The Girl and the Stars

Yaz reached the stone beam that crossed the gap and would take her to the first of the Missing’s chambers. The hunter’s star slowly swung into her vision, following its orbit, and she became aware of its unearthly song, a wordless refrain that had been there all along, unmooring her thoughts and letting them drift.

She fought for focus and crossed into the exposed chamber on the other side, a dusty rectangular box of poured stone, older than the ice caves but lacking their ever-changing beauty.

 

* * *

YAZ MADE HER way steadily, alert for hunters, descending at every opportunity. She didn’t know where Erris would be but she knew he would be deep. She just hoped she found him before she found the creature that the city had fashioned to destroy her. Its assassin. It made the regulator’s hunters look like fingerfish next to a shark—and not just any shark, one of the black kind that rarely surfaced but when they did drove all the whales from the Hot Sea.

She knew the undercity to be vast and her search hopeless, but for one thing. If she went deep enough she believed that Erris would find her. The star she held would act as a beacon for the watching minds that lurked in the depths of the undercity. Erris would find her. Or something else would.

The monotony of stairs and shafts and endless dusty halls nibbled at her vigilance and once again her thoughts began to drift with the red star’s song. Her resolve came and went in waves, iron at the peaks, rotten with self-doubt in the troughs. Quell’s desire that she return to the surface might lie in parallel with the priests’ but it was also his own, born of love. And here alone in the empty home of the Missing she could call Quell’s motivation what it was. He loved her and in the name of that love had dared a world unknown and undreamed of and full of danger.

The thought brought a smile to her lips but did not turn her around. It brought a question as well. Did she return that love? Did an answering passion burn inside her too? Did she even know what love was? Once Quell had been everything she wanted. Everything she could imagine. Her everything . . . but that was also the crack through which a cold wind blew. She had known so little. Her options had been so few. The course of her life had run before her with a frightening certainty. The inevitability of her life had appalled her. And yet when anything had happened to threaten that surety—Azad’s death showing how thin the ice beneath your feet can be, her growing strangeness reeling her toward the pit like a fish on a hook of its own making—when those things had challenged her certainty it too had terrified her.

Yaz wondered at her refusal to return to the regulator, a man whose wisdom her clan respected, a man whose judgment held such sway that her own parents had watched him topple their son into the black throat of the pit and had done nothing. Yaz had no regrets at following Zeen, though she didn’t fully understand why. But then does anyone fully understand themselves, or even want to? Wouldn’t that be very dull?

“No,” she breathed, finding herself at a four-way fork with no memory of the choices that brought her there. “No.” She did have a regret about following Zeen. She regretted not hauling the regulator down with her.

“No.” She spoke the word again. Louder this time, marvelling at the roundness of it in her mouth, the taste of its defiance. “No.”

Was she refusing to leave her friends just for that desire to reject . . . everything? Everything from the cruelty of a society that threw their broken children away, to the harshness of existence in the caverns where Broken and Tainted were locked in struggle, battling for different masters. Was she saying no to the inarguable necessities of life in a world of ice and brief seas? But you can’t just say no time and again. You need an alternative. Another answer.

Erris had shown her the green world. She had been the first Ictha to see anything like it; her parents had seen nothing even close, nor theirs, nor any along a long chain extending untold generations into an unchanging past. She had seen it and although she had never imagined such a thing she knew within moments that it was right. It was where she belonged. Where they all belonged. She knew that it was her answer, even though it was an answer that made no sense. It had continued to make no sense right up to the point that Quina had put into her hand a small wooden bead and with it a story of a man travelling an unimaginable distance from the south. The green world stood against the world of ice and all its cruelties, just like she now stood against the options offered to her.

 

* * *

   YAZ FOUND THAT she had come to a halt before a great glowing symbol on the rear lichen-covered wall of an arched hall. The lichen almost obscured the symbol like a thick, rough skin, scaled with disease. The script wall had opposed her on her first journey into the city, its defences becoming ever stronger as she travelled deeper. This time she’d seen only symbols like this one, heavy with lichen, indicating they were part of the city’s normal complement rather than freshly generated to oppose her.

“It’s easier this time.” She wondered if the city had now accepted her, or was perhaps luring her in deep before closing its jaws around her. Either way she needed to be noticed because the Broken had searched the city for generations without uncovering even half of it, and so the chances of her finding Erris were vanishingly small. He would definitely have to find her instead.

Yaz knew that on her previous visit it had been the city’s opposition to her that had drawn Erris’s attention. That meant she had to wake the city again. She would have to prod the bear in its lair, and hope that she could cope with what came next.

Lacking instructions Yaz decided to experiment. She took the red star in her hand and began to trace the symbol with it, reaching up above her head to start at the outermost coiling line. She scored the star’s smooth surface through the shaggy lichen along the faintly glowing lines of the symbol. Everywhere her hand went the symbol blazed more brightly behind it, until at last the whole thing shone with enough light to illuminate the chamber. Other smaller symbols began to show now, as if the light had leaked from the larger one into their dry channels. A host of tiny script now shone weakly from the rear wall and as Yaz approached it she heard music. Not the wordless song of the stars that seemed to belong to a voice, but a complex spiralling melody, at turns sad then joyous, the sounds of instruments though none that Yaz had ever heard.

Ghosts filled the room, phantoms that she almost saw, like words spoken just beneath the threshold of comprehension. An impression of dance. Graceful whispers haunting the emptiness of the air. Fading then gone.

Yaz found herself in the darkening hall with a tear on her cheek and a profound sense of loss. This had been a place of music and light and movement once, unimaginably long ago, and now only the sorrow of the vast city’s crumbling mind remained.

She moved on, hoping to encounter some other way of drawing Erris’s attention.

 

* * *

THE FIRST SIGN of the hunter was a variation in the song of the star in orbit around her. Yaz heard a harmonising, as though a second voice had joined the first. And then, as she focused her thoughts on the problem she became aware of its heartbeat, very faint but growing stronger. With the heartbeat came an idea of direction, and, as she strained her senses, she became aware of other hearts still fainter and more distant. She wondered how she and Quell had wandered into two hunters as they tried to leave the city. All she’d had to do was listen and it was there for the hearing.