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I found Master Quatre sitting on the dunes beyond our camp, watching the stars overhead in silence.
“Master Quatre, I have been looking everywhere for you! We thought--”
“I’m fine, Rashid.” He didn’t look my way, his gaze caught by the twinkling, swirling universe. His eyes reflected the color of the night sky back, not a delicate turquoise green, but a roiling indigo murk.
“I understand that you sometimes want to be alone,” I offered. Master Quatre wanted to be alone quite often, actually. “But I request that you at least inform me when you leave the camp. This is a dangerous place. It’s not like a colony, there are wild animals here!”
I had personally seen coyotes and jackals circling the camp, and some of our trash had been discovered torn to shreds, ransacked for food. Last night and the night before, I had left my tent and found coyotes outside Master Quatre’s quarters, waiting patiently for his return, ears flat against their heads. As I watched, they lay down on the cold sand and curled into sleep outside his tent. He must have been stealing away to come here for the past couple of nights.
Thinking of those wild creatures sitting like tamed dogs, I wondered if perhaps I had more to fear from the desert than Quatre did.
“I appreciate your concern, Rashid,” he said, his voice a sweet, sincere lilt, “but I’m not alone at all. They’re with me.”
I followed his gaze to the sky above, and wondered what he could be talking about. The stars? The planets? They were certainly visible here, in this endless vast expanse where no light or city could impede their view, but that was certainly of no comfort to me. The forty armed men sleeping several hundred meters away, the huddled mass of mobile suits beyond, the great hulking gundam resting hidden beneath its camouflage kilometers beyond that, those were my comfort. Out here, alone and exposed, we were not safe, Quatre was not safe, and the stars above us were of no help.
But Quatre was not afraid. He was never afraid. I knew, somehow, that he hadn’t brought any weapon with him to this secluded place. He didn’t think it necessary. Or maybe he knew, somehow, that it would not be.
“Don’t you feel it?” He continued. “Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Space calls to me. Does She call to you, too?”
“Of course, Master Quatre. She calls to all of us.”
We were all children of space, born by machine. We belonged to the bleak, dark universe above our heads.
The Earth was a beautiful, precious, tumultuous place, but space was our home.
He turned to me then, his shadowed gaze triumphant. He broke the gloom of the night with a brilliant smile. “She speaks to you, too? What does She say? What does She tell you?”
I found his questions confusing. In my hesitation, Quatre continued, brimming with enthusiasm.
“She tells me not to worry. We are safe. She has plans for us, and we will not be harmed. We need only follow Her, and She will reward us with eternal safety. Oh, Rashid! What has She told you?”
His eyes glowed softly in the dark, a beautiful turquoise, a holy blue. They were so bright in the emptiness of the barren desert, as bright as the stars, as bright as the sun.
I thought of the coyotes drawn to his tent in supplication. Had we been drawn to him the same way, our camp-- our very lives-- centered around him, pulled to Earth? Was it the work of something greater than just this young boy?
Who chose him to lead this war?
“I’m sorry, Master Quatre,” I said softly. “I think we are talking about two different things.”
I watched the information course through his system. His excitement drained from his face, his smile leaving him. He was not angry, never angry. He seemed merely disappointed. The glow of his eyes weakened to nothing. With a small sigh, he turned his gaze back to the stars.
“Please go back to camp, Rashid,” he said at last. His voice was sweet and so very young. “Don’t look back.”
“Master Quatre...”
“I am fine. The Heart of Space is...” He offered me a patient smile. “There is no need to worry.”
I walked, leaving him there on the dune. I could not convince him to leave with me, of that much I was sure.
The night was quiet, dead still, and for a hundred meters I walked, hearing nothing but the sound of my own breath. And it was not a sound I heard then, not truly, though I felt it in my heart and head and spine, an internal wail, a shaking rumble borne of silence. A great roar screamed through my veins, but all that could be heard was the strange, strangled gasp that escaped my lips.
I thought that something terrible must be coming, and thought to warn Quatre. And I turned back to him, though he’d told me not to look back. I still do not know what I saw there. Perhaps it was all my imagination. Dear Prophet in Heaven, I pray it was.
For what had once been stars in the vast roiling sky now looked to be eyes, a thousand upon a hundred million of them, gazing down upon the Earth, and as they opened and closed they rent the fabric of the universe asunder-- I could feel everything spinning, twisting, drawing toward them. There was no sound, no voice to even the wind, and the world felt cold, empty, eternally dead. And the eyes were widening, ever widening...
And beneath that terrible vision of space all-seeing, Quatre no longer sat on the dunes, but floated high in the air, his arms spread wide to the horror in the sky, his thin body pulsing like a heartbeat.
I wrenched my eyes from the scene and ran the rest of the way to camp. The coyotes gathered around Quatre’s tent regarded me with mild curiosity, but did not move from their posts. Even when I had returned to the safety of my own tent, I found I could not put words to what I had seen. My sanity, it seemed, would not allow it.
Eventually I slept. When I awoke again, later that night, I felt almost as if I had dreamed the entire thing. Maybe I had never gone off in search of Quatre. Maybe he had been in his tent the whole night.
I did not leave my bed to find out.
And when I slept again, it was to visions of eyes watching me from great holes torn out of space, and the slow, eternal beating of a dead heart.