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About Twice-Spent Comet:
But magic and falling stars have ways of finding those who need them, and when Fer takes a chance and looks up, there’s a mermaid staring back at them, silhouetted by stars.
Excerpt:
1
In the beginning, before Humans had claimed the stars as their own, they held hands as they watched lights streak across the sky and called it Magic.
Magic, as everyone knows, must be Spoken and Heard and Believed, and so it was so, that stars were Magic, and those that fell especially so.
Sometimes, the beginnings of stories are just as simple as that.
~~
Waking up is always the hardest part.
Fer’s been on this rock long enough that they’ve gotten used to the routine. Even grown to almost like it. Maybe it is just like an earthborn kid, to search for the positives of the place that’s going to kill you, but it’s hardly the worst of the habits Fer was born into. On the days that feel just that much longer, they even take to listing those positives, counting them off on fingers that no longer swell with just one day’s work.
They like how easy the work has gotten, when early on they’d barely been able to make it through the day. They like their new muscles, filling out fabric that had hung loose before. They’re fed better here than they were in the prison or the transfer ship, and the companionship is a huge upgrade.
The transfer ship’s captain wasn’t a fan of lights for the prisoners. Wasn’t a fan of much chatter, either. And in the dark, people lose things. Faceless, silent shapes. That’s what the prisoners became, on that ship. Fer paced their cell aimlessly, spilled ink on a blank page. Even now, months later, there are days where words sit heavy on their tongue. Like they’re a limited resource, waiting to be wasted.
Waking up has always been a slow process for Fer. On bad days, they wake up on that ship. On the worst days, there’s a moment where they forget they ever got caught at all. Where in the moment before they’re properly awake they really do expect to see the cluttered walls of their last hideout—dangerously close to being a home. Back before Adrastea happened, and everything went tits-up.
Then they open their eyes to the soft curves of their small cell, and they remember they’re here. Officially occupying the middle of nowhere, six months into a fifteen-year sentence they’re not expected to survive. And everything presses down on them, like artificial gravity.
But, hey. Could be worse.
Fer reaches over, taps the speaker set into the wall so that it’ll stop telling them to wake up. They step into their orange jumpsuit, garishly bright against the soft blues of the metal walls. With an underlayer that will glow even brighter in the event of a loss of light, the suit is “the height of prisoner-safety technology,” according to the worker who had issued it to Fer. As if Fer wouldn’t notice the fraying seams or dried blood staining the cuff of one of the five otherwise-identical suits.
They saved that one for days when they felt especially lucky. Or bitter.
Today, they’re mostly feeling hungry.
They duck through their empty doorway—no doors here, no barricading yourself away, just a thin audio divider that always feels slimy when stepped through—and into the common room, letting the noise of the only other occupants on this asteroid roll over them.
The best thing about prison is other people. Who knew?
2
In any other story, this cast might be familiar. Their silhouettes might do well against a backdrop of fantasy, where magic has a cost that is fair, where the only life sentence is living. In another story, they may be the stuff of legends—a heavy sword in the hand of the taller woman, a commander’s banner behind her. Her armor tarnished not because of losses in battle but because she wears her survival like a warning. The slight lady, bent not in exhaustion but in anticipation, some long lost royal bloodline rising in her like an omen, casting magic with hands too fast to see. The young man, short in stature but never in presence, charming folks with beautiful lies as he robs them of whatever they don’t need, wearing a different face at every town but still managing to have everyone know his name.
In another story, there might even be a shadow behind them, a patch where the dark sits just a little more still. Fingers stained in ink, words used sparingly but every bit as sharp as their companions’ blades.
But this is not that story, and there are no castles to protect, no revolution foretold. Only space, yearning and yawning. Only an asteroid, alone amongst the stars.
(There is still magic, though)
(There is always magic)
~~
“Looks like it’s going to be another hot one,” calls Moll. Her booming voice carries easily in the domed area that connects their rooms and serves as a common space. Bare but for a table and some chairs, shelving for knickknacks that none of them own, and the storage unit, tucked against one wall as best it can be, a large rectangular container in a round room.
“Not all of us grew up in weather too hot to breathe in, Moll. Would it kill ya to turn it down a notch or two?”
Benat’s grumble goes cheerfully ignored.
Moll, as the tallest of the four, has claimed dominion over the temperature control—both inside and outside—for as long as Fer’s been here. She keeps it just a little too hot for comfort, and they all complain like they’re working off a script. But Fer also knows that Moll checks all of their outputs during their lunch break, and when they’re in the red, she turns the heat down, gives their numbers that extra boost. Moll’s the reason so few of them ever end the day with a deficit.
Moll had winked, the only time Fer had caught her at it. “Conditioning, love. Always nice to have an ace in the sleeve, right?”
Moll’s got two—permanent aces traced in thick white ink against each dark forearm. Because she makes her own luck, whether with her large, surprisingly nimble fingers or the permanent buzz of a contraband tattoo gun, which she slides out of a hidden chamber in her prosthetic leg and can reassemble in under thirty seconds, if her bragging is to be believed.
They’re all a little in love with her, and she knows it. Fer would bet another ten years on their sentence that Moll’s never met a person who didn’t fall for her in some way or another. She’s just that kind of lady.
Benat groans again, slumped facedown on the table, breakfast ration turning less and less edible with every moment she leaves it untouched. The drawl that marks her as a Moon brat is even more pronounced when she’s just waking up, almost incomprehensible if you’re not used to picking the words apart from where they slur into each other.
The red sheen of the metal cuffs that mark her as a murderer are often the only solid lines of her figure.
(The rumor is that the cuffs—with colors for each crime—came from an Earth tradition, cutting the hands off of criminals. People say they can sever a wrist as easily as they can snap together and restrain. Fer’s never seen it happen, but they believe it all the same.)
Benat has the dubious honor of being the most high-risk of them all.
She doesn’t look dangerous, though. Most of the time she just looks tired, like her body’s never adjusted to the pull of the prison’s gravity, artificially altered to match the Earth’s stronger weight rather than that of her own home. Her shock-blonde hair hasn’t had much time to grow out from when they shaved it during her transfer, and it sticks up unevenly, always betraying her on the days she spends tossing and turning instead of sleeping, and her eyebrows are almost invisible against pale, freckled skin. The only color she has on her is the deep purple bags beneath each eye.
She looks young. Too young for a life sentence, Moll had muttered to Fer, when Benat had first arrived. Like either of them are much older than her. Like anyone deserves this.
Fer’s wanted to ask Benat, in the quiet moments after a long day when the barriers between them all feel paper-thin, what she’d done to earn a murderer’s mark. But it’s hard to talk about why they’re here when Mark is so fresh in all of their minds. He’d been a spitfire, chatterbox, talking too much and too loudly, until he’d paid for it with a cut safety line and a room that still sits empty.
It’s best to talk about lighter things.
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About Ziggy Schutz:
Ziggy Schutz is a young queer writer living on the west coast of Canada. She’s been a fan of superheroes almost as long as she’s been writing, so she’s very excited this is the form her first published work took.
When not writing, she can often be found stage managing local musicals and mouthing the words to all the songs. Ziggy can be found at @ziggytschutz, where she’s probably ranting about representation in fiction.
About Meerkat Press:
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