The Star Map

By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 33 Minutes

It was a hot, dry afternoon when Christina’s husband did that extraordinary thing, that thing no one else in Rustvale had done for as long as anyone could remember:

He left.

He wore his leather work boots, still smeared with oil from the nutrient factory, and he had his rucksack slung over his shoulder as he got into the old speeder he’d taken from the junkyard. The neighbors said there were tears in his eyes. But he never looked back, not even when Christina ran down the dusty street after his speeder as it flew away, barefoot, screaming obscenities and hurling stones.

“Good riddance,” said the neighbors. “That Hammond is a strange one, always looking up at the sky and studying those old maps. She’s better off without him.”

And she was better off without him…at least, that’s how it first appeared. She moved back into her parents’ house. She got a job in the greenhouse where the soliph was grown. She stuffed all of Hammond’s things in a trunk, including his wretched maps, locking it all away in the attic and refusing to open it again.

But then, only a week after the dust of his departing speeder had settled back onto the surface of the mesa, she discovered she was pregnant.

And on the evening the baby came, wailing and grasping at the sky, she looked down and saw her husband’s same clear brown eyes, and her slender little shoulders shook with silent sobs, late into the night.

✷

From the moment he spoke his first word, it was apparent that Elijah was an unusual boy. While other babies cooed “Mama” or “Dada,” Elijah’s first word escaped his lips on an evening walk as Christina pushed his rickety old stroller to the edge of the settlement.

She was very tired that night: her back ached from standing in the soliph fields all day, under the vast, domed ceiling of the greenhouse, delicately pulling the ripe flowers from the stalks so as not to crush the petals and spill the precious nectar inside. When she returned home, Elijah was wailing. He had been left in his bassinet, unattended. Her parents were sitting in the other room, and on their laps they cradled large, golden saucers, holding them very light and still so that the liquid inside remained undisturbed. They had soft smiles on their lips and their eyes were glassy.

Christina took Elijah from his bassinet, put him in the stroller, and went outside. It was a warm night, and the sky was clear overhead. The stroller rattled through the dirty streets, the front wheel rusty and in danger of falling off, until she arrived at the end of town, at the very edge of the mesa. There Christina stood with her hair blowing in the breeze, looking out over the valley below and the arid earth beyond it, the barren hills that rolled like waves of lifeless, cracked soil to the farthest reaches of the horizon.

“Star!” said a little voice.

In the stroller, her son was looking up into the sky.

✷

As the boy grew, he became stranger still. While other children took to the soliph early, rushing home after school where their parents gave them golden saucers of their very own, Elijah would find every reason to stay out as long as he could. He’d poke around at the cantina and watch the nutritionists mixing red protein cakes with water, kneading it like the people in ancient civilizations used to knead bread, back before the ground was poisoned. He’d climb on top of the mud houses, watching tired-looking men in overalls go to and from the nutrient factory, oil on their boots. He’d climb higher still, up into the limestone cliffs, and look down at the powerful, robotic arms of the nutrient factory, fertilizing and watering the unaccommodating earth. And sometimes he’d just lay on his back on the hard stone ground, looking up at the clouds. He explored everywhere he could.

It was inevitable, then, that he found the old trunk.

He was eleven years old when it happened. That evening, Christina returned home with her back aching from standing under the vast, domed ceiling of the greenhouse all day. She called her son’s name as she came through the door. There was no response. In the dining room her parents were staring at their saucers. They did not notice her, either.

She found her son in the attic.

“Mom, look!” he said.

He was on his knees. Spread out in front of him were many maps, yellowed with age, their edges curling and their ink worn. Each was unique, covered in strange symbols and charts and numbers, outlining topography that was wild and unfamiliar. On some were forests of green trees; others showed wide, rushing rivers; one depicted a tall, snow-capped mountain.

“See how strange they are?” Elijah was saying. “I can’t make sense of them; this land doesn’t look anything like our valley. And look, this one is different than all the others…see?”

From among all the other parchments, Elijah held up a single map. It was blue, a deep blue like the night sky. It was completely blank.

Seeing it, Christina was afraid. On her son’s face was an excitement that was all-too-familiar, his curly brown hair drooping over his clear brown eyes, and her heart twisted violently, like a wet rag. She snatched the map out of his hand.

“How dare you!” she said, her voice shaking. “Don’t you know things like these are hidden for a reason? You must never look at them again!”

He gaped at her in surprise. “But Mom…!”

“Not another word!”

After that day, Christina was shaken. She could not get his eyes out of her mind, and she could not stop thinking about the blue map. She remembered her husband, poring over the parchments at the table.

She still remembered the night he had solved it.

“It’s a star map, Christina!” he had said, looking very much like his son would look eleven years later. “The star map is the key!”

Three nights went by. On the fourth, while the rest of the house slept, she crept up to the attic and opened the trunk. She ran her fingers over the parchments, so rough, like his hands had been. One by one, she pulled them out. At last she came to the blue map, blank and lighter than the rest, light like the thin tissue Hammond had used to wrap the bracelet he’d made her for their first anniversary.

She took a second map from the pile and put it on the floor in front of her. It showed a wide forest of trees, something she’d only ever seen in picture books. Like Hammond had shown her, she carefully lay the blue map on top of it.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, in the darkness of the attic, pinpricks of light began to form on the surface of the blue map, like twinkling stars blinking awake. The rest of the blue parchment faded and became transparent, showing through to the second map underneath, a glowing series of dots that traced their way across its surface.

A path, through the woods.

Christina put the maps away and shut the trunk up tight.

But when she came home from work the next night, her father actually looked up from the golden saucer sitting in front of him on the kitchen table. His small eyes peered at her out of the wrinkled flesh that sagged down his face, like something melting in the hot sun.

“Christina, darling,” he said, “did I hear you in the attic last night?”

Christina took off her boots and wiggled her toes on the dried-mud floor. “Do you think there’s any place left that isn’t poisoned?” she said after a little while. “Anywhere in the world where plants still grow on their own?”

He blinked at her. “Does it matter?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. No one has journeyed off this mesa for so long. What if there’s someplace out there not kept alive by a nutrient factory?”

“Journeys. Ha! You sound like him.” He was not interested any longer, and he turned back to the golden saucer. His own toadish face peered back at him. “No, Christina, it does not matter. I am on the greatest journey.” He tapped his chest. “The journey inward. Why, if I could only describe to you the unplumbed depths, the mysteries, the vast wonders within, you would not think twice about what lies beyond this valley.”

“Hammond didn’t think so.”

He sighed to himself, a wistful sigh, like he was remembering a delicious dessert. “Yes, that is true. But Hammond was quite a lost, repressed young man. You thought so yourself, remember. You practically threw him out. All the neighbors could hear you screaming at him the day he left.”

A lump came to her throat. She knew he was right. But he said nothing else, merely hummed to himself, and when she left the room he was still gazing at his reflection in the undisturbed surface within the saucer.

✷

It became apparent to Christina, not long after that, that Elijah had disobeyed her.

He was still looking at the maps.

She never caught him. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to. But every now and again she’d hear the sound of footsteps in the attic or the crinkle of old parchments. Once, at dinner, she saw that Elijah’s daily rations of nutrient bars were still in their canisters, untouched; when she called for him, she heard a slam at the top of the house and he came hurrying into the kitchen, flushed and overly-casual.

“Sorry, Mom, I just forgot.”

Christina wasn’t sure why, but she let him go on. In fact, she began to go out of her way to make sure she didn’t catch him, clearing her throat and walking louder than usual when passing by the attic’s trap door. This went on for weeks, until one day, when she heard a loud cry of pent-up frustration issue from the top of the house. Then she put down her half-eaten nutrient bar, walked by her parents’ oblivious forms staring into their saucers, and climbed the ladder into the attic.

Elijah was sitting amidst the many maps, his face on the floor and his hands pulling at his curly hair. He didn’t even look up when she sat next to him and put her hand on his back.

“I can’t solve it, mom. I can’t figure out how they fit together and where they all lead.”

“Why don’t you show me what you have so far?”

At that, he sat up and cautiously studied her face. But she said nothing, and he turned to the parchments and began pointing and talking very fast.

“This is the first map. It’s our mesa. See? This second map is down below, in the valley. And this third map is further out, leading to these cliffs.” He tapped the paper. “But I don’t know what comes after.” He leaned forward, grabbing a handful of other parchments. “These four maps fit together, too, but they have different symbols and seem to connect in a circular pattern. Some kind of cave, maybe? These two maps actually overlap, here on this squiggly line, see? And this one, the mountain, has so many paths on it that I don’t know which one is right.” He sat back in frustration. “But I just can’t figure out how they all connect, or where they’re trying to take us!”

Christina looked at the many maps spread out over the floor of the attic. Then, without a word, she located the blank, blue, wafer-thin parchment and, gently, set it on top of the first map Elijah had showed her.

It glowed with pinpricks of light. They led through the streets, across the mesa, and down into the valley.

Elijah stared. Then he turned his wide eyes up at her in wonder.

“How did you know?”

“These were your father’s maps,” she said. “He solved the riddle the summer before you were born.”

Elijah was startled: she never talked about his father. He considered this for a moment, then looked back down at the dots of light flickering on the surface of the paper.

“Where does it all go?”

“Someplace wonderful. Someplace where there are green trees and cool water and real food, fruit and spices and sugar, like there used to be in the old days.” She paused. “At least, that’s what your dad believed.”

“But…do you believe it?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. “He begged me to go with him,” she said at last. “He thought that Rustvale was dying. He’d been studying the machines in the factory, and the manuals, and he was convinced they were breaking down. In a few years, he said, they would fail altogether. Then there would be no more nutrient bars and no more water. Everyone would die. But no one listened to him; they just wanted to grow soliph and look into their saucers.”

“What about you?” he asked.

“I didn’t listen to him, either.”

“But why? Didn’t you love him?”

“I thought I did,” she said. “But when he asked me to leave Rustvale with him, to leave my parents and my friends and my home behind…I didn’t love him, then. In fact, I hated him. And when he finally left, promising to return once he had found that magical place where green trees grew, I threw rocks at him. I told him I hoped he died out there in the dust.” Her eyes had grown moist, and she paused to wipe them with her sleeve. “But he was right. Rustvale is dying, and no one is doing anything about it.”

Elijah watched his mother’s tears, sitting in silence. Then, after a little, he said, “I wish I could meet him.”

Christina looked up. She reached out and stroked his cheek. “I wish you could, too.”

He looked at her, then back down at the maps on the floor. A light came into his eyes, and she saw his eleven-year-old heart swelling. He threw his arms around her with a cry.

“But Mom, don’t you see? He left us the maps! He wants us to follow him!”

✷

The very next day, Christina went to the junkyard. Once, it had been a harbor that housed the ships that had brought their ancestors here to Rustvale, docked all in a row with their jet engines still warm and their cockpits gleaming. Now it was a collection of scraps. The ships had been broken down long ago, used as replacement parts in the nutrient factory.

Christina walked through bits of glass and discarded gears, looking for anything with an engine.

Finally, she found it: under a tarpaulin was a single speeder, only meant to shuttle cargo from the holds of the ships to the town. It would not fly: its tiny repulsor engine pushed it only a few feet off the ground.

It was just like the one Hammond had used, all those years ago.

At first, the manager of the junkyard refused to let her have it, but Christina finally convinced him by bribing him with her key to the greenhouse and the promise of all the soliph he could manage to sneak out. When she started the ancient vehicle, the engine sputtered and coughed, and for a moment she worried that she had thrown her job away for a useless shell. But then the repulsors came on and the speeder rose into the air.

“See?” said the junkyard manager, rapping his knuckles on the side of the speeder. “Runs like a dream.”

The engine wheezed.

“One last thing,” said Christina. “I’ll need a weapon.”

✷

When she pulled the speeder up to her parents’ home, sending clouds of dust into the air, the neighbors looked up from their saucers. They were alarmed to see the speeder parked there, just as it had been eleven years earlier, and even more alarmed to see the laser blaster strapped to Christina’s hip.

“Well, now!” said one. “Little Christina, heading off on her own? She’s gone mad, just like her husband.”

“Poor Christina,” said another. “She’s unhappy, you can tell. She never did take well to the soliph; never learned who she truly is, deep inside. Now she’s headed out into the wilderness with that boy of hers? She’ll be dead within a week.”

When Elijah saw the speeder, his eyes widened, and they widened even more when he saw the blaster.

“Cool! Can I try it?”

Christina shook her head. It was an ancient device, and the manager had warned her that it may not even be functional; but she had been too nervous to test the weapon at the junkyard. One challenge at a time, she thought.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

Together, they loaded the speeder with supplies. Each had a sleeping bag and a rucksack filled with clothes, along with water, purifying tablets, medicine, and as many nutrient bars as they could get their hands on.

And, carefully rolled up and tied together with rope, they had the maps.

When they were ready, Christina stood with her hand on the doorknob. Across the street, the neighbors were watching. But inside the house, her parents sat unaware, peering down into their saucers with glassy eyes.

She closed the door.

✷

For three days, their speeder flew across the arid earth, Christina at the wheel and Elijah in the passenger seat. Elijah held the star map over the parchment that showed their current location, the glowing path reflecting the clusters of stars overhead.

The first day, the engine overheated. The sun was hot, hotter down in the valley than it had been under the cliffs on the mesa, so together, with some difficulty, they pushed the ancient machine into the shadow of a limestone boulder and dozed until nightfall. By the time the sun had set, the speeder was working again.

They went on, traveling by night and sleeping by day. In the mornings and at evening time, they would take out the maps and pore over them together. Sometimes Elijah’s eyes would shine with a wild intensity as he stared at them, fitting them this way and that, turning them over, looking for patterns and clues. Then he’d go run and stand on a boulder, squinting into the distance, checking for landmarks. When he found one, he’d let out a whoop.

“See here? That’s those cliffs in the distance. We’re going the right way!”

Christina would sit back and look at him in those moments, his curly hair blowing over his eyes in the wind, and she would see Hammond.

By the third day, they’d lost sight of the mesa they had called home their whole lives. Replacing it, on the opposite horizon, was a wall of cliffs. Imposing and jagged, they jutted up out of the earth like teeth, growing higher and higher as their speeder drew near, like a flea approaching a sleeping giant. They were just about to reach the edge of the fifth map; they had not discovered which map was the sixth.

Little doubts began to creep into Christina’s mind.

At last they came to the wall. The high cliffs were sheer, stretching far over their heads without a foothold, yawning in either direction as far as they could see. Christina cut the power to the repulsors and the speeder settled into the dust with a relieved groan. Then she and her son got out to inspect the great behemoth in front of them.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Elijah muttered. He was holding the star map over the map of the canyon. Christina peered over his shoulder.

The blinking path of lights led straight through the wall.

But there was no cavern, no valley, no canyon through the solid rock.

Christina pressed her hand to the stone. It was warm under her palm. She craned her head back, back, back to peer up at the ridge of the wall far above her head.

“We’ll have to go around,” she said.

But Elijah was pacing in front of the wall, staring at the map and shaking his head. “No, no, no…we’re supposed to be right here!”

“Elijah,” she said, her voice gentle and tired, “those maps were probably meant for ships. They would have flown over.”

“Dad didn’t have a ship. You said he took a speeder from the junkyard, just like us.”

She tilted her head back again and closed her eyes. There was a lump in her throat. “Yes,” she said. “And maybe he didn’t make it.”

Elijah stopped. He turned to look at her. Then he stomped his shoe on the ground, his face red and angry, and she remembered then that he was only eleven. “No! I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t have left you the maps if he hadn’t known he could make it without them. He must have made it, somehow!”

Christina did not respond, and Elijah went back to the speeder in a huff and began to unroll the other maps with quick, jerky movements of frustration. She kept her hand pressed against the warm stone. Above them, the giant slept, ignorant and immovable, sealing them into this dead valley.

From the speeder, she heard Elijah muttering to himself. “But it says it’s right here!”

She began to walk. Her right hand stayed on the wall, feeling its hard surface under her fingers as she traced them along its edges.

Until, suddenly, she didn’t feel it anymore.

Christina turned. There, right in front of her face, was the sheer stone wall. Yet now her arm went up into the stone, as if she were a ghost passing through its surface. She could not see her own hand; she wiggled her fingers and felt nothing but air.

“Elijah,” she called. “Come look.”

It was a hologram, made to look like part of the cliffside. It covered a wide entryway cut through the stone, triple the width of their speeder. Inside the cave, it was dark and very quiet. But Elijah just laughed and clapped his hands.

“I knew it! The map was right! Dad must have come this way.”

✷

They journeyed through the darkness for five more days, going very slowly. The yellow lights of the speeder mingled with the twinkling blue dots on the map, reflecting and dancing off the ceiling. Many times they came to a fork in the road, until they no longer had any sense of where they were; only the star map was their guide.

“Look,” said Elijah the first day in the darkness, showing her the parchments. “This is why I couldn’t connect the maps back in the attic: these four form the tunnel under the cliffs, and they are separate from the rest. Pretty cool, right?”

“Yes,” said Christina. She was peering into the shadows. “But it also means we don’t know what’s on the other side.”

On they went. The deeper they got, the more Christina could feel the weight of the limestone over her head, the sheer bulk of the beast whose insides they now traveled through. The steady hum of the repulsors echoed off the cave walls, punctuated by the occasional cough of the engine, and always Christina was afraid it would die altogether and the lights would go out, plunging them into pitch-black deep beneath the earth.

Then, on the fifth day, they rounded a bend and cried out in surprise.

There was light ahead.

Christina cut the power to the speeder’s headlights and held her hand over her eyes; after so long in the dark, lit only by artificial light, the sun pouring into the cave was foreign and blinding. Next to her, Elijah was squinting, trying to see what lay outside. Christina piloted the speeder down the last stretch of tunnel, and by the time they emerged from the cave at last their eyes had adjusted.

Stretching out ahead of them, tall and quiet and elegant, were trees.

Elijah whooped, jumped out of the speeder, and took off at a run. But Christina sat, dumbstruck: they were conifers, with only a few needles, growing in rows atop ground that was tough and coarse and dry. It was not a lush scene, but it didn’t matter: it was more green than she’d ever seen in her life, and she drank it in like a parched man guzzling water.

When Elijah was finished running through the trees, he sat down next to the speeder with the maps, his cheeks flushed and his eyes shining. Finally, he shouted, “Aha!” and held up one of the parchments. “This is where we are now!”

He laid out their current map, which depicted a large green forest, and laid the star map on top. The dotted lights glowed to life, tracing a path through the trees.

“This way!”

They got back into the speeder and Christina started the engine. But then, for a moment, she looked back. The limestone wall behind them appeared completely solid, an unbroken line of rock. There was no trace of the passage they had come through.

An uneasy feeling went through her, and she put her hand on her blaster. Why had the passage been hidden, she wondered?

What, or who, had they been hiding from?

✷

Her uneasy feeling did not last long. After five days underground, it was wonderful to be back in the sunlight, and she could not help but be delighted by the green of the trees. The deeper they went into the forest, the more the world came alive around them. The tough ground began to grow greener, the needles on the trees thicker. On the second day, as Elijah sat staring happily up at the sunlight peeking through the branches of the pines, a little shape drifted toward them on the breeze, paper-thin wings beating open and closed. It settled on Elijah’s chest and sat fanning its wings open and shut.

“What is it?” Elijah breathed. He had never seen a living thing that was not human.

“I think it’s a butterfly,” said Christina, who had never seen one, either. “There’s a drawing of one in the old zoologist journals in the Rustvale archive.”

Elijah reached out a finger to touch the little wings, and the butterfly detached itself and fluttered away, almost coy as it did little cartwheels into the forest.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” said Elijah.

She looked at his wide, childish eyes and smiled. “Never.” Then she turned toward the horizon. “We must be getting closer.”

After the butterfly came more life: on the fourth morning they heard sounds like music, and awoke to see little shapes with wings flying between branches in the trees. On the fifth day they came upon a family of large spotted creatures with long legs, nibbling at the tough grass. They raised their heads as their speeder broke through the trees, then took off at a run.

On the sixth day, they saw the mountain.

It was in the distance when the tree line suddenly broke, the ground sloping sharp beneath them into a wooded valley. In the middle of the valley was a rushing river, wide and quick, the water foaming white as it broke against big rocks. Beyond the river was the mountain. It stood in the distance, majestic and serene, nothing like the dirty brown cliffs of their mesa: this mountain was old and grey, and it wore a crown of white snow about its head. It made them feel afraid and safe at the same time, as if, despite their smallness next to it, the mountain was inviting them to climb it.

Elijah shuffled through the maps.

“Ah, now I see!” he said. “These are the overlapping maps, and this squiggly line where they overlap is the river. See? Here’s where we are.” He held up one map, overlaid across another. He moved the star map across their surface, and the pattern of dotted lights jumped from one parchment to the next, right up the side of the mountain. “I think that’s where we’re headed.” He lowered the parchments. “I think that’s the last one.”

That night, they camped by the river. The water was very fast, but they found an inlet where it pooled and Christina bathed and washed Elijah’s hair. The river felt fresh and cool compared to the processed water manufactured in the nutrient factory, and it had a bite to it that was energizing and a little alarming. Elijah complained about soap in his eyes, but Christina felt relieved to see the dust and grime seeping out from his curly brown locks as she scrubbed them. After bathing, Christina gave him a nutrient bar and sat leaning against the speeder, watching him study the final map, just as he’d studied the maps every night. He was absorbed in it, talking to himself in low tones, his little eyes moving rapidly over its surface.

“This will be hard,” he said after a while. “There’s lots of paths up the mountain, but only one of them is right. See how many twists and turns there are?”

“We have the star map,” said Christina. “It will show us the way.”

“We should probably study it anyway,” he said. He paused, then he looked up. “Do you think he will be happy to see me?”

Christina was startled. “Of course!”

“But he doesn’t even know about me,” Elijah said. “What if he is disappointed?”

She moved over to him and placed her arm around his shoulders. “He will be delighted, Elijah. I promise.”

Elijah nodded, but he did not look at her. After a moment, he shrugged her off. “I should study the map.”

Christina leaned back again and watched him. She watched him and she thought about her husband, and in her heart she wondered.

Then her stomach growled. She took a drink from her canteen, but she did not eat: they were almost out of nutrient bars. She hadn’t told her son. Thinking of the hoofed things they had seen the day before in the forest, her hand went to her hip where she’d strapped the ancient blaster. She pulled it out and looked at its worn surface, studying its barrel and trigger.

Soon, she thought, she would have to test it.

✷

On the seventh day, Christina awoke to a sound coming from deep within the woods.

She sat up quickly. Elijah was still asleep next to her, breathing soft. She listened. There it was, far in the distance: a low, heavy rumble. It was coming closer. Overhead, a flock of winged creatures flew the opposite way, frightened. The sound grew louder, a churning, grinding sound, followed by heavy crashes and a high whine.

Christina’s chest tightened. This was not the sound of an animal; this was a sound she had not heard since the mesa, since the constant grating of the nutrient factory.

It was the sound of gears.

“Elijah,” she said, shaking him. “Get up.”

He mumbled and stirred awake, rubbing his eyes. Then he heard it, too, and sat up straight. “Mom…what is that?”

Christina did not answer. She stood in front of the speeder and reached down to the holster, drawing the blaster.

She was standing there, the weapon in her hand, when the trawler came smashing through the forest.

It was a huge machine, a monstrosity, rolling on enormous treaded wheels. It knocked down the trees as it came, shredding the wood in a burst of sparks. There were men walking alongside it, men wearing armor and goggles and carrying motorized saws. When the trawler had done its work, the men sliced the fallen trees into lumber, throwing the pieces into large crates stacked on the back of the ugly machine.

The men were almost to the river when one of them noticed the woman and her son. He was brawny, with a thick mustache and long, dirty hair tied back in a ponytail. He straightened in surprise when he caught sight of them. For a moment, he just stared, his eyes magnified and grotesque behind his goggles. Christina felt Elijah shiver next to her. Then the man turned and hollered at the trawler, and when it was off an eerie silence fell over the forest.

Then a slow smile spread over the man’s face.

“Well, now. This is certainly quite a find, isn’t it, boys?”

The other men laughed, and the laughter was not friendly.

Christina tightened her grip on the blaster.

The man ignored her, cocking his head and peering down at Elijah. “You, there,” he said. “Boy. Where’d you and your mama come from?”

Elijah was hiding behind Christina’s leg, but when he answered his voice did not waver. “Rustvale,” he said.

“Elijah!” said Christina.

“Rustvale, eh?” said the man in the goggles. “Never heard of it. And where might you lonely travelers be off to?”

“We’re going up the mountain,” said Elijah, “to find my dad.”

“Elijah!” Christina repeated. “Don’t answer them.”

But the men just laughed again. The leader grinned, and Christina saw that he was missing teeth. “Up the mountain? Why, you aren’t looking for the city up there, are you?”

“City?” said Elijah, straightening. “Is there a city?”

“Oh my, yes!” said the man, clapping his hands in faux delight. “It’s a magical fairy land with sugarplums and waterfalls of gold, and everyone is happy and nobody is hungry.”

His men were guffawing. Elijah reddened. “You shut up!” he shouted. “My dad is up there and we’re going to find him.”

The man lifted his goggles, and instantly his eyes became black and beady. “Kid, if your old man is up on that mountain the only thing left of him is his frozen bones. There’s nothing up there but snow and ice.”

“You’re lying!”

“Elijah,” said Christina through gritted teeth. “Not another word.”

The man looked at her, as if seeing her and her blaster for the first time. He did not even blink. “You’re quite right, ma’am, quite right; that’s more than enough chatter. I think it’s high time we be on our way.”

They stood facing each other. No one moved.

“So,” said Christina. “Go on, then.”

“Oh, I thought the matter was clear,” he said, grinning. “You’re coming with us.”

Christina’s jaw clenched. “No.”

He laughed. “Oh, don’t worry now, miss, we won’t hurt you. No, I reckon you two will fetch a fine price as kitchen slaves back in Tarnish, just fine. Should be enough for me to retire from the trawler for a spell, settle down with my soliph for a good long while.”

He nodded at his men and made a gesture. “Take her.”

The men lifted their saws and advanced.

Then Christina knew it was time. Holding the blaster steady, hoping for the best, she pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The ancient gun just wheezed, a puff of dust coming out of the barrel.

So, she did the next best thing: she threw it at the leader’s head.

The metal gave a satisfying clang, right in his eye socket. He doubled over with a cry of fury.

“Now, Elijah, get in!”

They jumped into the speeder. Christina hit the ignition. The speeder coughed, groaned, but proved faithful: the repulsors came to life and the speeder lifted from the ground. The men ran towards them, saws raised, and Christina yanked the wheel as hard as she could and hit the accelerator.

But just as they began to speed away, one of the men leapt, his saw outstretched. There was horrible shrieking sound as the blade caught the engine. There was a burst of sparks and a billow of black smoke, and then they were away. The speeder did not stop: it zipped right in front of the trawler, bleeding great plumes of smoke, while the men howled in anger at their departing form.

Then the trawler rumbled to life, the great treads beginning to turn.

Christina aimed the speeder for the river.

“Mom!” cried Elijah.

The engine was on fire. The speeder was shaking all over, like an animal in the throes of death. The repulsors flickered, threatening to go out.

Behind them, the trawler roared.

Christina gritted her teeth.

Then they were passing over the river. The wild water surged under them, quick and fast, and they felt the spray on their faces.

They had just passed to the opposite bank when the repulsors gave out.

The speeder slammed into the ground, tearing up the dirt and grass and roots, the metal frame bending and twisting. Christina took hold of Elijah’s arm and lifted him from his seat.

“Jump!”

They did, tumbling from the speeder and hitting the ground hard. Elijah went rolling and Christina felt her leg snap under her. Ahead, the speeder crashed into a tree and burst into flames with all that remained of their supplies.

“No!” said Elijah, bolting to his feet. “The maps! The maps were in there!”

Christina lay on the ground, gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg. Over the river, she could hear the angry whir of the trawler that could not get to them across the water.

They lay there for a long time, watching the fire burn.

✷

By sunset the fire had gone out and the trawler men had finally moved on. All that remained of their speeder was charred and twisted metal: the supplies, the rations, and the maps had become ash. To make matters worse, Christina found she could not stand: the throbbing in her leg seared to a blinding white whenever she put pressure on it. She lay on her back in the dirt while Elijah sat crying silently.

“Elijah,” she said after a while. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

He sniffed. “How can you say that, mom? We have no speeder and no maps. You can’t even walk!”

She rolled onto her side and looked at his little face, puffed up from crying. His curls were getting in his eyes, and even in defeat there was a determined fire in them. She smiled.

“Do you remember what you said, back before the cave? He wouldn’t have left me those maps if he hadn’t been absolutely sure he could follow their lights without them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “that he memorized them before he left.”

He straightened a bit at that. “You mean…you think he made it?”

“Yes,” she said. “And we will, too. Because you’ve been pouring over those maps every night, night after night. You know them. You’ve embedded their patterns in your mind, on the bottom of your eyelids.” She looked at him very firm and very kind. “You can lead us up the mountain, Elijah.”

✷

All night long, Elijah wrote in the dirt. He muttered to himself, drawing patterns, recalling shapes, erasing them. Every once in a while, he’d close his eyes and Christina would think he had fallen asleep, but he would always open them and start drawing again.

By the morning, they were ready. Christina had barely slept, and as the light trickled back into the sky she watched the stars fade into the blue. They were still up there, she knew, behind the clouds.

It was now or never.

They fashioned a makeshift set of crutches for Christina from two fallen conifer branches, and, slowly, painfully, began to make their way through the forest. The mountain loomed overhead, looking down, waiting for them.

By nightfall, they were very hungry and exhausted, but they had reached the edge of the forest. The base of the mountain was just within reach. A path led up its side, into the gray rocks, before disappearing around a bend.

They settled up against on old pine tree for the night. Elijah found some mushrooms—Christina recognized them from one of the horticultural books kept on file in Rustvale’s greenhouse—and they nibbled on them as twilight descended. It did very little to placate their protesting stomachs. After, they wrapped the rest in a piece of cloth torn from the cuff of Christina’s pants, then fell asleep feeling empty in their guts.

The next morning, they began to climb.

It was a long, slow process. For two days, they dragged themselves up the path, stopping often for Christina to rest. The path itself wound back and forth, twisting like a serpent, and more than once Elijah had to help his mother climb up a slab of rock or over a boulder as she cried out in pain. Six times, they came to a crossroads. Elijah would pause, look around, then close his eyes, recalling the blinking lights of the star map in his mind. Then he would lead them forward.

It grew colder as they ascended. The wind became stronger, making their eyes water. It tore at their exposed places like the claws of little spirits. They took shelter in crevices and huddled together for warmth. By the end of the second day, they had finished the mushrooms. Christina could barely keep her head up.

On the third day, they came to the snow. The white powder covered the path and formed mounds on the cliff walls next to them. Neither had ever seen anything like it, but both were too tired and too cold to marvel: they shivered as mountain gales threw the white snow about, the cold crystals stinging their faces like pricking needles.

Finally, they came to a crossroad where Elijah stood for a long time. The wind whipped at his curly hair and his face was stricken.

“I can’t remember,” he said at last.

“You can,” said Christina. “You must.”

“Mom, I can’t…I don’t know…”

Christina looked up at the sky. In the darkness, beyond the wind and the clouds, the stars were watching.

Then she remembered.

“It’s this way,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Your father showed me this map once. I remember this spot. We’re very, very close.”

They continued on, further in and further up. Ever they grew closer to the cold, snow-capped peak. The snow crunched under their feet, and Christina felt her head swim: she was very weak.

At last, the path made one final, sharp turn. Just overhead, the spire of the mountain peak was silhouetted against the black sky. The wind wailed and moaned.

In front of them was nothing but a wall of cold rock.

There was nothing. No one.

“What?” cried Elijah over the howl of the wind, tears in his eyes. “Where is it? Where?”

The sound of the snow and wind was deafening. Christina was so cold and so tired, and all she wanted to do was lay down and go to sleep. But, unlike those first days when they had set out across the valley, she no longer had any doubts. She hobbled forward on her crutches and stretched out her hand to rest it against the solid granite.

Her hand passed through the wall.

She turned and looked at Elijah. Then, together, mother and son stepped through the hologram.

They both gasped.

The mountain peak and the cold wind were gone: they stood inside an enormous dome, within the heart of the mountain. Under the golden lights was a city. There were speeders zipping everywhere, and tall buildings and bustling streets. People were walking together, chatting and laughing, and children were playing in a fountain. Everywhere they looked, between the buildings and surrounding the city, there was green: palm trees and fruit trees and vegetable gardens and sunflowers. The air was warm, and they thought they could hear singing.

Christina, overwhelmed and exhausted, felt her knees shake. Elijah ran forward, laughing and shouting, and she only had time to hear his whoop of joy before her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell, and everything became black.

✷

Christina awoke.

For a moment, she thought she was back in her bed in Rustvale. She could hear her parents in the other room, setting their saucers on the table, pouring in the soliph nectar. Soon she would have to get Elijah ready for school and head to the greenhouse. She felt very tired, and her leg throbbed.

“Elijah?” she murmured.

There was no response. Then, as feeling crept back into her, she became aware that her sheets were much softer than at home. Over her head, she did not see the dried mud ceiling of her parents’ dwelling on that arid mesa, but a ceiling of rich, carved wood. Outside the window, the leaves of a tree moved gently in the breeze, and little winged shapes chirped and picked at seeds on the sill.

Leaning over her was a face. It had soft brown eyes and long curly locks. But the eyes were older, the locks longer, and for a moment she was confused: had Elijah changed overnight? What had become of her son?

Then the face broke into a smile and she felt strong arms enfolding her. She burst into tears and clung to him with all her might.

“Hammond, I’m sorry,” she wept. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Her husband sat back and wiped the tears from her cheek. “Sorry?” he said. “You came!”

They held each other, crying and embracing. They shared few words at first: Christina caressed his cheek and he kissed her hand. Then they began to talk together, in low tones, and told one another about their journeys.

“Christina,” he said, “I hoped that you would come since the moment I got here. I tried to go back and get you so many times, sometimes alone and sometimes with other people. But the men of Tarnish drove us back every time.”

“We met one of their trawlers on the way,” said Christina. “They tried to take us with them, to make us slaves.”

A dark look passed over his face, and he squeezed her hand. “You’re lucky you only came upon a trawler,” he said. “They have soldiers, too, and drones. They are knocking down the forest every day, destroying what little remains unspoiled in this world. But it won’t last forever. We are mounting our forces, and one day we will overtake them.”

There were flowers on Christina’s bedside table, yellow and purple. Christina caught the smell of them and a thrill went through her. She clutched at her husband, desperately. “Hammond, is this real? This isn’t just a dream? Are all the things you spoke about back in Rustvale really coming true?”

Hammond laughed a happy laugh. Then he stood and walked over to the window, reaching outside and plucking something from the tree, then returned to sit beside her, putting it into her hand.

It was an apple. It was red and ripe. She took a bite and it was very sweet. Tears came into her eyes.

“Oh, Hammond…”

He laughed again. “There’s a cure, Christina. The men of Tarnish can’t hold us back forever. Soon, when we are ready, we will rescue the people of Rustvale, and all the settlements, and bring medicine and plant seeds, seeds all over, and restore the poisoned ground.”

There was that look in his eyes again, that same look of hope and passion she had fallen in love with many years ago. He put his hand against her cheek. “How I’ve hoped you would come, Christina! And you have, you have!”

He threw his arms around her again and she wept.

Then the door opened, and standing there, looking in with wide and tentative eyes, was Elijah.

Hammond stared at him, and the boy stared back. The older brown eyes met the younger, the same curly hair reflecting back as if in a mirror. Christina watched them, her heart in her throat, and touched her husband’s arm.

“Hammond,” she said, her voice soft. “You left behind more than you knew. But everything you left behind helped us find you again. This is your son, Elijah. He used the star map to bring us here.”

Hammond gazed at him in wonder. Then he jumped up with a cry that came from his very depths and scooped up the boy in his arms. Elijah hugged him, hugged him as hard as his little arms could, and happy tears flowed down his face. Hammond carried him to his mother and gathered them both into his embrace, and they held each other close, up in the mountain above the death and the poison, up among the clouds where the stars looked down on them and smiled.

✷

Story by Matt Mills · Photo by Jordan Steranka

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