Chapter Text
The two of you worked together once, for however brief a time. (Any amount of time with her would have been too brief.) You were young and idealistic and knew nothing about this cavern you found yourselves in, and you found comfort in the steadiness each other’s presence provided. You met each other shortly after the Fall and survived those lean years together. Where one of you went, the other followed, always. Seldom were you seen about Benthic without each other, studying to make sense of this brave new world.
She was your best friend. She was your companion. She was your everything.
When December appeared to you to recruit you, you both had the dream on the same night. You both woke up in a sweat where you’d been sleeping tangled in each other’s arms. This meant everything. This idea of the Great Work gave meaning to the chaos. It gave you purpose. It gave you power to leverage against a whole world that tried to tell you and people like you that you have no place in it. You don’t know if you’ve ever been happier than you were then, though you wonder deep down if your joy came from the dream or how tightly she held you after.
She was the summer to your winter, smiling when you frowned, filling the room with the song of her voice when you preferred to be quiet. She was the realist to your idealist, feet grounded in the earth while you were looking to the spaces between the stars.
She was full of pertinent questions. What will we do in absence of light? Where will our food come from? How will we keep from freezing?
You would tease her. Who needed stars when she was right here? Seeing her smile was all the light you needed, and holding her kept you warmer than any sun. “Only one of me isn’t enough for the whole world,” she’d say. You never said what you were thinking: whenever you were together, she was the whole world. After all these years, you still remember how she filled a room with her presence. If you’d seen her once or a thousand times, that was something no one could forget.
But she never stopped asking. Who will die in the chaos? What does it mean to abolish all law if science itself becomes involved? How far is too far?
That was when she started to get an idea. What if we engineered our own sun to replace the one we’re going to destroy? The Neath had scientific possibilities unheard of on the surface. In her research, she had begun finding irregularities, wavelengths of colors that shouldn’t exist. She had already begun theorizing how much energy these things were capable of and how they could be used as a fuel source.
It was your role companions to be encouraging of each other, but you couldn’t help politely expressing your disagreement. Your mission was extinguishing stars, not creating them. You had faith in December’s plans, that a world post-liberation was a world worth fighting for.
But that wasn’t the end of your disagreements, which turned to full-blown arguments the longer she refused to let go of this pursuit of folly. You saw each other less and less, and when you did, there was a barrier between you that was never there before. She doesn’t tell you about her work, nor is she interested in hearing about yours. With how dedicated each of you were to science, that left you with little to discuss. Small talk about the weather can’t be made in a cavern with no weather.
Your duties at Benthic grew ever more demanding. June’s work became ever more elusive. Neither of you was spending much time at home anymore, sleeping in your respective labs. You had new colleagues. She had new colleagues. No one at the University seemed to remember the days when you were a packaged deal, or at least they were sensible enough not to comment.
You remember the day you heard the rumors that she’d been kicked out, too radical even for Benthic. That same afternoon, she asked you to meet for tea (what happened to the days when you saw each other every day for breakfast, tea, and supper?) to tell you in person that she was leaving the University. She claimed she quit before they could fire her. She had been commissioned by a new benefactor that would fund her research in totality, no matter how expensive the end result may be. All she had to do in exchange was develop her project to include a few specifications. Where would she ever get such opportunity from the red tape and underfunding of academia?
You cautioned her. A deal like that was too good to be true. Whoever offered it to her must have been desperate, and desperation was dangerous. What weren’t they telling her?
She told you the next thing, which sent a blow through your heart. She’d be leaving London, and she didn’t know for how long. The project was happening offshore, some island to the south, where a new laboratory was being built. The best and brightest were being recruited.
You grew ever more worried for her. Ships had only just begun charting the saltwater lake, and more had disappeared than had been sent. Those that had returned were scarred and haunted with wild stories too detailed to be mere sailor stories.
She again assured you that she knew what she was doing. Her employers were experts at handling international relations.
You became frustrated with her evasiveness. What happened to the days when you’d tell each other everything? Your voice rising now, you demanded to know. Who hired her?
Your cup slipped from your hands when she spoke. It was a good thing it was empty. Working with the Masters? Was she out of her mind? They were going to chew her up and spit her out as soon as they couldn’t extract any more use from her.
“A necessary evil,” she called it. “Did the Senate not work with Caesar?”
You reminded her what happened to the senators at the end of the play. You cautioned her. You tried your hardest to make her see reason. Setting aside all your ideological differences, this was simply too dangerous. The least painful outcome to this would be bad burns. “You're going too far this time. You can’t throw your life away like this. The Work needs you.” You reached for her hand, wishing you could voice the words stuck in your throat. I need you.
She countered with a question: what about you? Who were you to claim to care about caution with what you’d been studying on the ice? You were you to say she was going too far when you wanted to extinguish the world? That was different. How was it different? Because it was your idea and not hers? Because some clockwork dream told you so? She’s been having dreams, too, dreams of a future bathed in golden light that we will control, not any king or god.
“Which Master summoned you?” you begged to know, but she wouldn’t tell you, accusing you of distracting from the point.
“They think very highly of my research. They see the worth of my studies into optics, something the University never did. Something you never did.”
The point was that January and June were on very different paths. January and June were very different. Summer and winter, day and night, light and dark. This relationship wasn’t sustainable.
By now, anger was numbing your chest and making your hands shake. You agreed.
She got up to leave the tea room before you did. You heard the door open, and you heard her pause, looking back at you.
You wonder what would have happened if you had looked back, if you had looked at her one last time.
The few things she had left at your shared flat were gone when you got home. You moved not long afterward, unable to stay in that place alone.
Every day since that day, you have wondered what you could have done or said differently to make her stay with you. You know the answer is nothing. You could have never joined her on her crusade, and she was just as stubborn as you when it came to your goals.
You became even more reclusive. You never were one for people. That was always her strong suit, and without her, you felt like you were walking without a crutch. You threw yourself into your work, the only thing that made sense anymore.
Years passed. The news did what the news does best: it equivocated. The New Sequence does not exist; it is a conspiracy concocted to discredit the respectability of the Admiralty. The Dawn Machine is something whose existence cannot be confirmed or denied. The Masters never had involvement in such a thing. The only acknowledgement they made of the issue was Mr Fires announcing the suspension of the Icarian Cup race with a bitterness that suggested he didn’t care about human diversions but rather the failed project that had caused the cancellation. Was it him that hired June? Damn him. Damn all of them, but especially him. October chose the wrong one to target first.
You and your underground circles talked about the reality of the situation and what you should do about exposing the truth, but what good would it do if the public knew? Mass hysteria was fatal, and you couldn’t count on anyone not to doublethink and trust whatever truth their beloved Empress fed them. The machine was entirely out of control, sentient of its godhood against anyone’s plans and angry at its conception. Its chief engineers were missing or found encased in crystal (your heart leapt only once at this news, before you allowed the familiar stony curtain to descend). Nothing good could have ever come of this folly, and how much harder would it be to make the lights go out now?
More years passed. You worked and worked until you became Dean of Benthic, an achievement of a lifetime, an achievement that meant everything, proved someone like you had a place in academia. There were celebrations, but your heart wasn’t in it. The person you’d want to share this day with wasn’t here. No one even mentioned her anymore. Her lab had been condemned by the tragedy commission, emptied, and replaced with a coatroom. You did try to warn her what dangerous games she was playing with the Masters.
Even more years passed. Eventually, even work didn’t make sense anymore. Day after day, the same things. You all sat around talking about research, but what were you actually doing? What good did the ivory tower do for the revolution? You could approve grants for radical scholars, but then what? The harder you looked, the less you could find any tangible change occurring at the University.
There was only one way forward from here. You had no companion. You had no home. You had no career. There was nothing left for you. There was Nothing left for you.
June went Southwest. January went West.
You did not find what you expected at the Hurlers. You found something greater than you could ever have imagined. This changes nothing, because it has always been. This is not the key to nothing: it could be the key to everything. The Liberation of the Night. The secret of how to murder a sun.
You did not meet a new companion, because there was only ever one who you’d consider that close. An ally to the cause, but not to your heart.
One side of your mask looks forward, and the other looks back. You would never let anything compromise the Great Work: not your attachments, not your feelings, not care for your own safety or happiness. If the time came to make a difficult decision, you would without a second thought. If you had to choose revolution or love, you would always choose the former. Maybe that’s why you could never have her.
You’ve met new colleagues, wide-eyed and hopeful young people. Something about the zeal of the new generation manages to touch even your guarded heart. You’re one of the most senior council members in the Neath, which puts you in something of a mentoring position. Still, you can’t help holding people at arm’s length.
They have their whispered remarks about you, about your stone cold heart, about your ambition, about how you’ve dedicated more than almost anyone to the Liberation. You never say anything back to them; why should you care what others think as long as the work is completed? But if you could make them realize one thing, it would be that you are not frosty for sake of being cruel. You know firsthand how careless this world is, especially towards those that believe it could change. You know it’s likely they could be hurt, disappear, or die. That is not pessimism, that is not being as frigid as your namesake: that is reality. None of you are here because life was sunny and warm. None of you have been recruited because you are a stranger to suffering.
They always said January was the loneliest month: sunless, freezing, all color consumed by black and white. You look at it a different way: the serenity of a leafless forest, the hush that falls with fresh snow, the embrace of a quiet and unjudging dark. The light is full of sound and people all making demands of you and assumptions about you. How could you not embrace the night and all its comforts?
You seldom leave your solitude anymore, not only for your preference, but for your safety. Revolutionaries can’t act openly in a place like London. Still, there is the rare council meeting, and there’s something about a railway that you’ve been dragged to. Sometimes, on your rare ventures into the public, you pass someone wearing dark spectacles. You swear you see a little of her when you glance at their eyes.
There’s an underlying motivation to your studies, one you’d never admit to anyone and sometimes don’t even admit to yourself. Concentrate on the gaps between the spokes, the spaces between scattered light, the rests in the song. One day, the gaps might be wide enough to push through and find whatever happened to her.
When the lights have been extinguished, the New Sequence and the Masters have met their ends, and there is no one left to dictate what Is and Is-Not, she can finally return to you. You just have to hope that there’s something left to return. If you can only hold her for a second, if you can’t say more than seven words, “I’m sorry, I love you,” it will be enough.
The first star to fall will be no star, it will be that damned machine.