Chapter Text
“Don’t forget: rent due tomorrow!” Unkar called down the corridor. Rey tipped her head back toward him, shuffling her bag of groceries to her left hip. She reached for her keys and found—blasters, not again—they weren’t in her pocket. Bending to her knees, she set the paper bag on the ground and felt each pocket. Nothing.
Rey let out a groan and leaned back against the ground. Her groceries, various canned soups and a loaf of bread, stared back at her.
She could hear Unkar plodding back down the hall to move on to kindly harassing the other tenants. The poor old woman next door and her menagerie of kittens was presumably next on his list. Rey almost had what she needed for rent tomorrow, but her next paycheck didn’t come in until the end of the week. She had exactly one plan for this situation: borrow the deficit from Finn and pay him back on Saturday.
But now she had no keys, and her phone was right on the counter where she had forgotten it earlier this morning.
She kicked at some dust mites cartwheeling across the floor.
She could always go back to work and loiter around for a bit there, wait until she knew Finn would be home and then take the bus over to his house. But the thought of dragging her groceries and exhausted self back to the shop and just sitting there, well. Somehow that felt more like defeat than just laying back here and hoping her keys would magically reappear.
So Rey opted for the latter.
Her sleeves were smeared with car grease, so she rolled them up. Then she wiped her slightly blackened fingers on the grocery bag and coughed a few times. She checked her pocket: still no keys. So she leaned back until her head fell onto the doormat, trying to ignore the years of dirt and crust caked on the linoleum beneath her, and relaxed.
Unkar’s footsteps and berating voice faded into the distance. Rey closed her eyes.
Like this, she could almost hear it. The ocean. She could picture her mother’s delicate arms, pointing out to sea, gesturing for Rey to run to the waves. Her father nodded in approval and passed a cup of tea to his wife. Little feet tripping over themselves, Rey ran, tasting the salt, sensing the crash of waves with each thudding heartbeat. It called her; it begged for her, cycling over and over again, tying her to its eternity. She reached out.
And a wave crashed over her. Rey opened her mouth to breathe, flailed for the shore, but instead she heard—what was that?—gunshots? They faded as soon as she caught their sound, and now Rey heard a sizzling, overwhelming the ocean; she saw, maybe, a beam of light, so blinding that she had to look away. And another sound, endless, stretching on in a line forever. Like the blood in her veins ran still. And so did all else in the universe.
It was capped in darkness, but she saw it—
“Rey. REY! REY WALKER!”
She sat up and coughed out a sputtering breath. What the hell? Unkar’s face loomed over her, pudgy and squinting, and he dangled something in her face.
“Are you havin’ a seizure or something? You were dead still, but I’ve never seen anyone sit up that fast. And you forgot these downstairs. And rent is due tomorrow.”
He said all this and dropped the something he was holding onto her stomach. Then he turned and walked away. Rey clutched at the object, felt the hard, metallic shape of it, and heard that humming sound again. But then the object morphed into her keys and dug into her palm, tiny robot keychain and all.
She pulled herself to her feet.
Rey dreamt of the ocean often. Everyday, maybe. She conjured her parents’ home and her childhood, beating back against the waves. There was the beginning of a mural in her bedroom, in paint she knew she would have to dash over as soon as Unkar saw it—Rey unlocked her door and stumbled forward, dropping the groceries on the counter. She pushed through the bedroom doorway and cast her eyes on the mural.
The ocean looked back.
She had wanted the bed to seem like an island, looking out on the sea. So the water unfolded around her, tranquil in some bits, crashing in others. It was blue and white and layered, shadowed with greens and browns and even black. That little exercise from before—closing her eyes, listening for the ocean—was something her counselor had showed her, back when Rey was considered a ward of the state. Counting down from ten hadn’t worked, but the ocean could calm her. And her parents were always waiting there, just the fleeting bits of them she remembered: a thin arm, a warm plate clinked at her placemat, the smell of rosemary.
But what had she seen just now?
Rey climbed onto her bed and stared deeper into the mural, begging it for answers.
That sound—
It didn’t matter. Rey needed rent money. She needed to call Finn, now, and invoke their bond of friendship, and make another promise to herself that one of these days, soon, she would stop making ends meet and figure out how to do it all herself. She would swallow down her apprehension and just ask him, pretend it didn’t hurt that she felt like she was using him.
She rolled onto her back and dialed Finn’s number. It rang twice before she heard him pick up and shout a word of greeting into the speaker.
“Too loud!” she shouted back.
“What?” Finn yelled. “Sorry, it’s really loud in the studio right now, we have a”—there was the sound him consulting his notes—“Norse mythology-inspired post-punk modern rock band recording!”
Rey took a moment to look away from the phone and remember her task. While she did, she heard Finn shuffling around, and then the background “music” shut off abruptly.
“Taking a breather in the hallway. I needed it anyway; thanks for giving me a valid reason. So what’s up, Walker?”
She switched the phone to her other ear. “Listen, Finn. I hate to ask—“
“Rey. Rey, Rey, Rey. I got you covered. How much? I know you’ll get it all back.”
Rey closed her eyes and pushed down her smile, but she felt the tension in her shoulders relax. “Just a hundred. For tomorrow. Paycheck’s in by Friday—"
"No problem, Reyo. How’s it going over at the shop, by the way? That car you all had in last week was one hell of a fix.”
“I fixed it,” Rey said. She bit her lip. It had been one hell of a fix, and when she finished it, even her boss, who was basically she-who-must-not-be-named, was impressed. “Back in service as of Monday.”
“That’s my girl. And we’re still on this Saturday, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss karaoke for the world. And thank you, Finn. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“Right back at you. Well, I’ve got to get back to the Vikings. Someone has to let them down gently, and it sure as hell won’t be Phasma.”
Rey grimaced. Finn’s producer was not well-known for her subtlety.
“Talk later?” Rey said.
“Of course.” The receiver clicked, and Rey set down the phone.
A few minutes later her phone dinged with the one hundred dollars from Finn. Rey sighed and fell back against her bed. The ocean loomed over her, silent and huge.
This month was taken care of; she could breathe easy for the next. And the next? And the next, and all the rest after this one, well. She would have to just keep hanging on. Keep pretending that maybe, if she hoped hard enough, someone—anyone—would come back for her.
—
Early the next morning Rey woke to a fire engine outside, blaring away.
She pushed back the covers, bleary-eyed, and squinted through the blinds. The sound faded in the distance. Her dream—she could hardly remember it. There had been clashing, then peace. She was alone in a dark room, and she could only hear that strange sound again, steady and interminable. It had snaked through every crack in her mind, snagging on her every thought. It hummed with life, with destruction. Rey fell back into her pillow and squeezed it over her ears.
She hated that sound.
A few minutes later she dragged herself out of bed and wandered to the washroom. Rey turned the sink knob and washed her face, pulling tired fingers from her lashes to her cheeks. When she looked up, blinking the water clean, the mirror sparkled back at her, and she screamed.
The face in the mirror wasn’t her.
Or—it was her, but it wasn’t right. The Rey in the mirror had her hair pulled back in some weird spacey hairstyle, and her face was flushed with exertion. In her hand was a tall wooden staff that towered above her head. And her outfit! Rey raised a hand to her collar and the mirror image did too. But the reflection was wearing a sort of safari getup, with cream-colored straps and a cloak. She bared her teeth at Rey and slammed the staff against the ground.
Rey screamed one more time.
Then she blinked and the vision dissipated.
Rey—the real one—turned away from the mirror and anchored both her hands on the sink. Panting, she stared at the wall, daring it to conjure some monster, some sound, some reflection that hadn’t been there before. The wall continued on nonthreateningly.
Was she losing it? Finally? Rey wanted to call Finn, but how would she explain it? Yeah, now that I’ve borrowed money from you because I can’t make rent again, let me tell you about these hallucinations I’ve been having.
Hallucinations. What had Unkar asked her yesterday—was she having a seizure? Had she been? Maybe this was some sort of genetic disorder; maybe that was why her parents had surrendered her to the state so many years ago. Rey conjured an image of her father holding her mother in his arms while she prophesied the end of the world, and a crying young Rey looked on.
That was too painful to dwell on.
Instead, Rey left the washroom, avoiding any eye contact with the mirror, and popped open her closet. She slid into a tee-shirt and overalls—work clothes—and grabbed her backpack. Tying up her hair, Rey shoved her feet into tennis shoes, took one more look at the silent ocean above her bedframe, and then shut her bedroom door. She took a breath.
She was not going crazy. This was all perfectly normal.
Rey grabbed an orange from the fruit basket and headed out the door to the bus stop.
At work, Rey had a long list of cars that needed little tuneups, nothing major like the job from last week. So she started with the hideous orange convertible that had something off with the engine, plugging in her headphones and lifting up the hood. Minutes passed, then an hour, and Rey thought only of the mechanics of it, the way the wires and parts intertwined. Eventually she had the car lifted up and bent to lay flat across a roller, then slid under the vehicle, closing her eyes for a moment. She reached a hand up instinctually and didn’t stop herself. Without sight, her fingers found the right bar, then traveled a little further up to the piece she needed to detach. Rey enveloped it with her hand and pulled it out. Her hand circled the cylinder of metal, charred on one end. It released a puff of smoke in her face, and she resisted the urge to cough, knowing if she did she would smack her head on the car. She just held onto the ruined part and closed her eyes until the urge subsided.
The metal part elongated in her hand, morphed and grew texture. Her finger slipped over a switch on the side and the whole thing just ignited, a blaze of blue light that seared through her shut eyes. Rey clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out, and then she dared to peek her eyes open, dared to look. A beam of light extended from her hand, unchanging, whole. It emitted a humming sound—close to the first sound she had heard, but derivative of it, part of its whole. There was no heat, only perfect, cosmic light.
And a voice.
Darkness rises, it said. Deep, gravelly, certain.
And light to meet it.
Rey slammed her feet against the floor and pushed herself from under the car, into the open, her heart pounding. She stumbled to her feet and called for Vicky, her boss, but she had already gone out to pick up lunch. The garage was empty. Rey knew it. And yet, the voice had been so clear, as if its owner was laying beside her on a second roller, speaking into her ear. And the metal glow—Rey glanced down at her hand, and only then did she realize the humming had faded. The light had vanished. The metal part in her hand was just that: a charred, useless scrap of car junk.
That evening, Rey walked the last quarter mile to her apartment with earbuds firmly in, listening to something Finn had produced a couple years ago that had done well. She could still remember him bringing her the finished record, a small, serious smile on his face. Had it really been so many years? Four years of her working at the same mechanic, scraping by. The lyrics lilted in her ear:
Like so many lovers do
I walk between two worlds with you
Across the stars I’d scream our song
But would you follow me along?
That was the end of the chorus. A question, no answer. Rey thought it was beautiful in all of its truthful uncertainty. When she reached her building, she pushed in the door. The booming sound of fireworks, she figured, boomed from a few blocks over. She’d never get used to the Americans and their brazenness; she hadn’t since she’d first arrived. Rey trudged to her apartment.
She didn’t want to admit it, but she was going veritably insane, and if she didn’t address it now, it would surely spiral into something worse. Her counselor from childhood was no good, but maybe she could ask around, see if anyone knew a psychologist who would give her a discount—
Rey stopped. Her hand was on the doorknob, the door already halfway open. But she stopped all the same, because standing in her apartment, dressed like an amateur Indiana Jones and wearing a faded brown leather jacket, was a man.
And actually, he wasn’t standing in her apartment. Because her apartment was no longer there. In its place was a jungle, a tangle of dark green vines and trees that grew around each other and leaves half the size of sedans. The man turned to look at her.
At least this time, Rey thought, she had the composure not to scream.