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I was sixteen when I knew that I didn't want to become a Magnetic. That I would love to end, but, most of all, that I didn’t want to die. I laughed then, my reflection grinning back at me through the void, realizing that these verities were twofold, as was anything Magnetic.
“Come to me,” her low voice chimed through the quarters, and I turned. The pinpricks and needles of stars in my back, I went over to where she sat. On this side of the wide, solid pane, a lesser dimness ruled, stretching shadows into graininess. They coiled back into their silky essence as I walked. I got down on my knees, to lay my head onto her lap, as if I were twelve again and newly fished out of wreckage I shouldn’t have survived, a little ball of flesh and bones curled up around the failing beat of my heart.
She continued brushing her hair as she spoke.
“Dualities.”
I knew the sermon by heart. The first Law of Magnetics. Attraction. I closed my eyes against the tang of saccharide enveloping me, the softness of her thighs, the warm light kissing the curve of her shoulders, the line of her cheek. Repulsion.
“Order and …” She stopped mid-stroke, comb and hand sinking down on me, who dared to not look up. Our magic turned into pain that which could have been a caress. Carefully brushing her hair from my brow, she breathed onto my ear: “… chaos. Where is your heart, little one?”
“With you,” I lied, but in fact it soared out, to share the terror of the refugees crammed into their brittle vessels.
“I know,” she said, and I know that you're lying, was what rang through my mind. I stayed in my forcefully contained stillness.
“Another duality for you to contemplate. We are and then we are not. What I create is what I will destroy when it is no longer of use to me.”
Her words made me sink into deeper slackness while I cursed what we were with all my heart.
When the warship arrived, High-Levels in black robes transported to our vessel to witness the execution.
She was taller and shone brighter than any other living being.
We stood silently and watched the ritual, her outer gown sliding to the floor, revealing white fabric. She walked into the airlock, which sealed shut behind her with a hiss. A screen submitted the recording in real time, so that we could follow every part of the punishment.
Back straight, eyes closed halfway, she slipped out of her footwear and wound her headscarf in the pattern of old. It shone starkly against all the blackness and billowed as the outer door opened, the void greedily sucking at the air, and her stepping into it on bare feet.
There was a burning itch on my face, but I didn’t even blink.
Since the day that I was found drifting in space, they told me I was like her, and thus would become what she was. I fought against it, but I was so very scared.
Because you had to change the heart, the boiling core of something, to shatter its connection to the Magnetic field.
She smelled faintly of burned flesh and wet laundry when she came back through the airlock, declared the deed done, and that solar winds would do the rest. She retreated to her quarters straightaway.
It was, after all, hard work to kill an entire planet.