The Girl and the Stars

A thing.

The green shaded into brown. The same dark shade that Erris’s skin held. A moment later Erris watched her from the cube as if each surface were a window onto the world of grass and trees and buzzing beasts that he had taken her to. “Hello, Yaz.”

Yaz found that she had taken several steps back. “Hello . . . How are you in that box? How are you so small? And what is that?”

“A butterfly.” Erris laughed and with a sweep of his hand the brilliant blue wings took flight from his shoulder. “The real question is how are we going to get you out of here?”

“We?” Yaz felt a moment of hope. “You’re going to help me?”

“Of course. I told you, I have a talent for getting into places, and out of them. Admittedly I’ve been stuck in the void for thousands of years, which may shed some doubt on my claim. But the void is something else again. Walking through walls, however, is mere child’s play!”

Yaz knelt and reached out to touch the green world she could see once again. But her hands met a barrier, as if the cube were still there, walling her off from the warm breeze and the softness of the grass. “How can you help me through the walls? Do you have a hammer?”

“I’m coming out to join you. Well . . . in a manner of speaking. Don’t be scared.”

Yaz gave the small Erris a sideways look that dared him to suggest one more time that she might be scared.

“Alright!” He held up his hands in a placatory gesture. “Then don’t laugh either.” The cube turned black again.

“Laugh?” Yaz glanced about, her gaze coming to rest on the windows to the void. Something moved behind her. A grating noise. A shifting among the heaped detritus that Erris had somehow gathered.

Yaz spun around. Pieces fell aside as the something rose, toppling cabinets, shedding layers of flexible sheeting, raising dust. The thing kept rising. A head? Some dark shape atop two shoulders . . . a metal arm reaching.

Yaz stepped back sharply. “What . . .”

A hunter was lifting itself from the chaos. Only it wasn’t quite a hunter. It had more of a man’s shape to it than those multilegged horrors, and although large, Yaz had seen bigger gerants.

“Hello, Yaz.” The voice buzzed around the edges but it sounded like Erris. In place of a head a black sphere returning no light, the body beneath gleaming steel with complex moving parts exposed, the arms mismatched, one of jointed steel tubes, the other a flexible set of overlapping rings like the armour of an eel-shark. Both ended in hands sporting blunt digits rather than a hunter’s claws.

Yaz gaped, openmouthed.

“Well . . . laughing would be better than whatever this is.”

Yaz realised she had backed against the wall and had a metal bar gripped in both hands, ready to swing. She didn’t even remember picking it up.

“Erris?” She peered at the thing before her.

“At your service.” Joints squealed and the not-Erris made a short bow. “This is how I escape the void. I built it myself and it took a long, long time.” Even with the buzz and the crackle Yaz could sense in his voice an echo of the years spent. “I have a better one in another part of the city but that is far from here and I’m keeping it for a special occasion.”

“We still don’t have a door.” Yaz put the metal bar down and stepped toward Erris, trying to see if there were eyes hiding in the black sphere of his head.

“No, but we have you and you can walk through walls.”

“I can’t.”

“You can walk the Path, can’t you?”

“The Path?” Yaz frowned. “Oh. You mean the river?” Eular had called it the Path, the source of the power that only those with quantal blood could reach.

“The names are important, though you will have forgotten why on the ice where you have neither. A path or a river . . . both of them take you somewhere. There’s more to it than touching the Path. The trick is to walk it.”

Yaz shook her head. “I touched the river today. And the day before. Normally I have to wait days before I can see it again. A week if I want to be safe touching it. Safe-ish.” Another shake of the head as she remembered how the power had nearly broken her apart when she faced Hetta. “There’s no way that I could—”

“You haven’t noticed it yet.”

“Noticed what?”

The body that Erris had built himself owned none of the casual movement that a person had. It moved only when he willed it and stood statue still between. Now its stillness took on a new character, as if perhaps Erris had retreated to the void.

“Noticed what? Are you even there?” Yaz resisted rapping her knuckles on the construct’s chest. “What am I supposed—”

Listen!

Yaz listened. Silence. No wind complaining. No drip of water. Not even the groan of ice. The song of Pome’s star whispered in the back of her mind, its heartbeat swift as drumming fingers. “I can’t . . .”

It’s very deep.

“I . . .” And there it was, the restless song of a star. Star-stones Arka had called them. Eular had also called them core-stones and heart-stones. Whatever they were they sang and this one sang so deep that the notes reverberated through the longest bones in her body then sank deeper still, beyond sensing. Rising here and there like a whale breaking the surface before plunging into the endless fathoms of the sea.

*boom*

A shudder ran through the stone beneath Yaz’s feet, so deep that she would not have noticed it except for Erris. It was as if something the size of a mountain had fallen far away.

“What was that?” Yaz almost knew but the answer felt wrong.

Its heartbeat.

“Oh.” Her answer had been right. Every star had its own heartbeat, the small ones racing so fast that they became a buzzing rising beyond hearing as their star’s size descended toward dust. The large star that she and Thurin had taken from the ice by the settlement had a heartbeat swift as a running child. But the star that Erris had made her listen to had given just one beat and even as the breath she held became painful in her lungs there was no second beat.

“How big is—”

*boom*

That is the star that feeds the void.

Yaz could feel it now and was amazed that she had not before. She felt it tugging at the boundaries of who she was, washing against her mind in waves, setting voices whispering inside her head. “How big is it?”

Large.

The metal body in front of Yaz shifted as Erris returned to it. The arms flexed. “This is why your people scavenge from the city. Surely you know this? Even a small star brings the Path closer to the world. When close to a star of good size even a half-blood quantal can reach the Path and work wonders with the power they can take from it.”