1
Jude
Jude Adler lay on the hood of his car—an old Chevy Impala with rust in the paint and a driver’s side window that didn’t roll down—with one leg bent and his hands laced behind his head as he stared up at the stars. He’d driven out into the desert to get away from the light pollution in the city and now, with Albuquerque nowhere in sight and the moon nothing but a sliver in the sky, he was glad he’d made the trip. The stars out here were big, and they were bright, and counting them made it easy to forget the absolute shitshow that was his life—at least for a little while.
With them in his sights, gone was the looming dread that was his upcoming fifteen-page term paper, late rent payment, and bevy of texts from his parents currently sitting unread in his phone. The more he counted, the less he thought about how he definitely shouldn’t have driven out so far given the cost of gas these days, and yup, he was definitelynotthinking about how, a little over three weeks ago, he’d walked in on his snake of an ex-boyfriend in bed with their TA from a figure drawing class.
Okay, so maybe that last one was a bit of a lie, but… he was trying, okay?
His roommate, Ezra, and best friend, Corbin, both kept insisting that all he needed was a few rounds of tequila shots and a good dicking down to get himself right again, but Jude wasn’t convinced. The hole of despair he’d dug himself into was too deep for booze and sex to fill, but the problem was, without them, he wasn’t sure what would be able to help. Talking about it with Ezra and Corbin had only made him more miserable, and therapy was for people who had money.
So here he was, counting stars.
But the longer he counted, the more he realized it wasn’t helping much, either. The stars were pretty enough, but they couldn’t pay his bills or do his homework. They couldn’t put gas in his tank or make his ex un-fuck their teacher. That last realization stung, and as tears filled his eyes, the stars overhead blurred like they were made of watercolor paint.
“Damn,” he muttered, and angrily scrubbed them away with the back of his hand.
He’d nearly gotten to one hundred, and now he had to start all over again.
Jude scanned the sky, searching for a good starting place, when he caught sight of something streaking through the darkness. It was a shooting star, a tail of light trailing behind it as it sped past. Obviously he was going to have to wish on it—how often did you see a shooting star?—and he was nothing if not a sucker for the concept of good old-fashioned destiny. If it had even a miniscule chance of granting him a wish, he had to take it. The problem was that he had too many things he wanted to wish for, and only seconds to pick the thing he wanted the most out of all of them.
My whole existence is straight up clown shoes,he thought to himself.I’ve got no money, no boyfriend, and I willingly accepted student loans to pay for an artdegree. No one wish will help me. Not unless…
He scrunched his nose as he thought it through and came to a split-second decision.
“I wish,” he muttered to himself, “for a new fucking life.”
It was a big ask, and there was a chance the universe would interpret it in a way that would make everything worse, but shooting stars only lasted for so long—he hadn’t had time to think of something more reasonable or specific. Although, actually, this one wasn’t fading away like most shooting stars did. It was behaving bizarrely. For one thing, it had stopped streaking across the sky and had started moving in a downward motion. And was it… was itcloserthan it had been before?
Jude kept his eyes trained on it, hardly letting himself blink. It was definitely getting closer. It had gone from a shiny speck in the sky to an increasingly large ball of light that was growing with every passing second. This wasn’t a shooting star, it was afallingstar, and the longer Jude stared, the more certain he became that it was headed straight for him.
So this was how he was gonna die, huh? Smashed into a pancake by an asteroid.
Stellar.
When he’d wished for a different life, he hadn’t meant that he wanted no life at all.
Adrenaline pooled in his stomach. The urge to run seized him, but where would he go? Even if he scrambled off the hood of his car as fast as he could and got the door handle to work on the first pull, he’d never get the crappy engine to start before impact. The hunk of space rock was approaching way too quickly for that. So quickly, in fact, that physically running away—as in, on his own two legs—seemed just as pointless. Things that smashed into the ground from outer space exploded, right? There was bound to be some kind of huge blast radius involved. And if he was going to be a corpse one way or another, he’d rather not spend his last few seconds alive sweaty and wheezing for breath.
Resigned to his fate, Jude sat up and drew his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them as the ball of light drew nearer and nearer. He’d heard it said that when people were about to die, their life flashed before their eyes, but all he could think about was how much living he still wanted to do.
For example, he’d wanted to get one of his paintings accepted into a popular museum, and make enough money to not feel guilty for buying McNuggets when he had perfectly good instant noodles at home. Actually, scratch that. He’d wanted to make enough money to never have to eat instant noodles again, and while he was at it, find a boyfriend who was kind, and good in bed, and who would never cheat on him. Someone who would make him forget all about his shitty ex. Bonus points if he was hot enough to make his ex jealous—although if Jude got rich, jealousy was guaranteed whether he found a hot boyfriend or not. A little arm candy would just help rub salt in the wound.
As the life he would never get to have flashed before his eyes, the murder rock came closer. It was close enough now that it was apparent the “ball of light” Jude had seen was actually “lots of fire,” which did not fill him with confidence about his chances of survival. He was also able to tell now that it wasn’t a rock—although what it actually was, he still didn’t have a clue. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said it looked like it was made of metal, but because of that whole “lots of fire” thing, he wasn’t entirely sure.
A high-pitched whistling noise filled the air. It was the sound of the… thing… whooshing down at top speed, and that was too much for Jude. He couldn’t watch anymore. He didn’t want to stare directly in the face of imminent death. He’d rather clamp his eyes shut, bury his face in his arms, and cower at imminent death instead.
And he proceeded to do just that.
In the darkness, the whistling noise got louder. It grated in Jude’s ears, unpleasant in the extreme. Despite the gravity of the situation, he found himself becoming resentful that it was going to be the last thing he ever heard. Maybe he should have tried to get into his car when he’d had the chance—at least in there, he could have blasted the radio. Even NPR would have been better than this.
The good news was Jude didn’t have to suffer for long, not because he died, but because the sound stopped abruptly. The bad news was that it was suddenly replaced by a tremendous boom that reverberated throughout the desert and shook the ground so severely that Jude’s car rattled, and he nearly slipped off the hood. The object, whatever the hell it was, had crashed.
But it had not crashed ontohim.
Jude, body trembling from head to toe, unfurled himself and took a moment to process the fact that he was not dead, then looked up at the sky, where the only evidence it had once contained a burning ball of death was a line of smoke that was already beginning to dissipate. He took a breath, gathered his courage, and proceeded to check the area around him. His would-be killer had to be nearby, and as anxious as it made him, it was in his best interest to determine what had become of it.
It didn’t take long to locate.
