The Girl and the Stars

“I thought the city wouldn’t have you back.”

“Never heard of the prodigal son?”

Yaz met Erris’s gaze. “I can’t leave them.”

“Would any one of them wish you to die alongside them if they knew you could escape?”

“You could bring them—”

“I can only bring you because of the days the void star had to store your data.”

“I don’t know what that means.” But she knew it meant no.

Yaz sat, her heart still pounding, limbs trembling, but calming beneath the sun’s warmth and the soft touches of the breeze. Soon she would be dead, or worse. If Erris told her that this was free time, passing in a moment as she fell, then why not enjoy it? She slipped the skins from her feet and curled her toes in the grass. She had imagined doing so since her first visit, but the reality, if she could call it that, was beyond her imagining.

“Stay here. With me.” Erris’s smile was already sad, as if he knew her answer.

Yaz looked at the grass beneath her hand, a daisy nodding its head between her outstretched fingers, a tiny black . . . something . . . an ant, the word came to her, crawling between stalks that were as big to it as trees were to her.

“The Missing lost something of themselves when they cut away their evils. Something they didn’t think they needed and that Theus thinks they did.” She drew a deep breath, marvelling at the quality of the air. “If I leave my friends to die, even if I can’t help them, even if they would tell me to go . . . I would leave something of myself with them that I know I need. And even this place wouldn’t be able to make me feel right. Not even you. And in time I would be a poison to you, to this place, to all of it.”

“But—”

“And even this place has its darkness, hiding behind what we can see.” Yaz knew that it was Vesta who had made this green memory for Erris. But she also knew that Seus haunted the city’s veins. “You said yourself that Taproot is seeking to draw me into his plans. That makes me Seus’s prey, part of whatever game they’re playing between them.” She patted her hides, finding them dry, just as the city remembered her, as if the recent flood had never happened. Her fingers sought something above her collarbone, then pulled Elias Taproot’s needle free from her jacket. She held it out. “This followed me here where the water couldn’t follow.” The needle might be small but its significance was not. Its sharp truths could pop the sweet dream that Erris wanted to keep them in, just as easily as it could pop any other bubble. “There’s nowhere for me to hide, Erris. Trouble’s coming for me one way or another, so I had best face it head-on.”

“Stay.” Erris pressed his lips into a tight line. “Whatever happens here it would still be better than having your brains dashed on the rocks. Or being eaten alive by those creatures. Or used to house old evils in service to Theus’s search. You saw what he did, what your life would be. Mining the ice in the dark until your body grows old and fails.”

“There’s still a chance though. It doesn’t matter how slight. I can’t leave them while there’s still a chance.” Yaz knew she couldn’t leave them even when the last chance had long gone, but it seemed easier to speak as if she would.

“What chance?” Erris asked.

“I’m a . . . what did you call it? A quantal? Like the priests. I can reach for my power.”

“That would be like setting off a bomb.”

Yaz frowned in confusion.

“You might destroy half of the Tainted but you’d shred your friends too, and maybe yourself.”

Yaz looked out across the meadow. Butterflies were dancing among the flowers, all wings and flutter. Hidden birds sung out their tiny hearts, filling the air with a chaotic beauty. A lone tree stood amid the waving grass, its branches fingering into space, leaf-clad, swaying in a slow dance that struck an echo in her chest, something old and deep, a kind of peace she had never known.

“Do you think the world still has these things in it?”

Erris shrugged. “It’s possible. Near the equator. But if the ice hasn’t advanced from both poles to join hands then it’s only a matter of time. Our star . . . our sun . . . was dying when the tribes first arrived here. They thought we might have a hundred thousand years or longer. But the death throes of a star are hard to predict and it faded faster than they thought. Fewer than a hundred centuries to go from this”—he gestured about them—“to endless ice.”

She took in a deep, slow breath. “Can you show me the battle?”

“I was going to show you the coral reefs off the Kondite Coast. A sea warm enough to swim in, a riot of colour and wonder beneath the waves, and beaches of golden sand. We could take a boat and sail—”

“I need to see the area around where we were standing . . . are still standing.”

Erris furrowed his brow. “You’re just torturing yourself, Yaz.”

“Please.”

He sighed and waved away the world about them, painting in the battle as they had left it but frozen in time. His recollection was remarkable, though in the areas shielded from his vision things grew grey and misty, the figures indistinct with just an impression of numbers.

Erris helped Yaz to stand. “We can walk around. They’re not solid.” He swung a foot through a muscular Tainted wrestling with Kaylal on the ground.

“This isn’t how I look!” Yaz found herself in the act of punching the Tainted who had leapt at her, her fist frozen in the moment it met his cheekbone. She glanced around at Quell with his axe flung back, a spray of blood droplets hanging in the air behind the blade. At Thurin grappled around the knees and falling, his mouth caught in the moment of surprise. They both looked like themselves. But her face . . . was not her own, surely? Not the face she felt beneath her fingers. The fat that the Ictha needed to survive the northern cold had melted from her bones, she looked frail but fierce, the new angularity of her features carried a hardness with them, a threat, and the determination in her white-on-white eyes shocked her. A new person revealed beneath the old as time cut closer to the bone, like the world of the Broken that would be revealed if the ice were pared away. Yaz studied herself a moment longer. If she were one of the Tainted she would think twice about throwing herself at someone with that look.

“Zeen?” Yaz spun around, finding no sign of him in the confusion of bodies.

Erris shook his head. “I didn’t see him. But he’s fast enough to stay out of trouble.”

“He’s a boy with his head full of being a man. He’s stupid enough to get into trouble.” The thought of Zeen lying out there, wrapped around a wound, was a cold wind through her heart. She spun again, noting the occasional outcrops of harder rock, the bent girders, and here and there a gap in the battling crowd where a hole or fissure must lead down into the chambers beneath their feet.