Beyond The Dying Light

Chapter 2: Heatwave

The temperature was higher than usual on the walk home, but nobody on the streets seemed particularly bothered. People moved through it the same way they moved through everything on Aurelia — with the comfortable assumption that whatever systems were in place would handle it eventually.

Natan noticed it and said nothing.

"I'm home, mom."

"Welcome home." She appeared at the door, looked him over once the way she always did, and stepped aside to let him in. "How was school?"

"Fine."

She looked at him. The look she had developed specifically for this answer — eyes slightly narrowed, chin up, the expression of a woman who had heard that word used as a complete sentence too many times and was done accepting it.

Natan looked back at her.

Her expression didn't change.

"...It was fine," he said. "We had space science. The teacher said they've found fifty planets that could support other life. Aria got a new pencil from the government distribution — it draws by itself, you just tell it what to draw. She showed everyone. I told her it was trash and she pouted." He paused. "That's mostly it."

His mother's expression shifted into something satisfied. "Good. Are you hungry?"

"Yes." He set his bag down. "Did you make it yourself or did you use the machine?"

His mother drew herself up to her full height, puffed her chest out with the confidence of someone who had been waiting for this question, and looked at him. "Of course I made it myself."

He sat down.

She set the plate in front of him and he picked up his chopsticks and took the first bite and then stopped.

Oh god, he thought. This is — this is more delicious than the bento she made this morning. That was already good. This one is just cooked, just fresh from the pot, and it's—

He swallowed. Took another bite. Tried to be measured about it and failed immediately.

"Ehem," he said. "It's delicious, mom."

She smiled — the wide, uncomplicated smile of someone who had cooked for someone and had it land exactly the way they hoped. "I'm glad."

He ate too much. He knew he was eating too much while he was doing it and kept going anyway because it kept tasting exactly as good as the bite before it and stopping felt genuinely unreasonable. By the end of it his stomach was tight and full in a way that made the stairs look very far away.

His mother appeared beside him. "Come on."

"Sorry," he said, standing slowly. "It was too delicious."

"Yes, yes." She got her hand under his arm and helped him toward the stairs, and he let her because his legs had opinions about the situation and the opinions were mostly horizontal. "You always do this."

"Only when it's this good."

She made the sound she made when she was trying not to smile and not entirely succeeding, and helped him upstairs.

He made it to his bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the booster.

It didn't sell. Three times at school. Three times someone had picked it up, turned it over, asked what it did — and then someone else had laughed and said why would you strap something to your back when you have a turbo, why would you use your legs when you don't have to. The laughter had spread the way laughter spread in school hallways, fast and comfortable, not meant to be cruel and cruel anyway.

I want to help mom, he thought. She never talked about the money. She never said it was hard. She just packed his bento every morning and smiled when he came home and made dinner that was too delicious and never once mentioned that he was the only one bringing anything in anymore.

He was too tired to think about it further. He lay back and the ceiling went soft and he was asleep before he'd decided to be.

Morning.

The heat woke him before the alarm.

Not the usual warmth — this was noon heat in a morning sky, pressing through the walls and the window glass like the shield above them had lost several degrees of filtering overnight. He lay still for a moment, aware of it in the specific way he was aware of things that were wrong, then got up and went downstairs.

Breakfast. Bag. The walk to school.

The heat climbed as he walked. By the time the school came into view he could hear other students talking in clusters, pulling out devices, checking the numbers.

Forty degrees.

Forty-six.

Is this normal?

Aria was at the gate.

She was covered in sweat — uniform soaked through, hair sticking to her face and neck, bag hanging off one shoulder with the energy of someone who had given up on appearances twenty minutes ago. She looked up when she saw him coming and her expression did the thing where relief and exasperation arrived at the same time.

"Yes, it's hot today," she said, before he could speak.

He looked at her. The wet uniform. The flush on her face and neck. The way the heat had caught her.

"Aria," he said, "you look—" He stopped. Then, because his brain occasionally did things without consulting him: "—sexy."

Her hand connected with his cheek before he'd finished the word.

"Idiot." She pulled her hand back. "Perv Natan."

He touched his face. "That hurt."

"That's what you get. Let's go to school." She turned for the entrance, chin up, expression resolute. He fell into step beside her, hand still against his cheek.

It had hurt. It had also been completely fair.

The classroom was thick with heat and the sound of cooling units running at full capacity and still not keeping up. Every student had theirs clipped and running — the small government-issued ones, pushing cold air in tight circles, their combined hum filling the room with white noise. Sweat still showed on every collar, every forehead.

Every student's except Natan's, who had no cooling unit. Just his booster, which was good at exactly one thing and that thing was not this.

He sat at his desk and focused on the lesson and breathed through it.

Something appeared beside his hand.

Aria, holding out a small cooling unit. She was looking at the board, not at him. "I brought two," she said, very casually, like she'd just happened to pack an extra. "I know you don't have one. Use this."

He looked at it.

She was still looking at the board.

He already knew what he was going to say. She already knew what he was going to say. She had still brought the extra unit and was still holding it out, because that was Aria, and it was one of the things about her that he never acknowledged out loud.

"Decline," he said.

She put it back in her bag. "So stubborn."

He turned back to the board.

"Teacher," he said, raising his hand. "May I use the restroom?"

The bathroom was several degrees cooler than the classroom, which meant it was still hot but survivable. He turned the tap cold, cupped his hands, pressed his face into the water. Held it there.

I feel fresh, he thought. Marginally. He straightened and looked at himself in the mirror — flushed, damp, functioning. It's so hot today. What is going on.

He dried his face and pushed back through the door.

The scream hit him from the classroom.

He was through the door before he'd consciously moved — and inside, a girl near the window had collapsed half out of her chair, and the students around her had all stepped back simultaneously the way people stepped back from something they didn't know how to touch.

He crossed the room fast and got down beside her.

"Water," he said. "Does anyone have water?"

Silence.

"Water?"

People looked at each other.

"Who has water?!"

Someone at the back — finally, a moment too slow — produced a bottle and began passing it forward, hand to hand through the frozen crowd until it reached him. He got it open, got her head tilted, gave her a little at a time.

"Coolers," he said, looking up at the room. "Everyone with a cooling unit — get it on her. Now."

They moved.

Then something hit from outside.

Not the ground — the air. A sound like something enormous giving way, somewhere above and to the east. A c***k that was also a boom, rolling through the walls and the floor and every window simultaneously. The classroom went completely still.

Then a piece of the sky fell.

It was visible from the window — a section of the atmospheric shell, one of the panels that made up the fake sky, the enormous structure they'd all looked up at their entire lives without knowing what it was. It fell in a slow arc and landed somewhere several blocks away and the impact shook the building.

Students broke for the door all at once.

"Aria—" Natan was already on his feet. "Aria, where—"

"I'm here." She was by the door, bag on her shoulder, eyes finding him through the movement of everyone around them. "I'm here, Natan."

"Okay." He exhaled once. "Come on."

Outside was different.

The c***k in the atmospheric projection was visible now — a fracture running across the sky, and through it came light that nobody in the crowd had ever seen before. Not the filtered silver-blue they'd grown up under. Something harsher. Whiter. The actual star, unmanaged, with nothing between it and them.

The heat through that c***k was immediate.

Students poured out of every building entrance and stopped, looking up, and the expressions on their faces covered the whole range — confused, frightened, crying, some just completely still with their mouths open, unable to move into any response at all.

Someone checked their device.

"Ninety-eight degrees," they said.

The people who heard it went quiet.

Someone nearby started crying. Another person was shouting a name — over and over, spinning in a slow circle, looking for someone who wasn't there. A group of younger students near the fountain had pressed themselves together into a cluster and stopped moving, just holding each other, not running anywhere. A boy sitting on the ground with his head in his hands saying mom repeatedly in a voice that didn't sound like it was meant to be heard.

Natan pulled Aria toward the shade of the building's overhang. "Here. Stay here."

"Of course." Then, quieter: "It's too hot. My skin is burning even in the shade."

"I know. It's better than nothing."

Then the ground cracked.

Deep, resonant, the sound coming from somewhere far below — it became a vibration, and then it became something visible. The c***k started near the center of the school grounds and spread outward in a circle, widening, vast, the circumference of it large enough that four full football fields could have fit inside it.

The people near the edge ran screaming from it.

"What is this?!"

"Ahh—"

"Help—"

"Mom!"

Someone's skin was visibly burning where they'd been standing in direct light. A girl was crying and running at the same time, holding her arm. A teacher was trying to organize students into a direction and nobody was listening because there was no direction that made sense.

Natan watched the circle. Watched the c***k in its center deepen.

"Run!" He got Aria moving — hand on her arm, pushing her ahead of him, away from the circle's edge.

Then he heard it underneath everything.

A voice. Small. Inside the circle.

He stopped.

"Natan—" Aria turned back immediately. Her eyes found him and then found the circle and then came back to him and she already knew. "Natan, don't—"

"There's still people inside."

"I can see that — Natan, the heat, if you step out of the shade—"

"I know." He was checking the booster. Thumb on the charge. Not looking at her.

"No." She grabbed him from behind — both arms wrapped around him, face pressed into his shoulder, her whole body shaking. "No. It's dangerous. Don't go. Please don't go."

He stilled.

Her arms were tight. The shaking was real — not performance, not argument, just Aria holding on because she was genuinely frightened and for once not pretending she wasn't.

"Aria," he said. Low. "Trust me. Okay?"

She didn't answer right away.

The shaking continued for a moment. Then slowly — slowly — her arms came loose. She stepped back. Her face was composed. Her eyes were too bright.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was steady. "Okay."

He turned and ran.

The booster hit and shoved him forward across the open ground — the heat landing on him all at once the moment he left the shade, immediate and total, his skin registering it as something close to impact. He found the first person inside the circle — a boy, older, on his hands and knees near the inner edge, arms badly reddened, body done. Unable to stand, unable to crawl out.

"You're safe now," Natan said, and got his arms under him and moved.

He got him to the shade where Aria was waiting. "Aria — I'm counting on you. There's still one more in there."

She was already crouching beside the boy before he'd finished the sentence.

He turned and ran back.

The girl was near the center — curled small, back to the sky, having understood instinctively where the burning was coming from and turned her back to it. The back of her uniform was scorched. Just the back. She'd been fast enough for that.

He crouched beside her. "I'm sorry I'm a bit late."

She looked up at him. Tears on her face, cut lines through the grime. "No," she said softly. "Thank you."

He picked her up and ran.

Back at the shade two adults had appeared — drawn by the shouting, looking uncertain, needing direction.

"Someone help!" Natan said. "Help us — they can't walk."

"What is it?" one of them said, coming forward.

"Help us carry them. They can't walk on their own."

The two adults moved to take the injured students. Natan turned.

"Aria!"

She was on the ground — not collapsed, just down, the heat having done its patient work even in the shade. She looked up at him when he said her name, eyes slightly unfocused, and then focused.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be sorry." He crouched. "Come on."

She climbed onto his back — arms around his shoulders, weight settling — and he stood and adjusted and started moving. Her face was against his neck and she didn't say anything for a moment.

Behind them the c***k in the center of the circle kept widening. The groaning shifted — became mechanical, purposeful, something with intention behind it. People who had been running stopped. Turned around. Looked back.

Something was rising.

Metal first — just the edge of it, catching the harsh unfiltered light wrong. Then more, and more, rising slowly with the confidence of something that didn't need to hurry. A hull, armored, enormous, its surface scorched. It climbed out of the earth and kept climbing, and its shadow spread across everything — across the school grounds, across the running people, across the street beyond, still spreading — and people stopped wherever they were and tilted their heads back and stared with their mouths open and nothing coming out.

It rose until it nearly touched the fractured sky above them.

"Natan," Aria said quietly, from his back. "My bag—"

"Nevermind the bag," he said.

They ran as the ship kept rising behind them.

— End of Chapter 2 —