Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  Time passed. Behind me, I thought I felt the air change in the room. A minor disturbance, a new energy entering.

  “Celeste.”

  I hadn’t heard him speak in so long. The sound of his voice was the same, almost as familiar as my own. I rose from my seat and slowly turned around. Miles stood in the doorway wearing a white lab coat. He was noticeably thin—so much thinner than when I had last seen him. His skin seemed pale, his eyes red-rimmed, damp. I barely recognized him.

  He took a step toward me but stopped short. I did the same. We had let too much time pass and didn’t know how to be around each other. Our time apart, how we’d aged, the guilt and secrets and regrets—I could see it all on his face, just as surely as he could find it in mine. We were twins and strangers at once, still trapped on opposite sides of a coin.

  And the coin was in the air, turning over itself, dropping fast.

  We were both waiting for it to land.

  Dear Miles,

  I’m writing this letter late on my last night on the mountain. The other girls just gave me the traditional graduation send-off—though I suppose you don’t know what that entails, and I don’t have the energy to explain it right now. I’m not sure why I’m writing this letter in the first place. Even if I post it in the morning, I’ll arrive home before it reaches our house. I suppose I’ll carry it back with me, though I don’t imagine ever giving it to you. It’s one more secret between us.

  What would you think, I wonder, to know that I’m treating you like a diary right now? Maybe I’m preparing for the future, for when you aren’t here—when all I’ll have are these made-up conversations with you that I create in my own mind.

  I’ve been thinking how strange it is that we know any part of the future at all. Imagine if we never knew when our loved ones would die! We’d never know when it’s the final birthday or holiday or anniversary with someone. We’d never know to be on the lookout for the first sign of cancer, the initial ache of heart attack. We’d just live. That would be terrifying in its own way, to know nothing, but sometimes I think it would be better. Don’t you?

  These are the things I wish we could talk about. Like friends. Like siblings. So much is fraught between us just for knowing the worst of what the future will bring. But in this moment I’m writing to you alone in my single bedroom on the mountain, trying to delay the moment I must leave. I don’t want to descend into the heavier air below, but that’s where you are, Miles. And it’s time for me to return to you.

  Celeste

  25

  Miles finally leaned forward to hug me, but he hesitated at the last second. He was being cautious, like he worried he might lose me again if he made any sudden moves. Maybe he was right, because the sight of him spooked me. I had anticipated my brother’s death so many times that it was a shock to see him standing before me, alive and in the flesh.

  I pushed down those feelings and embraced him. I felt his ribs through his clothing, the rigid structure of his spine.

  “Glad to have you back,” he said, as if I’d been away on a mere holiday. He glanced at the girls in the waiting room. “Let’s go to the office so we can talk.”

  He, Julia, and I headed down the hall to the office and shut the door behind us. I hadn’t been in that office since that day I’d brought Cassandra for a reading. It reminded me of being young and frightened and uncertain of everything.

  I took a seat as Miles paced in front of Julia’s desk.

  “You already know that Julia has learned to read the abduction marking,” he said. “That means you can learn, too. It was all foretold in your juvenile predictions, how they said we’d work together. Well, here we are. I can’t do this without you anymore.” He started to rush, speaking faster with every word. “You’re the one who endured the abduction. You’re the one who knows what it’s like to be marked with the future. Only you can help these girls in the end.”

  “Miles, slow down and listen to me.” I took a breath. “I learned on the mountain that the Office of the Future is preparing to take action, to officially ask you to stop giving readings without a license.” I turned to Julia. “And, Julia, if he doesn’t stop, your license might be revoked.”

  Miles didn’t seem fazed. “They’re using the license as an excuse—they’re upset because I’m offering readings as a man, and because I’m pushing for an addendum in Mapping the Future. But once you learn to read the abduction markings, you’ll take over and then they’ll have no lawful reason to shut us down.”

  “I don’t have a license, either. Considering my transcript, it’s not likely I’ll be able to get one.”

  “You can serve as my apprentice without a license,” Julia said. “By the time you’re ready to apply for one, you’ll have enough experience to pass the test. As long as you earn a high enough score to justify why I’d choose to hire you over others, your transcript might not matter as much.”

  As Julia spoke, my gaze drifted to a chart hanging on the far wall in her office. I left my chair and wandered toward it, drawn as if it held the energy of a changeling girl. In a way, it did—it was a chart listing all the clients Miles and Julia had seen since the beginning of that year. It contained hundreds of records listing the date, anonymous client number, and either a positive or negative result for the abduction marking. The vast majority were denoted as negative.

  “What’s this?”

  “It helps us track.” Julia approached the chart and drew her finger down the column of abduction findings. “We don’t have enough data yet to be sure, but we hypothesize that the rate of girls who have the abduction marking seems to be incrementally decreasing. Right now, all we can do is record and observe.”

  “And hope that we’re right,” Miles added.

  “I don’t understand.” I scanned the chart again. “The girls who come here for readings have the same juvenile markings they’ve had since birth. It’s not as though they can change.”

  “No,” Julia said. “But if things were fated to shift—if your brother’s discovery of the abduction pattern is set to make a real difference—then the number of girls fated for abduction may begin to decline as we continue our work.”

  I felt like a child again, struggling to understand. “So we’re not changing the outcome so much as the fact that Miles was fated to make this discovery, and we were fated to help him, all of which will be reflected over time as fewer girls are shown to bear the abduction marking.”

  “Yes,” Miles said. “It’s like that study you sent us from the mountain last year, about those scientists who tracked how fate evolved over time by analyzing the fated behavior in individual lives over many years. We don’t have the luxury of studying a time period spanning decades, but this is a start.”

  I put my finger to one of the few positive results on the chart. The girl was identified only as Client 145, which made her results seem clinical and detached, but I knew the truth. She was a girl marked to be taken, to have her life wrenched apart. No matter how many outcomes we studied, we could never answer why such terrible things happened. It was something my friends and I discussed often on the mountain—why the overarching course of fate allowed tragedy, and why our free will wasn’t enough to overcome it. How we acted the best we could within the confines of our own fate.

  “With your help,” Miles said, “we should be able to see more girls, and to earn the trust of others who don’t yet believe in what we do.” He nodded to the chart. “Soon enough, you’ll be making your own entries.”

  “You’re forgetting that I’m not like you. I’m not gifted at interpretation.”

  “You can do this, Celeste. You just have to learn.”

  Julia went to the door. “We can start right now,” she said. “I’ll get Victoria.”

  She slipped out of the office. When she returned, a pre-changeling girl, brown-skinned with amber markings, followed her. The girl perched on the e
dge of the exam table in the corner and crossed her ankles demurely.

  “This is Victoria,” Julia told me. “Miles identified the abduction pattern in her markings last month. She’s agreed to help us by letting us practice reading her. Victoria, this is Celeste, Miles’s sister.”

  Victoria and I nodded warily at each other.

  “Is it all right if we show Celeste your markings?” Miles asked, and Victoria pushed up her left sleeve in response.

  I was still trying to process the fact that I was standing before a girl predicted to be taken. I felt sick on her behalf.

  “Go on,” Miles said.

  I held Victoria’s arm gingerly and focused on the undefined smattering of markings by her elbow. I’d long been taught that women were the root of the future, the cause and effect all at once. But at that moment, the future betrayed me. I came up empty.

  “I don’t see it.” I frowned. The markings on Victoria’s arm did not match the juvenile markings I had in that place. Without a reliable pattern, I didn’t understand how to read the prediction.

  “It’s not what’s there.” Miles hovered over me. I could feel his breath on my shoulder. “Look for what’s missing.”

  He could explain it eighteen different ways and I would never grasp how to locate something that simply wasn’t there. Even if this prediction was added to Mapping the Future, it would be a challenge to describe it. It wasn’t like the other markings, which could largely be identified on sight alone. That was probably enough reason for the Office of the Future to dismiss it.

  I continued brushing my fingertips over Victoria’s left elbow. She watched me with interest, as if she were rooting for me. After a few moments, something came alive there—a tingling series of jolts, like Morse code. It faded just as quickly. Surely I’d imagined it.

  “There,” Miles said, nodding. “I think you’re getting it.”

  “I didn’t feel anything.” I dropped Victoria’s arm.

  “You need to try harder,” Julia said.

  “I can’t do this.” I started backing my way to the door. “This is all wrong—I wasn’t meant to be an interpreter.”

  Miles and Julia looked at each other.

  “It takes time,” Julia said gently. “Why don’t you go home and rest. We’ll be back at it tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t look at either of them. I kept my eyes on the carpet as I left the office, where Angel was waiting in the hallway. She stepped in front of me, blocking my path.

  “You can’t leave us.” She grabbed my arm and looked as fierce as I’d remembered her back in Chloe’s waiting room. “Celeste, listen. Chloe’s leaving her money to Julia. Part of it goes to me, part to fund Julia’s business. So Julia can pay you like a real interpreter.”

  I shook her off. “I don’t believe you. Chloe is a monster.”

  “No, she’s just weak. She says the world was set up for her to do what she did.” Angel loosened her grip on my arm and stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Those girls would have been taken anyway. We know that now, thanks to Miles.”

  “We’re also working to change fate,” I said. “You saw the chart. What you and Miles and Julia are doing here can make a difference. We’re not like Chloe—we refuse to accept the world for what it is.”

  “But Chloe is helping now,” Angel said. “She’s leaving her money to Julia, and to you, too. You should be thanking her.”

  “I’d never thank Chloe.” My voice was shaking. I wanted to hate Angel, to hurt her, to make her feel all that Chloe had destroyed—but I couldn’t. She was a girl like the others, and she didn’t deserve the world people like Chloe had helped create.

  I pulled the tarot deck out of my back pocket. I was going to show Angel how serious this was, all the destruction Chloe had brought upon us. But my hands were shaking so badly that I sent the cards flying. They scattered across the floor, dozens of exploited girls splayed near Angel’s feet.

  The commotion brought Julia and Miles to the doorway. They peered out to see me crawling on the floor in the hallway, gathering cards. I was on the verge of crying.

  “Mom is on her way home, Miles,” I said. The tarot cards were slippery, slick like they’d been coated in something sinister. “We have to tell her and Dad about what’s going to happen to you.”

  I finally found my own card, which I held up with shaking fingers.

  “See,” I said. “This prediction isn’t just ours anymore.”

  Miles reached down and took the card. He might have anticipated this moment years ago, back when he was copying my markings in his notebook. Back then he knew what I did not—that I would be taken, and that my markings would cease to be my own. It had all come to pass just as he’d known it would.

  “That prediction is going to come true either way,” I said. “Keeping it from them won’t prevent anything. You should know that more than anyone.”

  My brother looked at me. I was crouched on the floor, loose tarot cards in my hands.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll tell them together, once Mom is home. But in the meantime, we need to work. And that includes you.”

  He handed the card back to me. He gave me back myself.

  The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

  Across her cheeks the girl smeared lines of red mountain mud; on her thighs and collarbone she dotted the iridescent dust of crushed shells. So disguised, she began the long climb down the mountain. Behind her, the voices of her sisters drifted like mist.

  Down to the foot of the mountain, across the rocky stream, through the valleys and meadows. When at last she entered the shadow of the forest, her body sang out for her old home. What beauty, what pain. She named every tree, every leaf, every patch of moss and liverwort. Every bluebell and fungus and poisonous weed. The stone in her heart was beating hard, so hard she could not ignore it. The girl sat on a rock much like the rock that had birthed her and reached into her own heart for the slice of stone. It slid out easily, a slippery beast. When she dropped it to the ground, the earth shuddered and groaned.

  26

  On the mountain, I read a fantasy novel about a society in which markings didn’t exist—no one could predict the future. The characters lived in a state of unknowing, waiting for everything to unfold before them without the benefit of fate or prediction.

  I read that book straight through in one sitting. How bizarre, how breathtaking, to not know what would come. I’d placed a long-distance call to the humanitarian dispatch center that same day so I could talk to my mother about it. She could tell I was shaken. She kept saying, “It’s only a book, Celeste. It’s not real.” But I was unsettled. In that book, both girls and boys grew up blank. They were the same.

  My mother, at that time, was working with a group of girls in another country who’d been denied education because their markings indicated they’d become homemakers. What’s the point in educating them, the teachers argued, if they won’t use their schooling? As a humanitarian, my mother fought for those girls. She brought them books, pencils, notebooks. She sounded out words with them. She taught them how to write and thus gave them the whole world of literature.

  After we’d hung up, I spent a long time thinking of what my mother was doing, how she’d altered the future even slightly. Those girls would grow up to be homemakers just as their markings predicted, but they’d also be changed by their ability to read. They could, perhaps, pick up the same novel I’d just finished and imagine different worlds out there, different ways to shape the same life.

  I tried to imagine a new world of my own making. I tried to imagine it back then, after speaking to my mother, and again that first night home, when I left Julia’s and walked back to my neighborhood alone. I envisioned a world where girls could go out at night, even as changelings, and where they could create their own futures without dishonorable transcripts holding them back. It was an outrageou
s dream, preposterous—but I lost myself in it anyway.

  At home, my father was waiting for me in the living room. The lights were off except the reading lamp at the far end of the couch. He was cloaked in shadow.

  “Are you ready to talk?” he asked.

  I paused in the entrance to the living room. “Not yet. Not until Mom is here.”

  My mother was rushing toward us on a train at that very moment. She was growing closer by the hour; I could feel her approach in my body.

  “All right.” He looked hurt, or maybe irritated. “I suppose you always were more her daughter than mine.”

  His words stung. I wanted to shake him, to make him see what I was really trying to say, what useless repetition ran in a loop in my head: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But I wouldn’t apologize to my father, not then and not in the future, either. I regretted hiding Miles’s fate, but as for the rest of it—the guilt and shame I’d carried from my abduction—I was done. It might take the rest of my life, but I was going to shed that burden, wash it off my skin. That was what I wished for: a metamorphosis, the ability to wake up restored and transformed.

  Or maybe that wasn’t enough. What I truly wished for, what I could barely allow myself to imagine, was a full reckoning. To transfer the shame and responsibility from the girls who were harmed to where it belonged—to the men, and to everyone who defended those men in myriad ways. It was so much to want for the world, so much change and justice and mercy, that it hurt to dwell on it.

  I left my father and went upstairs. In my bedroom, I groped around under the bed for the cardboard box sealed with thick silver tape. The tape had fibers inside, tough like tendons working to hold the whole thing together. I had to use all my strength to tear it apart.

  A single piece of paper lay flat against the bottom of the box. It was my brother’s charcoal drawing of the man who’d abducted me. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d packed it away before running off to the mountain.