Andrea Höst: And All the Stars

Tucking her phone into her bra, Madeleine explored behind her again, cautious toes still finding only dust turning to mud, and wet concrete. An inch back, and nothing. Another inch, and the ground shifted as it had before, but this time Madeleine didn’t freeze against the see-saw’s tilt, and almost immediately it settled. The settling didn’t surprise her – resting on rubble on a stairway, her raft was hardly going to tip upright – but the sensation of it was strange, not as firmly solid as she would expect from concrete stairs.

Feeling a sudden urgency, she wriggled several inches, her feet pelted by liquid as she moved closer to the falling water. And then her questing toes found the far border of her raft, another rough edge. She slowed down, backing inch by inch, until she was half out of her metal tube, part-lying and part-kneeling, then reached with her foot hoping to find the straight edge of a step, or at least firmly packed rubble.

Tickling softness.

She jerked her foot away, gasping and then coughing. Brief and strange as that contact was, she’d recognised instantly what her foot had touched. Hair.

It was a person, and all around her was the scent of their blood, and whoever it was had not moved, or spoken, or reacted at all to Madeleine’s foot in their face. She and her raft were on top of someone’s body.

The chance that this was not so, that she was crushing someone too badly injured to react, made it impossible for Madeleine to stay, to quiver or quibble or spend one moment longer where she was. She stretched out her other leg, trying to reach as far as possible, and this time met cloth, and a warm and yielding wetness, and though this left Madeleine in no doubt that the person beneath her was not alive, it gave her even less reason to slow down, as her foot found something solid beyond and she thrust herself up and back, with a temporary agility worthy of a gymnast, onto something which was step and only step, with a railing she could clutch while she sobbed and gulped to keep down the scalding liquid which rose in her throat.

Her foot, the whole lower part of her leg, was sticky-wet, and when she could move at all the first thing she did was hold it out, back towards her raft, and the water which fell so steadily. She wanted to stand in the narrow stream, to be certain nothing remained, and to be free of her thick coating of dust. But she couldn’t bring herself to cross over the crushed, mangled thing lying invisible in the dark, any more than she could turn her phone on it and capture a sight to burn her mind.

Still clutching her railing, Madeleine looked about for the source of light which made the darkness not quite complete. There were no sturdy exit signs or miraculously enduring fluorescents: instead a field, a wall, of luminous motes, shining and glittering.

It made her dizzy, for it was the sky, the sky at night with muted stars and yet it was here and to her right, not above, despite the direction gravity proclaimed to be down.

These wrong-way stars did not produce nearly enough illumination to truly see through the thin mist of settling dust, but she could make out shapes, black against coal grey. The ticket barriers. The railing. The stair which had been severed above the wide mid-flight step where she stood.

The glimmer was not enough to reveal any details of the platform below, so Madeleine had to resort to her phone, to gauge the eight-foot drop and then decide to work her way along the outside of the railing, keeping her head turned away from what lay upon the stair. She looked for the reflective strip which lined the edge of the platform instead, but couldn’t make it out through the powdery white mounded everywhere.

The climb down was relatively easy, the severed railing firm despite the absence of the upper half of the stair, and then she was on the flat expanse of the platform, a treacherous landscape of concrete and projecting rods of metal beneath concealing dust. Ridiculous amounts of it, some piles higher than she stood, and even the gullies between those mountains were knee-deep.

Madeleine guessed the entire ticket level had fallen down, but that did not explain what looked like an explosion in a chalk factory. Nor the stars. They drew her, a moth to the moon, her free hand held over her mouth and nose to keep out the fine haze of floating particles. Up close, unobscured, the stars blazed in a wall of black: galaxies and nebulae and fiery novae, stretching up and to either side of her in a faintly curving wall which bisected the broad lower expanse of the station and disappeared through the cracked and buckled cement at her feet.

Tucking her phone away again, Madeleine lifted both hands and brushed cautious fingertips against the surface. She expected it to be cool, slick and damp, like limestone in caves, but what she touched was velvet. Astonished, she pressed her hands against warm, smooth stone, sensuous against her skin. It felt as solid as marble, but somehow alive, as if waiting would bring a pulse, the beat of a buried heart.

And then light flashed, and she was picked up and thrown backward into the dark.

Madeleine lay suffocating in dust and near misses. Broken leg. Steel bar through her back. Broken neck. So many things she could have done to herself. Worse was measuring what damage she had actually done. She’d landed flat on her back, fortunately square on one of the deeper piles of dust, which had erupted like a geyser around her. Her already-painful skull was screaming protest at new abuse. But it was a reluctance in her arms and legs, a disconnect between want and ability to move, which spun her into terror. Paralysed. Was she paralysed?

Pins and needles. They arrived in force, swept through her, the whole of her body jolting with a hornet swarm’s stinging assault, but her spasmodic curl in reaction showed her that she could move, even though the most she could manage at first was to curl further, to clutch knees, elbows, and try to breathe through lungs which buzzed and burned, while somehow not inhaling powder. It smelled like an approaching rainstorm.

Madeleine did not quite lose consciousness, but when the stinging receded she lay numb while a new layer of dust sifted down. She’d nearly killed herself. Thrown away the unspeakable good fortune which had given her a protective cocoon of metal when however many others at the station had nothing to shield them. She had too much to do, too many images in her head which deserved release, and she had almost denied herself that. Sabotaged her own future just because of something strange and beautiful, velvet beneath her touch.

Her phone, still tucked behind the padding of her bra, lit up. The singer’s crooning murmur was far from a spur to action, but Madeleine did manage to pluck the device from her chest and tell it hello.

Her mother’s crisp voice, crackling with static. "Finally! Maddie, I’m on my way to the school. Stay inside . They say the cloud’s heading our way, but we should have time to get you home and seal the doors. Don’t hang up – I’ll let you know when I’m there."

"Cloud?" Madeleine blinked. "What are you talking about?"

A familiar, exasperated sigh. "Always in your own world. Look, they think it’s some kind of bio-weapon. A cloud of dust, coming from a black tower in Hyde Park. It’s happening all over the world – black towers and dust. They’re saying it’s aliens or – oh, what does it matter? Just stay where you are until I get there. Are you closer to the Strickland or Walpole Street entrance?"

The glow of Madeleine’s phone lit up glittering swirls in the powder still settling after her fall. Her throat itched, and she wanted nothing more than to be saved. And her mother was out trying to do exactly that, driving to school instead of home keeping herself safe. Riding to the rescue.