I nod, and smile a little. August told him this much. “Do you know whatCircinusmeans?”
He leans closer to me, shaking his head, and runs his hands up my arms to keep them warm.
“It’s the draftsman’s compass,” I say gently. “A tool used byArchitects. The constellation Circinus was named after it.” I can picture the string of stars resting in the night sky, faint, distant, but unique in their parallel pattern. “The first Architect wore the ring as a symbol, an emblem of who he was.”
I run my thumb over the ring. “It was a way for the Astronomer to find the Architect,” I say, peering up into his eyes, a hook tugging in the center of my ribs, always wanting to be closer to him. “It was a way to find you.” He takes my hands in his, holding them to his chest, then bends close to kiss me, his lips lingering softly against mine, as if he could stall time, and for a moment, the cold feels a million miles away. But when his mouth lifts, the icy air finds me again. I tuck my head closer into his chest, as close as I can get, listening to the thrum of his heart, and he continues to blow warm air into my palms, rubbing his hands up my arms, folding himself around me. He does this all night.
And still, it feels like my body is shutting down. The cold finding its way in.
The wind stops with the morning sunrise—an eerie calm.
Noah pushes the blanket away from our heads, snow sloughing away, and everything is coated in a frosty white, the sun winking off the perfect layer—not a single cloud above us.
The storm has passed.
Noah looks to me, his deep woodland eyes reminding me of the forest we left behind, the feel of the ground beneath us, the scent of moss always in my nose. I crave it now. Anything other than snow. “Can you feel your feet?” he asks, glancing at my boots.
“Barely.”
“We’ll get warm once we start moving again.”
I know this is only partially true, because the cold is always there, relentless. But I stand, wincing away from the bright sun reflecting off the snow. “We’re out of food, Noah,” I remind him. “And we don’t have much water left.”
He scrubs a hand down his face, blinking out at the mountain range that seems to have no end. “I know.”
I follow his gaze out over the sharp, serrated mountains draped in sunlit snow. It’s beautiful, a place that few have likely ever seen, and I know these mountains might kill us, but there’s no turning back now. It’s too late for that. Noah breathes, and it’s as if a wind is inside him, passing through his lungs with each inhale. He brushes the hair away from my face and helps me up.
We move quickly now, without the sharp wind always at our throats. But I can feel my skin burning beneath the bright sun, winking off the snow. I sweat—and I am cold, all at once.
It takes half a day to scale the steepest point, and when I reach the top, Noah is staring out at something. “What is it?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer, afraid to see another endless series of jagged mountain peaks. Certain we might never find our way out of this cold.
But when I lift my eyes, sucking in the thin mountain air, I let out a small gasp….
We’ve reached the edge of the mountain range.
Stretched out before us is a black-sand beach, with an ocean that falls away against the horizon. My eyes well with tears, and a lump expands in my ribs—I feel like I might drop to my knees.
We found the end.
We’ve come to the sea.
TAURUS, Alpha Tauri+16° 30’ 33”
He made the long walk up the driveway to her small home, built just outside of town.
He had heard in Fort Bell about the Astronomer who saw something in the sky, who talked of things that were surely a madness of the mind, a symptom of the sickness that couldn’t possibly be true.
The man knocked on her door, a curious slant between his brows, and he asked her what she saw. The Astronomer led him out to the quiet, grassy place near the pines, and they sat under the night sky, where he listened to her talk of the stars, of the constellations she was sketching onto paper so they wouldn’t be forgotten, and he felt a sureness in his ribs he had never known before.
Night after night, he visited her home, and they stayed awake until the sun crept up over the row of pines. She taught him how to chart the sky and pointed to constellations that still had not been named.
They didn’t mean to fall in love. It was a symptom of something greater—greater than the crackling ache in their ears or the twitch in the center of their eyes. This feeling took hold inside them, a soft, gentle coiling of the heart, a buzzing they couldn’t ignore.
They spent two months this way, together, marking the stars, talking of theories and possibilities. But none of it mattered, because there was no cure for the sickness, no remedy.
No way to save themselves. Except one.
But they would need to wait… wait for the twin stars to appear in the east.
