Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  She beat at me with all the tenacity of a windsock on a mild day. Finally, I heard a different noise; a noise that sounded like …

  I loosened the hold around her throat by a fraction. She gulped air and tried again.

  “Left … pants pocket…,” she gurgled.

  “Put them in my hand,” I ordered.

  Weakly, awkwardly, she fished a hand into her pocket and pulled out a small, metallic key. As soon as it was in my hand I took the pressure off her neck entirely. I let her go and earthwormed myself up and over into the front seat. I had about two seconds before she got enough air to be a problem again, so I didn’t waste it uncuffing myself yet.

  During the melee, she’d dumped her gun on the passenger seat. I grabbed it with my conjoined hands and made sure the barrel was the first thing she saw when her vision cleared.

  “Facedown! Lie facedown! Do it now!” I hollered.

  She nodded, unimpressed, rubbing at her bruised throat, and lowered herself into the footwell of the backseat.

  This was the only chance I was gonna get. I kicked open the door and wriggled out of the car into the sand.

  I unlocked my ankles first in case I needed to run. I kept the gun trained on the car as best I could while I freed myself. But she wasn’t coming out. Next I freed my wrists. I thought wildly of X rubbing her wrists again—these manacles were no joke—as I dumped the heavy cuffs into the dirt. They landed with an almost delicate thwump.

  I gave myself a nanosecond to look around. I had no fucking clue where I was, and night was upon us.

  With a surer grip on the gun, I called out, “Patty?”

  “Yeah,” she answered from inside the car.

  “I’m gonna open the back door. Crawl out. Hands and knees.”

  “Yeah,” she said again.

  I unlatched the door and stepped back, keeping the gun on her at all times. I was ready for her to try anything … but the door pushed slowly open and she poured herself languidly into the dirt, doing as she was told. The fight was out of her. The way I heard her sniff, just once, barely noticeable, I knew she was crying.

  Once she was out of the car: “Stand up. Slowly.”

  She did.

  It was the kind of dark that obliterated most visual nuance. Everything was its own shade of dark purple. Still, I could see the hate boiling in her eyes.

  “Now run,” I said, and ticked a direction with the gun. “That way.”

  “I’ll…”

  “Far and as fast as you can.”

  “I’ll be alone,” she said. In protest? In resignation? I wasn’t sure.

  “Go!” I jabbed toward her with the pistol.

  “I’ll just be alone,” she said again. “I’ll just have to run forever.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come here! You did this to yourself!”

  She staggered away a step, then came back, her body unsure of which suicidal impulse to follow: go to the woman with the gun or to the open, dark desert.

  Her head was down, her face obscured in the black-and-purple smudge of night, so I didn’t see her mouth move as she spoke. Instead, it was as if the words floated out on their own, independent of either of us.

  “I would’ve been better than him,” I heard her voice speak. “Not like a lover, but … every other way.”

  It almost broke me. So I screamed.

  “GO!”

  She nodded, took a step back … and then another one … and then turned her body to face the new direction.

  “Jesus, Patty, don’t walk, run!” She lumbered away, torturously slow. I fired the gun into the air. “I SAID RUN!”

  She picked up the pace ever so slightly.

  There were towns. There were roads. If she picked up the fucking pace she could be in civilization before sunup, before the desert became deathly hot again.

  But the fastest she managed was a limping jog. And even if she sprinted like a demon, I wouldn’t have time to watch her go. I hurried back to the car.

  I could feel grief trying to happen. It needed to happen. The blighted skin around my eyes felt tight and foreign—maybe tears would have helped. But I refused to let it, no matter how unnatural it felt to press forward. Just as it went against everything inside me to leave one of my own in the wilderness.

  They were coming for me. They were coming for you.

  The best I could do was a private eulogy. “Thank you for trying,” I whispered to Patty into the car as I turned over the engine. “Thank you for getting such a good head start.”

  Wait. How—

  I spun the wheel and sped back in what I hoped was the direction of the truck.

  The stars began to show themselves, as bright as streetlamps.

  27

  THE LOVELY thing about adrenaline is it drowns everything out. But it’s only temporary: everything is still there once the tide has receded—in fact sometimes, if anything, things are clearer and stronger, like statues that have been washed clean in a flood.

  Teresa sold us out, I had thought. But even in the moment, something about that rang false. It was too perfect, too obvious, too exactly what I wanted to believe.

  There was this fact, too: she loved you too much.

  Love makes you do stupid, reckless things, against all laws and better judgment.

  Just look at Patty.

  How had she gotten such a good head start?

  As I drove back to the truck, I had two more realizations. It would be a night for such things, it seemed.

  The first was that this had been Quill’s plan all along. The fraternization policy. It was unnatural and cruel and worked exactly how they’d intended. I’d found myself wondering over and over lately why such a policy was in place; why couldn’t we have friends or connections or love of any kind with the only other people who knew our secret? But now it was clear to me. Only the most hollow and pliable of employees could stay there with any real longevity. Anyone with even the barest hint of insurrection, of loneliness, in their bones—even if it was buried as deep as it had been inside me, so deep I never would have even suspected it was there—would eventually fuck up. That was by design. It was a self-cleansing mechanism that was brutal in its efficiency. Keeps the blood fresh, and as soon as it begins to grow stale and unsatisfied? Sic the white blood cells on it.

  The second thing I realized, in my newly adrenaline-scrubbed brain, was less esoteric than that. It was just a memory, really.

  Because, as I drove farther and farther away from Patty, I felt like I was coming out of a dream. And I remembered you, last night, as we lay in bed together. How you jolted against me in some sort of waking spasm. You had broken the silence to ask me something.

  * * *

  “LET ME in,” I said to the roll-top door at the back of the truck. “I’m alone.”

  “Jesus!” You slid up the door. “I was losing my mind! What took so—oh my God.”

  I could only imagine how I looked right now. It was almost full dark but even in silhouette I must have looked like warmed-over death. And besides the physical damage, I’m sure you could sense something else about me.

  “Gimme a hand up?” The truck suddenly seemed twenty feet tall. And apparently …

  “What happened to your eyes?!”

  … you’d been sitting in the dark.

  “Pepper spray. Give me a hand up, please.”

  “Is someone here? Are they still—?”

  “Fine, I’ll climb up myself.” I started to reach for the hand holds on the side of the doorway when you finally snapped to and pulled me in.

  “Okay, you wanna tell me what the hell happened out there?”

  “Turn on the light—why were you sitting here in the dark?”

  “I was just…” You trailed off guiltily and flicked on the interior overhead cargo light. It cast a sick, yellow pall over everything.

  I gasped.

  “What?!” You jumped.

  I was looking at Moss. He was still leaning up against the cold metal corner of the
cargo area, next to the Turndown box. There was one strand of moss left on his chest. Even while I’d been gone he’d been wisping away.

  “Look,” I whispered, high and frightened. “He’s almost gone.”

  You looked. You nodded. You swallowed.

  “We need to worry about you, though,” you said. “Your face looks like it’s been thr—”

  “Can I see the burner?”

  “What?”

  I held a hand out as answer. I didn’t want to say it again. I kept my voice perfectly even—sweet, even—as if I didn’t want Moss’s final moments to be full of upset.

  I don’t want this to be true.

  “Um … yeah, do you need to—have they signaled somehow? Wait, did they do this to you?”

  “No. They didn’t.”

  I want Teresa to have sold us out. Except—

  “Dak, you need to tell me: are we under some kind of attack right now?”

  Patty would have been coming from Quill. Which means—

  “Give me the phone, please, Matt.”

  “Yeah, okay, um, it’s, uh…” You dug into your pocket and handed it to me. I flipped it open.

  Unless she hopped a plane or something—

  “Do we need to get ready for, for an attack or—?” You were anxiously pacing in a very contained place, like a kid needing to pee.

  “I’m looking at the call log,” I said. I surprised myself saying it. You shut up instantly.

  The call had to have been made last night.

  And … there it was. Silence dropped onto us like a weight.

  “Okay,” you managed.

  I stood there, breathing. The call had gone out around the time I was in the garage with Teresa. When I thought you were asleep. The call lasted five minutes. There’d been plenty of time. And you knew where the phone was because you asked.

  Some part of my brain refused to accept it, though. Some final, stubborn, childish part that was hoping for an obscure answer, a technicality that could excuse this. I wasn’t really feeling it fully … until I finally looked at you and you whispered, your beautiful eyes wet with apology:

  “Dak … we’re never going to get across the border. You know we’re not.”

  * * *

  I SPRANG into action like a coiled thing.

  “Okay we gotta move now. Where’s your drill stuff—”

  There were bags on the floor of the truck. I rifled through each one rapidly, dumping out their contents. One was snacks. One was our Lloyd Suits, another helmets.

  You stood there dumbly. “What are you—my drill stuff?”

  It wasn’t here. It must be in the cab.

  “Jesus, Dak, stop, we have to talk!” I heard you call as I hopped down out of the cargo bed and made my way quickly to the cab.

  The stars were revealing themselves above us, bright and placid. You jumped down from the back and ran after me.

  “It’s the same deal, the same deal they offered us on the phone! We’ll get a year each and then they’ll let us go! Maybe we can find each other!”

  The driver’s side door was locked.

  “Dak! We have to figure this out!”

  “I am,” I growled as I made my way around to the passenger side. You continued blathering on behind me, a pesky shadow in the darkness.

  “They said they’ll have papers, new contracts, superseding the old ones, guaranteeing one year in prison and then we’re out. For good.”

  The fucking passenger side was locked too.

  “If they catch us at the border we’re dead, or in a hole forever, or overseas in a chem-zone, not even together!”

  “Keys.”

  “Seriously: how is that better?”

  “Give me your keys!” I expected my voice to echo, but it didn’t. It just drifted up and away.

  Our voices never had the chance to echo, I thought feverishly. Inside the ship, now out in the darkness.

  I grabbed you and began searching your pockets.

  “Hey—Jesus—what’re you—”

  I found them, pushed you away, and turned back to the passenger-side door. Once it was unlocked, I threw the door open, climbed in, and there it was: a bag between the seats. I could see the back hump of the drill peeking out, even.

  As I went for the drill, you pulled me out of the cab.

  “Dak! You have to stop and you have to listen to me!” I blinked back at you, willing myself to feel detached so I didn’t do something emotional and stupid. I couldn’t see your eyes, I couldn’t get lost in your eyelashes, so I focused on your voice. Your voice wasn’t echoing either. Of course, why would it, we were in open desert, the mountains were too far away to bounce off of. Still, I found myself thinking, Maybe it’s us. Maybe we’re the reason. Maybe it was always us.

  “We made a bad call,” you were saying. “We thought we could beat the world and we were wrong, nobody can do that, that’s always wrong!”

  But you were wrong. I’d never stepped a foot wrong in my life. I always followed orders. Even in choosing you, I was following orders, just finally from my own heart, finally I’d made the call, I’d issued the commands. It couldn’t be wrong. I can’t let it be wrong; it’s all I’ve ever done—

  “Dak, this isn’t—it’s not that I don’t—”

  “Please, stop,” I heard myself whimper.

  “I wasn’t faking it, I wasn’t using you, I wasn’t lying about us, maybe there could still be us after—”

  “Matt,” I said, more firmly. You stopped talking. I let myself speak slowly and deliberately, still trying to feel divested from the situation. But the more I said the more I heard the edge of something sharp and steely honing into my voice. “Do you know what’s really sad? What really upsets me? You didn’t call it in after Haydon made the offer. If you’d just done it then, I could say, ‘Sure, he’s scared, people get scared.’ But that’s not when you did it. You did it after dinner with Teresa and barely fucking me. That’s when you did it. And the most fucked-up part of all? I’m still going to save you.”

  I reached back into the cab, grabbed the drill, and trudged my way to the back.

  * * *

  OF COURSE, I headed straight for the Harp. I heard you outside.

  “All right, Dak, listen to me, yes, you’re not wrong. Trip’s call scared the hell out of me.”

  I got inside the Turndown box and set to unscrewing the Harp’s rig. You climbed into the back of the truck.

  “Get a Lloyd Suit on,” I barked at you as I worked. “I won’t trigger it ’til they’re close.”

  “But the call wasn’t enough to put me over the edge. It was that dinner with Teresa.”

  The drill felt heavy, deadly, in my hand. “Don’t you dare say that to me—don’t you dare!” I seethed.

  “It’s not that I want to get back together with her—I don’t, that’s not me anymore either. It’s just…”

  We didn’t have time for you to fucking find yourself! “Spit your bullshit out and then get your suit on!”

  “It just reminded me that there’s all the rest of life, you know? There’s life outside the service, outside Quill, Sierra. There’s a whole world that’s not life-or-death. And there’s love that’s not always, like … it doesn’t have to eat everything, it doesn’t have to be like, like—”

  You cut yourself off. I stopped drilling.

  “It doesn’t have to be like me?” I finished the thought for you.

  You were waffling and I realized again as you spoke just how young you were. I never really considered it to be such an issue before, but here it was. You were still practically a fucking teenager.

  “Me and T didn’t hold each other like we were drowning,” you hedged, you whined. “Don’t you wanna hold somebody and it’s just nice? It’s not, like, keeping you alive? Don’t you wanna live in a world where, like, seconds don’t make all the difference and love doesn’t have to mean the world ends?”

  I’d finished unscrewing the Harp and dumped the drill onto the bottom
of the Turndown box. It landed with a sonorous, heavy thud. I leaned the Harp against the side and scrambled out of the box before heading straight for our suits.

  “Put your suit on. We’ll seal each other.” I began stepping into mine.

  “Okay—let’s—why don’t we put the Harp in the bag so it doesn’t hurt anyone—”

  “They might be ten minutes out, it might be less—put your suit on!”

  “When they get here we need to be clearly unarmed with our hands—”

  “Put it on!” I was almost completely suited up. I picked up one of the helmets and threw it straight at you. It hit the wall next to you with an outraged metallic clang.

  “Jesus!”

  “And I’ll seal my goddamn self, I guess.” I jammed another helmet over my head, and then worked on the seals.

  “It’s just too big,” you were saying. “It’s all too big. We were wrong, baby, we were just wrong.”

  The whoosh-buzzing of my seals wasn’t loud enough to blot out your yammering bullshit. I needed it to stop.

  “Put your goddamn suit on!” I bellowed.

  When you spoke again, your voice was low and even.

  “No,” you said.

  “What?”

  “No, I won’t do it.”

  “Matt…”

  “We’re not gonna get through the border, okay? We’re not gonna be millionaires in China. And even if we were, we’d be scared they’d get to us for the rest of our lives.”

  “Please, please put it on.”

  “I wasn’t faking it with you. I loved being with you. I don’t wish it never happened. We tried, I’m glad we tried, but it didn’t work. We have to be smart now. They’re bigger than we are. All we can do now is get the softest landing we can.”

  “But I love you.”

  I said it without fanfare. Without hesitation. I didn’t choke on it. I didn’t cry. I don’t even think I said it as a plea.

  As soon as it was out of my mouth, though, I heard the Harp begin to hum. Faintly. Fainter than ever before.

  “Dak—”

  “I love you,” I said again, raising my voice over the hum. “And that’s gotten us this far. Just please: love me enough to get us the rest of the way. Please.”