Andrea Höst: And All the Stars

Madeleine was in the bathroom, pulling the oversized tracksuit top over her head, shucking the pants, staring at herself in the mirrored wall. Blue wrists. Not a flush of colour beneath the skin, but bold streaks extending to the inside of her elbows. More at armpit and groin, midnight blue. She turned, considering the true bruises on her back, dim by comparison, and spotted more midnight blue at the back of her knees.

Pressing the skin of her right wrist produced none of the pain response of a bruise. The skin was warm, soft, normal. She didn’t feel sick, beyond having eaten far too much too quickly.

" …just in ," the presenter was saying as Madeleine returned. " The Seoul group has reported intense, urgent hunger, an almost crippling– "

Madeleine hit Mute and turned away. If anything worse happened, she’d know it as soon as anyone, and she didn’t like the way the presenter kept having to stop and swallow, didn’t like what his voice rather than his words were telling her. It pulled her into thinking of a whole world looking at their wrists, clogging the phone lines, melting down Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, comparing symptoms, reaching out in their overwhelming need to know what it all meant, how far it would spread, what would come next, after the hunger. If she spent her time thinking about how she would die, she wouldn’t finish.

Thankfully she was working with quick-drying acrylics, had already laid down the base colours, and could now build detail. The clothes, necklace, hair, polish, and blue seat made a vivid mix, and she would have to work to stop Tyler’s skin from receding, or losing the magnetic quality of pale green eyes.

Racing symptom three.

Drumming rain, lukewarm and persistent.

Sitting tilted in a corner, Madeleine puzzled over why she felt the rain should be hotter, and turned her head away from slick tiles. She’d been leaning against them so long it felt like her skin was peeling out of a mould. Lifting a hand she could trace the indentation of grouting below her eye. Velvet.

She blinked, saw tinted glass, and recognised the outer wall of Tyler’s enormous shower, and then looked at her foot, her leg, all the way up to the sodden hem of the tracksuit top. Midnight blue. With stars.

What surprise she felt was for the lack of pain. Pain had been the constant, the dominating force which had overtaken every other consideration. It had started in her lower back, tiny twinges, and she’d thought it just another consequence of her marathon at the canvas, a companion to the stretched ache between her shoulder-blades. The pangs had spread to her legs, her arms. Not too bad at first, an intermittent ache that made her want to shift and move. But then sharp, deep pains along her bones, making her gasp and jerk and stamp about.

For a while she’d been able to work through, but one jolt had taken her at a bad moment and she’d slashed a fine line of white across half the canvas. After quickly repairing what she could, she’d had to step away. Better to leave the piece unfinished than destroy what she’d achieved. Particularly Tyler’s hand, toying with the long topaz necklace. That was some of the best work she’d ever done.

Her memories were hazy after the last of the painting. Another patch of extreme hunger, and a long time on the couch, shifting and twisting. Random images from the television: black towers and people in Hazmat suits. Roadblocks. Blue and green animals, everything warm-blooded showing stain. Crackling feedback on her phone when she tried to answer a call.

It had been daylight when the tremors and cramps started, knots beneath her skin which made her cry out and whimper. That was why she’d ended up in the shower, needle-hard water stitching her skin because the heat and the pulsing force had been the only thing which had helped at all.

She pulled off the sopping tracksuit and by slow degrees drew her feet up, levered herself on to them, and shut the water off. Then she shuffled with geriatric gait to lean against the mirrored wall. This time she didn’t need to look for patches of blue skin, but catalogued instead what was familiar. Her head, barring a patch below her right eye, remained its usual untanned self. Her neck, except for a line up the back. Some of her right hand and the thumb and two fingers of her left. That was all Madeleine.

The rest, from just below her collarbone down, was an unbroken dark blue, studded with motes of light. Galaxies, nebulae and fiery novae. They weren’t on the surface of her skin, but seemed to float below it, as if she had become a window on a night sky at the centre of the universe.

And the way it felt! The mirror she leaned against, the tiles beneath her feet. Everything she touched was a confusing mix of the texture she expected, but also velvet. And when she ran blue palm along blue arm, it was velvet on velvet.

There were still fine hairs along her forearm. Peering close she could make out the faint lines and ridges at her wrist, and her fingers showed the prune effect of long exposure to water. If it wasn’t for the shimmering light beneath, and the feeling of velvet, she could tell herself that she’d simply been stained blue. But her skin was not her skin.

Was she turning into the tower?

Memory of warm stone, wondrous and strange, flooded through her. Touching it had sent a tingle all through her, but then it had thrown her away, blasted her–

The mirror shattered, and Madeleine was tossed forward, bouncing off the basin and falling to her hands and knees. Fragments of glass and tile rained down around her as she cowered, hands over her head, but none of it touched her, and she was aware of strength flowing out of her in a way which felt as uncontrolled as a throat wound. She was doing this, destroying everything around her even as she shielded herself.

Madeleine pulled it back, an effort which left her limp, barely able to lift her head to survey her handiwork in a room suddenly dim, lit only through the open door. Shards of glass and ceramic lay everywhere. The mirrored wall, ceiling light, the basin, shower screen, even the tiles – all looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. But she wasn’t injured at all. Not even the smallest fragment had reached her, though she would now have to find some way to move without cutting herself to shreds.

The television was still on. Madeleine could hear a voice with a British accent, talking about death tolls. About blues and greens , a mandatory no travel order, and the possibility of person-to-person transmission.

She was hungry again.

Tyler’s inadequate pantry finally drove Madeleine outside. It was Saturday morning, four days after the arrival of the Spires, and she no longer felt like she would keel over if she walked any distance, but she might if she didn’t find something to eat soon. Whatever else being blue meant for her, it made skipping a meal a major problem.

Overnight rain had washed Woolloomooloo clean of obvious dust. High white clouds studded a ceiling of dazzling azure, and the sun’s warmth tempered a fresh wind. She could hear some kind of electronic music, but it was too faint and distant to identify the source. Otherwise, silence. The long row of boats bobbed lazily in unshrouded water, and high fencing hid the lower apartments' patio gardens, so it wasn’t until she reached the restaurants, their outdoor eating areas still in disarray, that Madeleine had any reminder of disaster beyond the clean black shaft of the Spire dominating the cityscape.

She’d hoped to find the restaurants – well, not open for business, but perhaps one or two of the dozen with doors ajar. But a line of shutters and solid glass doors greeted her, and she’d collected too many cuts in awkward places making her way out of the wrecked bathroom to be eager about breaking in. There was, however, something unexpected where the wharf widened and curved around to its second mooring. A café table set with a brilliant white tablecloth. Seated very upright beside it was a girl, pouring herself a cup of tea.