s when I realized that Vadix could see my thoughts and memories just as well as I could see his. He could hear the creaking in the rafters, the splintered rope groaning under the weight of my father’s body. He could see the strange, distorted image of his face—like someone had taken out all the pins that held it together, that made my father vital and strong and real . If you’d asked Abba, he probably would have told you that he died years before, when his wife lay down with another man, and then was lost to him.

Without Alyana, he always said, way back in the days when my parents were young and we were happy, I’m nobody.

In a way Abba had been a lousk too.

Vadix fixed a narrow finger beneath my chin, angling my face up to meet his. “This pains you. This loss. Your father.”

“Of course it does,” I said, and sniffled. My face was suddenly covered in inexplicable tears. I hadn’t expected to cry tonight—but then, I hadn’t expected to find myself in his bed either. “Maybe it shouldn’t. He didn’t—he didn’t treat me well. Called me names. I think he was mad at Momma for leaving him and me and my brother. Or maybe he saw her in me, in the way I looked at boys and was always late to everything and always in my head. Maybe. I don’t know. I just know I needed him to be someone else, someone who could take care of me.”

“Maybe he wasn’t able to be anyone but himself for you,” Vadix said, his words plucked out carefully. I wondered if he was really talking about Abba at all. “Maybe he did try his best.”

“Maybe. It wasn’t enough.”

He set his head back on his pillow, staring up at the sky above. I watched him draw his tongue over his lips to wet them. When he spoke, his words were still tentative. Nervous. “I do feel a connection to you. Just as I once did with Velsa. The wild child, the animal girl of my dreams. I do not lie about this. One cannot deny one’s zeze . Now that I have met you, I wouldn’t be able to now even if I tried.”

I didn’t doubt it. Why else would he have welcomed me into his home, his bed—even the dark corners of his mind? But I wasn’t sure what to say, if there were any words that could make the situation between us better.

“I will do my best not to cause you harm,” he said at last, the words thudding resolutely onto the sheets beside us. “I do not wish to hurt you. I will see that your people are safe and well cared for before I—”

He broke off there, but he didn’t need to finish his sentence, not really. We both knew how this ended. I’d seen it before, with Abba—that stupid, hopeful look as he settled his life in his last days, arranging to have me married off. Abba had meant to see to it that I was safe, too. But safety was never what I wanted, not really.

What could I say? Vadix held me tight against his fragrant body, the strength of his grip undeniable. He’d said it himself. He didn’t want to hurt me. He was trying his best. Wasn’t that enough?

Of course it wasn’t, but it was no good telling him that. I buried my face in his cool flesh and murmured my consent. He drew me close. It wasn’t all of what I wanted; it wasn’t half of it. But in that long night, our first, it would have to do.

Day had already begun to blot out the stars, but the silver light of the Asherah still burned above. I kept my eye on her as I lay sleepless in his bed, my hands folded over my stomach. Even here I couldn’t escape her shadow. Up there, within her walls, I had killed a man, shaking clouded powder into dark wine. I had seen other deaths, too. Abba, his body a heavy weight that bowed the rafters. Mar Jacobi, his blood spilled out on the engine room floor. And Momma, years and years before. The first loss. Sometimes I felt as if everything else in my life spiraled out from that.