1
RACHAEL
Rachael Townsend used to have a mighty superpower: anything she saw, she drew. She traveled from world to world, and sketched every mind-blowing vista.
Until she woke up from a coma, and the one thing that gave meaning to her life was gone.
* * *
This is the most outstanding sight Rachael has ever seen—and it’s wrecking her heart.
Rachael’s boyfriend, Wang Yiwei, lies across her bed wearing nothing but his blue Space Underpants, which fit like a glove because they were made for him specifically. (Yiwei’s muscles look even more cut after a couple weeks of Royal Space Academy training.) His lovely brown eyes are full of warmth, though he’s probably getting a cramp from staying in the same position for so long, with his leg bent and his chin resting on one hand.
Rachael has never felt so helpless in her life.
“I’m sorry,” she says yet again. “I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I just … can’t.”
“You’re fine.” Yiwei smiles bigger. “Take all the time you need.”
Rachael perches on the edge of the bed and tries to put on a brave face.
In between her and her half-naked boyfriend is a plastiform pad and a pile of lightpens and styluses.
She picks up a stylus and tries to put the outline of Yiwei’s spiked hair and square jaw on the page. This used to be so easy. Just … turn what you see into a shape. Light and shadow, texture, colors, all of it.
Rachael’s stylus touches the page, and … nothing. Her mind freezes. She loses concentration.
“It’s okay,” Yiwei says. “I can hold this pose forever.”
Something is hollowing Rachael from the inside, eating away at her willpower. Her self-esteem.
Who am I, if I can’t do the one thing I was always good at?
“You are giving me lots and lots of inspiration,” she tells Yiwei. “Just not the kind that turns into drawings on a page.”
“Relax,” he says. “Nobody but you and me here.”
This time, Rachael picks up a lightpen. For a moment, muscle memory takes over, and she can feel the picture take shape. Turning vision into execution—but as soon as the lightpen touches the page, it’s gone.
She lets out a roar of frustration and throws the lightpen at the wall. Xiaohou picks it up with one of his little front legs and tries to drum on the floor until Yiwei tells the musical robot to cut it out.
“You can stop,” she tells Yiwei. “We’re done here.”
Xiaohou looks up and warbles a few bars of Rachael’s favorite K-Pop song by Blackpink, like the robot wants to cheer her up. She glares at his round opaque metal face, with its gumdrop eyes and pouty little snaggletooth mouth. His little ears wiggle. The music stops.
Yiwei hasn’t broken out of his pose. “Don’t give up yet. We barely got started.”
Rachael is already putting away her art supplies, with a throatful of sour. “No point bashing my head against the wall. There’s something seriously wrong with me.”
“Your brain got jacked by that doomsday machine,” Yiwei says. “None of us could have done what you did, and of course it took a toll on you. I bet the aftereffects will wear off eventually.”
Rachael shakes her head. “If it was going to wear off, it would have.”
The best brain experts from a hundred planets did every test twice, and they all said there was nothing they could do. Rachael used the art-making part of her brain to control an ancient superweapon at the head of a butterfly made of starlit threads—and now, every time she sets out to create art, her brain tries to connect with that weapon, and she freezes.
She’ll probably never make art again. This is killing her.
“Everyone owes you a debt that’s impossible to calculate.” Yiwei maintains eye contact with Rachael as he puts on his Space Pants. “You saved all our lives—not only me and the other Earthlings, but everybody, everywhere. You’re the galaxy’s number-one hero.”
Whenever Yiwei says things like that, it’s like he’s lowering a huge weight onto the space between her shoulder blades.
* * *
Rachael steps out of the Royal Academy dormitory (where she’s sharing a suite with Tina and Damini) and winces. She would give anything to be able to draw this skyline.
Off in the distance, she can see the curved crystal fingers of the Palace of Scented Tears, the walls of the Wishing Maze, the multicolored lights of Gamertown, and the truthspike at the center of the Space Academy campus. More walkways crisscross underneath the one she stands on, as far down as she can see.
The whole city is at her fingertips, thanks to the blue-and-white-striped puff that floats next to her. Her Joiner has little googly eyes and a slanted grin, and it bounces when it delivers a new message.
JoinerTalk, Damini to Rachael: Rachael, everyone at the academy wants to meet you!!!! You’re famous! In a good way, I promise. Can I bring some kids over to the dorm later???
When Rachael gets a “text” from one of her friends on her Joiner, the words appear in a cloud that only she can see. But also? She kind of “hears” their voices in her head, and “sees” their faces, like living emojis, in her mind’s eye. When she replies, she sometimes forgets to smile back.
Wentrolo, the main city in Her Majesty’s Firmament, has 150 million people living in it, from a few thousand planets. Everybody has a place to live, because the buildings are constantly changing shape. (Today, a bunch of the nearby buildings are shaped like ampersands, but a few days ago, they were teardrop-shaped.) There’s no money—you can get anything you want for free, as long as you help other people occasionally.
Even if all you want is just to hide from everyone.
* * *
Stuff Rachael thinks about when she’s hiding out in her room and not making art:
I hope my parents checked on Tina’s mom. Maybe the three of them are better friends now?What if someone farted in the middle of the Javarah Smell Ceremony?If I had all my old Supernatural AU fanfic with me, I could publish it on the JoinerShare and nobody would know what it was based on. A whole bunch of aliens would think I invented Sam and Dean, and they always worked together at a truck-stop diner.Even though we’re all here together, I miss the other Earthlings so much.If I stare at the wall long enough, I can see patterns in the tiny cracks.* * *
* * *
Wentrolo feels like a small town most of the time. Rachael only sees the neighborhoods she’s interested in, and she has her Joiner set to maximum privacy, so nobody notices the “war hero” walking among them.
Most of the time, anyway.
Right now, a familiar voice comes from behind her.
“Honored Rachael Townsend!”
She ignores the shouts. Instead, she gazes down at a family of Javarah who are playing with their kids, one level below. Adult Javarah look like fox-people, but their kids are shiny and blue, with no fur yet.
“Esteemed Rachael Townsend! Please wait up!”
Here comes Senior Visioner Moxx (he/him), a large Ghulg (with tusks going up the sides of his face past his eyes). The left sleeve of his cranberry-colored uniform scrolls with his medals and commendations from the Royal Fleet, under an insignia that reads WE GOT YOUR BACK. He strides toward Rachael, as if he’s about to take command of a planet.
The sight of this swaggering warthog-man brings back memories of high school. Moxx isn’t going to fat-shame Rachael or throw her stuff in the trash, but his body language is way too familiar.
“Gracious Rachael Townsend, may you walk in gentle sunlight and sleep under bright stars.” That’s how a Royal Fleet officer greets a civilian in the Firmament.
Rachael knows the correct response, but she only gives him a tiny nod.
“You haven’t been responding to my messages!” Moxx grimaces, making his tusks lift up to his neon-red hair. “We want to give you the Royal Fleet’s highest commendation, the white half spiral, for your role in the Battle of Antarràn.”
Sometime in the past few months, people started talking about the Battle of Antarràn. Rachael prefers to call it “that time we got trapped in a mausoleum and a bunch of people died for no reason.”
“There’ll be a ceremony, and you will deliver a speech. Everyone will attend,” Moxx says.
Ugh. Hard pass.
“Why am I the one getting an award?” Rachael stammers. “I bet Tina would love the white half spiral. Or Damini, or Elza.”
“You’re the one who actually saved us all.” Moxx fidgets. “Additionally, your friends are enrolled in the Royal Academy, the princess selection program, and the ambassador program. It wouldn’t be appropriate to single out any of them.”
Rachael’s stressing out, which is when the headaches start.
Moxx is still talking. “You are the only one who’s ever communicated with the Shapers. I mean, uh … the Vayt. You told us that they warned you about some terrible threat. Something that we don’t know how to fight is coming for us. Everyone is more scared than they want to admit. We need your help!”
And with the headaches come glimpses of … something. A terrible presence scritches at the underside of Rachael’s brain, leaving an impression of distorted flesh, glistening like lukewarm soup—things no human was ever meant to see. Rachael can almost hear them shriek, the way they sometimes do in her dreams.
Rachael always had a little voice in her head feeding her anxiety, telling her that everything was already ruined. Now that voice has a personality of its own, and it’s the people who took away her ability to make art. The Vayt.
“I told you everything I know,” Rachael mutters. “I don’t exactly get a clear message from the Vayt, and the connection only goes one way.”
She takes a breath, and then another, until the headache fades.
When Rachael wasn’t being examined by doctors to figure out why she can’t do art anymore, she was getting prodded by experts trying to understand the Vayt, the mysterious creatures who rigged the entire galaxy to put human-shaped people on top. The weapon Rachael controlled was part of the Vayt’s plan to protect against some mystery threat to everyone, everywhere—all she knows is, the danger is already here, and time is running out.
So they attached brain-gargoyles to Rachael’s head (she still has bite marks on her scalp). She spent a day doing Aribentoran poetic meditation, where she tried to doubt everything. She went inside a smoke-cocoon. She even got a hug from a one-eyed Oonian cuddle-priest who was way too handsy.
Damini keeps fretting that Rachael could suffer serious damage if she tries too hard to dial in to these nightmares.
“I was thinking,” Moxx says, “you could try going into what the Javarah call the urrl zatkaz. It is a type of restorative coma.”
Rachael sighs. “Do you really think it’ll do any good?”
Moxx has the worst poker face in the universe. His tusks go sideways and his big eyes unmistakably say nah. But he stammers, “It’s … worth a try. We have to try everything.”
“One coma was enough for me. Sorry.”
“It’s not entirely like a coma,” Moxx says. “I did some research and found the Earth term ‘spa day.’ You never know, maybe this will—”
Rachael flicks her left ring finger. Xiaohou responds by doing a happy backflip and blasting some CrudePink music.
She walks away, with Xiaohou on one side and her Joiner on the other. Xiaohou has gotten upgraded so many times, he no longer has any visible speakers or cameras, and he looks more like a metal monkey. He can actually swing by his tail.
JoinerTalk, Rachael to Tina: ugh moxx again. this time he wants to put me in another coma, for funsies
JoinerTalk, Tina to Rachael: this is NOT what the Royal Fleet is about. We do not force people to undergo medical experiments
JoinerTalk, Tina to Rachael: do you need me to come down there? i can ditch school
JoinerTalk, Rachael to Tina: nah i got this
“Honored Rachael Townsend!” Moxx shouts over the CrudePink. “Please don’t turn away.” He rushes after her. “You must understand! The galaxy is at a breaking point, and we need answers!”
Rachael walks on, and the CrudePink gets louder. It’s that song about getting burned to nothing by a supernova and then your fried atoms coast through space for a billion years, until they drift down to a planet and become part of someone’s lunch, and they choke on your billion-year-old ashes. Super catchy.
“We’ve had teams of scientists examining the Vayt machine in the Antarràn system,” Moxx yells. “And nobody has been able to connect with it the way you did. It’s completely shut down.”
Not my problem.
“Gracious Rachael Townsend, please!” Moxx shouts.
Rachael does another hand signal, and her Joiner summons a barge, which glides right next to her. A moment later she’s flying over the city, and Moxx is a tiny speck.
Joinerguide: Life in Her Majesty’s Firmament
Welcome to Wentrolo, a stunning achievement in urban design. Right at the center of the Glorious Nebula, Wentrolo is the capital of Her Majesty’s Firmament, resting on top of an oval made out of pure starstone. We have everything we could ever need, including our own private sun.
Around half a million people arrived in Wentrolo on the same day you did, but don’t worry: this city keeps growing to make room for everybody.
There’s so much to see here. There’s the Palace of Scented Tears, where the queen and her Privy Council help to decide the fate of worlds. Tourists aren’t allowed inside the palace, but you can explore the outside, not to mention the beautiful Peacebringer Square, and the Wishing Maze—which might just change your life. Elsewhere, there’s the Royal Space Academy, the majestic Royal Command Post, and the Garden of Starships. But also! You can play every game in Gamertown, get anything you might need in the Stroke or the other shopping districts, or learn about the traditions of a hundred different worlds in their separate neighborhoods.
But don’t feel overwhelmed! The device you hold in your hand, that little ball of fur looking up at you right now, is your key to finding your way around this city. Your Joiner will help you to locate whatever you need, and you can also decide just how much city you’re ready to handle at any given time.
Copyright © 2022 by Charlie Jane Anders
