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Zinnia stays in the chapel after the evening prayer to Mother Void to clean up.
Privately, she feels closer to Her in moments like this, as she sweeps the skinny aisles between the pews or tucks a wayward prayer book back onto the stack, all little chores that will be undone by the chaos of the day to come, wiped away until it is as if she never did them at all. Every moment of existence is a constant struggle against entropy, and it makes her intimately, warmly aware of the way the Void looms on all sides. It was where she came from and where she will go, and it expands in her ribcage in the moments in these peaceful moments in between.
By the time she’s finished, the twilight of the sky through the tall, high windows has faded and darkened to a starless black. She steps out into it and takes a deep breath.
One of Zinnia’s fellow boarders runs past, obviously late for curfew. The darkness makes her anonymous, a gray shape among black, except for when she dashes close enough to trigger the automatic lights strung up above the path to the dorms. Then, for just a moment, she’s lit in brilliant light, before she sprints out of reach and back into the darkness, only to start the whole process over again at the next light. The lights shut off, one by one, in her wake, so that it seems as if Light itself were following her.
Zinnia pulls her hood up, and locks the chapel door behind her, and smiles.
She stays out of range of the automatic sensors, letting her eyes adjust back to the darkness. She knows the way by heart, has wandered it backwards and with her eyes closed. And everyone knows she always volunteers to clean up the chapel, so she has all the time in the world to get back.
Case in point - she meanders her way up to the door of her dormitory hall at least twenty minutes past curfew and finds it isn’t even locked. She ducks inside and finds the hall monitor on duty, Lissa, utterly uninterested in her, though Lissa delights in interrogating latecomers for little slips of gossip. “Lock up after you,” is all she says to Zinnia, sprawled sideways in an armchair pointed at the door but looking down at her own fascinating hangnails instead of at Zinnia. “One of these days Sister Vos is going to come right at curfew, and I’m going to be carrying water for a week because I left it open for you.”
“You could always lock up and then get up when I knock,” Zinnia said, turning to fuss with the ancient lock, which has at some point in its long service had its bolt bent at the slightest angle, making it hard to slide home.
“No,” Lissa says flatly. “Hey, do you think I could convince Sister Vos that fishnets are acceptable to Mother Void as long as they’re black?”
“No, but please try to convince her when I’m there,” Zinnia says as the bolt finally jams its way into place. “Goodnight!”
Lissa grunts as Zinnia makes it out of the common room and into the hall. The doors on either side slide past, most of them closed, one or two of them cracked or all the way open even as the girls inside change or argue or trade contraband. Just as Zinnia passes Oress’s door, Oress herself shoves her entirely naked torso out her own door to shout, “Hey, anyone have a tampon?”
Zinnia walks faster and just barely manages to avoid whatever is thrown at Oress.
“I didn’t say a pad!” Oress shouts as Zinnia finally makes it to her own door.
It’s not just hers, of course. But Vellin is already passed out, belly-down and fully dressed, on her bed, and Kiya’s bunk is empty as she is no doubt huddling in the third floor bathroom and furtively blowing smoke out its window with a pack of other girls.
Zinnia’s own bunk, the bottom one, isn’t empty. Chibera lies there, sprawled out upside down, her bare ankles resting on Zinnia’s headboard and her arms crossed behind her head. Her skirt, already rolled up until it’s far shorter than regulation, has flipped up enough that it’s more like a belt, exposing the long lines of her legs. She’s taken off her tie and left it strewn like a ribbon across her own waist, but otherwise she’s still in uniform, the shoulders of her blazer bunching up enough that her cheek squishes against it as she lolls her head up to look at Zinnia.
“Hi,” Chibera says, dark eyes sparkling.
“Hi,” Zinnia says, and bends down to kiss her.
Zinnia is tall enough that this maneuver requires a bit of awkward ducking under Kiya’s bunk, but it’s one she’s pulled off almost as often as she’s walked back from chapel after dark, so it’s done easily enough. Chibera leans up to help, grabbing the front of Zinnia’s blazer for leverage, and Zinnia cups the back of her head as she kisses her, feeling little prickles against her fingers where Chibera’s shaved hair is starting to grow back in.
“I saw you running back from wherever you went instead of evening prayer,” Zinnia says as they part.
Chibera grins. “Don’t tell on me.”
“I won’t,” Zinnia says, letting go of Chibera’s head to trail her fingers over to her cheek instead. “You looked beautiful.”
It’s insufficient to explain what Zinnia actually felt, seeing Chibera light up the dark, a temporary and fleeting spark. But Chibera’s grin softens, and Zinnia thinks maybe she gets it anyway.
“I actually was coming to see you,” Chibera says, swinging her feet up and wriggling up to sit. Zinnia sits beside her, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, and lets her swinging foot knock against Chibera’s. “I wanted you to come out with me.”
Zinnia nuzzles the side of her face, feeling Chibera’s ticklish giggle in response. “We’re past curfew,” she says. “Lissa won’t let us in again if we go out. Actually, Lissa won’t let us out at all. She’ll keep us for an hour, trying to figure out where we’re going, until it’s too late to see whatever you wanted to see anyway.”
“I have ways in and out of here that Lissa would never even dream of,” Chibera retorts, turning her face to nuzzle back.
From her bed, Vellin groans. “Go flirt somewhere else,” she shouts, muffled, into her pillow, and then drags the sides of it up over her ears.
Chibera laughs, ducking her head until her nose presses against Zinnia’s neck, while Zinnia tries to reach over her to get to her pillow and throw it at Vellin. She mostly presses further into Chibera, until Chibera, still laughing, wriggles up to stand, whirling around to present her open palms in invitation to Zinnia.
Zinnia sighs - but she grabs Chibera’s hand and squeezes it, letting Chibera pull her up and out of the room.
Together they clamber up the stairs, passing a little knot of girls who are playing cards on the third floor landing instead of any of their rooms for some reason, then going all the way up to the fourth floor, where the sister on duty sleeps.
Zinnia pulls up short as they creep onto the fourth floor. “This is how you sneak in and out?” she hisses, looking over her shoulder as if Sister Vos will form out of the shadows any moment. “Are you crazy?”
“Crazy for you,” Chibera says, and Zinnia comes very close to ruining the whole thing by knocking her into a wall.
But they make it down the hall and to a dusty room at the very end, where a bare bedframe and a single desk are the only evidence that anyone ever slept there. Chibera clambers onto the desk and shoves up at the ceiling, which is when Zinnia realizes there’s some kind of attic hatch up there.
“Should you really be showing me all your secrets?” Zinnia asks as Chibera coaxes a ladder down. “Aren’t you worried I’ll turn you in?”
“I trust you’ll keep it between yourself and Mother Void,” Chibera says as she clambers up the ladder, then turns to offer Zinnia a hand.
Zinnia ends up needing it, though she does try to get up without it. Her hands go numb at the oddest times, and now they have a pins-and-needles feeling to them as she and Chibera squeeze through the attic shaft and out a door, onto the roof.
It’s gotten a bit cooler since she first entered the dorm house for the night, but she’s in her full uniform, the version with pressed slacks, while Chibera is barefoot and in a skirt as tiny as she could make it. Zinnia shrugs off her blazer and shoves it at Chibera, even though Chibera is still wearing her own. “For your legs,” she says, and Chibera gifts her another one of those big, sparkling grins of hers, fizzy and effervescent even in the dark.
“Thanks,” Chibera whispers, wrapping the arms of the blazer around her hips so the back of it hangs over the front of her legs. “Hey. Look up.”
Zinnia looks up.
It’s usually hard to see the stars from the school. There are always too many lights and too many distractions, girls yelling at each other or lightly defacing the windows with greasy handprints and foggy breath. But now, they’re high enough up that they can avoid some of the light pollution, and Zinnia can see the pinpricks of stars puncturing the void.
“Huh,” Zinnia says, squinting up.
It's not particularly impressive. Even up here, there's enough ambient light pollution that she can see some stars here and there, but not an endless array of little lights and riots of color. Which is preferable, honestly. Zinnia knows stars are considered beautiful, but she doesn't really like that kind of thing. She likes the quiet, and stillness, and inevitability of the end.
And Chibera. She likes Chibera a lot, even if it’s hard to square with the rest of it.
But Chibera must hear Zinnia’s ambivalence in her voice, because she crowds in, the warmth of her shoulder pressing through her blazer to Zinnia’s bare arm. “No, wait. Up - little to the left - no, not that far - ”
“You could tell me what I’m looking for,” Zinnia says, a little distracted by Chibera’s warm breath against her ear.
“That’s cheating,” Chibera says. “Okay! Right there! Wait for it.”
Zinnia squints at the starry sky and waits for it.
And then, all of a sudden, she sees it. A star winks out, and part of the sky goes that much darker.
Zinnia straightens, eyes widening. “Was that - ?”
“Our original sun,” Chibera says gleefully. “Did you forget?”
Zinnia had. But it came rushing back to her: herself and Chibera, all of eight years old, in a lower form classroom, learning about the death of their original solar system. A nighttime lesson, a first for them and a source of much rowdiness in their class, where their teacher let them look through a telescope, one by one, at the light still coming from the place their species had once called home, so long ago, still visible even though it had long burnt out.
Talk to me when the light stops, Zinnia had said, annoyed she’d missed evening prayer to look at a bunch of dumb lights.
But Chibera remembered, all these years. And she’d calculated it exactly, so Zinnia could see exactly when the light stopped.
Zinnia whirls around to kiss Chibera right on her laughing mouth, grabbing her arm to keep from tipping over. And Chibera grabs back, winding her other arm around Zinnia’s back, pressing her close.
“What do you say?” Chibera says, smiling, when they part. “Worth breaking some rules to come out here with me?”
Zinnia stares at her sparkling eyes, the most beautiful lights she’s ever seen, and smiles. “Every time.”