Omega Moon

by Noah Harris

  And then as the light reflects from the dome right into my helmet, glinting in the sweat-soaked hair that’s falling in my eyes, it comes to me like lightning…

  All I needed to do, this whole time, was be a wolf.

  Loping across the dunes, faster than a roller and stronger too. Wild upon the warmth of the moon, running without this heavy suit and body. Without fear or shame to hold me down, hold me back, push me away from the shimmering dome of Tiptree. My dreams are all about to come true in there. If I can just make it. All I have to do is slip loose. Let this heavy body go, and the wolf run free.

  So that’s what I do.

  11

  Mine

  Julian

  Waiting for Alden gives me hives. I’ve never been great at waiting for anything. I’d rather give up than endure a long wait. When I think about waiting, it’s like time dilating, opening up larger and larger, to swallow us. Like the week we spent in the waystation that felt like a year.

  I thought then that if Pippa knew about us, she might have some biological insight into why our bodies always wanted that skin-to-skin body contact, even before we were lovers.

  It just felt so exceedingly natural, so lovely. Never too far from curling up in each other’s arms, hands tightening as we pressed ourselves together, squeezing tight. Alden’s hands on my hips, my arm crooked around one of those huge biceps. Until it would subside, and we could become two bodies again.

  I brought it up again when I was stalling, before he went out across the sand and I started to imagine worse and worse fates for us both.

  “Back home they say wolves live forever. Because for wolves it’s always now.”

  He wrinkled his nose, looking down at me in bemusement, making me chuckle. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “That sounded wrong, but you know what I mean. When you’re doing something you love doing, and you don’t have to even think about it. Like work, or sex…”

  Alden nodded. “Flow.”

  “Yeah! Or like how you said, how it always takes longer to get somewhere if you’ve never been there before. It’s all in your head, so if you don’t notice time passing, then it isn’t really passing. It’s always forever. And that’s how wolves live. In the legends. I mean it’s not…”

  Alden squeezed me tight. “No, that’s exactly it. Like shirts and skin, back on the shuttle. When we were in bed, it was just one moment forever. Just us touching. No time.”

  I blinked back tears, relaxing into his lap and chest as forcefully as possible. He squeezed me again, laying a hot kiss on the back of my neck. And we lay like that. Forever.

  Alden nodded, humming deep in his chest so I could feel him. “Like you said about the moon. Pulling on the ocean, and the ocean pulling on the moon.”

  Pleased, I fell silent. He knew.

  “I always thought sex was…like this thing I could hear, in another room. A wolf chained up and starving. And because they told me he didn’t exist, I put everything into making that true.”

  He didn’t usually talk like this, and I was curious.

  “But also, because he was so strong. Because those feelings were so powerful, I guess I thought I could get lost in it. And I guess I was. Am. But I can’t believe I was so scared of it. Of me.”

  There was sorrow in his voice, for lost time. Part of me feels it too. All that wasted time.

  “Now we’re all alone up here. Nobody’s watching. And we know who we are. I know you. I can see you, and you can see me. And we’re both real. It felt like we were the only things that were real on the station.”

  I shifted against him lovingly but didn’t interrupt.

  “And I guess it’s like you said about Romulus and Remus and the souls. How we have to find each other over and over, a million billion times, forever. And when you said that, I thought it was awful. Wasting all that precious time, when you’re already mine.”

  He was quiet long enough that I sat up, turning to check on him. His eyes were joyful. Mad, with a familiar wildness.

  “But now, I think I get it. I’ll just keep finding you and finding you. And every time, I’ll say ‘See? I could find you anywhere. Because I’m yours.’”

  I watched Alden hopping across the sand like a deranged video game character until he was out of sight. And it took about as long as I figured it would, to come down from the breathless heat of his presence.

  It’s getting hard to think around him. And to not think about him. So, I work on packing up the place. Boxes, neatly stacked at the door, ready to roll. The bright white outside feels like that certain kind of truth you hate hearing and never get used to. All honesty, and no room for fear. Just the things that had been too hard to look at before now. With Alden in love with me I’m pretty sure I can do anything at all. And now that includes admitting anything at all. It’s a good feeling, even if it makes me dizzy. But I can’t imagine any circumstance where it might get me in trouble. He gives me courage all the way down.

  I pray for the dead. And then for the living. I pray to the gods of Earth, and then try and see if I can feel any on the moon. Nothing. I’m a tough sell on religion usually, but I need all the support I can get.

  Trying Alden’s meditation just gives me a headache, so I go back to thinking about sex, and coming clean up there in the sky.

  I thought about how shifters have kids, even some of the effects of being an omega. It was a relief to unburden myself of all those secrets. Alone now, it’s comforting to have it all flood back. Shifter rules, fear and shame was everything, for almost my entire life. But for him, it’s all shiny new information. I worried I was just taking the burden off my own shoulders and putting it on his, but he had to know. It’s always better to know.

  And Alden seems much more confident than he was even twelve hours ago. Maybe it’s not a burden at all. When he smiles like that, like it’s something precious, or looks at my body like it’s something holy, it doesn’t feel shameful. It feels like we’ve discovered heaven, and I want to stay here forever, and never go back down to Earth again.

  Once he returns, we’ll be moving pretty much nonstop. Taking the roller to the colony, turning it on, catching a ride back home. In a week or less, we’ll be out of there.

  The dome of the colony itself, Tiptree, is big enough that there are places where you can look up into the sky, and just barely see a reflection of more city above you, curling all the way around. Once there’s a working atmosphere, it’s designed to mostly hide that, since it’s proven to be disorienting. But they said some towers and skyscrapers would always be visible, poking down through the clouds. It’s visions of that pristine place that send me off to sleep.

  For now, everything is white in the darkness. We’ll have minimal light when we arrive, filtering down through the empty hollow city, and when we reach the end we’ll turn on the artificial sun. Let there be light, we’ll say. And solar panels for a mile in every direction will connect to the grid, powering a generator with more energy than we’ll ever need.

  In my dream I’m walking around among those solar panels, searching for Alden, looking for his bunny hops, or the trail of a great silvery roller. Strong thighs pumping him up again and again, into the air. Biceps bulging as he lands, fists clenched. Of course, he’ll be wearing a spacesuit, but in my dream he’s a half-naked superhero, devouring the miles between us and safety. It’s so beautiful, the animal strength of him, that I don’t even notice as the dream begins to curdle.

  About a hundred miles from his goal, Alden’s jumping begins to slow, and then stops altogether, until he’s just walking on the surface. I call out encouragement, but he can’t hear me. In the dream it’s because I’m too far away. The radiation interferes with comms. Or maybe I’m a ghost. The brisk walk slows, Alden’s arm held tightly against his side. Is he injured? I can tell he’s getting tired. My heart beats faster with worry as I get closer.

  His breathing is ragged, and his eyes look bruised, exhausted. Like a zombie shambling forward. His mouth moves
but no sound comes out. Maybe he’s singing himself a walking song, like back in Corps. He could be repeating my name.

  When he finally falls, I gasp, and nearly lose the thread, rising toward consciousness. But some part of me knows I can’t leave yet, and I dive back into the dream. Just a little deeper. Just a little more time.

  He’s so strong, and so beautiful, even pulling himself forward with his hands. This is love, I think. This thing that animates him. It’s stronger than any other force on Earth, or Moon. So, it must be love.

  His lips are turning blue.

  I reel back out of the dream nearly altogether, panicking. The last thing I see chills me to the bone.

  Alden rises all at once to his knees with the beatific smile of a saint, grinning up into the light of a sun, howling like a wolf. I can feel what he wants. To wrench off the scarred skin of a lifetime of disappointment and be reborn in the moon’s reflected light.

  And now he’s unzipping his jumpsuit, stepping out into the punishing light. Golden hair lighting up in every direction. He looks so incredibly beautiful in that moment it brings tears to my eyes, all fear swept away, for a moment.

  And then he steps out of his body, too. A golden wolf dancing off upon the white.

  I can’t move, shouting his name over and over, as that wolf vanishes. I wake up with tears on my cheeks and a throat raw from screaming. This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare. And it’s real.

  The part of me that’s always known where Alden is, when he walks into a room, how he’s feeling, I thought it was about smelling him, as shifters do. But he’s not here now, and it feels just the same.

  Am I making this up in my moon madness? Am I imagining his danger, our bond? Were we ever really dreaming together?

  I reach out across the sands with my mind, tentatively. A muscle you’ve never known about before, doing a movement nobody can teach you. Where his heart should be, there’s just the cold. I have no time to waste.

  The next hours pass in an instant, as I set out jumping through the sky after him.

  At the base of the dome, I’m terrified. I never saw him. I looked as I went, and it sickens me to imagine I might have missed him, flying over him as I jumped. But just as I reach the door of the dome’s outer bunker, he’s there. Sprawled across the doorstep, almost. His suit deflated, sickening, in the heat. My heart leaps and I pray to every deity I can think of to let him be alive. Let him live.

  Part of me doesn’t want to find out. Part of me wants to sit here and wait for the inevitable. But I can’t do that. This is my alpha lying here and I have to know.

  Dragging him into the bunker, I feel myself sigh with relief as I sink down beside him, his suit readout telling me he’ll be fine. Let him wake up on his own. An oxygen tube and saline IV, and let his body do the rest. Some people say having his omega nearby induces faster healing in an alpha, but I don’t know how you’d test for that. I couldn’t handle being anywhere else anyway.

  It’s a strange smell, like a freshly painted house, but mossy, too. The light from the dome is all we have, slanted like a summer evening. I want to sing his name loud enough to shake the floors but instead I sit on my hands, looking around.

  The walls of the structures around the dome, this first bunker, look like quarried rock, but I know it’s actually moon dust, mixed with cement by robots, so all that we build will be native. A beautiful idea. I just didn’t realize how beautiful until now. The walls look like limestone, the heaviest and most solid things I’ve seen on our whole journey, other than Alden’s thighs earlier today. They’re thick enough to withstand the radiation and keep out the suffocating heat and even deadlier cold. They didn’t need to be lovely too.

  I can’t wait to explore it with him. This unborn, bone-white city, so ready for life. There’s something so mysterious and vast, so inviting, about the base. I can see through the long rectangular window of the command tower the bunker leads to, barely, in the dim filtered light.

  A sideways city, slicing downward into the moon like an apple core. And far, far down at the other end, a generator ready to light up our new world.

  But first, the roller. Oxygen supply’s going steady and his heartrate is stable. He’ll be okay. For this part I actually do have to dig out the manual. A three-ring binder, with diagrams and warnings on every other page. But it all comes back to me as I read, and I place it back carefully on the bookshelf in the command tower after just a few minutes.

  “Let’s do it,” I grunt to myself. I want to howl into that empty city below, just to hear the echo. We will. But not yet. To hear Alden’s roar shake the city, I would give anything.

  “Is this real?” Alden chokes out, his voice so dry I hiss at myself for not having water ready. Instantly by his side, too relieved to even think about how relieved I am.

  Why hadn’t I thought of water? He accepts it sweetly.

  “It’s really real. We’re home.”

  He shakes his head, eyes and mind already sharpening.

  “Back to the shelter first. It’s going to degrade, and our trash will just go everywhere.”

  Not exactly. There’s no wind to scatter it, not really. But I can’t imagine we have supplies to waste. He’s right.

  “Need anything while we’re here? Or do you want to stay, and I can circle back, or…”

  Without opening his eyes, Alden reaches out, with a firm smile, squeezing my hand.

  “As long as I’m with you,” he says, squeezing hard enough I can tell he’s regaining his strength. “Please don’t leave me anywhere.”

  I blink away a tear and nod. “Of course not. You rest. I’ll be right beside you.”

  He takes a few minutes to look down into the city, once the oxygen tube under his nose has done its work and he’s rehydrated. His color comes back so quickly I feel faint, anxiety dissolving down my spine with nowhere to go but toward anger.

  I want to kick that spacesuit into the sun.

  About thirty minutes out from the wreckage, Alden moves up to lounge in the passenger seat, and eventually agrees to eat something.

  Then we’re there. Our little home, I think, even if just for a short while. It feels full of love now, not shadows like before. With Alden here, there’s nowhere for ghosts or fears to fit.

  Alden stumbles carrying his third crate, and I order him back into the roller. Those wide shoulders fall in defeat, but he doesn’t fight me. And it’s only a few more minutes before everything’s reasonably packed up, and we set off again for the dome.

  He tries so hard to be lively company, bravely trying to stay awake, but he can’t seem to string more than a couple of sentences together before nodding off.

  “Alden. Baby. Go to sleep. Sleep while I drive. I promise you I’m not going anywhere. We’re so close to home plate.”

  He nods, too tired to protest. “Can I have some music on? It was way too quiet when I was jumping.”

  I know exactly what he means. Your breath during those hours of bunny hops goes from keeping time to reminding you just how endless the trip has been. I can’t think of a single reason I’d ever make a journey like that, unless it was for him. No other way. Whatever music is on now, he likes it enough to reach out and turn it up before drifting off to sleep.

  This will be the memory I return to most often in years to come. The shuddering of the roller around us, the smell of him beside me, curled up in the copilot’s seat. Music blasting us both with warm sound, saying You are alive. You are alive. There will never be silence again, if you don’t want it.

  I’ll remember the drive with my whole body. Looking over and down at him, feeling my heart fill to bursting every time I see his face. Every time I catch a glimpse of that light, that thing inside him that calls out to me so strongly. My alpha, my love, my man. My greatest treasure.

  Anything before this love, before this man, is just a black-and-white movie of a memory. No color, and no thorns to hurt.

  Before, I was an undiscovered blank book. And here is my hear
t now, full of Alden Armstrong. Driving as he sleeps, smiling to myself with all our secrets. The difference between them as stark as the moon’s night and day. Between emptiness and life.

  It’s not because I’m wild, or an omega, that I’m crying again. Now that I have him back, so close I can touch him whenever I want, I realize I’m crying because I’m so filled up. Full of more emotion, it feels like, than anyone has ever been. Shining with it.

  Maybe that’s why they call it a heat, the roller’s vibrations traveling up through my seat and into my lap, spreading warmth across my thighs and stroking my cock to rock hardness. Because I’m bursting like the sun. Ready to wrap him up in warmth forever.

  Alden looks so peaceful when we arrive that I don’t want to wake him, but I know he wouldn’t love it if I kept him from seeing this view properly, for the first time.

  “Baby,” I whisper. His eyes pop open with a happy growl. “Baby look.”

  Alden shifts forward, bringing his feet down to the floorboards as he unfolds. Shading his eyes to search the landscape, until I hand him my mirror shades.

  “Oh!” he says when the scene finally resolves. “Oh my gosh, Jules. Look at it.”

  The city of Tiptree, even just this tiny domed nub of it, shines like a jewel. Her lunar-white buildings naked and unadorned. Her towers, spires and squared-off cubes, square windows cut into every surface letting light reflect and refract. Grown there almost like coral by the ceaseless labors of robots who’d been working for longer than we’d been at Flight School, preparing just for today.

  “Julian,” he breathes. “Look what we did.”

  I know he means humanity, but I can’t help chuckling to myself.

  “Look what we did,” I agree reaching out for his hand. He presses mine to his cheek, unable to tear his eyes from the sight of that gorgeous strange new land.