Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  I tell him to go ahead and say it was me. The cops won’t give me a problem. I work at Quill Marine.

  And with that I head for the door.

  On my way out, though, I turn back and survey the scene. Janey’s on her knees, helping her man stand up. She’s babbling to him in soft, soothing tones.

  “I didn’t know, baby, I won’t bother you so much, I didn’t know. I didn’t know I was bothering you so much, I’ll stop. Let me get you home.”

  Snapshot, I thought. Right there: everything you need to know about love in one handy image. So neat and tidy you could put it on a print and hang it in Grandma’s house.

  I walked out of there, shaking my head, suddenly very tired.

  * * *

  THAT’S NOT my last real memory of the woman that was Dak, but it’s certainly the most representative. And like I said, by some point the next morning, that life was over.

  And like I said, it’s all your fault.

  But I’m not mad at you. Not for ending that life, at least. That life wasn’t all that spectacular to begin with.

  Besides, here’s something people have said about the end: sometimes paradise is waiting on the other side.

  It might only last a few moments. It might take a whole lotta hell to get there. But it’s there.

  So let’s fucking get to it already.

  2

  ASK ME where I worked and I’d tell you: Quill Marine.

  Ask me what we did there and I’d tell you: marine stuff.

  I could get more specific—why, I could wax for hours about the reproductive cycle of the noble sea urchin and how it relates to the water’s tonicity balance; or how phytoplankton secrete an enzyme that helps us produce a more sustainable kind of plastic—but I rarely got the opportunity to go too long. That’s by design. And anything I said from that point on was gonna be 100 percent bullshit anyway.

  The real Quill Marine Labs is protected by layers upon layers upon layers of bullshit, most of it so boring and eye-glazing as to dissuade any in-depth investigation.

  Being boring is the most effective guard dog there is.

  Still, the naval base is located a few minutes off of the water in a pretty small town in Northern California and, to quote our old friend Feetbreath, it does take up a fair amount of real estate. So people talk. People guess and assume. Surely, something interesting must go on in that immense, faceless compound, right? And it must be connected to why they never seem to hire anyone local, mustn’t it?

  * * *

  “HOW’S ALL the mind-control stuff going?”

  Sam, the owner of the Seaview Diner, asks this as he lays down my veggie omelet and cup of coffee. Every time.

  “I knew you were going to ask that,” I respond.

  “That only proves my point,” he tips back.

  Every morning I’m on shift I stop by the Seaview, and every morning it’s the same repartee. Although that morning was a little different.

  “I heard you had a rough night at the Heron last night,” Sam tsked.

  I heard the sound of Feetbreath screaming, of his clavicle snapping, and wished I could control even my own mind.

  People talk. People wonder.

  “Miss? Miss? Please, just tell me that there’s no chance of a Chernobyl sorta situation over there? Please? I have children,” a woman once whispered to me desperately at the supermarket while I was standing in the deli section, looking for the tofu dogs.

  But honestly, besides the occasional embittered townie who wishes we took his job application, the interest in Quill Marine is mostly circumstantial. Fanciful, even.

  Hell, it’s not even as if Quill is the only research lab in the area.

  Most people who live in the area are commuters—they go inland to work in the Sustain Farms or south to Silicon Valley or up to Trinidad to work for the next closest research facility, Humboldt Marine. In fact, Humboldt, formerly Humboldt State University Marine before its privatization and now known by the enviable nom de guerre “The Bone Factory” for its research in bone regrowth, is one of Quill Marine Lab’s saving graces. As far as we know (as far as I know, I should say, since somebody always knows more), they’re a legitimate research lab, and they do enough actual work that Quill Marine gets to act as a sort of plucky younger sibling—always trying, but never in danger of coming close to the big guy’s reputation.

  Then again, as someone who worked at Quill Marine, I’ve learned not to really believe the thing that anybody or anything presents themselves to be. The Bone Factory could actually be the ones dabbling in mind control. They’re owned by the same private defense contractors that bought Quill Marine almost ten years ago, after all. They could be manipulating our every thought, constructing our entire reality out of whole cloth. Everything you’re seeing right now could have been conjured up by them and you’re just sitting in an empty metal room none the fucking wiser!

  See? Isn’t parsing fun?

  Quill Marine has its own covers and initiatives. It conducts marine studies and releases verifiable results. It does a pretty phenomenal job presenting itself as a by-the-numbers aquatic research facility. It has a front. And then evidence behind the front. And then evidence behind that evidence. The only remotely notable aspect of the company is that it chooses its new hires from a very specific, very remote talent pool.

  So none of us in Quill Marine ever begrudge, or even take that seriously, the occasional line of questioning about What We’re Really Up To. It’s more fun for everyone to imagine we’re doing something spectacular.

  I’m sure you entertained a few fantasies yourself before you found out the truth.

  And in this case, it’s not like you were wrong.

  * * *

  IT TOOK me some time to get used to life out here. And honestly, a big part of the adjustment was shedding the implications of terms like “California living.”

  After all, California living was part of how the job was sold to me. I’d be so close to the beach, to wine country—what an ideal place to ride out the rest of your career, they chirped! After war zones and hell holes and Washington, D.C., now it would be surfboards and floral shirts. Sunshine and seagulls. The twang of a Dick Dale guitar lick always just finishing off an echo somewhere.

  Life this far north, though?

  Replace all your palm trees with firs and redwoods.

  Replace all your surfers with lumberjacks.

  Replace your sandy beaches with rocky cliffs.

  Replace all your fantasies of lounging in the sun next to a cooler full of Coronas with getting caught in a downpour while trying to read a book on how to better handle seasonal depression.

  Now when I think of the beach, it doesn’t conjure up images of escape. Instead, it’s more like encasement. I don’t want to mislead, though: depending on the day, that could actually feel like a good thing. After all, one of the first things you learned on incursions in the service was to find a safe place to set your back. Up here, with the sprawling chaos of pretty much the entire continent stretching out before us, the impenetrable rocky shoreline acts less like a getaway and more like a bulwark. I felt cornered … but for someone like me that’s actually more relaxing than having everywhere to run.

  And, sure, sometimes you need to drive a bit longer to get to places. Nearby towns like Trinidad, with its population of around four hundred, don’t always have the most recent movies in theaters (they just got a new one called Kindergarten Cop, is it any good? Don’t tell me). But there are plenty of bars and I could still hear the ocean. It was my own version of California living and, on my best days, I actually cherished how different it was from the one I thought I was getting. I could look at the rest of California, so jarringly different from this one, and it was a little like being the only single friend in a room full of married couples. Yeah, we had our own problems, but we were also untethered from some massive amounts of bullshit.

  It’s nice. I thought I’d even grown to love it.

  I really thought that
.

  * * *

  THANKS TO the incident at the Heron and my inability to stop replaying it, I showed up to work at Quill the next morning with the unshakeable feeling that I’d forgotten something. Parker, our guy at the front gate, did his usual thing of studying my ID in his little booth for a full minute, silent (even though we’d both worked there together eight years at this point), giving me plenty of time to sit in my jeep and stew over what it was that I wasn’t remembering.

  Lloyd isn’t ready to try out his new suit just yet, and we’re not scheduled to run any more tests on the dogs, thank God. The visit from Sierra’s corporate assholes isn’t for another couple of weeks. I have plenty of time before the Harp powers up. What am I forgetting?

  It was like I’d undergone brain surgery and someone left a nickel in my skull before sewing me back up. I could feel the thing sitting there, but I couldn’t … quite …

  “Date of birth?” Parker finally asked in his flat, impersonal voice.

  I gave him the answer automatically. January 12, 19awhileago.

  “Middle name?”

  I told him I don’t have one.

  “Cool.”

  He handed my ID back to me, and, with that part of our day dispensed with, his entire demeanor flipped. He leaned out of his booth window like a gossipy housewife.

  “So,” he clucked. “The guy got here about five minutes ago and I’ve got him in holding. We taking bets on this one?”

  “The guy? What guy?” Then: the realization. “Ah, shit!”

  Parker chuckled. “What, did you forget?”

  I had a rough night, asshole. “Arrgh! When’s Power-Up?”

  “If it’s regular?” Parker checked his watch. “Like, nineteen minutes?”

  Plenty of time, right? On a normal day. But on a newbie day? I growled and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. Parker smirked.

  “Better get a move on.” He pressed a button and the gate slowly trundled open. As I drove ahead he called after me. “So that’s a ‘no’ on taking bets, right?”

  I parked in my spot and walked as quickly as I could to holding.

  * * *

  MAYBE THIS was the exact moment my life ended.

  Then again, maybe not. I mean, I certainly wasn’t impressed.

  At the very least, this is when the whistling of approaching bombs could be heard.

  * * *

  THE LITTLE waiting room they built near the front gate isn’t shitty at all, and that’s by design. If there’s a mix-up in clearances, a person could be waiting here for hours while we wait to get them vouched for. The coffee’s solid. The sofas are comfortable.

  And there you were. Not sitting on any of them. Standing in the middle of the room, ramrod straight. Not at all looking like the god of destruction you’d turn out to be. There was no Shiva here. No eater of worlds. Just a tall, skinny young man on pause. Like a horse gone to sleep.

  You saw me. And then you actually saluted.

  Internally, I pitched a sigh that could’ve powered a steam locomotive at least halfway across the country.

  “Lieutenant Commander Matt Salem, ma’am.”

  I stared at you for a moment. Then I said, hopefully with not too much malice: “You wanna try that again?”

  I could actually see your thought process, rolling over everything that had just happened, and then—oh! there it is!—realizing your mistake.

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Literally everybody does it.”

  “I’m just … Matt Salem. Hi.”

  “Feels naked, right? Just saying your name all by itself?”

  “I kinda hate it.”

  We shook hands, like normal people do. I looked at your eyes. Big, eager, underneath long, almost feminine lashes. Physically very attractive, beautiful even, but also kinda cute, in a lost puppy sort of way. But I was someone who definitely couldn’t own a dog.

  “So, listen, we need to get going—”

  “Oh, do you need to see my clearance doc? They sent it to my phone, so I can—”

  You pulled your phone out of your pocket and my guts fell down around my ankles. It took all my willpower to not smack it out of your hands.

  “Don’t ever bring a phone here again.”

  “I’m … sorry, ma’am. I just thought I’d need it to identify mys—”

  “Don’t ever. Bring that. Again.”

  “I’m turning it all the way off and I will never bring it here again.”

  I could tell you meant it. I could tell that if I asked you to throw that phone down on the ground right now and do an Irish jig on its shiny face, you’d do it without even a moment’s thought.

  I considered it. Instead I told you to leave it here, under one of the couch cushions if that made you feel more secure, to be picked up at the end of the day. I was feeling generous.

  “We identify you,” I said. “You’ll see what I mean in a minute. Come on, we’ve gotta hustle.”

  I watched you pat the couch cushion down and I think I experienced a moment of pity. Bringing a phone was a misstep. I was already dreading what I would have to do if there was another one.

  It’d be a shame, I remember thinking. You smelled weirdly good.

  I pushed open the door to holding and we made our way back outside to the front door of the lab.

  * * *

  I LIKED to think of Quill Marine, the real Quill Marine, as a giant, segmented, man-eating insect, and only the right people are immune to its digestive juices.

  Maybe what we actually did there prompted me to look at the world a little more grotesquely, I don’t know. For whatever reason, it was hard for me not to think of being swallowed whole and starting on some sort of peristaltic journey every time I clocked in for a shift.

  From the outside, of course, it was nothing special. Before Quill was privatized, back when it was just Quill Naval, they tried to make everything look as unremarkable as possible. If it weren’t for the fences and guards it’d almost look like a community college.

  The main building itself was a pretty standard office building: there were hallways and rooms (which mostly sat unoccupied), offices, innocuous hanged wall art.

  You wouldn’t realize that this whole area was actually a mouth.

  A guest wouldn’t notice, but there were teeth there—guards with weapons behind walls ready to deploy and chew stuff up if it didn’t actually belong.

  Failing that, though, everyone went through a series of steps to make their way through, and the first step was easy enough: a sign-in counter. A tablet embedded in the wall, tilted at an angle for ease of writing, next to a metal door. I thought of this station as, like, the uvula.

  Do giant, segmented, man-eating insects have uvulas?

  I don’t know. Fuck you. This one does.

  I signed in.

  Your turn came, and as you leaned over to work the stylus over the screen I thought again how good you smelled and how it’d be a shame to shoot you in the back of the head.

  I hoped it didn’t come to that. And maybe it was the urgency I was feeling to get through all our checkpoints in time before the Power-Up, but I suddenly realized how tired I was of all this security, of all the steps and secrets and, well, the brutality.

  With your sign-in complete, the screen processed for a moment, then the door unlocked with an audible thunk. You looked at me. There was no real expression on your face at all, yet somehow I knew you were feeling giddy surprise, and even a smidgen of pride. How could I know that? It’s like you were a language I didn’t know I could already speak.

  “So, that’s it? We just walk in?”

  “Not even close.”

  * * *

  ONCE INSIDE there was a winding hallway and another metal door. This door had a Plexiglas window set into it. On the other side, looking very much like some placid mental patient, was Rosh. His dark, receding hair was messy but his pencil-thin mustache was neat. He stood, wearing coveralls and a patient, prudish smile, holding a tablet like a fi
g leaf, in front of his beloved machine and, surprise surprise, another metal door.

  “Wow, what is that?” you asked as we approached the door. The machine looked like a pharmacy blood pressure machine and an old Atari had somehow successfully reproduced. Except instead of a pressure cuff there was a long, white stick with a chin guard sticking up in front of the screen.

  “That would be Rosh and his scanner.”

  “Oh, but I don’t have an issued ID yet—”

  “You are the ID.” I opened the door. “Hey, Rosh!”

  “Hello, person I don’t yet recognize!” Rosh chirped—then looked at you, eyes narrowing. “Alongside a person I genuinely don’t recognize.”

  “Matt Salem. It’s his first day—you get his vitals?”

  “One moment, stranger, I shall check.” Rosh conferred with the tablet in his hands.

  God, I hoped this went quickly. Rosh was easy to adore … but usually only in retrospect. Probably out of necessity, Quill Marine employs a lot of weirdos. None of us, with the exception of Trippi, the woman who works reception upstairs and needs to sound as normal as can be, are that socially well adjusted (probably means Trippi’s the most damaged of all of us). Rosh was one of our more, let’s say, indulgent personalities.

  “Behold!” he crooned. “Right here in my system, a Matthew Salem! Will wonders never cease? But is that really you?! Why, you could be anyb—”

  “Let’s run me through first, please,” I said, sitting down at Rosh’s machine. “Where are we with the Harp countdown?”

  “I wouldn’t have the first clue what you’re referring to, stranger,” he barked disapprovingly.

  I grunted and settled in, placing my chin on the guard, looking straight into the bottomless black of the concave screen. Rosh intoned the directions as if I hadn’t heard them a full seventy million times by now.

  “Take a deep, fulfilling inhalation!” I did. “Now, without blinking, very gently exhaaale.” I did. The scan mulled everything over, made an affirmative little beep, and Rosh threw his hands up in triumph. “Aaaand suddenly I recognize you! Quill Marine Security Chief Dakota Prentiss!”