I stared at her, then bent to peer through the telescope again, catching the last of the star’s streaky light before it vanished.
“It happens so fast,” she said, a somber edge in her voice. “It’s why I never noticed it before, never caught it right as it was happening. But it’s been eating up stars all around it. And the closer it gets, the easier it is to catch it when it happens.”
“Closer?” I asked, a tremor working its way up from my toes, a bone-deep knowing.
She touched the telescope gently with her hand, lowering her eyes to me. “It’s moving closer, Vega.” A sudden seriousness in her voice. And I didn’t need her to explain what that meant, because I already knew enough about the stars, about the sky, about anomalies like black holes.
“How long before it reaches us?” I asked matter-of-factly.
She lifted a shoulder, cut her eyes back to the sky again. “Not sure. I need to keep charting it, measure how quick it’s expanding.But—” Her words broke off and she wiped at her temple, avoiding the next thing she would say. Delaying it. But finally it found its way out of her mouth. “Eventually it will fill our entire sky.”
“And then it will be too late,” I finished for her.
She nodded, a grim cut to her eyes, and she wrapped her arms around me, pulling me to her. But I lifted my head. “What about the sister stars?” I asked. “What if they don’t appear in time?”
Air left her nostrils, and she turned her gaze to the east. “We have to hope that they do. Otherwise…”
I pulled back from her, looking up at the dark half of the sky, at the black hole. “We won’t survive.”
This is what I don’t tell Noah, what I keep locked away in the cage of my chest. I let him sleep, lungs rising softly, mouth parted. Because the weight of it is too big. And there is still hope in him—a light like flint in his eyes. And I don’t want to rip that away. Because the end is a monstrous thing, smudging out the sky—an end that won’t be like a fairy tale or bedtime story. It’ll be broken skies and broken us, and nothing left.
It’s the thing that not only blots out half the horizon, but it’s also making us sick.
Mom said it was thedark matter, the stuff between stars—tiny, unseen flecks of dust, imperceptible. It spreads outward from black holes like pollen from a honeysuckle tree caught in October winds. And each day that the black hole inches closer, more dark matter rains down on us, making us sicker, weaker. Making our ears ring and our vision spark.
The dark matter has been breaking apart our bodies, disintegrating us bit by bit.
It’s been there all along.
The consumption was never contagious, never spread from person to person. It starts seeping into our bodies from the moment we’re born—we breathe it in, our air saturated with it—shredding us apart. Killing us.
We bury the dead, calling itconsumption, a word we know. We understand.
But this is something else.
Not a disease, not a thing passed from one person to another. This filters down from our skies and kills us slowly. Until eventually it will take everything.
Mom always said that the anomaly held more mysteries than answers, a thing that was difficult to describe. To identify.
But what she knew for sure was…
This is how we all die.
SCORPIUS, Alpha Scorpii–26° 25’ 55”
No one believed her.
The first Astronomer had found a shadow that eclipsed part of the night sky, a feature of the stars she had never seen before. It terrified her worse than the sickness, worse than the burning in her ears that was always there now, that felt like it was punching tiny holes in her skull.
The others thought her foolish, mad, her mind swollen with ideas that could not be proved, could not be made true, no matter how much she pleaded for them to see.
They were too worried about the crops, the consumption that sunk into their bones, the graves they dug behind their homes, and the dust that sometimes choked out the sky. If the consumption didn’t kill them all, then starvation would.
But the Astronomer sensed there was something else to fear.
A thing bigger than all the others.
She rarely slept anymore, just peered up at the night sky making notes, hands shaking from the weariness in her bones. She measured and charted—the only thing she knew how to do—she made coordinates where stars had once been, but now were gobbled up by the dark.
