while the black stars burn

by kucy a snyder

  *

  The next morning, Kamerynne made some phone calls to former associates of her father’s. When she told them what she wanted to know, most of them claimed ignorance or blew her off. Finally, she got in touch with a senior programmer who offered to call her back on another line. He gave her a name, and a campus address.

  Kamerynne walked to Boelter Hall and found a small, windowless office on the third floor. The door was open a crack. Inside were two pale computer science students huddled around a Sun Microsystems computer. Their desks were piled high with diskettes, computer cables, and empty Mountain Dew cans.

  She rapped on the door frame to get their attention. “Hi, is Chad Barnes in here?”

  “Can we help you?” one of them asked, barely looking away from the code on the monitor.

  “I hope so. My name’s Kamerynne Craigie, and—”

  “Are you Cameron Craigie’s daughter?” His eyes focused on her like lasers.

  Nat had the same star-struck expression when she found out she was standing in Grayce Aberdine’s house.

  “I am, in fact.” She smiled at them, and suddenly they were both on their feet, talking over each other.

  “Wow, it’s an honor—”

  “I was so bummed to hear about your dad, it was terrible—”

  “I was hoping one of you guys could help me with a project,” she said.

  “Sure, what?” the first asked.

  “I need everything you can tell me about keyloggers....”

  *

  Kamerynne disappeared into the computer science underworld at her college. She emerged long enough each day to visit Nat at the hospital, but beyond that she was in the computer lab learning what she could from Chad and his friends or at her own machine. She burrowed into cracking like a larvae in a juicy apple. The search for illicit knowledge and cryptic information excited her almost more than sex.

  The day before Nat was released from the hospital, Kamerynne went to her computer to install a program to record keystrokes and copy her incoming email in a separate, hidden file on her hard drive. But as she dug into the computer’s core system to install the hypervisor...she discovered another keylogger already running. It didn’t look like any of the standard malware Chad had showed her. Kamerynne was able to decrypt enough of it to see that it was sending the data to a computer in the Ukraine. Nat’s native country.

  Kamerynne looked up the IP of the receiving computer, not expecting to find anything...but the address was registered to the European branch of Charybdis Studios.

  *

  A week after she picked up Nat from the hospital, Kamerynne downloaded a torrent of Cthylla: The Rising, which was still three months away from opening in theatres. She’d figured they’d gotten another actress to play her mother’s role...but her mother’s character wasn’t in this film. She hadn’t been recast; as far as this movie’s script was concerned, her character had simply never existed. Had she been written out after her death? Or was she never supposed to be in the film in the first place?

  Kamerynne took a screen capture of the list of supporters in the movie’s end credits and spent several hours looking up names. Ten attended the Temple of the Deep Mother at some point in their lives. And three seemed to have something to do with the Messina Strait Foundation, the group that had inherited her parents’ money.

  *

  “What do you know about Charybdis Studios?” Kamerynne asked when Nat stumbled into their dorm room at three in the morning.

  Nat paused in the doorway, her face flushed with alcohol. “A little. Not much. They made the Cthylla movies.”

  “Right.” Kamerynne paused, not sure if she should continue. “Why would someone from those studios be monitoring your computer?”

  Nat laughed dismissively, but also turned pale. “That’s silly. That wouldn’t happen.”

  “But it did.” Kamerynne nodded toward her computer. “They’re watching you. Why?”

  Something seemed to crumple behind Nat’s eyes, and she got a faraway expression. “To make sure I’m doing as I’m told.”

  Kamerynne’s heart beat faster. Was she going to get the truth, at last? “What are they telling you to do?”

  Tears spilled down Nat’s cheeks. “Right now? Helene wants me help get rich people to donate to the Foundation. But I’m shit at it. Eventually I’m to go in the water, and the goddess will come out. She needs sacrifices to bring her into the world. It’s what I was made for.”

  “Made for? What do you mean?”

  Nat gave a shuddering little laugh. “It’s funny, you know? You and I were both conceived at parties. Only your parents didn’t mean to make you. Mine did. My mom had sex with every man at the temple so nobody would know who my father was. Thirteen guys, and she didn’t get pregnant the first time, so they had to do it again during the next new moon. Me and all the other temple babies, we’re goddess chum.”

  Kamerynne tried to get her mind around what Nat was telling her. “You’re...you’re saying you’re supposed to be a human sacrifice?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.” Nat’s face was a sickly grey.

  “Why...why do they let you walk around? Go to college?”

  “They don’t care how I live my life; they just care that I’m there when it needs to end. And who knows when that will be? It could be next week, it could be in twenty years. And if it’s in twenty years, I might as well be useful in the meantime, right?”

  “Why don’t you run away? Look, I’ll give you money to run away.”

  Nat laughed again. She looked like she was going to start weeping at any moment. “There’s no place to run. The Foundation is everywhere.”

  “The Messina Strait Foundation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is the Foundation connected to the Temple of the Deep Mother and Charybdis Studios?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The Foundation runs the studios and the Temple runs the Foundation.”

  Kamerynne stared at her for a moment, feeling herself dangling above that terrible, cold, unfathomable blackness she’d feared since she was a kid. “Did the Foundation kill my parents?”

  “Probably, yeah. I mean, I don’t know anything specific, but yeah. Once a wealthy person changes their will for the Foundation, they don’t last long.”

  “Jesus. Fucking. Christ.” Kamerynne wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to push Nat’s face right through the wall. “How can you be so casual about that? They murdered my parents! Does that not mean anything to you?”

  “It’s terrible! I agree! But...they do it every day.”

  Part of Kamerynne’s mind was whispering This can’t be real over and over. The room seemed to be tilted, the air a suffocating blanket. She looked down at her hands; they felt like they belonged to someone else.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Kamerynne’s tongue felt like borrowed flesh, too, and was hard to move.

  “Because it doesn’t matter if you know or not. They won’t kill me for telling, because they need me for the ritual. And they probably won’t kill you, not unless you go to the papers or the cops or something stupid...and you’re not stupid. They already have your money. And when the Goddess rises, everybody dies and none of this mattered. That’s just how it goes.”

  *

  A month later, Nat and a group of 100 other young women attended a beachside retreat near Bolinas, California. Helene Arcanjo led them into the water at high tide during a freak storm; all of them drowned. A pair of fishermen found Nat’s body washed up on a nearby beach three days later.

  Just hours after that, Kamerynne’s BMW was found crashed and burned in a ravine; the body inside was so badly damaged it could not be conclusively identified.

  Nat’s cremains were interred in the lovely Chapel of the Chimes, courtesy of an anonymous donor.

  Bank accounts and mutual funds belonging to the Messina Strait Foundation and Charybdis Studios developed mysterious electronic leaks, and in the space of a few months their assets
plummeted so far that they had to seek bankruptcy protection. And after that, high-ranking members of the Foundation started turning up dead: a few car accidents, an electrocution in a bathtub, a heart attack in a hot tub, a plane crash.

  Some people in the hacker community speculated that Kamerynne faked her death, re-emerging as a formidable grey hat named BldyM@ry, bent on destroying the Foundation and groups like it at all costs. Others claimed she was simply a dilettante who died of grief.

  Regardless, the Goddess never rose from the depths.

  But perhaps that’s just a matter of time....

  While the Black Stars Burn

  Caroline tucked an unruly strand of coarse brown hair up under her pink knit cap, shrugged the strap of her black violin case back into place over her shoulder, and hurried up the music building stairs. Her skin felt both uncomfortably greasy and itched dryly under her heavy winter clothes; it had been seven days since the water heater broke in her tiny efficiency and the landlord wasn’t answering his phone. Quick, chilly rag-baths were all she could stand, and she felt so self-conscious about the state of her hair that she kept it hidden under a hat whenever possible. She hoped that her violin professor Dr. Harroe wouldn’t make her take her cap off.

  Her foot slipped on a spot of dried salt on the stairs and she grabbed the chilly brass banister with her left hand to keep from pitching forward. The sharp, cold jolt made the puckered scar in her palm sharply ache, and the old memory returned fast and unbidden:

  “Why aren’t you practicing as I told you to?”

  Her father scowled down at her. He was still in his orchestra conducting clothes: a grey blazer and black turtleneck. His fingers clenched a tumbler of Scotch over ice.

  “M-my hand started to hurt.” She shrank back against the hallway wall, hoping that she hadn’t sounded whiny, hoping her explanation would suffice and he’d just send her to bed.

  The smell of alcohol and sweat fogged the air around him, and that meant almost anything could happen. He wasn’t always cruel. Not even usually. But talking to him when he’d been drinking was like putting a penny in a machine that sometimes dispensed glossy gumballs but other times a dozen stinging arachnids would swarm from the chute instead. And there was no way to know which she’d get, sweets or scorpions.

  “Hurt?” he thundered down at her. “Nonsense! I’ll show you what hurts!”

  He grabbed her arm and dragged her to the fireplace in the music room. She tried to pull away, pleading, promising to practice all night if he wanted her to. But he was completely impassive as he drew a long dark poker from the rack and shoved it into the hottest part of the fire. He frowned down at the iron as the flames licked the shaft, seemingly deaf to her frantic mantra of Please, no, Papa, I’ll be good I swear please.

  The iron heated quickly, and in a series of motions as artful as any he’d performed on the orchestral podium he pulled it from the fire with one hand, squeezed her forearm hard to force her fingers open with the other, and jabbed the glowing red tip of the poker into her exposed palm.

  The pain was astonishing. A part of her knew she was shrieking and had fallen to her knees on the fine Persian carpet, but the rest of her felt as though she’d been hurled through space and time toward the roaring hearts of a thousand black stars, cosmic furnaces that would consume not just her flesh and bone but her very soul. They would destroy her so completely that no one would remember that she had ever lived. The stars swirled around her, judging her, and she knew they found her lacking. She was too small, unripe, and they cast her back toward Earth. It was the first time and last time she’d ever been glad to be a disappointment in the eyes of the universe.

  Tears blurred her vision and through them her father looked strange, distorted. In that instant she was sure that she knelt at the feet of a monstrous stranger who was wearing her father’s pallid face as a mask.

  “Now, that hurts I expect,” the stranger observed cheerfully as her flesh sizzled beneath the red iron. “And so I don’t expect I shall hear you whining about practice again, will I? Now, stop your little dog howling this instant or I’ll burn the other one, too!”

  She willed herself to bite back her screams, and he finally let her go just as she passed out from the agony.

  When she woke up on the couch, she discovered that her father had fetched some snow from the porch and pressed a grapefruit-sized ball of it into her palm to numb her burn. Icy water dripped down her wrist and soaked her sweater sleeve. The air was filled with the odor of burned meat. Hers. It made her feel even sicker, and for the rest of her life the smell of grilling steaks and chops would make her want to vomit.

  Her father gazed down at her, sad and sober.

  “I would never hurt you, you understand?” He gently brushed the hair out of her face. “If anyone has hurt you in this world, it was not I.”

  He bundled her into the back of his Cadillac and took her to see a physician friend of his. Caroline remembered sitting in a chair in the hallway with a handkerchief full of ice in her hand, weeping quietly from the pain while the two men spoke behind a closed door.

  “Will her playing be affected?” her father asked.

  “Christ, Dunric!” The physician sounded horrified. “Is that your only concern for your own daughter?”

  “Of course not!” her father huffed. “Nonetheless, it is a concern. So, if you would be so kind as to offer your professional opinion on the matter?”

  “She’s got a third degree burn; her palm is roasted through like a lamb fillet. I can’t see how she could have held on to a live coal so long of her own accord. Are you sure no one else could have been involved? Perhaps a resentful servant?”

  “Quite sure,” he replied. “My daughter has some...mental peculiarities she regrettably inherited from her mother. You know how unstable sopranos are! Her mother often had a kind of petit mal seizure; I believe some pyromania compelled the girl to take hold of the coal and then a fit prevented her from dropping it as a sensible child would.”

  “That is unfortunate.” The physician sounded unconvinced, and for a brief moment hope swelled in Caroline’s heart: perhaps he would challenge her father, investigate further, discover the truth. And then perhaps she’d be sent to live with her mother’s people in Boston. She’d only met them once—they were bankers or shoemakers or something else rather dull but they seemed decent enough.

  But it was not to be. The physician continued: “Her tendons and ligaments are almost certainly affected. She may need surgery to regain full mobility in her fingers, and I fear that her hand may be permanently drawn due to scarring.”

  “Well, she only needs to curl it ‘round the neck of her instrument, after all.”

  It took two surgeries to repair the tendons in her hand, and all her father’s colleagues marveled at how brave and determined she was in her physical therapy and practice sessions afterward. Her father glowed at the praises they heaped on her, and while he never said as much, something in his smile told her that, should she cease to be so pleasingly dedicated to the musical arts, there were things in his world worse than hot metal.

  Caroline traced the lines of her scar with her thumb. The doctor’s knife had given it a strange, symbolic look. Some people claimed it resembled a Chinese or Arabic character, although nobody could say which one.

  She flexed her hand and shook her head to try to banish the memories. There was no point in dwelling on any of it. Her father was long gone. Five years after he burned her, he’d flown into a rage at a negative review in the newspaper. He drove off in his Alfa Romeo with a bottle of Glenfiddich. Caroline suspected he’d gone to see a ballerina in the next city who enjoyed being tied up and tormented. But he never arrived. He lost control of his car in the foggy hills and his car overturned in a drainage ditch that was hidden from the road. Pinned, he lived for three days while hungry rats gnawed away the exposed flesh of his face, eyes and tongue.

  At his funeral, she’d briefly considered quitting music just to spite his memor
y...but if she refused to be the Maestro’s daughter, what was she? She knew nothing of gymnastics or any other sports, nor was she an exceptional student or a skilled painter. Her crabbed hand was nimble on a fingerboard but useful for little else. Worst of all, she knew—since she’d been repeatedly told so—that she was quite plain, good as a violinist but unremarkable as a woman. Her music was the only conceivable reason anyone would welcome her to a wedding. A thousand creditors had picked her father’s estate as clean as the rodents had stripped his skull; if she abandoned the violin, what would she have left?

  “Caroline, is that you?” Professor Harroe called after she knocked on the door to his office.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do come in! I have a bit of a surprise for you today.”

  She suddenly felt apprehensive, but made herself smile at the professor as she opened the door and took her accustomed seat in the chair in front of his desk, which was stacked high with music theory papers, scores, and books. “What is it?”

  He leaned back in his battered wooden swivel chair behind his desk and smiled at her in return. Her anxiety tightened; Harroe had been her music tutor since she was a teenager, and he almost never smiled, not at his colleagues’ jokes nor at beautiful women nor at lovely music. She searched his face, trying to decipher his expression. He looked practically giddy, she finally decided, and it was a bit unsettling.

  “Did you know that your father was working on a series of violin sonatas when he died?”

  Her skin itched beneath her sweater. She rubbed at the scar again. “No, I did not.”

  “He was writing them for you, for when your playing would be mature enough to handle them. He told me he intended them to be a surprise for your 21st birthday. I think he realized his dalliance with drink might lead to disaster—as indeed it sadly did—so he arranged for his lawyer to send me the sonatas along with a formal request that I complete them in secret.

  “I regret that I am not half the composer he was, but I am proud to say I have done as he asked. Six months late for your 21st, and for that I apologize, but at last his music is ready for you.”