by Mac Rogers
I close my eyes.
“There will be pain,” the voice leaning toward me says. “But then there will be strength.”
* * *
DID THOSE newborn fish react to what was happening to them when they were speared as bait? I don’t remember. I can’t even remember if they flopped around.
* * *
I FEEL your lips press against mine. I remember how I used to clutch your head, wishing so badly in the heat of ecstasy that I could crush you with my hands, turn you into powder and breathe you in. Why is love so violent?
You open your mouth wide and I do the same. For the briefest of seconds it feels like your tongue reaching toward mine, so familiar, so welcomed. But it doesn’t stop.
It doesn’t stop.
I somehow find the air to scream.
* * *
“THE HELL is that?” the guy operating the torch outside shouts.
“Who cares?! Get us in, get us in!” someone else yells at him and the hissing resumes.
* * *
THERE IS pain. So much pain. Scalding, burning pain. The kind of pain that circumnavigates the entire spectrum of sensation and winds up becoming insensate, becoming white warm static. The static spreads throughout the nervous system and begins to focus itself, tune in to another frequency.
It starts to feel like paradise.
It starts to feel
We
We start to feel
We are together and we are electric.
* * *
“DAKOTA PRENTISS: you are the Moss,” we say in Matt’s voice.
“I am the Moss,” we say in Dak’s voice.
“Do you know what to do?” Matt’s voice asks.
“Let’s find out,” Dak’s voice responds. We let her take the lead.
The rectangle in the back of the truck clatters to the floor.
* * *
THEY WERE expecting to pour into the truck. They were not expecting us to pour out.
We open our Dak’s mouth and gorgeous, verdant tendrils of ourselves, our moss, spread onto the person leaning into the entrance. He is wearing a Lloyd Suit but we know, Matt knows, Dak knows (I know), where the seals are and we find our way in.
Now he is Added.
We pull our helmet off and we turn to the man next to us. We open our newest mouth and now another is Added.
We are stronger. Stronger. We are pulsing with love.
* * *
BY THE time we bodily exit the truck we are five times larger, connected by thick, vibrant threads.
Now we are seven. One of us knows that is a poem and we are grateful.
Seven mouths. Seven new directions.
We Add more.
There are screams, the desperate pop of gunfire, but all is temporary. When we are Added we do not fight. We feel gratitude. We add another shelf of volumes to our library and are so very happy to read.
* * *
THE ENSIGN we thought of as Moss had a child. It liked to sing. Those memories got him through the lonely, soundless vacuum of space.
* * *
THERE ARE so many cars and trucks crowded into this empty patch of desert. Standing up in a jeep many vehicles away, Haydon is screaming into his megaphone, ordering people to put their helmets on, fall back in line.
We go to him.
We spit moss out of our Dak’s mouth onto the ground, just tendrils at first, but they thicken and thicken, they become elephant legs, they become redwood trunks, and they lift us into the air high over the trucks. They continue to shoot at us but it makes no difference; they can’t shoot all of us, and there are so few of them left. We Add more and more as we stride over to Haydon, who is screaming.
We remove Haydon’s helmet, wrap moss around his waist, and lift him all the way up until we are face-to-face with him.
A memory occurs to us: a thing to say when picking someone up, gleefully appropriate.
“Is your Daddy a thief?” our Dak asks, and Haydon whimpers.
Our tendrils rush in, ready to Add him on instinct, but our Dak stops us.
I say who we Add, she protests. I don’t want him in our colony.
But then she—we—realizes. Haydon has secrets. Haydon has stories. When we feed, we feed on everything. We do not waste. We can use him. Our leader, our Dak, consents, and we go in through his tear ducts. His face contorts first in pain, then in pleasure, then in the deepest gratitude and joy, and we remember something else together:
There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the look of joy on the face of a friend.
* * *
WITHIN MINUTES there is something like forty of us, connected in a vast web of green. Dakota’s human body is high on a trunk above us. We send moss down, build up a second trunk, and bring Matt’s human body up, as well. Our Dak reaches inward and smiles, understanding love and all its noble attempts. Her Matt did love her. As best he could. We celebrate them. This has all been thanks to them.
We remember all our loves. We are stronger now. We are fearless now.
We remember our Dakota’s fear of never knowing.
We think: she never asked him if he had the dream, the one everyone has when they first met us in the building known as Quill Marine. Of rushing blackness, a blackness so thick it’s almost monolithic and yet still that feeling of movement. The dream that leaves them all with the conundrum: “am I rushing toward something alien … or is something alien rushing toward me?”
They didn’t know it was a fallacy. There is no binary. It can all be one. It is all one. All fragments of one thing joining together in a desperate lurch to be whole again. We are all sides of every equation and that feeling of separation, of foreignness, is only as vast as the separation of electrons inside an atom.
They didn’t know. But we do.
We gather up our Dakota’s consciousness and place it at our vanguard. Our Dak has plans. Our Dak earned a life of peace and we intended to give it to her—but our Dak is not so interested in peace now. Our Dak is still a soldier. And she knows, we know, that some tours never end. Our Dak is elated to finally be in charge.
Our legs move in tandem, rolling like the invention of thunder through the desert, hands clasped together, an immense herd. We hunger for more: more stories, more life, more love.
We grow.
We ride.
And the stars seem so very close we could reach out and make them ours.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
NAT CASSIDY is a playwright, actor, director, musician, and finalist for fifteen New York Innovative Theatre Awards as well as winner of two such awards. Steal the Stars is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
MAC ROGERS is an award-winning audio dramatist and playwright. His audio/podcast dramas The Message and LifeAfter have been downloaded more than eight million times. He has won a New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Production for his sci-fi The Honeycomb Trilogy. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Part One: The Death of Dakota Prentiss
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two: Afterdeath
Interlude
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Three: Conception
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Four: Gestation
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Five: Living Fish and Dead Fish
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Six: You
Now
About the Authors
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
STEAL THE STARS
Novelization copyright © 2017 by Tom Doherty Associates. Based on the podcast Steal the Stars by Gideon Media.
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-17262-4 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-17263-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250172631
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First Edition: November 2017
