I smile up at him softly. “Trust me.” I squeeze his hand, meeting his eyes, and he lets me go.
The air around me softens, a humming quality against my ears, and I can feel Noah’s eyes on me, the breath held in his lungs as he watches me cross the room.
“If your wife is sick, then she’s in pain,” I say to the man, reaching into my coat pocket and finding the bottle. The man’s expression is fixed, like he might reach forward and rip my hand from my arm just to get at the bottle—to get at me. But slowly I open the cap and shake out a handful of pills, half a dozen at least, then reach forward to grasp the man’s hand—calloused and rough—and place the pills gently in his palm. “To ease her discomfort,” I say, offering him a tiny smile. “They won’t cure her, but they’ll dull the pain.”
The man’s eyes are like a serpent, flicking from me to his openhand. And I see the flecks in them, the spots of black—like he, too, might be sick with consumption. He brings his other hand to his palm, struggling to locate the pills—eyelids squinting—feeling each one, then rolling them against his palm.He’s lost most of his sight,I realize. But not all of it, since he was still able to see the mark on my neck. “Thank you,” he manages, and his voice sounds level again, the fevered thoughts, the panic, subsiding.
“I wish I could offer more,” I say, knowing it won’t be long until he’s just as sick as his wife.
I place the bottle back into my pocket, my ears crackling, and walk to Noah’s side. He looks at me, mouth tense, then lets out a deep breath, as if he’s been holding it in since I slipped from his grasp.
The wind howls through the open door, and Cricket is already standing on the front porch, leaning against the railing, waiting for us.
“If you’re her,” the man says before I can slip out the doorway, “you can save us all.” He coughs once, clears his throat, then says louder, “We’re dying. And soon they’ll be no one left.”
I look back at him, my heart aching, and part of me wants to tell him the truth: that Iamher. Give him some small, dying ember of hope. But if those men come asking about us, he might tell them that the Astronomer stayed in his house. It’s not worth the risk. So I only offer a tight smile. “Keep your wife alive as long as you can,” I say. Because time is slipping like sand through cracks in rotted wood, and it might already be too late for him, and his wife. For everyone.
I give him one last look—knowing we can’t waste another minute more in this house, in this dry, dusty landscape—and Noah wraps his hand through mine, pulling me out into the dawn light.
GEMINI, Beta Gem+28° 01’ 34”
The sickness was only getting worse.
Season after season, settlers lost their eyesight, their hearing, and more graves were dug in untilled soil, in pastures where cattle once roamed, on the outer edges of towns.
Even the first Astronomer was not immune: she heard the lowhissin her ears and felt the burning rush behind her retinas.
She woke each evening and walked out onto her simple porch—feeling the sickness inside her, cells splitting apart—and she stared up at the sky. She could offer no remedy or relief to dull the pain in others, or herself.
All she had now were the stars.
She lay on her back in the tall meadow grass behind her house, listening to the crickets wail their sad, lonesome tune, while she blinked up at the sky and wondered what was there.
She wondered… what she had missed.
SIX
You shouldn’t have done that,” Noah says, once we’re a good distance from the lone house. “He could have grabbed you, hurt you.”
I breathe, letting my eyes stray to the hard lines of Noah’s face, tension cut into the space between his eyes. “But he didn’t,” I answer. And I suspect Noah never would have let that man hurt me. He would have been at my side in an instant if the man reached for me; he would have protected me no matter what. I sense it now more than ever. That Noah will do whatever it takes to keep me safe, to get me to the sea.
No turning back.
Still, he grumbles under his breath, clenching his jaw—not liking the risk I took. But I couldn’t let that man and his wife suffer. Even if he knew who I was.
“We need to find water, a creek, somewhere we can bathe,” Cricket says, glancing back at us. Dust still clings to our clothes, our eyelashes, packed inside our ears.
“There’s a lake to the east of here,” Noah replies.
I lift both eyebrows. “We’re not going to Mill City?”
“Hell no,” Cricket answers. “We ain’t going near that place.”
We walk for a full day under the monstrous sun, burning our necks, the tops of our skulls, until the land begins to change. At first, a few trees rise up around us, and then the ground becomes hard-packed like clay, then a stubble of green. Little white flowers poke their heads up through the soil, and we move into a series of low hills crisscrossed by dry creek beds, the water long ago soaked into the thirsty ground.
We follow one of these channels down into a gravel wash, among tall fir trees.
And then, at last it appears: a lake.
