The Ptolemy Project by Kate St. Clair

Author:Kate St. Clair
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626349988
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

LYRA: 22

The emptiness inside her is so dense and clawing that it steals her sleep. It’s a void that keeps eating her alive, like the collapsing stars they’d learned about in C7. Lyra used to romanticize the image of light vanishing into the heart of them, like their deaths were so heavily felt that nothing around them escaped. It’s something her mother would have said. Giving lives and emotions to the cold stars who felt nothing and never would.

Lyra flips onto her stomach, hoping to smother the ache in her chest with her own weight. The ear pressed into the pillow fills with her heartbeat, and her head starts to throb. Aquila’s face blinks through her mind, and she grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes as if she can scrub Aquila from them. The guilt is too heavy to bear, knowing that she’d been the only one standing between her friend and the pain she’d suffered.

If she could read the code pressed into the skin of his forearm, would it have told her what Cygnus was? Did it even matter? Whoever put them all together clearly thought they were the same species of damaged.

For nothing, her brain repeats, though it isn’t Zeke’s voice anymore, but hers. It’s all for nothing.

Was he right? She’d seen the shift in her mother after she tried to explain the music she heard in fire. How everything Lyra did following that day was viewed with guarded withdrawal, even from her sisters. They’d seen cracks in her she couldn’t see herself, and everyone was waiting for her to erupt into pieces and slice them apart.

The void rises, pulling in her heart, her lungs, crushing them together inside her. She sits up suddenly, afraid the feeling might swallow her completely. Her feet touch the floor, and she tiptoes past sleeping Pollux into the kitchen. Without fully understanding why, she ducks beneath the kitchen counter and hooks the bottle of disinfectant powder with her index finger. She lifts it out quietly, her other hand searching out the glycerin soap bottle from the pantry.

A memory surfaces of this pair of chemicals on a black countertop. It was her Chemics class, and Homer had been throwing half-sucked candy into her hair from the seat behind her, but she was locked onto what the instructor was saying. She remembers the codes he wrote out, like a secret language, chained together to make something important.

She’d remembered it the first time she’d been in this kitchen, when she’d seen half of the code on the disinfectant bottle and its counterpoint in the pantry. She just hadn’t remembered the second half of the story.

How when these two came together, they made beautiful fire. How the little puff of it they’d made in Chemics class had stalled her heart, and she hadn’t even noticed Homer. How she’d hidden the remainder of her experiment into her pockets and smuggled it home.

Lyra slips through the patio door, the Tect a shadow across the courtyard.

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