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SUA TAKES THE first breath and starts their song—Mizi had insisted, after all, that she sing first.

Oh, my clematis. 

Hope bloomed from the abyss. 

Oh, my clematis. 

Always be by my side. 

It's all she can do to keep herself from crying. Mizi can only offer a nervous smile, oblivious.

IN YOUR VEINS sits stardust. Sua traces the typeface once, twice. Running over the cream-coloured pages, she pinches between her fingers, reverent in knowing that Seokja unnie had curried the little favour she had with Mother to get the book, handing Our World's Way to Sua before she left home for Anakt Garden to keep her busy if she was too shy to play with the other kids. Her finger lingers on the line. In your veins sits stardust. 

Sua scours the page. That is, of course, because all matter in our infinitesimal universe persists, existing all at once, never to truly be created or destroyed despite being pieced together anew. It cycles through our world, drifting as the iotas of dust our lungs respirate with and the dirt caught in the crannies of fossils from species long lost. The passage is punctuated by the image of a man brushing away debris from a half-concealed skull belonging to an extinct Earthian species, crouched over dirt and sand in the searing sun despite the sweat lining his brow and the mud caking his pant legs, rolled up to the mid shin.

The matter belonging to the core of a star that once scintillated immeasurably bright across its tiny scope of the galaxy, sequestered in a field of other stars vying for something to see its light and bask in it, to make something of its life of burning until there's no more left of it, may very well sit in the marrow lodged within your mother's knee and in the back tooth of your closest companion—beneath it, the candid photograph of a child with their mouth open as their mother probes within with floss, gently attempting to pry a baby tooth out. And in the light that is still being reflected back to us here on earth, prevailing lightyears of distance and the gentle agony of time's crawl, is the star that overstays its welcome, nothing more than a dying carcass lodged in our distant memories. 

The Composition of Stars reads the chapter's titling, no different than the subject matter of every other section within this book, stuffed with the formulae used to calculate the distance of celestial objects and the know-how of black holes and soon-to-be supernovas simmering with energy that thrums beneath their surface, waiting to be revitalized. But the chapter's opening sentence lingers with her in a sea of clinical language. In your veins sits stardust.

Sua already knows what runs through her veins, the compositional ratio of erythrocytes and leukocytes to thrombocytes, the percentage of plasma in the total sum of her blood that carries nutrients to be distributed and toxins to be discarded, though Ivan peers over her shoulder and sneers, "I bet there's only gross things in your veins. Like dead bugs, and tar, and black licorice."

Indiscriminately, Sua slams the book shut and tucks it beneath her arm. "You've never even had licorice," she rebuts, but Ivan cocks a brow anyway, lips turning with amusement at how she guards the book.

"What?" he says, scooching closer to where she sits cross-legged on the grass. "Were you reading something naughty, Sua-ah?"

"Don't call me that, you scoundrel. I'm older than you."

"Noona, then? Is noona scared that someone will see what she's reading and take away her precious book, just like how she's scared they'll take away her sweet little Mizi?" Ivan laughs at his own stupid proposal, entirely unaware of the speed at which Sua plots his imminent death. The large branch near the tree they sit by has never looked sharper. He continues, "Don't worry, I won't tell," then makes a zipping motion over his lips, smiling. "My lips are sealed."

"Just shut up altogether, Ivan. No one needs to hear you speak." She brushes the stray blades of grass off her clothes and looks away, scanning the false dimensions of the garden, its static sky and uniformly circular trees. "I'm sure Till would agree you'd be doing everyone a favour."

Sua ignores the slivers she sees from her peripheral vision of Ivan's crumbling expression before he laughs again and looks away. "Someone's feisty," he murmurs. "No wonder you're stuck burying your head in weird books whenever Mizi's not around because you've got no one else to talk to, either."

"For the last time, it's not weird, but you clearly can't comprehend anything more complex than two plus two–"

"What's weird?"

Sua whips her head forward. At the foot of the hill stands Mizi, flushed and somewhat breathless from dance practice. Her hair is damp, and glasses are missing from her face. Her soft features are set with an innocent confusion that makes Sua's heart swell when she asks, "What are you guys doing?"

Ivan butts in before Sua can get a word out. He shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly. "Oh, nothing. Just on what books Sua-ah's been reading, even if she's too shy to show it."

"Oh!" Mizi scampers up the hill and drops to sit beside her, throwing her arms around Sua as she lays her head on her shoulder. Her hair smells faintly of sweet fruit. "Let me see, let me see!"

Pulling her book from her side, Sua gently cards it open until she lands on the chapter she is at. "Here," she points. "I was reading about stars. The entire book is about space." She glares at Ivan on that last word. "Just space," she punctuates, and Ivan looks away sheepishly.

Mizi squints at the text. Sua sighs. "Put on your glasses, Mizi."

She fights a pout but obliges, retrieving her glasses case from her pocket. Slipping them out of the case, Mizi slots them onto her face haphazardly, which Sua gently corrects as she nudges them into place on her nose. At the brush of her palm against her cheek, Mizi melts into Sua's touch, nuzzling into her hands. "Oh, Sua, I missed you so much."

Sua feels her cheeks burn and ignite at the pointed look Ivan shoots her before looking away with a whistle. "I miss you, too, Mizi," she says quietly, blocking out the oversized oaf in the corner of her eye. If he must bother somebody, why doesn't he bug that guitar brat instead? At least he gets something out of being a nuisance to the boy he wants: his attention.

Mizi's smile curls into something quieter, eyes creased into little crescents and pink with bashfulness. Possessiveness swarms Sua with the vigour of a blight to a fecund crop. No one else could make Mizi smile like that, she relishes, not even Ivan, who Mizi insists on rubbing elbows with despite Sua's grievances and the guitar brat's pinched expressions whenever the two are together, though the shame of agreeing with the guitar brat forces her to wring her hands and leave Mizi to frolic with Ivan whenever.

The other girl snuggles against Sua's shoulder, smiling up at her. "So, what about stars?"

"Stars?" Ivan says without missing a beat, even if that beat is the twitch of Sua's eye. "They've got to be pretty big if we can see them from all the way here, right?"

"Totally!" Mizi agrees, pulling onto her knees and spreading her arms wide, "Super big! They've got all those pretty patterns, too, when they're put together as constellations! I bet it'd be so fun to live on a star, too!"

"You can't live on stars, Mizi," Sua says gently, and when Mizi's excited expression drops the slightest bit with a frail "Really?" Sua ignores everything her book has ever said about human needs and environmental conditions to survive in space and acquiesces, "Or, well, on any of the stars we know so far. But the chance of it is out there somewhere, I'm sure."

"I didn't take you to be the type to believe in far-flung ideas like that, Sua-ah."

"And I didn't take you to be the type of creep that hangs around random girls when his next practice session is in ten minutes."

Ivan laughs. "Guilty as charged." He stands, saluting Mizi with a wink. "See you later, missy."

"Can you go already?"

"Bye, Sua-ah," he says, finally slinking away. Mizi calls after him and vigorously waves while Sua drops her gaze back to her book spread over her lap as she thumbs through its contents.

"Good riddance," she mutters.

Mizi turns her head back to her. "Do you have to be so standoffish? Ivan's just trying to be nice. Maybe if you weren't so stubborn, you'd see how dependable he is sometimes, like when he piggyback carries me on his back and runs around the garden for as long as he can when we're bored."

"And if he drops you?" Sua says. "And your head cracks open?" She's heard all the whispers about the kid from the year before them, the 49th, who had his brain spilled across a rock after tripping from a bout of roughhousing with another boy. Sometimes, when Mizi's busy with a class they don't share in the evening, Sua sits by his grave and quietly does her work away from everyone else. "What then?"

"Then I wouldn't be mad because I know it'd be an accident, and all the times he's been good to me by helping me out when he sneaks me his food when I'm on a diet or by going over a complicated text from Music and Religion with me when I'm confused, will cancel it out." Mizi balls both her hands, then presses them together. "The good will neutralize the bad." Her hands shift into a prayer gesture. "And I'd ask whatever watches over us from the Great Anakt to be nice to him, pretty please, because I know Ivan would be sad about it, too."

Pretty please. Only Mizi could believe in miracles like that in this world of theirs, one where her death would mean something to the Great Anakt and where Ivan would ever feel a sliver of remorse when he spends his time terrorizing the boy he's so hung up on. Sua sighs. "You have too much hope in that scoundrel."

"Be nice!"

Sua shakes her head. "I wouldn't let anything like that happen to you, Mizi. I wouldn't ever let anyone take you away from me, not even the Great Anakt."

Mizi laughs, then a twinkling sound brighter than the light that any star could muster in her presence. Sua wonders what star's light is carrying the memory of them right now, from when they first met and she watched Mizi burst into tears to the day they found each other again and couldn't let each other go, shaking with giggles in the grass as they clung to one another. "The only way we'd be apart is if you left me, Sua. You wouldn't do that, would you? You wouldn't ever run back to the stars you fell from, right?"

"No," Sua answers. When she looks up, the artificial sky has switched to its model for dusk, the first glimmers of starlight strung emerging along its darkening horizon. "Not for a million lightyears, no."

She forgets about the stars when Mizi tangles their arms and pushes her down so they can lay and watch, the light of those distant bodies imprinted in her eyes. Sua thinks she could burn forever, pinned high amongst the heavens, in that gaze if it meant Mizi would never look away from her.

ON ANOTHER PREDICTABLY cyclically mandated pleasant day in the Anakt Garden, Sua wakes to Mizi's rapid shouts and cries. "Sua! Sua!"

Blearily, she blinks at her. "Mizi?"

"They're here!" she beams as Sua rubs her eyes into clarity, running a hand through her cropped hair.

One of the garden's instructor segyein enters her room. Their beady, squalid eyes zero in on them both, dragging over Mizi's hand on her shoulder and the other around her arm. Sua pulls Mizi closer as they garble, translated by the projection their wristwatch emits. [The inspectors are here. Don your uniforms and line up with your cohorts in the front. Don't keep them waiting.] 

Sometime later, Sua wanders mindlessly, tuning out the chatter filling the air as she files through the crowds, jostled by the push of bodies until she finds her cohort's line.

Mizi, three queues to the right of her, winks at her and mouths you got this until the guitar brat stumbles behind her in line. He flushes bright red when she smiles at him and starts up a conversation despite his sudden resemblance to the Earthian tomato—a delicacy that Mother, particularly pleased with Sua's acceptance into Anakt Garden, had afforded her with when she pulled her by the leash to an opulent restaurant specializing in the lost art of Earthian food.

Seokja unnie had dressed her that day, delicately powdering her face and fastening her dress. She brushes Sua's hair and muses, "No wonder Mother loves you the most."

No older than eight then, Sua watches herself in the mirror as the older girl sorts through hair accessories scattered over the vanity countertop, deciding between bows and headbands or clips and ribbons. Eventually, she settles on a white headband, matching the knee-length dress she fitted her in. Seokja finishes doing her hair and meets Sua's gaze in the mirror with a wry, weathered smile. "So small. So dainty. So perfect. What will you do when the segyein come and pick you, deciding you're worth letting audition to step up to the slaughter of Alien Stage, Sua-ah?"

Sua only blinks at her reflection and sees the image of Seokja behind her, her lip wobbling as she rakes a hand through her hair, her palm against her scarred, sightless eye. "What will you do then, Sua-ah?" She laughs, an aborted noise that crawls out of her throat as phantoms do from their attics they're bound to, wailing in their shackles. Seokja unnie slams a fist on the vanity countertop, a perfume bottle toppling and shattering from the force. The concentrated scent of lilies stings her nose. "Answer me, Sua! Do you think a pathetic, weak girl like you can endure, Sua?!"

"-Sua–"

-an elbow lodges into her side. Sua startles. She nearly stumbles.

"It's our cohort's turn soon," says Ivan, pointing at the group performing for the council of visiting segyein, most of which she recognizes. Mother, of course, who causes Sua to stiffen when she realizes she'd been watching her all this time; Ivan's segyein Unsha, surrounded by his bodyguards, his wife in tow who whispers to the other female aliens as she coos over each student. Mizi's segyein Shine, stark amongst the others with her ethereal figure and soft-swept eyes, tenderly watches Mizi as she anxiously braids and unbraids her hair, while Heperu, the iron fist that meticulously trained the King of the Stage himself, eyes their lot in scrutiny, sizing up their capability in comparison to his prized pet. Other segyein owners mill the inspectors' table, skittish of the results for the fruits of their labour.

The cohort at the front finishes their demonstrations and returns to their section. The inspectors scrawl their final notes before the head of the council, a segyein with a face as shrivelled as Sua's fingers after she stays in the bath too long, motions for the next cohort, Mizi's group, to come forward. Shine's eyes are wet as Mizi approaches, beaming at her. Ivan elbows her in the arm again. "And to think you almost slept through missy's turn, Sua-ah."

"Why do you even call her that?" she whispers harshly.

"I-" Sua smacks Ivan's arm when he starts too loudly, "-I thought that was how her name was said when we first met, honestly." His expression slightly blanches at whatever memory the admission summons. "It just stuck around, I guess."

"Then stop," she says, brows furrowed as she watches the way the inspectors scrutinize Mizi, picking apart every note she hits and every step she takes, waiting for her to crumble under the pressure as she takes the centre of the formation for the bridge of the song. Mizi's smile remains easy and loose,her steps precise, but the strain of her shoulders betrays her.

"Why?" Ivan says, and Sua imagines hanging him from a tree using the sleeve of his shirt, double the length of Sua's—plenty of length for a noose, she thinks. He leans in, watching the performance over Sua's shoulder. "What's it to you?"

Abrupt clapping cuts through whatever biting response Sua nearly musters. Ivan straightens and pins on a smile as he claps, with Sua following suit. She erases her glower a moment too late when Mizi scans the crowds for her, and her hopeful expression falters. Ivan snarks a laugh. "Do you like me so much that you've started mistaking missy for me, Sua-ah?"

The inspector segyein begins warbling for the next cohort to step up. [Cohort 7 to the front. Ensure that everyone is able to contribute to the harmony and that there is no infighting to impede your performance.]

Their wrinkled eyes set on Ivan and Sua. [You have five minutes to prepare.] 

Sua takes her spot in the formation and waits as the others finish their incessant squabbling over who gets what part and who gets to stay in the centre the longest. Ivan stands at the edge, allotted the position to ensure visual balance despite his gargantuan proportions—or so the instructor segyein said, with whatever else they did when lecturing them about teamwork in preparation for the showcase. Still, Sua is grateful that Ivan is four people away from her.

She runs through the song and dances with muscle memory, letting her thoughts wander. Did she upset Mizi? Can she even see Mizi after the showcase to explain to her? Most owners would take their pets home for the day, parading them around while bragging about whatever score they'll be given after all this. Mother will no doubt want to take her to check her weight and figure, ensuring that Sua hasn't softened in the places her skin is meant to stretch taut over her bones.

Soon enough, the song ends, and Sua presses her eyes shut as she strikes her final pose. She holds it with battered breath until the inspector segyein calls for them to move. The others scurry off to their respective owners, preening for attention. But Sua stops to sift through the hurdles of pet-humans and segyeins for a blip of pink amongst the masses. Her heart sinks every moment Mizi evades her sight, but the guilt is short-lived once replaced with an iron-heavy dread. "Sua." 

Mother always was too stubborn to debase herself to simple translators. A garbled imitation of human language falls from her lips instead, mimicking the stuttering white noise that the faulty, sonic-based human technology of gramophones and record players produce, rendered an exotic display in any high-end segyein's collection; a sign that she can do what no one else can, hiring experts to scavenge the carcasses of human culture left to take her pick amongst its collection, stringing stolen words together as she flouts, "Did your mother enroll you at the garden just for you to achieve the same score as some low-class segyein's pathetic pet?" 

Sua turns, slow, measured, and bows her head.

Mother's beady, compound-structured eyes zero in on her, picking her apart from every angle. Sua wonders how her eyes contort her likeness, how her tenuous form can stretch so wide in Mother's eyes every time she adds another day to her fasts, every bite she takes a luxury lest she lose herself to fleeting indulgences. Mother cocks her head and tuts. "You've gained, too." 

She stares at the grass harder, inextricably conscious of the fake blades caught in her shoes, pressed against the soft of her heel. Her breath sits spooled under her tongue, stifled, with her stomach bobbing as it pulls in, flattening to acceptability.

Mother tips her head up. "Have you not seen your deplorable state, Sua? Are you so ignorant?"

Sua forces her wobbling lip flat. What can she say? Yes? No? That there are no mirrors around? That looking into the pond's reflection makes her wonder what it's like to slip beneath its surface and crawl to its bottom, holding her breath until she doesn't need it anymore? That every time Mizi holds her from behind, she presses her hand against her abdomen, frowning when she feels nothing but smooth skin.

Mizi's hand drags up to her ribs, fingers slipping over the ridge of a protruding bone. "Have you been eating lately, Sua?"

Seokja unnie circles her pinky finger and thumb around her wrist, frowning when the pads of her fingers don't meet. "Have you been sneaking food, Sua-ah?"

She swallows her breath down altogether and forces her stomach to remain taut. "The instructor segyein haven't seen any issues regarding my diet and my performance output–"

Sua staggers backwards. She topples onto her knees, clutching her smarting cheek, eyes stinging as the sight of Mother blurs in and out of focus in her wet vision. Humiliation burns her features and spears her chest—only lacking pets feel the agony of Mother's raised hand, and Sua hasn't heard Seokja unnie collapse in the kitchen every night wailing, surrendering her soul to beg to be seen for more than what the skin stretched over her bones can offer, just to be a lacking pet–

"It's a shame," Mother says coolly. She secures a leash around the girl's neck. "You do it to yourself, Sua. Tonight's pet banquet has been the buzz amongst all segyeins." She tugs Sua to her feet, apathetic to her stumbling as she rises from bruised knees. The segyein's voice drops to a gentle murmur, caressing the blooming welt that stains her skin, supple and delicate, befitting of the kind of pet that crumbles so quickly. "And yet all I have to show for it is a pudgy, undignified mutt that can't even control herself before she ruins herself."

Sua wobbles forward, tongue tucked between her teeth as she blinks away the blurriness of her gaze. Distantly, Sua notes, she hears something fall into the grass—she thinks it to be a pebble until the small object shatters beneath her shoe as she hobbles after the segyein, furiously wiping the hot tears that fall and sting her cheeks.

Mother clicks her tongue. "Wish your sister Sunhwa good luck tonight for her debut at the banquet, pet."

SUA DOESN’T SEE Mizi for another three weeks.

She sees all her pictures, though.

Pictures that make her heart stutter as she clicks between each one of Mizi, red-lipped and in figure-hugging dresses, in silks that cut away at the thighs to offer a supple view and feather boas draped across her scantily exposed shoulders. Everywhere Sua looks, she finds her: across billboards and in snapshots with millions of views and likes from leering segyeins, plopped into TV commercials as she dances along to every jingle, rendered an intimate, candid shot of a girl enjoying herself, and not a meticulously crafted endorsement of whatever asinine product. Videos of her busking in the streets go even more viral, of her joyously singing amongst segyein fans, teaching them the choreography that only her slender, human body can transmute into something beautiful, and nonetheless smiling at their mindless gyrations in imitation of her.

Worst of all, though, are the clips of the pet banquet.

Seokja unnie sits them down to watch each broadcast as they air. Among the gaggle of girls, there'd been sneering over Sunhwa taking her place, similar in age and wildly popular as a model for Mother's beauty and maintenance brands. But the coring emptiness brought by her week-long fast had made it difficult to care about anything other than trying not to bite her hand off. Even Sunhwa had given up on scraping for gratification from Sua, inert to everything, and settled for instead sending her uncharitable looks every morning when Mother measured everyone's weight and the inches of their waist, harping on Sua'a fluctuating numbers the loudest.

Sua focuses on her book, instead, now on the chapter for orbits of various astronomical objects, as the others giggle and gossip about who's wearing what and when the performances will start.

For many, the idea of orbiting another isn't a far-off thought. Groups of friends may circulate around its most popular member, the lifeblood of this network of connections. Lovers may find themselves in comparison to our solar system's Pluto and Charon, named after he who reigns over the realm of the dead and his loyal ferryman who stewards new souls forward in Pluto's service. It was the latter that caused the former to lose its status amongst the true planets of their system with their mutual orbit, for true planets do not debase themself to the level of their moon—painting Pluto a feeble sight in comparison to Jupiter and its harem of moons that all vie for his attention, and, as though hand-in-hand, Charon couldn't let go of Pluto, no matter the selfishness of the act. 

The dwarf planet and its moon are notable in other ways, too, as both will always show the same face to the other, with its other side hidden. If you continue with the metaphor of them as lovers, you ought to question what it'd take for the other to realize they only know half of who they love, or will only ever know the half they're given, for when their orbits inevitably decay and the two inch closer together at their periapsis, more in union than ever, their orbit will collapse as Charon, smaller than Pluto, is splintered into infinitesimal fragments by the other object's atmosphere, leaving Pluto without any closure. 

"Sua-ah, look!"

But with its four other moons, Pluto always had others orbiting around it, yearning for it. What's the loss of one in the grand scheme of things? Even Earth, ever the loyalist to its singular permanent moon, so significant she simply is 'the moon' to all that look up at her, has had smaller moons join its orbits now and then, flirting with new company. Perhaps a new moon altogether will form in Charon's place, coalescing the debris left behind by the collision and the other dust and gas present, taking what's best of the original. 

Sua looks up. Her book falls from her hands, clattering onto the ground.

Beautiful is a failure of a word, Sua thinks. It says too little; it stretches over too much. But beauty is a weapon and Sua is its victim with how Mizi's tender smile crinkles at the eyes, illuminated a dazzling amber in the warm light of the banquet hall that drapes across her powder pink ball gown, and tinkles in the reflection of the gleaming gems that are strung around her neck and line her wrists as Ivan takes Mizi's hand, clad in a charcoal-coloured suit with that same powder pink as the colour of his boutonnière, the camera flickering to a shot of him smiling, and kisses it.

The camera pans out to reveal her hand on his shoulder and his around her waist as they gently waltz, mirrored by a thousand other pairs in the ballroom, swirling around each other as they drift through the space like jellyfish across the drift of oceans, steady, rhythmic. "Like they're made for each other," Seokja unnie dreamily sighs. Sua thinks of all the times she crawled up the attic steps and caught the older girl lost in the motions of a waltz, hand outstretched for a partner that was never there with an audience of dust and cobwebs, but all she can feel is the unrelenting desire to scream and tear out her hair when Seokja unnie catches her gaze and her expression withers. "Oh, Sua-ah, I'm so sorry, I didn't know–"

When she pulls herself up and grabs her book to retreat, she only hears fragments of whatever Seokja unnie yells after her. Sua stomps up the stairs to retreat to her room, a luxury she'd earned with her top scores for her exams last semester. "Wait!"

Seokja unnie clamours up the stairs, lifting the skirt of her long dress as she inches towards Sua. "Sua-ah, wait, please, let me talk to you."

"Sometimes I forget you're so young, Sua-ah," Seokja unnie says, tucking a stray strand of hair behind Sua's ear. "I always thought a girl as daft as you would struggle at Anakt Garden, being so small, so easily frightened." Her thumb caresses the younger girl's cheek. "But I should've seen all along that you wouldn't be captive to your abilities or intelligence. It'd be to your emotions."

The older girl gives a brittle smile when Sua looks up at her. "I'm sorry that boy didn't choose you, Sua-ah. Sometimes, when we're young, the things that we want so dearly can't only be ours."

Sua rips away from her touch. "I don't want him!"

"You don't have to lie, Sua-ah, I understand–"

"Understand what? Understand because Mother can't even look at you after she–" Sua's words wane as Seokja unnie's expression withers, "–she–"

Sua retreats into her room. As she pulls the door closed, watching Seokja unnie's pained, wet eyes remain on her through a shrinking sliver of space, she whispers, "Just forget it."

She ignores the sob emanating from outside before footsteps drag down the stairs until silence sets in again. Sua crumbles, burying her face in her hands as her knees hit the ground with a bruising slam.

Sometimes, when we're young, the things we want so dearly can't only be ours. 

She should be happy, shouldn't she? Happy that Mizi's dreams of performing for everyone who has ever loved her are coming true before her eyes, to dance, to sing, and to cheer as she inches closer to standing on that star-studded stage? So then, why does it hurt so much? Why does her very mind feel like it'll collapse and splinter into a thousand little pieces? Why does her heart shudder with each convulsion of movement, aching where it sits within her whenever Mizi is lost in the warmth of someone else's gaze, so far from where she can reach?

In your veins sits stardust. 

Something falls and shatters to the ground as Sua wails, slipping between the gaps of her shaking hands, once, twice, thrice, as the pain nudges deeper into her skull, carving itself a home until she looks up from her hands and realizes, oh, I'm crying stars.

Stars, shattered across her floor, splinters reflecting broken beams of coloured light across her floor, pink, blue, and green; stars, pooled atop her hands, crystalline in shape as she gently shakes them to watch as they glimmer yellow, orange, and purple; stars, stitched in the sky, blinking back at her as Sua catches their gaze out the window, wondering did you send these down to me? Did you tear yourselves out of your standpoint within the murky galaxy, travelling light years, to land in my sweaty hands? Did you? 

Her blurry vision shakes as she struggles to focus on the blank wall before her. Sua sets the stars on her lap and rubs her eyes dry, rapidly blinking to fend off the burning sensation in them. Then, she pries open her book and hurriedly flips through its pages until she lands on The Composition of Stars again. She skips past the pages that detail the Earth-bound cosmos, sequestered to that tiny pocket of the universe they called the solar system until she lands on the gnostic musings the author indulged in far too frequently:

Of course, when discussing the composition of stars, calculations of mass, gravity, and distance aside, there is one more source of genesis for these celestial bodies set within the ethers above: the most agonized of mortal tears, causing iridescent crystals to erupt into brilliance in the likeness of stars. 

And, of course, do men of science denounce the mystical idea of tears turning to stars, reducing it to a rare medical condition where enough salt buildup within the eye that fails to be excreted through regular flushing like crying causes the eye to burn and itch until crystalline salt pellets fall from the organ in large chunks. But there is a kind of glory in mystifying our pain, a kind of comfort in making something marvellous out of the horribly mortal feeling of, selfishly, foolishly, wanting what is not yours to keep. 

Some cultures believe in Vega and Altair, others in Zhinü and Niulang, Catherine and Heathcliff, Gatsby and Daisy, or Hamlet and Ophelia—thwarted by a malign star, as they say. But perhaps the stars aren't so callous. Perhaps they hear the cries of lovelorn souls and abandon their lofty seats that render any mortal mere dust and reach them the only way they can, for the heart is an eye, and the only way to bleed it dry from that which it aches for is to keep it from looking for what it cannot have. When Ophelia lay within the pond, slowly sinking deeper into its grasp from the weight of her skirt, fraught with the madness that drove her to be nothing but a lost woman, in the wake of her cries, there must have been stars bobbing within the waters, drowning with her. 

Sua pinches her eyes shut and laughs, pressing the book shut. She's had enough of stars. She gently lays the crystals on the ground, pulls her window shut, drags the curtains close, and curls up in her bed beneath her blanket.

"Mizi," she breathes in the dark. Her head swims. "Oh, Mizi."

SUA DOES WHAT she does best next: she hides it all away, wincing as she scoops up the crystals, and they score her hands bloody and send them into the depths beneath her bed, vanquishing them the same way Mother does with a faulty sister. She practices sucking in her stomach all the while.

What follows is what she does worst: keeping Seokja unnie from knowing. The underside of her bed halts its Stygian imitation of the night sky when she presses her cheek to the floor to peer in and sees nothing of the faint scintillation that the crystals offer in its darkness, instead finding them in a bag on her bed that's tied close with a bow. Seokja unnie's silence towards her grows with each new cluster of stars added to the bag until it tears and overflows, and Sua decides that she must think her stupid, still, when she gives her a tepid, wordless hug and another empty bag, the day she is to return to Anakt Garden.

Sua looks at the older girl, peering at her weathered, half-blind eyes. Seokja unnie gives a wry smile. Don't cry where they can see, Sua-ah. 

She sucks in a little tighter when she hears Mother's voice encroaching, releasing a small huff that makes Seokja unnie spill a laugh smothered by the back of her hand. Sua meets her in the eyes again. And when have I before you? Seokja unnie must think her even more childish for what sits at the bottom of her bag.

The older girl shakes her head and makes a simulacrum of a laugh. Don't prove me right by shattering before them, Sua-ah. That's what they all want to see when it's time to churn out flakes of ash from high above the garden. 

When it's time to return, sequestered with the other Anakt Garden students at its front gates, Sua stays close to Mother as the segyeins wait for their pets to be taken out of their hands. She holds her head up high when Mother gives a final scrupulous once-over and maintains it as she treads ahead of the other pets that reluctantly follow the instructor segyein back inside.

Anakt Garden has changed little in the weeks she's gone. The sharp dimensions of the sky and the permanence of its clouds, and the undulating scurrying of the younger students within their season's lot beneath the cover of the uniformly shaped trees and through the shallow pond—if she were to draw and colour an image of it all, it'd be the only thing needed to understand life within the garden until the question of how many years, how many months and days, minutes and seconds, were left for them.

Or so it is until dusts of white flutter down from the ethers above, and Sua grimaces and shields her face with her hand, clutching her book tighter, as she maneuvers through the waves of children that stop in reverence for the first sightings of 'snow.'

"Nice, isn't it?" says Ivan, unfettered by the flecks of white collecting in his hair, just as Sua finds somewhere comfortable to sit. He has enough self-awareness not to drop down to join her. Instead, he simply peers down at what she's busying herself with and cocks his head. "Till draws better."

Sua slams her notebook shut. "And where's he, then? Did he finally find somewhere to go where you couldn't follow?"

Ivan continues, looking off into the distance. "He hasn't come back yet. Classes don't start until two more days, anyway." The light breeze scheduled for the afternoon brushes his bangs into a mess. Sua holds her tongue to thwart the need to scold him to fix them, no matter how much it niggles at her how they obscured his eyes, the only source of honesty she could get from him. That's what Seokja unnie would do. And she wasn't interested in becoming Seokja unnie, not even if Mother's lukewarm reception to anything she did was only chipping the chasm between them wider and pulling Sunhwa closer to her favour. She'd seen enough of the articles crooning her praises every mealtime as Mother boasts and Sunhwa simmers in self-satisfaction with every precious bite she takes, afforded only ten a day. "Mizi's still gone, too."

"What?" Ivan says then, the sound emerging from beneath his tongue like the clatter of iron. "Didn't know she wasn't here?"

"Mizi usually has a class right now," Sua says defensively. Nothing online that she'd looked through containing Mizi had said when she was coming back, either.

"Mm, yeah, Music and Religion," he says in turn. "She's been telling me how hard it is to 'get it' lately. Was explaining to me between shoots that whatever they teach us about the Great Anakt isn't much in comparison to whatever they had down on Earth." He looks at her and smiles. "She says some crazy things, you know? All 'My god, my universe,' when I asked why she wanted to sing." His eyes narrow into something imperceptible, leaving Sua with faint slivers of whatever they emote from beneath the wisps of his bangs. "Too bad they put you in the other class for Arts and Religion instead when you changed out of Dance and Movement during that time slot."

She should smash her fists into his face. She should bite and claw and pull at whatever of him she can, whatever they don't already share. She should hurl anything she has to say about Till—he doesn't love you; he doesn't want you, and you don't know what it's like to be wanted, do you? You can only flatter yourself for the cameras and mold yourself into whatever the audience wants of you, Ivan. What do you know? She wants to scream, her heels digging into smatterings of pebbles embedded into the ground. What do you even know about love, Ivan? 

A sob falls from her lips instead. Then another. And another. Sua crowds her face with her hands and drags her wrists against her eyes, struggling to wipe them dry until a star scrapes against the flat of her palm. She scrambles to catch it.

Ivan catches it first. "Sua."

She snatches it out of his hand. Her wobbling lip struggles to still, but the tears evaporate from her eyes as dread tightens her chest. Staggering back, Sua clutches the star.

Ivan coos. "Oh, you. Poor Sua-ah." He encroaches closer, leaning down to reach her line of sight. "Crying over what you already have. Did you cry when you saw Mizi and me dance together? When all the posts online said we'd make a good couple? Did you?"

He pulls away, scowling. When his gaze falls, Sua looks down, too, only then realizing the blood dripping from her enclosed fist, staining her uniform. Then, Ivan's laughing, and the sound makes Sua want to carve open one of the trees to make a new home out of it, away from those ink blot-coloured eyes that unravel her like a single tug of a stray thread on a shoddy garment. "What's missy to you, huh? What is she, really, for you to be crying like this, Sua-ah?"

"What would you even know, Ivan?" Sua despairs. "It's all just a game to you, isn't it? Getting under my skin, pulling my Mizi away from me bit by bit, taunting me, even though you don't think she's anything more than some air-headed girl!" Her bloody fist slams into Ivan's chest. "Why? All you've ever done is dig under my skin, push, and prod until I can't take it anymore." She chokes back a gargled sound, somewhere between a scream and a cry. "Why? What have I ever done to you?"

More stars fall. More sounds clatter in her ears, and through her blurry, stinging vision, Ivan's lips flap open and closed as frazzling pain shoots through her skull. Sua seizes her hair in her hands and pulls until the ache climbs to her scalp instead. Ivan grabs her by the wrists and forces her still. "Look at me, Sua, look at me."

When she does, he can only summon another mirthless laugh. "'My Mizi?'" he scathes. "Who else do you think you can lose her to, Sua? Me? Till? A segyein?" Ivan holds firm when she struggles in his hold, hurling curses. "Look at yourself, Sua-ah. What's there to cry stars over? You know where we're both going. You know what's bound to happen. You know how this world has always been."

He grabs her by the jaw. "Who made you think there was anything worth hoping for in this world to be foolish enough to cry stars? Who?" Ivan looks to Sua and basks in the venom in her gaze, sneering, "Her?"

Ivan howls when she sinks the blunt of her teeth into his hand, tumbling backwards when he shoves her away. Blood dribbles in rivulets from the etched mark of the bite as Ivan holds his wrist, brows knitted as his eyes press close. "I can't believe you."

Sua licks his blood off her teeth. It tastes like triumph. Shakily, she opens her fist and picks up the blood-stained star. She throws it at him. When it bounces off his cheek, she flashes a sardonic smile, sure to show what remains of his blood on her pearly whites. "Then don't. I never did in you."

MIZI COMES BACK two days later.

She charges into Sua's arms, giggling wildly, headily, into her neck, filled with the kind of energy that the dendrites of each nerve cell pass on to one another, as though reaching through the chasm of the synapse to chase the next's touch.

Their forms imprint into the grass as they topple over, filling the nooks and crannies of each other. She pushes up the other girl's round glasses that threaten to fall off her nose. Sua basks in the scent of the soft, pink hair tickling her cheek, smelling faintly of Earthian hibiscus and mint, and chants my girl, my girl, my girl with every breath she takes against Mizi's skin.

The words don't need to be said. How've you been? Nothing without you, Mizi. Have you been eating well? Just as much as I need, Mizi. Don't worry too much about the loss. I've just started dancing more. Oh, well, I've been dancing a lot lately, too. Did you see? Of course, I saw. You looked beautiful. I wish you were there. I can't always be. I know. But your sister was there, and so was Miss Nigeh. Surely you could've come? I would've come without you ever needing to ask, Mizi. I'd come with you as the world crumbles and as the trees change colour.

Oh, don't laugh. I mean it, Mizi. I know, I know! It's just– When have we ever seen the trees change colours, Sua? In all the photos from Earth, remember? I remember. They're beautiful, the way those tiny little embers of red and orange can fill the streets like one big flame. Do you know why Earthian trees do that? They can't live through the winter season—too cold, too little sunlight. When the chlorophyll content in the leaves dies off by early autumn, only the carotenoid pigment remains, allowing them to redden the way they do. Our trees never do that. Change? Die off in some way. That's change, too.

Dying? 

Dying.

Do all the leaves need to leave? It's in the name, isn't it? That's just how it is. And don't they come back soon enough, anyway? And what about when the world crumbles? Well, if it's in autumn—are we on Earth? Yes, Earth! Okay, well, if it's autumn, then the leaves will go. And then what won't? 

She meets Mizi's amber eyes that pool with warmth from beneath their frames. "Me."

"You promise?"

Sua smiles at Mizi, at the dirt stuck beneath the beds of her nails and the blades of grass scattered in her hair. She can't spot the freckles that dust the bridge of her nose as well as she used to. "I promise. Till the trees grow red."

They fall into routine quickly—rehearsals, classes, practices, lunch, tests, then more rehearsals, classes, and practices. She works the kinks out of Mizi's back before Dance and Movement, and Mizi applies rosin to Sua's violin bow before her turn to play in Instrumentation. They link elbows while waiting in line for lunch and spend their study period passing notes, filled with scribbles of whatever esoteric Earthian species Sua can think of—Coenobita purpureus, Punica granatum, and Elphidium foraminifera, each one spurred on by Mizi's little doodles of awe beneath them and musings of I wonder what they taste like and We should go find the sea one day, Sua, and see if we can find anything similar. And when the guitar brat's sheet music gets turned into a paper airplane by another kid and gets stuck in a tree, Sua offers to retrieve it to quell Mizi's crestfallen expression over it.

"I think it's closer to the right, Sua– no, that's a little too far, hm, go back a smidge to where you were– oh, yes! You're there, Sua!"

Legs wrapped around its trunk, she shimmies up the tree, inching towards the highest branch to grab the paper airplane. Mizi's voice clamours from below her, making up for what Sua struggles to pick apart from leaf to leaf, branch to branch, squinting to make sense of the smoothed-over shapes her eyes conjure. Finally, she spots the blot of white hidden within the recesses of the tree's foliage and reaches out to grab it. When it remains out of her range, Sua pulls herself up higher. Her fingers finally graze the edge of the papercraft as she stretches her arm to bridge the final smidge of distance, unsuspecting of anything until there's hot breath moving against her ear, whispering, "Oh, Sua-ah, don't you know you don't need to be so stubborn if it's too far for you to reach?"

Sua blinks. The fall doesn't seem so bad until she tumbles onto her side, scraping her knees and elbows in collateral. She presses her eyes shut to block out vertigo that overtakes her and the oncoming headache summoned by her instantaneous thrust into the artificial sun's gaze, unable to linger in its light as she used to. Mizi drops to her knees, speaking in tongues of panic, until the snap of a branch from behind snatches her attention, and she turns to look. "Ivan!"

Shakily, Sua sits up, blinking slowly. Mizi places a hand over her bruised knee, her thumb rubbing over the wound. "Where'd you come from? How were you up in the tree?" asks the pink-haired girl.

His lips curve into that stupid, swarming smile. "I've always been the best out of all of us at hide-and-seek, right? It's not too hard to climb up there and hide in the trees, anyway. And with our beloved Sua-ah putting in so much effort to retrieve Till's little paper airplane," he looks to her, faux-graciously, "and having so much trouble, I couldn't help but pitch in."

"Right." Sua picks a twig out of her hair. "I'm sure Till would appreciate your efforts."

"Oh, I'm sure he'd appreciate yours, too." Ivan unfolds the paper, carefully smoothing out its creases. The sheet warps and bends, nonetheless. "After all," he says, holding it up, "you helped save his next masterpiece. I'm sure you have thoughts to share, no?"

Sua squints at the sheet. From where she is from Ivan, the sharp lines of the notes bend and buckle as she wades through them, attempting to make sense of their arrangement. Ivan's stare remains on her all the while as though counting every second too long that she takes to read. "It's good," she finally says, "but a bit repetitive. The third measure could be shortened. And the fifth measure could've had a smoother arrangement. It feels like too many complicated notes crammed into one bar.

Ivan hums. "You ought to tell him that, then." He breaks into a sudden grin at whatever's in the distance.

"Oi, give that back, you ass!"

Till scampers up to Ivan, shoulders hunched. When he tries to snatch the paper away, Ivan pulls it above his head, higher than he can reach. Before Till can even jump to get it, he balls the paper and throws it down the hill, then takes off in a dart of motion. Till chases after him, hurling curses at his back until he and Ivan are specks in the distance from where the two girls sit.

Mizi sighs, re-adjusting her glasses. "Boys are so rowdy."

Sua makes a sound of acknowledgement. She rubs her eyes once, twice, hoping they'll clear. Mizi presses her cheek against her shoulder. "And I thought you were supposed to be the eyes between the two of us. What are we gonna do when you turn out to be blinder than I am without my glasses?"

"Count my mercies that it's not before our Music and Religion exam, that's for sure," she says, and Mizi laughs, a fledgling of a noise that grows in her throat. It's not enough. "You know who I think I'd see at the exam, grading how fast I can read sheet music?"

"Who?"

"Ivan. He might as well not be human anyway with the way I see him practicing making expressions in the morning. Sometimes, I think he's one of the instructor segyein secretly pretending to be human—and doing a bad job at it—to spy on us."

Mizi's grasp on Sua grows firmer as she shakes with a quiet laugh, steadying herself. "Sua, please, that's so mean!"

"But you don't disagree?" she says.

"Ivan's just interesting," Mizi says, but her words are a little too hot off her tongue, sheepish, the way they always are, when she steals an extra treat, and Sua points it out. "I think he's just… committed to looking his best. He has the reputation for being the fancy-shmancy one among us, doesn't he?"

"Oh, certainly. I'm sure everyone will be floored to learn how elegant he is when he tumbles into the pond after looking at his reflection too closely in the mornings. He never has a straight answer for why he's drenched sometimes."

"That's why?!" Mizi exclaims, erupting into another fit of laughter as she scrubs her face.

Bottling lightning is a fruitless endeavour, she knows. But if Sua could keep that smile forever, could hide it in the soil to let the flowers grow a little brighter the next morning, then finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening.

Don't cry where they can see, Sua-ah. 

Who made you hope for more to be foolish enough to cry stars? 

"Sua?"

Looking back at Mizi, she fights the dull ache slowly sprouting at her temples and musters a small smile. "We should go back soon. Break is almost over, anyway."

FINDING THE GREAT Anakt would not be so frightening. 

Sua etches the words again and again. The table shakes with the force of the motion. She neglects the reading glasses that fall halfway down the bridge of her nose and continues—finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening. 

But every so often, Sua glances at the margins of the right side of her notebook, running over what she scribbled during the formal announcement in class, lettering ragged as she had run the numbers: 247 more orbits around this system's sun until graduation. 

Mizi's note in pink ink sits beneath her writing. So soon!!! Aren't you excited, Sua? We're gonna be out there, out in the big wide world, soon! 

Very. 

Mizi's expression faltered when she read Sua's words. But before Sua could write anything more, the instructor segyein barked at the pink-haired girl to pay attention. And with Mizi's hectic schedule—she shared no other classes with Sua, all of her extracurriculars, and the amount of modelling and acting work that swallowed the other girl whole—Sua hadn't talked to her ever since.

Sua had done her best to keep her head high on her shoulders, busying herself with her dieting regimen and managing her coursework. Her days had woven themselves into a cycle: 800 calories when she had Dance and Movement; 500 calories when she had Arts and Languages; 300 calories when she had Arithmetic and could fight through her headaches, digging her nails into her palms during each assessment to keep herself afloat until she could hide in the grass for lunch and pull at her scalp until the pain blended in with every other sensation, melting into nothing. And when the rumble of her stomach and the dullness of her days without Mizi bring their star-strung agony, she wets her sleeves every morning to drop each crystalline tear into the pond at the farthest edge of the garden, watching as each one sinks to its bottom as easily as matter does into the boundless ether.

Mizi was happy, after all, and finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening.

Sua had seen her every ad and hummed along to each song that went with them, had watched as Mizi exuberantly brushed her teeth while her rendition of the White-Sharp toothpaste jingled played, and finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening.

She nodded along every time she and Mizi could squirrel away what little time they had left in class after lessons, quietly commenting as Mizi had gushed on about how tiring it can be to hold smiles for the cameras but how cool it was to tinker with them when the director had let her try her hand with them during her break, and finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening.

The page rips beneath the tip of her pen, the words made unintelligible. Sua stares at the inkblot marring the paper as it pools and spreads, ruining her handiwork. She turns the words over on her tongue instead, chewing on them and forcing them down her throat the same way she'd convinced herself that there were worse things to feel when she'd had a hand clamped over her mouth while receiving her branding or when Mother had first inspected her body for 'signs of impurities' after another segyein had slid their hand up her skirt during a banquet—knowing, like a hymn, finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening.

Ivan snatches her notebook off the vanity table. He holds it up to read, incredulous. "What are you doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"What are you always writing?" he says, turning the book over for her to see. "It's all I see you doing. Do you realize what it makes you look like, Sua?"

She shrugs passively in the way he hates—passive, unfettered, as though clueless to his playground aggravations and cheap tricks. "You're the one that snuck into a girl's dressing room before a shoot. What does that make you look like, Ivan?"

He laughs sardonically, leaning against her vanity table. He drops her notebook and procures something from his pocket, hiding it in his grasp. "You've said it yourself before. Everyone knows better than to suspect something from the two of us."

She sets her glasses straight on her nose. The nuances of Ivan's expression sharpen—the tense line of his lips pressed flat, the saccades of his ink blot-coloured eyes, as though rueing for her. "Right." Sua straightens in her chair, folding her hands in her lap. "So, I'm not sure why you're so intent on carrying this facade that you care, Ivan. I've overheard your conversations with your guardian— 'There's no one to hold me back here, sir. I'll only focus on myself, sir.'"

Ivan remains stony. Sua cocks her head. "You don't think you and I are the same, do you?"

The boy sputters a laugh, looking away. When he glances back at her, the curl of his smile is half-hearted. "No, no, would I really be sitting here writing all these things to convince myself that getting a bullet lodged in my forehead isn't so bad, Sua-ah? Would I?"

"Can you?" she tries. "When you get up on the stage, do you have anything to actually live for? Anyone to die for?"

"Sua-ah," says Ivan. As a warning, maybe. But not in the way, Ivan knows how to threaten, no, watching competition out of the corner of his eye before subsuming whatever meagre performance they gave as his own, tongue and teeth like knives when he sings. He looks to her and she thinks Ivan must be wondering why he's trying conversation with unset taxidermy that fights to stay still, why he wrings his hands and expects better of her every time.

"No, you answer me." Sua rises from her seat, sure to make each step pronounced by the clack of her heels as she approaches him. Ivan's grasp on the vanity table becomes white-knuckled. "Answer me," she says, quieter, relishing in every uncomfortable, skittish twitch that Ivan tamps down yet can't remove the evidence of. "You're afraid, aren't you? Dying alone? Dying unloved? Dying with no one who really cares watching? Dying without him ever–"

"You're crazy!" he spits. "You know what you're going to do to her, right? You've spent all this time putting your hands over her eyes over every terrible little thing in this world, and now you're betting on a one-way ticket up to the Great Anakt itself so you can make sure she's still standing when she watches you get your brain shot out." He leans in, mere inches away from her. "Do you even hear me? You're fucking crazy! What are you going to do when she realizes what a sick, twisted little thing you are after all this time, Sua-ah? That all you can ever think about is keeping her for yourself, wishing she was forever lonely, but that only you could make that loneliness go away whenever she was with you, so that she can only breathe for you, you, you?"

Ivan's breath is warm against her cheek. Strangely, there's something vindictive about knowing he's taking the same stolen breaths she is, meant to live and die as nothing more than animals to be tamed, rotting in the same pit. "Nothing stops the living from scouring the graves of the dead. Will she love you then, Sua-ah? Will she?"

Sua laughs until she shakes. "Oh, Ivan," she says, breath ragged, "you've got nothing to tell me, do you? No one to worry about leaving behind. No one to worry about remembering you this way or that. No one to even care. And that vial in your hands?"

Ivan refuses to look away.

"You ought to throw it away. I don't need charity. My eyes are just fine. You've spent so long glaring into them that you forget that I can see through you, too. If I'll be nothing but the blood on Mizi's hands and the trauma that weighs on her conscience, well," she says, "you're nothing but the scum beneath Till's shoe."

A loud knock raps on her door, announcing that she's next in line for the shoot. Sua tucks in her chair. "Good luck, Ivan." She stops at the door and musters her sweetest smile, honey and venom, false gods and their irrational toils. "Only 246 more orbits left to make a mark until graduation, you know?"

Ivan says nothing when the door slides closed.

IVAN SAYS NOTHING, too, when it comes time for their monthly physical examinations, and he watches her walk into her physiological appointment, steps slow and measured, through the glass window of his own appointment room.

The segyein doctor barely affords her a once over. The translations of his old, rusted watch lag. He flashes a smarmy smile when he catches Sua staring at it impatiently. [It's an antique from Earth. Quite a primitive model, I'd say. You wouldn't know the half of it on how difficult it was to modify it to even get projection onto it.] 

He scrolls through her information on a monitor. [Sua, yes?] 

She nods.

[I have some news regarding your optometry exam.] 

Sua nods again.

The segyein pushes his glasses up. [You're going blind.] 

You're going blind. "Oh, " the words echo in her mind. This must be how beached fish feel—doomed by water too warm and tides too unforgiving, knowing better than to hope but still begging for breath when the sun hits their face for that first moment of horrified marvel. Everything is so, so bright now, the lights above her searing themselves into her eyes. "Oh," she says.

[Your eyes are heavily irritated, constantly. For the time you've been sitting here, I've observed their twitching and your compulsion to rub or touch them.] He scribbles something on a board. The translation on his watch sputters with static.

[They are extremely sensitive and overly receptive to light and other stimulation. Additionally, you struggle to focus on specific objects. Your spatial awareness has degraded, and your other senses have suffered from their diminishing ability. Your ears are essentially forced to over-perform to compensate for your ailing eyes yet struggle to compute all the information they receive. You often listen too closely for one thing and are blindsided by other stimuli in your environment.]

"Oh," says Sua again. Her mind races. How many freckles does Mizi have? How big are the splotches of birthmarks on her right shoulder blade? How long are her eyelashes? Nails? Her hair? She has to remember. She has to. She has to.

[Were you aware of these symptoms?] 

Sua nods no. Mizi's hair goes to her mid-back. Her nails are bitten down, much shorter than they should be. It's why she jokes she'll always wear gloves on stage. She has approximately 34 freckles—no, 35. Yes, 35. Or 36? Sua should just rule out all composite numbers over 50. Or composite numbers altogether. Then Mizi can't possibly have 34, 35, or 36 freckles. No, she has to start over. From the left of her face, there's one directly beneath the very edge of her eye, another set right next to a faint mole, one close to her ear, a fourth just by–

[Sua.] 

She blinks.

Then, again: [Were you aware of these symptoms?] 

"No," she says. "I'm sorry, no. How could I have known?"

The segyein sighs. After another moment of furious writing on his clipboard, he rises to rummage through a cabinet. He places a vial before her. Pilocarpine Hydrochloride Ophthalmic Solution reads its label. [I'll have to notify your guardian of this development, unfortunately. As for now, seeing as irritation is what is causing you to rub and touch your eyes, bound to cause yourself infections, these eye drops will work as a temporary means to alleviate their itching. Take them sparingly, only when you absolutely need them.] 

"And if not?" Sua asks.

He whistles. "Good luck getting onto that stage."

Sua drops the solution into her eyes and blinks until they set in before realizing she has company.

Mizi looks up from her assortment of papers at the sound of the door clicking shut. Sua peers down at her, Mizi sitting cross-legged on the floor, and catches her gaze for the first time in over a week.

The pink-haired girl rises to her feet, leaving her materials in an array on the floor. She doesn't run to Sua as she thought she would, burying her face in the other's shoulder. Instead, Mizi awkwardly shuffles in place, expression reserved and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "So… hey."

"Hey, you," breathes Sua.

Mizi blinks at her and then looks away. She clears her throat. "Um, well."

"Well…?"

The nebulous air between them fails to fade. It makes a lump form in Sua's throat. Swallowing her breath, Sua tentatively approaches closer. "Mizi?"

"I- I didn't realize you started growing out your hair again," she stammers out.

"Oh." Mother hadn't told the stylists to crop her hair to its usual bob in a while. Sua was content to leave it as it was. "Does it make me look so different? You're so shy right now. It's like you've never seen me with long hair."

Mizi smiles despite herself. "Of course, I'm so shy. You're so pretty it makes me wonder how I could ever compare."

"Compare?" Sua says. "The only people you need to compare yourself to are the others in your modelling class." She glances at the analogue clock above. 15:17. "Shouldn't you be there right now?"

Mizi flushes. "I've been a good student otherwise! One or two classes missed won't make that big a difference. Besides," she says, "-besides, I just wanted to see you. Ivan told me you've been in these meetings every day lately." She glances at the meeting room. "Is something wrong?"

"No, no," says Sua. She crouches down to collect Mizi's papers and file them into a neat stack, pointedly bypassing her concerned expression. She rises and hands them to her. "It's just about my brand deals, anyway." Her ears still ached from the heavy, crystalline earrings she'd been obligated to wear at the last human culture exhibit she'd appeared at, forcing a placid smile. "It's nothing special."

In truth, Mother storms in every time, demanding to know why her goods are damaged. She gets the same vague speculations about whether it's the particles of glittery eyeshadow that she's been wearing for her promotions getting caught in her eyes and irritating them or if having to read the sheet music from afar in Instrumentation is straining her eyes. Each explanation leaves Mother more miffed than the last.

Mother and the doctors argue in circles about whether to switch out her academic courses for a purely performance-based roster or to rescind her access to books to keep her from straining her eyes further, each argument making no more progress than the last. It's all static in her ears, anyway.

Sua simply closes her eyes and lets the noises wash away in waves. The stars have made their verdict, after all. No amount of eye drop solution will rebel against the kismet of the heavens.

Mizi furrows her brows, unconvinced. "Sua…"

Sua smiles, small and reserved. "Things are so busy now, aren't they? We're everywhere we look now. All eyes are on us the closer we get to graduation and the grand stages of Alien Stage."

The strand behind Mizi's ear falls loose. Sua brushes her cheek, then tucks it back into place. "All we can do is try our best to keep up."

Mizi flushes harder, melting into Sua's touch. "You're so far from me now."

"I'm right next to you, Mizi. Just by your heart whenever you need me."

"And when you're not?"

Sua can't help but laugh. She can't even read the posters on the wall's far side from this distance anymore. Her world is caving in on itself, phantom-made shapes slithering into the places of what she knows instinctively, flattening the garden's flowers into splotches and the faint scars lining Mizi's hands from childhood into absentia.

"When I'm not?" she muses. Her smile turns brittle. "When would I ever be gone long enough for you to miss me?"

THE DAYS BLUR by without Mizi.

Sua fills them with petty vengeance. She digs her heels into Ivan's foot whenever they're paired together in Movement and Dance, knowing he'd never break his perfectly plastered smile for pain when in the eyeshot of their instructor, sparing himself of the inevitable blame for slacking and causing her misstep by moving too fast for her to keep up with. When it's time to present a self-written piece in Instrumentation, Till flounders for his sheet music, stammering that he doesn't know where they went, something in her curls with vinegary vindication as he's sent back to his seat blinking back tears, failed without remorse.

Serves you right, she thinks. What did you expect when you drew her all over the back of your papers? Writing stupid songs for her? Don't you know that to love her is to suffer? 

Of her most illicit agonies, though, like picking at the scabs of a wound until it bleeds anew, Sua spends reading.

The smuggle is contraband; pulled from her academic classes and with her reading resources rescinded, Sua is apathetic as her room is turned over to remove every possible danger to her eyes, be it a night lamp or simple posters she's won over the years that she might strain to read. Once her deserted room is empty of unwanted company, Sua pulls her mattress out of its frame, picks up her copy of Our World's Way with shaking hands, and hugs it close. As Ivan begins handing her volumes between their classes, the collection in her bed frame grows exponentially, sneaking a crude light under her door when no one's looking. Sua reads every night until her eyes water and burns, forcing herself awake when the niggling itch of her hazy vision keeps her up.

She tries not to think about the reading glasses Seokja unnie gave her—now abandoned at the bottom of her nightstand drawer. If even the flesh that clings to her bones isn't her own as she wiles away on less than 600 calories a day—Mother's law now that she's just a show pet—why bother?

(Maybe she's scared. Maybe she isn't. Maybe no one will care by the next season when she inevitably finds herself in front of Mizi on that dazzling stage. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe everything will change. Maybe she just hopes she'll have Mizi's touch memorized by then, to know it even if a thousand splendid suns crowd her vision and she feels nothing else but their immeasurable, dooming warmth.)

"Finding the Great Anakt would not be so frightening," she murmurs between pages—a hymn, a psalm, a creed. She finds religion in the texture of weathered paper and the flecks of cracked spines that crumble in her hands and worship in every ounce of knowledge she steals. The Crane Wife is a folktale of a crane who masquerades as a woman to be the wife of the man who saved her, plucking out her feathers every night in secret to file away her agony; Earthian bodies of water called bogs are of the perfect condition to preserve the bodies submerged in them in accordance of the centuries-weathered folk belief that they provide safe passage for the dead; Mizi's ads have made it to magazine print, interview answers rendered in the glossy text that declares "I'll be with Sua" each time her ambitions for the upcoming season are brought to light.

When she thumbs through an archaic dictionary, looseleaf pages slipping out of their bindings, she kisses each word she doesn't know—firmament, sympatric, Jungian, cazimi, vicar, and Umwelt.

She turns the last word over on her tongue, pressing it between the crevices of her tongue. Umwelt—the sensory world to any organism, entirely idiosyncratic to the next species' perception. 

Stardust thrums and explodes in the soft of every Earthian organism she finds in the books she devours: in the sandy beaches on the island of Okinawa filled with star-shaped exoskeletons of ancient foraminifera, emerging from the ocean floor; in the sea stars clinging to the surfaces of rocky tidal pools and coral, cushion stars and blood stars and sunflower stars, preying on urchins; in the rare fossilized remains of ophiuroids, preserving their wriggling forms in inertia for millennia despite their fragile forms which shatter to pieces in death.

The pattern is clear: for every splinter of a star that drifts to the bottom of the ocean floor, does life spring from its coil, celestial light rendered mortal. With each crystalline star, she drops into the garden's pond, watching as its depths swallow it up after skimming across its surface once, twice, thrice, Sua can't help but wonder what she's creating, what soon will roam the depths of the pond amongst its artificial fish and algae, what version of their paper-thin world they'll filter through their Umwelt.

The pond's water warps with Ivan's likeness amid her thoughts. Sua sighs. "Yes?"

Slowly, Ivan sits down. He peers at his reflection, contemplative, only then speaking, "It's not like you to come here so early."

Sua remains quiet. Ivan is nonplussed, continuing, "I didn't realize this is where you were leaving them."

The only response is the sound of another stone slicing through the pond's surface before sinking into its depths.

Ivan reaches into his pocket. At first, Sua thinks he's brought another asinine cure-all for her eyes. But then he exhumes one of her stars, turning it between his fingers before throwing it into the pond, counting as it skims across its surface before finally sinking into the water. "Seven," he says, dryly amused. "Beat your record of skips."

"Sure."

"Sure?"

Sua throws in another star. It manages a measly three skips. "It doesn't matter."

"No," Ivan agrees. "It doesn't. Nothing we do ever will. I can't stop you from anything."

Another star—eight skips. Ivan's count is slow, his reaction delayed. "Oh. You beat me."

"It's like we're chasing each other in circles, always trying to do better than the other," says Ivan. "Like those Earthian betta fish. Or two rusted horses on opposite sides of a vintage carousel." Ivan pauses. "I was at an Earthian entertainment exhibit recently and rode one, you know—nearly fell off. I saw your guardian there with one of her other pets—one of your sisters? You have so many. I don't know how your guardian keeps track of all of them."

Another star—ten skips. "Ivan."

Ivan blazes on. For a moment, he leaves her, staring far off at his rippling reflection. But then he's back, giving her a wry smile that fails to lift higher. "I had to go up and talk to the entire audience that day. I guess people get curious about Anakt Garden's cream of the crop. And it's all questions I'm used to; all ones I've learned to deflect the answers to spreading platitudes about my guardian as he smokes the place filthy from where he sits."

"But then someone asks if I've ever gotten jealous of someone," he says, "if it's ever consumed me whole."

"Ivan."

"And I say yes. And they all wonder who could've gotten all they've ever wanted to the point that Ivan, of all pets, could be brooding over petty envies, and all I can do is laugh 'no.' No, she's never gotten everything she ever wanted, either. A shame for the both of us." He looks to her. "But she once got very close."

Ivan pulls to his feet. The finely pressed creases of his ironed pants have faded, giving way to small wrinkles as he brushes himself free from the blades of synthetic grass. Sua shifts, looking up at him. "Ivan–"

"The kid they replaced you with for the Best Outstanding Student award as competition doesn't measure up to half your wits, you know," remarks Ivan. "Can't even spell benevolence without stopping to sound out the word. It's a tragedy, Sua-ah. I've lost the only person worth spending an ounce of effort on to a string of bumbling idiots who think they're something more because they have a half-decent mark in Language Studies." Ivan theatrically sighs, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead in imitation of a lovelorn maiden. "A tragedy, you hear me, Sua-ah, a tragedy!"

Sua studies Ivan.

She studies the ink colour of his eyes and the bangs that brush over them, which she's sure Seokja unnie would fuss with and tell him to push out of his face. The long length of his fingers, the snaggletooth his lip sometimes catches on, makes him mess up a line. The way his eyebrows push up as he laughs, and Sua finds that she doesn't hate the sound, how it sounds richer than whatever Ivan summons for all of his interviews as he files through each vapid question, like the taste of fig jam wasted on day-old stale bread in the morning and warding away rain from an expensive suit with a half-torn, plastic umbrella while hurrying through a storm, finding yourself smiling because it means you can pay a visit to the quaint laundromat where you find company in the relentless whirring of the dryers, to iron out the wrinkles.

One of the first things she'd ever written after enrolling at the garden before she and Mizi had found wholeness in one another and the beds of crimson flowers that never stopped blooming were still a marvel, a poem, she remembers, was about Ivan. All the lines she had to apologize for after their teachers caught a glimpse of it still ring clear in her head.

I hate how he looks at me.

I hate his stupid hair.

I hate how he's always waving at me. His fingers are too long. 

I hate his weird tooth that always shows when he smiles.

I hate his pencil-line eyebrows. 

I hate that he's laughing. Always at me. Laughing right now at me as I write this. 

The bite she left sits half-forgotten on his hand, faded to nothing but a faint mark. But the stars will be, too. No one remembers the same version of the sky. No one remembers how many students there are in their year, how many of them will actually survive till Alien Stage.

No one will remember her and Ivan when all is said and done.

Sua hangs her head over the water. "She won't ever know who I am."

Ivan's smile is soft. "At least she'll love the ghost of you."

GRADUATION RIPENS THE trees with sudden fruits and the garden's fields with myriads of flowers picked from old Earthian catalogues—Sua knows this from one of the documents Ivan slipped her, an old, hand-stitched manual he asked for as a gift after winning the Best Outstanding Student award a few days prior.

Mother sends a meticulous team to prepare her, each to dress, style, bejewel, powder, and perfume her to perfection. She loses their names in the hubbub of the process, inert as they ask for her opinion on this or that on whether she wants pearl earrings or dangling silver, a white lily scent for perfume over jasmine or if she wanted curled hair to try something new instead of leaving her hair as straight as usual.

She hasn't seen Mizi in 23 days. She can barely read the label for the eyeshadow colour she's wearing off its palette. Her Umwelt decays and the world shuffles on unrelentingly.

Ivan offers an easy smile to the crowds, filing over her as he makes eye contact with Sua from the podium of the temporary stage loaded into the garden. The artificial sky is dimmed to dusk, and the air is sweet with nostalgia as guardians and pets alike chatter over how fast time has gone and how their first days are no farther than being another yesterday.

Sua nurses water throughout the ceremony, taking paltry sips in fear of bloating. She tries not to stare as Mizi whispers to the other girls she's with—ones she did group modelling gigs with, Sua recalls. One girl, Evie, whose name is burned into her brain from the perfume shoot Mizi did with her, names embossed on the packaging for the new eau de toilette Mother chose for Sua's last TV appearance—Mizi and Evie—leans in close to point and giggle when Ivan nearly drops the podium's microphone, floundering to catch it. Mizi grabs her hand and squeezes when she slaps her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing too loud.

(It takes her a second too long to smile in recognition when she catches Sua's gaze and doesn't know what to do with herself.)

Sua doesn't look away from the podium for the rest of the ceremony.

Ivan's speech is rendered static in her ears. When he begins calling up the other students one by one, and it comes time for her to approach the stage, bound to small, tentative steps as she treads up the stairs to not stumble in her too-high heels, Sua forces a smile and fights a grimace when she stiffly shakes hand with each instructor segyein. She pushes the flicker of hurt on Ivan's face out of her mind when she walks past him before he can shake her hand, too, and hurries off the stage with her diploma and fake Earthian white lilies.

What did he expect? She wonders. Didn't the bite hurt? Didn't all the years I spent shooing you away like you were a flea-infested dog hurt? 

Ivan reads another speech instead and glazes over her whenever he looks at the crowd. Sua thinks she hears a tinkling star fall in the distance when Ivan is turned away from the audience, shoulders sagging in a way only she can notice, and something falls at his feet, shining.

She hadn't realized that Till wasn't at the ceremony until now.

She hadn't realized that Ivan still had her star from their fight all those days ago, that it was the gem embellishing the brooch on his breast pocket until now.

She hadn't even realized that her stars had company at the bottom of the garden's pond.

"Who made you think there was anything worth hoping for in this world to be foolish enough to cry stars? Who?" she whispers to herself. Her eyes itch, and her heels blister. The stars must be cheering, laughing, as they crumble before false gods. "Him?"

Ivan has the decency to look troubled when Sua forces herself to approach him as he mopes by the drinks and asks for a dance through gritted teeth at Mother's behest. Think of what that boy could do for our reputation, Sua. All eyes would be on you and him tonight. 

My reputation, Sua bemoans internally as she tugs his disorderly tie into shape and smooths his unruly collar down until it is crisp, as though a mother preening her son than a dance partner, is in tatters. 

Ivan just laughs. 

"What?" she snaps exasperatedly. "Can't even tie your own tie right?"

"I didn't think how I looked for this dance would matter so much to you."

"You're embarrassing," she says. "I didn't want you to embarrass me more with a sloppy tie when they film us for the graduation taping." She frowns. "Fix your hair. Your bangs are a mess."

Ivan's hand settles on her waist when they take their place on the banquet floor. He looks up at the chandelier above them, dripping jewels and sending fractals of shimmering, amber light across the banquet hall that reflects across his cheeks and shines tessellating shapes in his eyes. "You think that could fall on us?"

"It'd be my lucky day," Sua says dryly. She doesn't have the heart to continue her ribbing the longer Ivan stares off, expression distant, scanning the crowds for a boy who'll never look for him, too, and says, instead, "You're a better dancer than I am."

Ivan doesn't look back at her. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," she affirms. "Don't blame me if I step on your feet."

He offers a rusty chuckle and pulls them into position, laying a hand on her back after he pulls her hand onto his shoulder. The music begins its crescendo, and they loosely sway, waiting for it to set into place.

They move in a tentative tandem. Ivan doesn't look her in the eyes but smiles whenever he catches her watching his expression, driving her to find sudden interest in the meticulous, painstaking carvings swirling across the ceiling. She tries not to step on his feet but doesn't apologize when she does, either, removing a stray piece of lint on his collar instead. Cameras flash, and Sua thinks they look half-decent in the photos together. Like they get along. Like their stars shine together at the bottom of the garden's pond like she hasn't spent so much of her life grimacing whenever she realizes he's around like kinship fits over them as easily as a velvet glove does, and that she'd dance with him until the chandelier above comes crashing down on them both.

But that would never happen because Sua will never die for Ivan, nor will she die with him, because Sua can barely even see the way his expression pinches when he looks over her shoulder, the incessant lights blurring her vision, and says, "She's here."

And then he drops her hand, and Sua is the one still figure in a sea of swirling forms. Mizi smiles at her like all the light in this world has condensed itself down to its softest pieces and found itself in her eyes, her voice, her touch, extending a hand as she tentatively approaches, bashful. "May I have this dance?"

Sua blinks once, twice, and takes it. Mizi doesn't hesitate to pull her back into the rhythm of bodies.

What about that other girl? What about me? She wants to ask.

"Where've you been?" she says instead.

Mizi flushes. Tentatively, her hand curls around Sua's waist, touch firm. Sua mirrors it with her hand on the other's shoulder. Skittish, Mizi glances away as she pulls Sua closer, running through the motions of the waltz with frantic imitations of the other dancers.

"Mizi?" Sua probes.

Mizi snaps forward to look at her. "Y-yeah?" She chews her lip as she dips her, the grasp on her waist tightening before she lets go in a panic once they're both upright again. "Sorry," she says. "I just didn't want to drop you."

"I'd forgive you," says Sua, half-amused. "Just like I forgive all the questions that you forget to answer."

Mizi is nearly as pink as her hair when she spins her, and Sua's backside presses against her until they find themselves face to face again. "O-oh. Um, well, sorry–"

"You don't need to be so nervous," Sua interjects.

"Right. Right." Her cheeks fail to settle from their rosy state. Yeah, sorry," she says nonetheless. It's silly, but…" Mizi summons a small smile. I've never seen you so beautiful. You look like a bride," she whispers, her gaze shy.

My bride. 

"Elope with me, then," she says. "Let's run away where no one else knows and spend our small lives together. Somewhere by the sea. Somewhere we can sleep comfortably every morning and wake up to the shore singing. Just somewhere."

There's a split-second fracture of time where nothing happens, where the crescendo of the music quiets and the other waltzing pairs around them still. Mizi can't look anywhere but at her. Sua considers taking it all back as a joke. Just kidding. We have auditions soon, anyway. Have you been preparing yours? Is that why every time I'm foolish enough to sneak into your room, you're always gone? 

"You'd want that?" Mizi asks softly. "Really?"

"Would I lie to you?" Sua dips her this time. She ignores the sting of how Mizi gives into her so effortlessly, how struck she is at the impression of Sua thinking that she doesn't trust her—that she could ever fathom Sua blindsiding her.

"Oh, Mizi." Sua cups her cheek. "Who else but you?"

Mizi falters. For a moment, Sua thinks she'll say something. But the music stops, and then Sunhwa is at Sua's side, barking that Mother wants to see her. Reluctantly, Sua pulls away. Mizi stares back at her, expression defeated, before turning away to find someone else.

Sunhwa digs into Sua's wrist as she drags her forward. "Don't look back. Don't think about anything else, Sua. That's how we all die: caring too much."

But Mizi replays in Sua's head even as Mother asks her what she's eaten today, and Sua responds only water. Pleased, Mother strokes her hair. The gesture only patronizes her. Sua flees the brusquely shining banquet hall and wanders the dark corridors instead. When she finds a janitorial closet, she locks herself in it and buries her head in her hands. The stars fall soon after, littering the floors. She kicks one away, watching as it skitters under the crevice of the closed door apathetically until footsteps approach and someone picks it up. "Sua?"

Sua wipes her eyes dry in a panic. She shucks the remaining stars away, only answering when she's sure they can't be found. "Yes?"

"Can you open the door?" Mizi asks. Then, after a moment of consideration: "I'm sorry."

"You don't need to be." Sua unlocks the door. The futile hope that Mizi can't tell she was crying crumbles when they come face to face again, and she looks pained. "Really. I didn't mean anything I said then."

Mizi looks even more wounded. Sua speaks in a low, hurried string. "Not unless, well, you…"

The door closes, and the world reduces to Sua, Mizi, and the awkward smell of chlorine cleaning agents and bleach. She can feel the heat emanating from the other girl, the stifled breaths they both struggle to take.

Then, Mizi takes her hand, eyes still set on hers, and Sua feels the ridge of a gem against her palm. She glances down—a ring she recognizes belatedly. "Mizi."

"I wanted to give it to you for a while, " she flusters. "Not with the intention of doing it like—" Mizi swallows. "-like this. But," she avers quietly, "I want to, now. I want to." She slips the ring onto Sua's finger and lifts her hand to her lips to christen it with a kiss. "Marry me, Sua, please. Even if no one else knows. Even if only the stars know."

Soon enough, the garden will consume her whole, her ashes burned and scattered like snow, like stardust from up above the vistas, like sand filled with the exoskeletons of foraminifera past and dandruff in her hair that Seokja unnie scolds her for yet tenderly washes away whenever she runs her a bath, nails scratching her scalp. Forever an unresolved 'what-if?', an aborted chance, a pebble that sunk after two skips across water, forgotten for the next daughter Mother can afford, Sua knows what she will be.

My rebellion, Sua thinks, is you.

Sua wins the final race, taking Mizi's lips against hers. Time stops, maybe. Breath stalls, maybe. Stars fume, maybe. She doesn't care. She is breathless, and aches behind her eyes, hunger sitting sharply in the core of her belly, sticks and stones made of her figure, and Mizi are flush and warm and so very alive, all Sua could ever want and need and trespass the sorry lines of desire for, could relish in the same reckless way she does when stealing sips of Mother's aged, antique fire whiskey that sits heavy on her tongue, burning.

When they pull away, Mizi is crying. Her forehead is warm against Sua's. "Come with me, please. I'll take you to the sea. I'll take you, Sua, to Alien Stage and beyond."

Sua offers her answer, her lips chasing Mizi's.

Oh, the immediate forgiveness in Eurydice.

SHINE BOOKS A seaside beach home, alone to just the two of them for two weeks, on a distant planet as Mizi's graduation present. Most days, it's cold and rainy, and the sky is overcast and gloomy, but Sua doesn't mind it much. She's had enough of the stars.

When Mizi busies herself with preparing (re: failing disastrously until Sua offers to help) breakfast, Sua finds herself cracking open Our World's Way, tracing its cracked spine longingly, every morsel of information it could offer devoured to the bone from the first day she'd ever stepped into Anakt Garden. Now auditions are to start in a week and a half—though this planet's days are three hours longer than the home planet's—and Alien Stage's 50th season begins filming in three months, and yet Sua is still here, losing herself in the scraps left of Earth when the world around her becomes too much.

In that hellish place, I'm worried our unkempt and stupid Sua-ah will go pop and die. 

She's never going to see Seokja unnie again, is she?

Mizi clamours into the room, sheepishly reporting that she burned her attempt at Earthian pancakes again. Sua offers a tired smile, sets Our World's Way away, and helps salvage what's left of breakfast. She hides the stars she sheds in a napkin and hums along as Mizi chatters on about the possibilities of their auditions and what to do next if they get into Alien Stage.

(There is no other option but to get into Alien Stage. They'll both go pop and die if they fail the auditions. But Sua only smiles and offers, "I'm sure we will. We'll perform together on that big stage, I promise.")

In the evenings—and on most nights when she can't sleep, Sua metes Mizi with a quiet kiss on each closed eye before leaving her to sleep. Sua strolls along the shores and discards her stars. Now and then, they wash back up in the mornings, and Mizi collects them, excitedly showing her them. Sua smiles through it nonetheless.

Tonight, the sea is hungry. Its waves chew the shoreline relentlessly, crashing over Sua's shins as she stands in its fray until her fingers are clammy with a coldness that sits between the crevices of her bones. The sky is clear, and Sua squints to make out any constellations. In one of her Earthian Culture Studies classes, she recalls that past humans were superstitious enough to follow the stars for direction, betting all they had upon their light when migrating under different skies than their own, wherever they called home.

But what have the stars ever done for her? What have they ever offered her?

Her eyes itch, and the stars don't respond. She thinks she might scream, but Mizi still slumbers. Sua runs into the waves and swims until she can't look back. Breath evades her lungs, and darkness cocoons her, pulling her in deeper.

I'm sorry, Mizi. 

Sua gasps for air.

I can't stay. I can't stay. You love me, and I can't stay. 

She thrashes wildly.

You'll hate me.

The waves skin her alive.

I've lied to you until the end, and you'll hate me, I know. 

Her hands give out.

But you'll live. 

Sua washes onto shore, salt stinging every orifice. It's not her time. The firmament has decided it so.

You will live to forget me. 

Stars tumble into the sand. She wheezes a bitter laugh.

For where else could I find a paradise so enchanting? 

IN HER FADING consciousness, Sua hears the last lines as a fading whisper.

Oh, my clematis. 

Hope withered in the abyss. 

Oh, my clematis. 

Please stay by my side. 

Sua mouths the last words that she can offer, her vision darkening. In your veins sits stardust. Look at the stars, and you will find me. 

But no sound comes.