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Chapter Text

The moral of the story of the princess and the frog was to never ask for help, because it always invited trouble. If that silly girl had wanted her ball back, after kicking it down a well, she should have found a way to get it that didn’t involve the whims of a capricious amphibian.

For whatever reason, this is where Rae’s mind goes. Just taking a rest, admiring the view of the early twilight, she’d set her carrying case down while crossing the bridge up the mountain hike, where the trees started to give way to rocky scrub, and a stream flowed at least five meters below, sometimes a river if there’d been a rainstorm. It was closer to a river that day, and the damp had brought out the boldness in so many slimy, crawly things.

A frog had hopped onto her boot. Nothing more remarkable than that. But she’d yelped and kicked it away, and the back of her heel had knocked the case over the edge of the bridge.

Curses spew out of her mouth, and then she clamps down on her tongue. She buries the thought that the contents of the bag are damaged beyond repair, and starts looking for ways to climb down the embankment.

She didn’t expect a voice. “What have you tried to drop on my head?”

The speaker strides out from the shadow of the bridge, splashing through the flowing water. His cuffs are rolled up to his knees, and his feet are bare; he has a paint bucket in one hand that rattles and gives the impression of pebbles instead of paint for contents.

And Rae knows him. “Galli,” she says, through a strained grimace of disbelief.

He looks smugly delighted. “Rae! So it is you. I saw someone coming up the trail, and I thought — I’d know her anywhere. Broad shoulders. Curly ponytail. Walking with purpose.”

She doesn’t know what to make of this. Their last encounter had ended on a distinctly sour note. And it makes her think of the princess and the frog again. He was definitely the frog, and he had shown no predilection towards turning into a prince.

Galli fishes the bag out of the water, while Rae’s stomach sinks to see it soaked and dripping. “My, my. Heavy. What’s in here?” he asks.

“My telescope,” she says, through dull despair. “I’m sure it’s broken. Damn, damnit. That fucking frog.” She resists the urge to kick the railing of the bridge. “No, don’t open it. Leave it alone— don’t put it back in the water! For fuck’s sake! I’m coming down to get it.”

Because she has no intention of asking for his help, no intention of owing him. She crosses the bridge and starts clambering down the bank, though it’s steep, almost sheer, and the rocks are damp and muddy.

Galli sloshes closer, bag in one hand, bucket in the other. “That is not the easiest way down,” he observes, amused.

“I just want my bag back.” Rae lowers her foot, and then it slips on a patch of slimy moss.

She’s a good climber, and her fingers have a solid grip, even if she’s sort of crabwalking down. But the pail full of rocks or pebbles drops with a clatter as Galli darts forward and cinches an arm around her hips. “Careful!”

“I’m fine!” she snaps. “I wasn’t going to fall.”

She thinks he just wants an excuse to hold her again. And her tear ducts burn indignantly at that.

He sets the telescope bag on a dry flat rock beside him and reaches for her. “But you’ll get more mud on yourself.”

“Which never hurt anyone,” she retorts, but she lets herself drop forward into his arms. For a moment he’s holding her, arms around her thighs, and then he lowers her to the ground.

Rae is aware that she shouldn’t be indulging him. But she has spent the summer restless and lonely. Galli is still as hauntingly strange and stimulating to be around as he’d ever been.

She would say, when they’d been dating, but that was the rub, wasn’t it? It had seemed like they were, because it wasn’t exactly a friendship with all the sniping and bickering and moments of strange intensity. And then she’d kissed him one night, in the middle of a concert he’d bought her tickets to.

Or maybe she hadn’t, maybe she’d imagined that, because he never mentioned it. Not after the show, not the next day, never. And it had stuck in her throat like a parasitic worm, eating her happiness for at least a week. Then she’d brusquely cut him off one day as he ambled towards her locker. No, she wasn’t going to stay after class and play a round of chess with him. She had work to do, thank you very much. Slammed the locker door. She didn’t know what expression he’d been wearing as she stalked away, but he didn’t talk to her for the rest of the semester.

“What are you doing out here?” she asks. “Collecting rocks?”

“Fossils,” he says, passing her the backpack and lifting the bucket, which had remained upright but filled with water. He pours the water out and takes out a chunk of rock, shows her the smooth series of ridges in the shape of a spiral ammonite.

“Ohh. Yes, the riverbed is full of them, isn’t it? Is this a new hobby?”

He beams. “I’m filling a new bed in the greenhouse. The theme is prehistoric plants; ferns and cycads. Some flowers; protea, allspice. Only the best and most authentic decorations for it, of course.” He sweeps a hand over the landscape. “This whole place used to be under an inland sea. Back in ancient times. It’s marvelous.”

Galli was the only kid at LHS who bothered with the greenhouse. He even watched over it in the summer. But Rae had had her suspicions just about confirmed that he really did live in the building, like the rumors said. It was definitely creepy on some level, but for a time she’d considered it intriguing.

“And you must be here for stargazing,” he adds knowingly, perhaps wistfully. Perhaps remembering, You can join me if you like. Do you want to…? But he’d said no, that time.

Rae wonders if he’d chosen to grow dinosaur plants so he could be picking about here in the riverbed on a clear summer evening. “Saturn is close. You can see its rings.” She unzips the case and frets angrily over the pieces of the telescope. “As long as I didn’t… shit …” One of the lenses is cracked, and so is the barrel of the scope. Her heart cracks too, the telescope had been a present from her parents, on her ninth birthday.

“That’s a shame. How did it fall? Did you say there was a frog?”

“On my foot, it just startled me, and I… Ugh. I’m so stupid.” She closes the case. Her boots and socks are starting to soak through too, despite her attempts to stand on the rocks, and as the sun sets, it’s getting chillier. It’s going to be an unpleasant walk back down the trail.

Galli angles closer, conspiracy glinting in his eyes. “I’m sorry about your telescope. But you can still see Saturn tonight, if you want. Even the rings. But you’ll have to keep a secret.”

Don’t strike a deal with the frog prince, Rae thinks. Don’t owe anyone anything.

“How secret?” she asks.

“Very.” His lips curl upwards, charming her as he always did with those devious smirks. “It’ll be a bit of a trek, though.”

With her wet feet? It seems like a bad idea. But he’s got her hooked, because she has to know what kind of secret he has hidden up on the mountain. “I have a flashlight, but if it’s very far into the woods…”

“We could stay the night, at the place I had in mind.”

Rae’s stomach somersaults, in good and bad directions. Vague shivers of anticipation and foreboding, from the various genres this story could take. And anything would be too much, wouldn’t it? They aren’t dating, and she doesn’t even feel like she trusts him.

“What place? Yes, I know it’s a secret, just… tell me first.”

“It’s an observatory. A small chamber in the side of the mountain, off one of the old mining tunnels. And it’s…” His voice lowers. “It’s sort of occult. The, ah… people used it for astrology.”

Rae’s mouth falls open in astonishment. She holds up a hand. “You can slow down with the secrets. One at a time, please.” She rolls this idea over in her brain. “People. What people, and when?”

“Back in the day,” he shrugs. “The old age of New Age. The nineties. There were some strange groups in the area.”

“Ah. The nineties.” That smoothed over the weirdness a bit. What she found more unusual was that she hadn’t heard of it until now. “Honestly, that sounds haunted.”

A toothy grin. “It might be.” He hesitates. “It’s safe, though, because I’ve spent a lot of time there.”

She mulls it over.

“I’m getting out of the water, anyway. It’ll be dark soon.” He picks up his bucket and wades upstream.

Rae tries to follow on the rocks, though she can’t avoid stepping in the deeper water. When she sees an easier path up to drier land, she veers off, taking hold of an overhanging sapling’s trunk and hauling herself up. “Look, I don’t know,” she says, from up on her high ground. “I… want to.” She admits that much, begrudgingly. “It sounds like an adventure.”

“It will be, I assure you.”

“You’re so incredibly strange, Galli.”

Standing below her in the stream, the boy bites his lip. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” he says at last. “In a bad way.”

“It wouldn’t be bad if I knew what I was getting into.”

His smile fades, his affect of mystery relents. “I was cold. I know, and I’m sorry. I just. I don’t know if it could work. But I wanted it to, so I couldn’t bear to turn you down.”

Rae purses her lips. “Okay.” And sometimes she has to remember that he’s a kid. She’s a kid. Because that hadn’t been her first kiss, but by her calculations it was something like her fifth. You think you know so much after four. But he’d been so stiff and awkward, like he couldn’t really process it. Her gut twinges unexpectedly. “Don’t apologize. I think… I was a jerk.”

She expels the emission of guilt like it’s a gross but necessary action. Like kissing a frog. Responsibility, her mind whispers. It turns the fairy tale around, taking out the rage and discomfort and feeling of being trapped by masculine impudence. It thinks, suppose you ruled a kingdom, and a small creature you could easily kick off your boot told you they’d been cursed and needed one small act of charity.

Galli scrunches his brow, and then relaxes, shakes his head ruefully. “No, not at all. Are you sure you want to miss Saturn?” He swings his bucket in an idle arc. “Saturn. Kronos, the Lord of Time. Son of the sky and the earth. Youngest of the Titans. The Bringer of Old Age.”

She rolls her eyes. “You can stop wooing me quite so much.”

“Wooing you?” he laughs but doesn’t deny it. “I don’t know the constellations as well as you do. They’re all different here, different names. Teach me?”

He hasn’t earned her spontaneity yet. That’s what she tells herself. “I’m not going in your haunted cave just yet, Galli. Put a rain check on that.”

“But it’s a perfect night.”

“Yes, it is,” she agrees. The sky is already sparkling with early stars. “My boots are definitely drenched, and I…” A heavy, bitter sigh, and she hefts her case. “I need to find out if this thing can be repaired. I’ll be distracted.” In truth, she is aching to cast it aside, forget it and let his adventure carry her off.

Some unclear notion is skritching about in the back of her thoughts. It’s warning her she might not be ready.

“You should come back next week,” Galli tells her. “Mars will be bright.”

She says something in response, a vague hum and a nod, but she thinks she understands what was going through his mind that night at the concert, because her feet are steadily carrying her away, back to the path and down the mountain trail as the shadows fall.

Chapter Text

Rae hits the books.

The town library is her temple, almost literally. She likes it best on a Sunday morning, when she knows she’ll have a few hours of uninterrupted solitude. When she had just moved here from the city, in her furtive pre-teen exploratory phase, it had been a comfort to know that the sort of folk who’d judge her for glancing at ungodly content were by dint of their natures not around to catch her.

Now, in the wood-walled reading room of the second floor, she digs through newspaper archives for traces of more unorthodox religious activity. The internet yields surprisingly little. There are records of nineties-era cults and spiritual self-help groups dotted all around the region, but none near enough that they could have been meeting on the mountain. But she combs through print articles so provincial they have spelling errors left in, records that had never been uploaded onto the web, spreads them out on a mahogany table as one might jigsaw puzzle pieces, and gleans more.

She sorts the papers by age first, and when that is unforthcoming, by key words and phrases that jump out to her. It turns out it hadn’t been a local group, but an itinerant one, and it hadn’t been in the nineties at all. Mentions were made in a tiny human interest spot from just five years ago of men in dark purple robes, how they’d been granted permission to set up a campsite on the mountain. The first sentence piques Rae’s interest. Last week’s meteorite strike has attracted to Mt. Jacob some out-of-this-world enthusiasts…

Sure enough, the town gazette from a week prior has the story. A heavenly visitor came down to clash with Jacob last night, but unlike the Old Testament tale, this battle was fought between rocks. The rest of the article plays up the analogy; too much, Rae thinks. The author was clearly milking it to sensationalize the event. Further in they explain that the object had not been found and it was surely small, no bigger than a bowling ball; that it had nevertheless put a dent in the side of the mountain by collapsing a mine shaft, and had started a small fire in the brush.

Yet it’s the only thing written directly about the meteorite, and it had happened just half a year before her family moved. She’s affronted that no one bothered to tell her. Rae goes back to the clipping about the purple-robed astrologers. The information given is sparse, but it names them as “acolytes”, which rings a bell, and she returns to the internet.

“Acolytes of the Beyond” comes up, it had been a footnote in the first round of searches. Not with many results, but a few passing comments on such a group visiting impact sites, believing them to be opened channels to the cosmic darkness. One member had been suspected but cleared of stealing from a museum— wait. That’s a name she knows. Tashu was her freshman history teacher, and is still (nominally, because he rarely shows up) advising the astronomy club at LHS. She can’t say it’s out of character for him to be in a cult that showed up to commune with cosmic darkness. Or even to steal meteoroids from museums, though his innocence was vouched for by the school superintendent.

This is all she can find. After weighing the ethics of it, Rae searches for ‘Galli Rax’. Frustratingly, but then also thankfully, to spare her conscience, there is nothing.

She puts the articles back into their folders and plastic covers, and returns them to their shelves. Her mind hums with intrigue. Though she’d focused on the mountain, she feels like she’s taken in the whole of Empire County so she could sieve through it. Stepping out of the library is like walking out of a movie theater, surfacing from the deep trance of information and trying to reframe it for the light of the real world.

Which is why it’s so abrupt and unpleasant when a hand closes around the collar of her shirt.

She saw Norra Susser walk up to her from across the street, and yet with her thoughts as placid and contemplative as a vernal pool, Rae gave the girl the benefit of the doubt, something she should know never to do with a Lucas kid.

“You’ve gone too far!” Norra spits, too close to Rae’s face, while shoving her back.

Being ripped from her calm makes Rae even more furious. She wrenches her attacker’s grip away from her shirt and pops the heel of her hand against Norra’s nose. Just a quick jab, but it’s so effective that she reels back, while Rae closes in. “Don’t you start shit with me, Norra!” she barks, puffing up her chest.

But Norra isn’t so easily intimidated. “Ow, fucking—! Ow, god damn!” She’s back to jabbing a finger at the air between Rae’s eyes. “Get your hell school in shape, or else! You Lawrence kids always cross a line.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Rae says frostily. “I’m not part of this ridiculous prank war.”

The blonde girl regains her composure, while a drop of red trickles out of one nostril. To her credit, she is stoic about it, like a commander on the battlefield. Her bomber jacket would be a touch of authority, if it wasn’t dotted with patches for rock and roll bands and political affiliations — there’s the anarchist AO, a peace sign, a blue-purple-pink pride flag. There’s also the logo of the radio station Norra’s boyfriend Bren Wexley ran, until it got shut down for disruptive content.

It always got under Norra’s skin, when Rae called the rivalry between their schools a “prank war”. Lucas High and Lawrence High shared one large combined building with two wings, and shared an acronym with it. The dual dueling institutions gathered up all the adolescents of three counties, under the banner of L-H-S.

The Lukes had some sore delusion that the Laws were out to get them, and they’d formed an extracurricular sport of trying to even this playing field. It was obviously puerile and stupid, and Rae had no interest in accommodating their persecution complex, but things had escalated between the student bodies. She had to admit that some of the kids in her school let their nasty side show.

“Not part of it?” Norra growls, indignant, incredulous. “You held Wedge hostage! For a whole day!”

Rae prickles defensively. She wants to shout, but she has to hiss, “He stole the SATs! If someone found out, they would have invalidated them all!”

“You locked someone in the boiler room over standardized tests.”

“The SATs! You’re screwing with people’s futures.”

Now latching on to the usual Lucas victimhood tripe, Norra turns up her nose. “Lawrence screws with our future. Wedge got the proof. You cheat—”

Rae feels a genuine, cartoonish vein twitching on her own temple. “I have never cheated!”

But was there really proof? She cleared the pictures off Wedge’s (stupid nickname) phone, and put the stolen forms back in the main office once she figured out his locker combination. If he sent the pictures out before she got to him, though…

“Your administration does, they’re fucking lunatics, one of your creepy old teachers heard Wedge banging on the door and left him.”

Rae shuts up for a moment. “… I did not know that. Was it…" On a hunch she asks, "Was it Tashu? He is a creep, actually." No love for creeps.

"Yes, it was. So that’s wrong? But not what you did?”

It is more unsettling to think about — because the faculty shouldn’t be involved with feuding, they should act responsible. Rae has to admit that her own actions were irresponsible. Had the old kook been covering for her? Covering for the integrity of the examination? But what’s chilling, in fact, is that Tashu shouldn’t have known what was going on.

Norra is scowling impatiently. Rae flushes bronze.

“Look,” she mutters. “I am sorry. But. The SATs.” She curls her lip, defiant. “We’re not rich. We had to use my college fund when the recession hit, so if I don’t get a scholarship…!”

“… Okay.” Norra exhales. “I know your school is crazy, the world is crazy. But tell me you didn’t booby trap any food in the school.”

“Food in the school? So you were sneaking into the building again?”

“Making casts of the locks. Don’t look at me like that, apparently we need them. Rae, there was some kind of drug. Bren almost… he could have hurt himself, or someone else. You can’t do that to people, you can’t drug them. That’s evil.”

Main street is quiet, but that’s a good and bad thing. There aren’t going to be many nosy Nancies since service is still going. Rae still eyes the second floors of the buildings, over the shops. Her pulse spiked when the word drug was spoken. It’s taking a few seconds to process it.

“What did he eat?”

“A chocolate cupcake, one of the sports teams had a party and left—”

Rae sets her jaw. She’s being strung along, isn’t she? A story like this would be an unnervingly detailed prank, but it’s so outlandish. “I am appalled, but please just give me a moment, you’re saying your boyfriend snuck into the school to copy the locks, and he got a bad trip from a weed cupcake he stole—”

“It wasn’t weed, he had hallucinations.” Norra grimaces as she tries to talk about it reasonably, clearly squirming at how unreasonable it sounds. “Like flashing lights and noises and creepy monster people with melting faces. And everyone steals from the refrigerators. No, I know you don’t, but everyone knows it’s a thing we do, and he was in our cafeteria, not yours. Tell me someone didn’t leave them on purpose.”

Rae notes the backpedal. Not accusing her, accusing someone. But if it’s someone, they would need access to the school building, and they’d need the drug. Which drug?

Her mind is like a car skidding over ice towards a precipice, and she slams the brakes and whirls the wheel and it does nothing. Sometimes she wishes it wasn’t so dogged with its curiosity.

Okay, it’s saying nastily, hallucinogens can’t be easy to come by, but suppose there doesn’t need to be a supplier. Is it easy to grow psilocybin mushrooms? Can’t be, or they’d be everywhere (she doesn’t know for sure, there are things she refuses to learn about on principle). Don’t you have to find them in the wild? You wouldn’t need to train pigs to hunt truffles if your average horticulturist could set up planting beds for them. But suppose there was a place, suppose a secret, someone with a knack for flora, maybe someone else with an interest in mind-expanding experiences…

She hates this line of thought because it’s so base and ugly. It puts her in the middle of a crushingly cynical landscape, streaked with old infected memories she doesn’t want to be haunted by. And it’s nothing but conjecture. It’s incomplete and unclear as a theory, but the doubt is enough.

“… I would never fucking touch illegal drugs,” she tells Norra stiffly. “I don’t know where you get off acting like I would. And do you really think I’d cover this up if I knew about it? Who do you think I am?”

“You are really too much,” Norra snaps. “One apology for that little hostage thing, and you think everyone should trust you now. But you know I wouldn’t be talking to you if I didn’t think you were the best of the lot.”

But you put your damn hands on me! Rae wants to snarl. Holding on to her last scrap of patience, she asks herself if there’s a point to this kind of moral high noon showdown. Does she really need to wait for everyone to admit they’re wrong, to do right?

What else can I do? Rae thinks. I haven’t put anyone else in a basement.

Responsible, responsible, croaks the frog in her throat. Yes, if you had cursed a man with an enchantment, would you be free of blame when he was free of the curse?

Put an end to curses, then. She could tell Norra her suspicions, but it wouldn’t be right to get her and her boyfriend involved in any more of this.

“… I apologize for the nosebleed.” Not quite there. “For giving you the nosebleed. By punching you.”

Norra brushes it off. “Fair play,” she says.

“I… I have no idea what happened, but I’ll tell you if I hear anything. Sounds like work for the police.” Rae has to get one last dig in. “I guess you can’t tell them about trespassing and copying locks. You’d have to lie. But that’s a risk—”

“Lots of things we wouldn’t want the cops to know about,” Norra agrees. She smiles.

Rae concedes that point with a returning thin-lipped smile, and steps off the curb to cross the street. If only she’d left the library minutes earlier, or later, and missed the pleasure of this conversation.

When she’s sitting in her car, she wonders if she’s about to cry, which is absurd, because she doesn’t even know if Galli did it, or did it on purpose, or if he had anything to do with it, or if she cares about him that much.

But she can admit being cut up about the telescope, because she lied about it, hid it in its case and told her parents that Saturn was lovely but she was back early because she’d forgotten bug spray. She wouldn’t have done that unless she was running away from hurting too much.

Rae presses her forehead against the wheel and waits while angry sobs are wrenched from her throat, as she relives unwrapping the present and gasping with delight, embracing the box possessively, the first night she’d been on the apartment balcony while her mother said there was so much light pollution, they should go out to the country to stargaze someday.

They had gone out to the country, but not for the sake of her stargazing.

Then she breathes easier, the moment bled out. “You’ll deal with it,” she says aloud, as she starts the engine. “You didn’t do it, but.” Slaps her foot to the pedal. “It’s your responsibility.”

Chapter Text

On a spring midday, warm enough to dry off ground soaked from a yesterday of rain warm enough to melt the snow, Galli slides a card of paper across the stone chess table in the school courtyard, poking the tips of Rae’s fingers. She’d been looking over her shoulder; the touch surprises her.

“What?” she says, because Galli had a lot of ways of getting people’s attention, often odd like this.

He slides the paper another centimeter, until it tickles her palm. “We’re going,” he tells her, beaming. “To this. Next Saturday.”

When Rae lifts her hand, she sees a printed ticket. “Are we?” she asks, arching a brow. “On whose authority?”

They got on by haggling their way towards activities. Rae couldn’t help but weasel out of it when people asked if she wanted to come along somewhere. Did she want to? In that moment, probably not. But Galli had a habit of decreeing instead of asking. It let Rae be disagreeable if she wanted to.

“You’ll like it,” Galli says.

“Will I? Are you planning to hypnotize me?”

He twines his fingers with hers, squeezing lightly. “Why, yes, I am.”

She finds this adequately charming, and reads the ticket. “Music of the spheres. Ah. A symphonic program of space-inspired compositions. So that’s a logical compromise…”

“A beautiful symphony is something to compromise over? No, this time I’ll convince you to fall in love. If you listened to the playlists I made…”

And she had. Long after midnight, completely cocooned in her bedsheets, in a bleary fatigued state that brought her inhibitions down, so she could pretend the guilty pleasure was part of a dream. Actually attending a live performance with him, surrounded by people, carries a tinge of the dread she’d expect having her diary read aloud, when the private is made public.

Rae reaches for a half-eaten pastry sitting between Galli’s hands. “I could accept a bribe.”

Galli scoops it up quickly. He’s always very touchy about his food. “But I thought the tickets would be the bribe.”

“For what?”

He props his cheek in his palm and responds only with an inscrutable smile.

“You want to go to this thing,” Rae points out. And then she softens, because of course he does, but he isn’t sure how to ask. “I’ll join you.”

This time I’ll convince you…

The venue is under the open air, a college football stadium converted into amphitheater, the field laid out with folding chairs. Such an unglamorous setting; Rae wouldn’t have said no to a concert hall, a chance to put her single evening gown to use, after the couple of dates it saw with that rich kid Lero.

Galli has expensive tastes, too, for a boy who mucks about in the dirt for fun. He cleans up so quickly, swapping sweat and coveralls for silk shirts and combed hair, like a theater actor dashing in and out between scenes. It comes off as an affectation, but for some reason so does tonight’s hoodie and denim pants. Nothing he wears quite fits him.

Maybe he figured Rae to be a down-to-earth gal, that she saw his music tastes as too tony and pretentious and this could change her view of things. Though, maybe tickets to a high-class event are outside his budget. Sometimes he talks like he could have anything he wanted, sometimes like he lives on scraps of charity. A little orphan Annie fostered by a Daddy Warbucks.

Foster care is the only explanation for how his tongue dodges around “parents” or even “caretakers” or “guardians”. Or “home”.

The concert grows on her. At first it doesn’t measure up to those brief liaisons with wealth Rae enjoyed, even if the music is pleasant. The temperature falls, but her coat is warm enough except in bursts of gustier wind. Then the sky turns to black velvet, and all the diamonds of the heavens break through. Galli chose a spot far from the stage, citing some secret of the stadium’s acoustics. But the bright lights would have been distracting from the view overhead.

It also means they can talk.  After a few modern pieces, the main musical event is The Planets. Rae reads the program. “Yeah, I know it. I’ve heard it before, I think.” Not wanting to seem shallowly interested in anything with a space-related label on it, she adds, “It’s about astrology, the Greco-Roman gods. Not exactly the real planets.”

“What are the real planets about, anyway?” Galli muses. “They’re all barren lifeless rocks, or toxic lifeless clouds, but then to the eye of humanity they become gods, more alive than any mortal. Bestowing temperaments and driving impulses.”

When he speaks like this, which is often, his voice has a bit of a tense waver. Eloquence can be nervous filler, as much as a stutter.

Some people liked talking so they could have attention on themselves. Galli isn’t like that, Rae observes, because everything he says feels like a veil he’s holding up between them, trying to divert her attention away from himself. Always distractions, flourishes.

Rae laces her fingers around her crossed-over knee. “Lifeless, as far as we know.”

“Compared to Earth, though? Listen. Music like this is what makes people dream of finding something out there. But you won’t find symphonies in space. You find them here, here on Earth. Everything you’re really looking for is here, isn’t it…?”

The first movement, Mars, silences them. Rae isn’t sure if she’s been belittled, if he thinks her stargazing is childish. She thinks she might be angry, until she realizes the brass and marching tempo of the music is driving her impulses, stirring her aggression.

It really is the Bringer of War. And now, for the first time, she’s hooked. On the music itself, not just — okay, she can admit it, the thrill of having Galli Rax lingering at her desk during passing periods, with only eyes for her. He’d been in her class before, mouthy and sullen and growing in uneven spurts, just an errant blip on her radar. But boys could do that, vanish for a summer and come back tempestuous, cryptic, enchanting.

Sure, she thought the operas and symphonies were hokey. But was she resisting, pushing back against the naked emotion in it trying to carry her off? She knows she would trust a rocket ship on a course to the edge of the solar system. This should be easier.  

Just as the movement’s name suggests, Venus, the Bringer of Peace, pacifies her. As Mercury, the Winged Messenger, starts, Rae leans over and says, “You know, some astronomers argue Jupiter’s mass affects the frequency of impacts to inner planets, from the asteroid belt, from comets.”

“Hm?”

“I mean people aren’t wrong to think - about planets.” She reaches deep in her factoid center, speaking to match the rapid pace of the now swelling orchestration. “Impacts heated the Earth and created the moon and gave Earth its tilt, created the iron core so the magnetic field could block radiation, brought water, maybe early organic molecules, and later impacts caused mass extinctions. They do- Yes, they are larger than life. Everything in the solar system moves everything else. That’s what brought all of this together.”

Galli stops staring at the lights of the orchestra, and stares at her instead. Something shifts in his features. In the afterimage of a blink, he doesn’t quite look the same.

“Could a symphony do that?” Rae challenges, as Jupiter soars in with its grand fanfare. “No — just make you think you could grasp something so big.”

What a symphony could do is embolden her to spill all this nonsense while grinning ferociously. Rae realizes this when she sees the gleam return to Galli’s eyes.

He has to lean closer, right next to her ear, to make himself heard. “But a symphony brought us together.”

Rae sinks her head down against his shoulder, writhing a bit with embarrassment. “Hah,” she says.

And he laughs, his chin bumping the top of her brow, because he thinks he’s clever.

At first, the company in Rae’s latest relationship didn’t measure up to her brief liaisons with the wealthy, either. Their lives were so intriguing and dynamic, always moving forward, just the way she imagined herself. Motivation, ambition, drive.

Rae couldn’t say when or how it sank in that they weren’t going anywhere at all. It had to be before the last date, where Lero explained to a gaggle of his parents’ friends, unbidden, “Rae grew up in the inner city, you see.” Which provoked such a thoughtful wrinkling of brows.

She’d nodded and grinned agreeably, proud of having come so far, with a private understanding she was even more dynamic than they. On her way back home —by train, coach class — she watched the houses roll past, darkening in the dusk into featureless geometric silhouettes against a still light, powder blue sky.

Then she’d curled up on the downstairs day bed with a pulpy crime novel that was sitting on the coffee table. Like the instant coffee from the pantry, it was insipid and addictive and it kept her up all night, until her eyes were as runny as soft-boiled eggs.

An arm squeezes her midriff. Rae stirs, blinks blearily, and lifts her chin. The music has quieted.

Galli’s voice murmurs, “How did you fall asleep?”

She doesn’t explain the Pavlovian conditioning behind it, the long-after-midnights under the covers. “What planet are we on?”

He chortles gaily, letting the question in its absurdity linger. “Neptune. The Mystic.”

“I think I drifted off on Saturn.”

“The Bringer of Old Age.”

She staunchly wrestles down the corners of her lips. “I missed Uranus.”

“The Magician,” he says, and then his eyes narrow and he sucks in the insides of his cheeks.

Rae contains herself, but it’s a lot to contain; with this much compressed mirth she could leap up and launch herself into the atmosphere. Maybe she’d left a bit of bait, but he wasn’t supposed to take it.

But Galli fixes her with a side-eye, the most delighted smirk, as if he’d heard the sharpest bon mot. “It missed you too.”

How could it be that funny, to him of all people, the most effete creature Rae has met? She hates that she’s laughing, but she is. He got the timing just right.

“I’m surprised, because it got loud—”

“Stop,” she says.

“You stop, I meant the music.”

“Okay. I get you. We’ll listen to Uranus later. Privately.”

He doesn’t say anything, but she feels his arm drift up to press her head against his chest. To silence her, no doubt.

As she permits this indignity, finding herself in unusually merry spirits, the final movement fades out. There is protracted silence before the applause finally comes, and the conductor eventually turns to bow.

And — it would remain like this in her mind, out of order, unsettlingly incongruous — it’s at this point she thinks back to what happened before she fell asleep.

Galli, in the still freshly formed memory, has on a dreamy smile. “I should like to be a conductor,” he remarks.

“Oh,” Rae says. “I think that would suit you. In my fifth grade violin class, our teacher was…”

She’d had a child’s crush on him, and he’d been quite elegantly gay, and this emboldened her to out herself, to impress him (and it worked, she became his favorite). It took her a few more years to learn enough emotional algebra for that attraction equation, liking girls because she liked boys. But it could be the other way around, now, as she's coaxed closer by the scent of flowers that clung to Galli's skin. “A bit like you.”

“You’ve learned the violin?” Galli claps his hands together jubilantly (not unlike the way her violin teacher would, Rae notes). “Good, you can be my concertmaster. We’ll take the world by its ears.”

Even joking, it’s such an intimate proposal. Rae swallows. “I’m out of practice,” she says. Her smile has a will of its own, because the somersaults her stomach is doing are so vigorous they overshoot what she thinks of as happiness. “Not sure I can still play. I busted my hands up on the boxing team.”

In a solemn gesture for something so trivial, Galli places his palms over hers.

Rae glances over and sees cast-down eyes and soft pensiveness. It’s strange, and she angles closer, out of curiosity.

When he swiftly raises his gaze to meet hers, she thinks, a lure.

They played too much chess; she was used to the pang of alarm when she realized, often a dozen moves before the checkmate, that she’d lost. But sometimes she hadn’t. More than once, she forced herself to play to the end, and tripped him up on his own presumption.

This is the part he would be most presumptuous of all. She can’t let him make this capture.

There are two moves available. She moves in.

He is stiff and still, lips clamped tightly together. Eyelashes tickle her cheek as he blinks once, then twice.

Later, she calls him cold. But the air had been cold, he just hadn’t warmed her up. She can’t remember an initial biting chill, only prickling numbness, the sense of her mouth turning to rubber. Then nothing, until she woke up.

Rae has her eye pressed up to the end of the telescope’s eyepiece when the back door bangs open. Startled, she knocks the piece against her cheekbone, and feels glass kiss her cornea.

Usually she liked the sunroom (or sun-closet, size-wise) for its full view of the yard, where she could catch someone approaching in her periphery. She isn’t used to being snuck up on here. Squinting out of her left eye, while pressing the heel of her palm to her right one, Rae bares her teeth at the visitor.

Her brother is on the other side of the coffee table, bright-eyed and angel-faced with good intentions. He’s a tall young man, sporting the family broad shoulders, hair a crown of curly black thorns, currently trying out a bit of a beard.

“It’s broken…!” he says, pointing.

Rae shuts the telescope case, so he doesn’t touch anything. “It fell. Seeing if I should buy a new lens.” She lowers her laptop screen as well.

“You okay?”

“Buy me a new eyeball.”

Emil chortles. He’s the sort of person with a changeable weather, and a breeze of sociability is dancing around him. A black bandana hangs loosely from his neck. Rae points at it.

“Off with antifa?” she drawls disdainfully.

This is their private joke, but he has earned it for the time he needed bailing out after going toe-to-toe with a wall of riot shields. Emil pulls the cloth up to cover his nose and mouth. “So much property damage.” He tugs it down again. “We were scraping old paint in the elementary school. It wasn’t the plan but the meeting ended early and these workmen left their tools so we got into it, I don’t know why! That place peels everywhere. It was like architectural eczema.”

“You get paid?” I sound like Mom, she thinks. Fretting over finances.

“In karma.” He puts a finger to his lips. “Does it count as vandalism? The school can’t complain. Less kids eating paint off the walls.”

The sun-closet was Emil’s work, too; when they moved in the windows had been painted over and he’d made a project of peeling it all away.

“I wish people snuck in and fixed up our school,” Rae gripes. “Instead of the ridiculous— oh, you don’t even know what they’ve been up to…!”

Emil leans against the doorframe. “Gonna tell me?”

He sounds like Dad, Rae thinks. Always up for a story. And then— the story spills out. Most of it, and it loops back on itself too many times. she keeps things vague and then has to backtrack and confess details when she worries the vagueness paints a worse picture.

To Rae’s horror, her brother knows exactly who Norra and Bren are. He and his group heard all about the school radio station getting shut down. Fearing that it might be better for her to explain the situation first, Rae is pressed through a cagey retelling of what happened and why Norra took it out on her.

“We’ll say I manhandled this student, to get the tests back,” she hears herself explain in an unfamiliarly high octave. “Wouldn’t like to think what the school would have done with him. He got lucky with me.”

“Rae.”

“It—” Her voice is such a squeak that she can’t go any further. Her diaphram quavers, in what could be silent laughter or sobs or hyperventilation. “I’m going to be in such deep… deep… shit if anyone finds out! I bet half the kids at Lucas High know already, everyone in that stupid rebel squad, but they can’t tell on me yet because they don’t know who’d be in worse shit, with all the shit they get up to.” She claws at the patchwork blanket covering the mattress. “Fuck! I gotta deal with this.”

The springs squeal under Emil’s weight as he sits. “Oh-kay,” he says, in astonished tones. “Take it easy, Raesie, I know these kids. They don’t want trouble.”

“Goddamn Norra. She said I was the best of the lot,” Rae admits. “But she’s got a gun to my head.”

“No, she doesn’t! You don’t have to do anything.”

I wish you hadn’t said that, Rae thinks, knowing exactly how she has set herself up by telling him as much as she did. As long as she hears it from him, she can tune it out.

He doesn’t know about Galli; she left that part out.

Because it's just a theory, she reminds herself. Would she rat Galli out if he really did mess about with hallucinogenic mushrooms (or whatever it was)? Yes, she thinks decisively. If he did it, of course he needs to pay for it.

She curls up on the side of the day bed and shudders. Could it mean he’d been inviting her up the mountain to get high? It’s a nauseating idea, because… because that isn’t who she is, she isn’t that kind of teenager. She’s heard the spiel, as early as elementary school, how easily a bit of vice will ruin your life.

Of course she hates it. Even the thought of slowing down, of being grounded, of losing momentum when her final year of high school is the countdown to ignition, and every little bit of drag risks her chance of reaching escape velocity. It’s just gross. It’s gross and she won’t allow it.

She feels her thumb drag along the wall, and flake of plaster comes off, wedged under her nail. Quickly, she flicks it away, before her brother notices.

“You always did that when you were left alone,” he says, and Rae shoves her hands between her knees in mortification.

Thinking back on it, she supposes he’s right. And so of course, as the older brother to a willful toddler, he tried to deal with it, but this time she can't get him involved. Much as she knows she shouldn't pick at this crack in her world, she also knows she probably will.

Chapter Text

The shutters clack together, filtering corn-gold evening light into stripes. Rae twists the cord around her finger, and cinches the plastic armor plates tighter over the window, so her room is truly dimmed.

She greets the glow-in-the-dark posters on her wall impassively. The one calling itself Eyes on the Stars, which might have been a thing to behold were it literal, and not an infographic about astronomy and culture, is curling down at its upper left corner. Rae sticks it back in place, lamenting the humidity’s effect on the adhesive. The tape forms a lump under a playing-card sized book cover. Two figures lounge against a balcony overlooking a red ochre plateau, gazing up at a sky that is blue in the light, but has been changed by darkness into a night sky by the luminescent green dots in the poster’s paper. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

“Mars will be bright,” she says dully.

Everyone has already had their dinner, Mother and Father calling from their respective workplaces, Emil in front of the TV with a video game, and Rae alone at the head of the dining room table. She is still thinking over Emil’s offer to join. He’s playing through a crime-solving adventure that Rae already beat, so participation means nagging him as he works through the puzzles. Which might be fun, but only when she’s calmer than this.

Her phone buzzes. There’s a text from an unknown number. —Rae Sloane? it asks. Only that: her name.

The world sharpens, just a bit. Rae’s eyes narrow and she swiftly types, Who is this?

—Your brother gave me your number. it’s Bren Wexley. from Lucas High

Exhaling, Rae leans against her desk. He’s trying to arrange a truce, she replies. Once that sends, she hastily adds, I heard about what happened to you. And I agree it was strange.

—Norra still thinks you did something but I don’t know

Rae sucks on her teeth irritably, but gives her new correspondent a chance to type another message.

—I just want to figure out wtf happened though and idk why you would have done something or how like maybe that night scrambled my brain but I don’t think this was a prank, everything looks so weird now

What looks weird? she asks.

—Like the school rivalry is weird I never even questioned it but I don’t know why they let us do that

Rae interjects. The school rivalry has always been weird. Did it take an acid trip for this guy to realize?

—I have a theory

She straightens her back, and smiles. Go on.

—you know about project MKUltra?

Rae’s fingertips are tingling as she types, I’ve heard the name. She makes a decision as she hits the send button, and grabs her white and gold varsity jacket off its coatrack.

“I’m going to go stargazing,” she announces to her brother as she descends the stairs. “With the astronomy club.” It doesn’t even feel like a lie at this point, because there were weekly stargazing nights advertised and scheduled; the flyer was up on the library’s corkboard. Earlier in the summer, Rae decided to work around the fact that the supposed instructor never showed up.

“They have a spare telescope?” Emil asks, pausing his game.

“They said they would.” Rae pockets the car keys. “I hope they meant it.”

Can I call you? she types into her phone. I’m going to be driving. But let’s talk.

Bren has a shaky cadence to his voice, which he keeps low, speaking close to his phone’s receiver. “Wow, you’re, uh, more interested in this than I thought you’d be.”

Rae glances at the phone sitting in the passenger’s seat, and then turns her eyes back to the road. “I’m just trying to put an end to the madness.”

“Madness?” the voice on speakerphone repeats, seeming in the intonation to be aiming for a movie quote. He’s clearly trying not to take himself too seriously. Rae impatiently permits this and waits for him to continue. “What I’m thinking is probably madness. MKUltra though. Those are the mind control experiments the CIA did on people back in the fifties.”

She is a bit scornful. “Did they really? Or do people just theorize—”

Bren’s wavering voice firms up a bit. “Yes, they absolutely did! This is something they admitted to. There’s a whole documentary I was just watching and it freaked me out because the guy who— so he killed himself, or the CIA probably killed him, but the official story was he jumped out of a window. And his son has been trying for years to find out what really happened. And they trace it back to this night a week before he died, where the man, this guy Frank Olson, was meeting with a group of fellow agents in the woods, and they spiked his drink with LSD.”

It’s lurid, possibly exaggerated. And yet it’s a beautiful puzzle to chew on, beautiful in how it tickles her mind with paranoia. Rae watches the peak of Mt. Jacob loom over the rolling fields and woodland, the gold light deepening into orange in the streaks of cirrus clouds scalloping the sky. “Damn,” she says.

“I hope I don’t go the same way.”

“You watched this before or after that night?”

“I started it before. Finished it after. And I couldn’t not think about it when I was in the school, and I started feeling weird. I’m not saying the government did it, but it was so much like what happened to me. Weird stuff happens to Lucas kids all the time, Rae. Like Wedge getting left in the basement. By the teacher, not just by, uh, you. Whole classes failing tests because they couldn’t concentrate. Or how they took down my radio station—“

“Why don’t you describe your experience?” Rae suggests smoothly. “The bad trip itself.”

“It started a few minutes after I ate the cupcake Norra thinks did it, and it kicked in really suddenly. I didn’t know drugs could work like that. It was like a dizzy spell; my knees got weak as I was going down the stairs and I saw this glowing light from inside the greenhouse.”

Rae’s hands tremble violently on the steering wheel. She grits her teeth and shakes her head sharply, telling herself to concentrate. “Someone was in the greenhouse?”

“I thought so, obviously, and it creeped me out, and I was still feeling dizzy. I didn’t go looking in there, like, who wants to die, right? But I had to sneak out into the courtyard to get to the gate. Soon as I got outside I got scared and I thought, shit, this is really happening to me. The air was… shimmery? Like thin see-through curtains were floating about everywhere. 

“As I was trying to cross the yard I saw this. Person-shaped thing. Standing right in front of me. Its whole body was shadowed and its face was moon-pale, and it looked like melting wax.

“It chased me.”

“What!?” Rae exclaims.

“Yes! It came at me! It might have been a normal person like a teacher or guard or it might’ve been a complete hallucination, but I couldn’t fucking tell, I wasn’t taking any chances. It moved too smoothly, like a ghost, maybe because my vision was blurry, and I just… couldn’t. I could not. I ran like hell and I hit the fence and climbed it and I didn’t even feel the barbed wire, I went over it and fell on the grass and kept running.

“Norra said I was bleeding everywhere when I got to the parking lot. I remember she put a blanket around me and got me in the back and drove off. And she called all her friends and they kept yelling at each other about whether to call 911.”

Pulling her car up by the side of the road, at the entrance of the mountain trail, Rae sinks down into her seat and rubs her face with her hands. Every hair on the back of her neck is poking out of a raised bump.

“Bren,” she says, forcing an amiable tone. “Brentin. Thank you for trusting me.”

“Now that you know, are you going to join our rebellion?” Trying to put a lighthearted spin on things. Or maybe it was never as serious as she was taking it and he was milking his story for the dramatics. Because of course he has no idea what Rae is working up the courage to do — or the self-preservation instinct not to do.

“I. Hah. Who knows, maybe.” She exits the car and stares at the gap in the trees, where the path begins. “I have to go.”

“Conspiracy theories aside, I called because I think we could tell the police about what happened, if we agree to… cover for each other. When it comes to the things we’d rather not—”

“I’ll think about it,” Rae says brightly. She hangs up.

Her gut is as knotted as a pair of earbuds left in someone’s back pocket. 

It’s not a long walk through the woods to the bridge. The boards creak and the brook warbles underneath them. Rae freezes in the middle when she hears sloshing. The last time she came up this way, she’d been taken by surprise. This time, she thought she’d been more alert. No further noise from below. Is someone standing still, like she is? Or was it nothing, perhaps a frog hopping off a rock.

Rae has never wondered, before now, what the sounds of the forest mean to the chipmunks and mice and sparrows and frogs. They merge into pleasant ambiance for a hiker, but each rustle could be the only warning before a predator strikes.

No one waits for her in the shadows under the bridge when she climbs down the bank. But her senses stay on high alert.

The water level is lower than the last time she was here, only ankle deep, with more exposed rocks forming a dry path through it. The sunset light seems to tint the ripples in the water. But perhaps the color has a different source, Rae thinks, digging her fingers into the stream bed and holding the contents out for inspection. The silt has flecks and streaks of orange that paint her fingertips a warmer, lighter brown. It’s rust. Iron oxide.

There are old iron mines in this region, and one of them runs under the mountain. As Galli told it, his secret observatory was created or used by some cult visiting an impact site that opened up an old tunnel. Rae imagines the veins, and the wound, and the flow of blood tracing back to the source.

Prey animals might need keen senses, but she fancies herself more of a hunter, anyway.

She heads upstream. See? You’re doing this to feel clever, an inner voice notes. Rae smiles thinly in response. If she’s right, then she is clever.

That orange color fades from the sky, but remains tinting the stream bed, urging her on as the burst of daring that overtook her begins to wear off.

As it did when she was putting stolen tests back into their file in the administrative office, now afraid of being caught and blamed by anyone who walked in. Realizing that she was too afraid to unlock the doors of the boiler room because she couldn’t face the accusations.

As it did years ago when she woke from a fog of desperation on a train station platform with a packed bag of everything she thought she needed to live on her own already weighing her down. A bag of child’s treasures lost to whoever grabbed her by its handle in the dark.

No one would ever take from her again. Not her future, and never her heart.

The trees thin where larger boulders take over. These are rocks that were flung out here by detonations. Long round grooves and holes tag them as having been blasted by dynamite. And without the trees, there is the view of the whole county. Houses cluster along the roads, acres of forest and field compete in a patchwork, flecks of light wink on in distant windows, and that concrete crystal of a high school lurks beyond a hill.

While the land is full of dusk shadows, the sky is a fading peach on the horizon and turning cobalt at the zenith. Venus is setting, Jupiter lingering, and the moon’s silvery glow is waking up from its daytime shyness. On the other side of the sky, Rae finds the dot of fire Mars has become for this one rare summer.

She turns away from them reluctantly, but feeling their presence at her back pushes her on, despite her feet growing sore. Everything in the solar system moves everything else.

But now, like a snake slipping into a hole, the stream disappears, up a steep incline into a rock pile. The space in between the rocks hides a deep darkness that might be a mine shaft, but there’s no way a person could squeeze through. Stymied, Rae storms forward, hauls herself up, and presses her face against the rocks, squinting.

Is this the end? Though she can be relieved that this is as far as her mad quest will take her.

One last look. She pulls her phone out of her pocket and turns the flashlight on, pointing it into the crevice.

The beam meets — dead center of the tunnel — a pale-faced figure, still and silent.

Rae screams, cut off as her teeth snap shut over her tongue. The phone flies out of her hands; she leaps backwards, and her feet slip. Vertigo strikes, followed by shocked, impotent rage. The world tilts away with dreadful finality. How far down? Ten feet? Fifteen? Down into the water, to sleep on a bed of stones.

They’ll never find your body, that inner voice tells her in a panic, microseconds before her head strikes the ground. They’ll think you ran away!

What? Of course they’ll find you. You idiot…

Rae wakes in pain, aches everywhere. Some are sharp, and when she shifts, they sharpen even more. It’s better than oblivion, even a few more moments to herself before the end. She could weep with relief.

There’s a smell, like that of rain on pavement, mixed with compost and the tang of blood. Echoing footsteps grind loose stones together as they rapidly approach and stop by her ear. A cool touch pats her cheek, before she has time to be frightened.

“Can you— I mean are you— Ah, Rae. Oh god.” Stilted, anxious laughter, from a voice she recognizes.

“I’m alive,” Rae slurs. “… Galli?” She cracks tear-crusted eyes open. It’s dark, pitch black above her except for a pool, a portal of off-black sprinkled with stars.

He is an indistinct shape crouching over her, an afterimage. She can’t make out the whites of his eyes, even though his teeth faintly flash as he speaks. “Y-yes. You’re alive. Lie still.”

Rae lies still. “We’re inside,” she says, forehead wrinkling in thought. “The tunnel.”

“I got you in,” he agrees.

She notes the caginess of the response. He must be overwhelmed himself, and trying not to overload her with information. She wants to tell him she’s alert and could use details, but perhaps not, because she can’t verbalize this well. Her thoughts march by in single file, and the darkness is making her drowsy. “Am I in bad shape? Bones broken? Did you call for help…?”

He holds up her phone apologetically. No light appears as he clicks the power button. “I fished this out of the water. The screen is pretty shattered.”

“You don’t have a phone?”

“No, I. I guess I better help you up,” he says, shifting his seat on the ground and working his arm under her shoulders. “Tell me if it hurts.”

“It’s night,” she mumbles, blinking at the hole in the ceiling. “I was out for a while.”

Galli cautiously hoists her up to a sitting position and braces her from behind. She tries to support herself, palms against the dirt, and is thwarted by a stabbing pain in her fingers.

She whimpers, composure cracking. Galli’s breath catches in a gasp.

His touch finds her wrist, then slips further down. He lifts her hand, and kisses the knuckles with such fervent, delicate reverence that a shocked surge of heat under her skin chases off the throbbing.

“H-hey,” she croaks. “You’re getting bold.”

A contrite giggle. “Aha, yeah. But I did rescue you.”

He rescued me. The thought squeezes her stomach slyly.

“Are they broken?” she manages to say, slowly curling her fingers into a fist, waiting for the pain to return, but it doesn’t, and she spreads them again. “For a second it really felt like they were…” She runs her hand down her jacket and one pant leg. “God, that’s weird. I fell in the water, didn’t I? My skin still feels wet, but my clothes feel dry. Or the other way around. Can’t even tell.”

Galli’s chin presses down on her shoulder. “Maybe you hit a nerve on your back. That would make your skin feel weird…”

“It would.” Rae swallows. “Am I wrong thinking my spine’s gonna crack in half if I sit up the wrong way? Like it’s just barely holding together.”

“Umm. Well, it could happen. Worst case scenario."

“All right, I’ll risk it.” She leans forward, shifting to a kneeling position. Galli’s hands press on her back, smoothing from shoulder to hip. It’s so— sensual. Oh wow, Rae thinks. Good job getting distracted.

Her eyes adjust to the darkness, and the flirtatious tickle in her gut subsides the more she can pick out of the rough rock walls, the pitch black holes, and the broken tracks curving away on both ends of the tunnel. This isn’t right… Her mind snaps into focus. What am I doing here?

“Galli. Why am I here? What were you thinking, honestly? You couldn’t call for help?”

He shifts in her peripheral vision. It startles her, even though it shouldn’t; he is pale enough to pick up the faint starlight, almost ghostly. “I-I told you, I don’t have a phone. I didn’t want to leave you lying there!”

“Yes, but I, I really could have been hurt! Call with your voice, damn it! Yell down the mountain at the road!”

“But you’re okay!”

Rae stands up, feet spread apart for balance. “But I don’t like thinking about the alternative!”

Galli makes a deeply frustrated noise and pushes himself upright. He’s still an indistinct shape; when Rae squints, she can make out his features, but barely so.

“I’m glad you’re okay. Good lord, Rae, you scared me so badly. Seeing you fall.” There’s something off about the way he says it, like he’s reading from a mental script.

“You scared me too,” she blurts out. “That was you. Watching. Wasn’t it?” And then her pulse ticks quicker behind her ears. Something unsettles her in that memory.

“That was me. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault, honestly. You’re right, I should have called for help.”

“Yeah, well. I lived. Which way is the exit?” She keeps her tone casual. “How do we get out of here?”

He hesitates.

“Which way?” she shrills. And then immediately regrets it, because he flinches away from her. “I’m sorry, I’m just on edge. This place spooks me.”

“I understand.” He starts walking. “And you must be so tired, too. Come on, this way.”

“I shouldn’t have listened to ghost stories before heading up the mountain.”

“Ghost stories?”

She takes a breath and follows. “A Lucas kid I talked to. Saw something like a ghost at the school, when he was sneaking around. A ghost, late at night, in the greenhouse, and in the courtyard.”

Silence, aside from footsteps.

“Galli.”

Silence. No footsteps. He’s stopped. Rae looks back, finds his shape in the shadows.

“He thought he was high on some kind of drug. But I didn’t eat anything since dinner and… I may have seen a ghost, too.”

She shivers down to her toes. Should I run, like Brentin did? Or will that make things worse?

“Is this the observatory?” she asks, because she needs him to respond before she loses her nerve and bolts.

It’s only a slight relief that his reply has a note of self-consciousness. “Nnn. Yeah. Kind of. But not… I could show you. You want to leave, but you did come up the mountain looking for something.”

“Yes,” she spits. “You’re hiding something.”

He responds with equal harshness, taking offense. “Like what?”

“How should I know? You expect me to have it all figured out? A million stories could fit.”

“Fit how?”

She doesn’t respond, and he starts walking again, and she resumes following. Thoughts gather slowly.

“… Hah,” she says eventually. “You ever read Bradbury?”

“Fahrenheit 451? We all read that freshman year.”

“The Martian Chronicles. I thought about the Martian people, from one story in particular. When an Earth ship lands on Mars and it looks like a small American town, all quaint and lovely. And it’s full of people, people they know, people who’ve died, but they’re Martians, just powerfully psychic, making the men see whatever they want, whatever puts them at ease. Once they’ve killed the invaders, their human faces melt. I remember it so well. At the end, their melting, shifting faces. It sounds like what Brentin saw that night.”

Once again, the footsteps stop. Rae turns around. Galli is easier to see; the cave has become lighter. A breeze tickles her skin, her wet or not-wet skin. Maybe that spot of brighter darkness up ahead wasn’t more mine shaft, but the way out. It can’t be the entrance by the stream, that was blocked up with rubble, but of course he must have brought her in another way. Must have gotten in another way.

“So it could have been,” she flutters an irritable hand through the air, “who knows what, an acid mushroom cake, it could have been a horrible, fucked-up prank. But you could be a Martian for all I know.”

For a moment the light dims again, perhaps a cloud passing over the moon, and Galli is a mere disembodied voice in the dark. “Could I be? Really?”

“Sure. Sure. The meteorite. I read about that. Could have been a spaceship landing. And then those cultists find an alien aboard. Maybe… maybe they’re with the government, in the business of paranormal cover-ups. It stays secret for years, the alien makes himself look human. Makes his spaceship look like a caved-in tunnel. They let him go to school.”

At first this oddly-spun story eases her mind. It takes the edge off worries about crime and vice, but she realizes she has never had a clear picture of what mundane wrongdoing could be going on. She is struck by the thought — I’m a child. Seventeen isn’t old enough to know how the world works, and she still operates on a blurry impression of reality, just the way children do.

She doesn’t know what drug dealers even do. She would have been ashamed to know, and so she refuses to know. They are simply the bad men. Devils of the wild, preying on youthful souls. Although she might have put them together with the bogeymen of government mind control experiments that Brentin insisted were real. And maybe—

Just maybe, he’s right, that she and the students of L/LHS were trained to overlook far more abnormal shit than most kids her age.

I know about space more than Earth, and aliens more than people.

“I. I guess a drug would make the psychic effect wear off. But which one—” It crashes over her in a chilling wave. “It could be a secretion. Brentin ate something. And you, you don’t let anyone touch your food. And you don’t like being kissed.”

The princess and the frog.

He clasps his hands behind his back, shifting weight from foot to foot. “… But I do.”

“You do?”

He moves as if he means to melt into the shadows. “When it’s you.”

She feels— so big. As she said at the concert, in answer to the jollity of Jupiter, the solar system is vast, full of pulls and cycles and forces, affecting each planet down to the atoms coating the surface.

Galli clears his throat. “Good night, Rae. You’ll be fine? Getting down the mountain? I should come with you, shouldn’t I?”

“You’re really planning on staying here.” Her forehead scrunches up. “Sleep aboard your spaceship?” You’ll know you were right, Rae tells herself, if you never see him again.

It could be a very cunning illusion, just like in the stories. They could be in a brightly lit metal corridor, or something with even stranger architecture. Those lost hours from evening to night could have been spent in some bath of high-tech regenerative gel. What if she really did break her neck?

But that would make her theory startlingly prescient, from his point of view.

And he does ask: “How… If it were true. How could you guess?”

All those little hints. If it were true, he would have been trying to tell her for a long time.

“… It can’t be true, though,” Rae says firmly. “If it were, it would be the secret you wanted to tell me.”

Galli shuffles his feet, and approaches cautiously.

“If you’re mixed up in something bad, though, I’ll help. I’ll. Rescue you. Hah.” Rae crosses her arms. “I haven’t even started on my other theories. What about the cult, the school, the greenhouse.”

Voice softened to a breathy whisper, Galli closes in. His hands are spread now, supplicating. “I’ll be your Martian. Or whatever you like. As long as you’re not afraid of me.”

“Not planning to invade Earth and abduct us for experimentation?”

He starts to say something, with a tight wry grimace, like he’ll play along with that idea, but then his face falls. (It doesn’t melt. Yet.) “I’m just a kid like you,” he mumbles.

He reminds Rae of a shy pet prowling closer until it allows a stranger’s touch. When he doesn’t move away, she traces a hand over his cheek, pinching the skin experimentally. “If that isn’t your face, you… have good taste.”

He closes his eyes, leaning his head against her hand. “Of course I’d want to be handsome for you. An alien could be ugly,” he cautions, opening his eyes again. “Grotesque. Like a grisly ghost.”

“Someone has to kiss the prince, even if it turns him into a frog. If he really does like being kissed.”

“By the most beautiful princess.”

“See?” Rae taps a finger to his breastbone. “You do like me.”

This gets a real smile out of him, at last. His lips quirk up and his eyes glimmer and he’s bending closer, trembling with uncertain hope.

They meet. His wrists lock together around her waist, gently ensnaring her. A tentative sigh against her lips. She tastes his tongue. Faint humming exhalations purr from his throat; they’re sharing every tiny vibration passing though their jawbones. I’ll make you mine, she thinks, hugging him closer against her chest, a surge of possessiveness taking over, a part of my body, an extra sense, becoming yours, a piece of you. I’ll move you, like the planets. Whoever or whatever you are. My Galli.

The light filtering through her eyelids grows brighter, and brighter still. She opens her eyes — to wonder. “Oh,” Rae breathes.