Page 26 of Until the Stars Fall

“Nah, you won’t. Try again.”

But now that I’d thought of setting him on fire, I was too nervous, and my second attempt produced even less than the first. He patted my hands before taking his away.

“That’s absolutely alright. It’s not a linear process. Let’s go see if we can fix the life support system.”

The past two days had been a mix of working to negate the need for the crocheted netting and sitting down to try again on the candle. Even though I was never able to even repeat my first small victory of the ember, Beck neither lost patience nor faith in me. But we’d been at it so long tonight that I was starting to lose my cool.

“I can’t do it, Beck, I just can’t.” I rubbed my forehead.

“It’s okay. Maybe I’ve been trying to get you to focus on the wrong thing. What if your magic doesn’t work this way?”

I folded my arms tightly across my chest and bent in on myself. “The thought of forging out in a new and equally fruitless direction makes me sick to my stomach.”

He leaned forward, catching my eye. “But we can’t get to where we need to go if we’re going the wrong way. What kind of magic did you do when you were first learning?”

I sighed, thinking back. “I don’t know. Um…I used to move things with my mind. I dabbled a little in sigils. I had a tarot deck.”

He nodded, pleased. “Divination.”

“I also used to…you know, I was pretty good at healing.”

He cocked his head. “Still think I’m bad at palm reading? What did you heal?”

I smirked. “Small things. Cuts, scrapes—I was the only girl in high school who never had a breakout.”

“So you’d heal anything that came along back to perfect health?”

“You’re making a lot out of it, but kind of,” I said through a yawn.

“So what if we—”

“Please, not tonight. I can barely keep my eyes open, and I just feel like screaming.”

He rubbed his beard and glanced at the clock. “Tell you what, lemme think about your healing magic, but I don’t want to send you off to bed all aggravated. Hey, you wanna see my favorite place on the ship?”

I loved how his face lit up whenever he was excited about something. I nodded.

“Come on. Let me show you.” He got to his feet and started out the door, crooking his finger at me to follow.

I went with him into the elevator and all the way up to the mezzanine of the Star Deck. A tarp stretched across the pool, filled as a reservoir for laundry and sanitation and not for swimming. He walked me past it to the diving platforms, a higher and lower one set at one end of the pool. I hadn’t paid attention to the higher one before, but now I noticed it was blocked off at the diving end with metal bars and hemmed in on three sides with wood and rugs.

At the top, the entire platform—about five by eight feet—had been cozied up with rugs, blankets, and pillows. He walked a few steps onto it then crawled down into the area, flopping on his back amongst the soft things. I had to hand it to these witches, they didn’t just dabble in comfort, they made it a high priority.

He patted the rug beside him. “Come see.”

I hesitated a second. Where did he think this was going? I lay a body’s width away from him, but he didn’t even turn toward me. His hands clasped on his belly, he gazed out of the overhead window into the dark wilderness of stars.

“You ever study astronomy?”

“Not really. Only the extreme basics I needed to work on ships.”

“Well we’re just over a week into FTL travel, and it’s so hard to know which star is what without a detailed star map, but look over there.” He pointed to a spot on his far right. A nebula shimmered in beautiful, vivid brightness like the eye of a god. “That one’s a collapsing star. You can tell by the concentric shape of it. But just look at it, Gem. Red dwarfs, white stars, there’s a blank space over there, maybe a supervoid”

“What’s a supervoid?” Him using my family’s nickname for me was…charming.

“They form when a bunch of smaller voids coalesce together, like soap bubbles. Or it could be an advanced civilization that’s cloaking its stars in Dyson shells, mining them for energy.”

I turned my head to him. His eyes were lit up, roving all over the great beyond.

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