Chapter One — Empty Sky (I)
(Lucas)
The trouble with being invisible, Lucas had decided long ago, was that you saw everything.
He saw, for instance, that the alpha at the returns desk was going to knock over the donation jar a full three seconds before it happened — saw it in the wide, careless arc of the man’s gesturing arm, in the way he stood like the counter had been installed for him personally. Gold Star, by the cut of his coat and the way Mrs. Ableman straightened behind the desk like a plant turning toward light. The jar went over. Coins scattered across the floor of the Harrowgate Community Library in a bright brass rain, and the alpha glanced down at them with mild surprise, as if the floor had done something rude.
“Oh — don’t trouble yourself,” Mrs. Ableman said, to the alpha, who had not moved to trouble himself and showed no signs of beginning.
Lucas was already on his knees with the dustpan. That was the other thing about being invisible: you always knew where the dustpan was.
“Terribly sorry,” the alpha said, to Mrs. Ableman, warmly, and the warmth was real, that was the thing — tier people weren’t villains, mostly. They just moved through the world like the world was water and everyone else was the water. The alpha stepped over Lucas’s hands to reach the counter. He didn’t step on them. Later, Lucas would be expected to count this as courtesy.
“Sixty-two,” said Milo, when the alpha had gone. Milo was shelving in Biographies with the aggressive precision of a man alphabetizing his feelings. “That’s sixty-two this year.”
“You’re not still counting.”
“I am absolutely still counting. Sixty-two times a star has stepped over, around, or through one of us like we’re weather.” Milo slotted a memoir into place hard enough to make the shelf hum. Milo was starless too — beta, said the paperwork; starless, said everyone under forty, because slang was honest where paperwork was polite — and he wore it like a fight he was always about to pick. “You should’ve let him crawl for his own coins.”
“It’s a donation jar. The coins are for the children’s wing.”
“The children’s wing can wait ninety seconds for a Gold Star to bend at the waist. It’d be educational. Most of these kids have never seen one do it.”
Lucas laughed, which was what Milo was fishing for, and tipped the coins back into the jar. Through the tall front windows, the light was going long and amber. Sixth bell already. Above the rooftops across the square, someone had strung the first of the festival lanterns — paper stars in white and gold, waiting for dusk — and the sight of them put a small cold weight in Lucas’s stomach that he was careful not to look at directly.
Reunion Day. Tomorrow. The whole city pointed at it like a compass needle, and Lucas had spent twenty-six years politely declining to go where the needle pointed.
Here is what the paperwork said about Lucas Veil, in the vault of the Temple Registry where every citizen’s sky was kept on file:
Natal chart cast at birth by Astrologer Second-Rank Odelle Grei. Finding: no stellar aspect. No lunar aspect. No presentation projected. Classification: Earthbound.
There was a friendlier word for it in the liturgy — the Earthbound, spoken from the pulpits with a special gentleness, the way you’d speak of the deserving poor. There was the honest word, starless, which is what the kids at his primary school had used, along with several less printable variations. And there was the phrase the astrologer herself had reportedly used, standing over his cradle with her instruments and her charts, which his mother had repeated exactly once, when Lucas was nine and had asked why she cried at his birthday every year, and never again:
Empty sky.
His mother kept a shrine shelf in the front hall, the way everyone’s mother did. Two small figures in worn gilt — the Radiant with his arm outstretched, the Still with his hands folded — and below them, in a neat row, the presentation tokens of the family. His father’s Dwarf Star token, humble but there. His aunt’s Comet. His cousin Berrit’s Gold Star token in its little place of honor, polished weekly, because Berrit had presented at fifteen to general rejoicing and had spent the subsequent decade being insufferable about it at every family dinner.
And at the end of the row, a gap. Not an empty space — a gap, carefully maintained, dusted around. His mother had never filled it and never removed it. For years Lucas had understood the gap as hope. Around age twenty, betas being long past the age when late presentation was even a folktale, he had come to understand it as something else, something closer to a small domestic grave, and he had stopped looking at the shrine shelf when he came through the front hall, which took practice, because it was positioned to be the first thing you saw.
He was twenty-six now. He had a room he liked, a job he was good at, a plant he had kept alive for three years, and two friends who would lie down in traffic for him. By any reasonable measure it was enough. He had built it to be enough the way you build a boat to be watertight, and he did not go looking for the places where the sea got in.
The sea got in anyway, sometimes. Certain evenings, mostly. There was a particular color the sky went at dusk in early autumn — gold falling into rose falling into a blue like held breath — and every year, two or three times, it caught him crossing the square or standing at a window, and grief went through him like a hook through water. Enormous, formless, whose? — grief with no funeral attached, no name, no sense. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Then it let him go, and he would stand there with wet eyes feeling like an idiot, and put it away in the box where he kept the other things that had no explanation, like why he could not look at the festival lanterns without his chest going tight, and why, in a city where every child grew up wishing at shrines the way they grew up breathing, Lucas Veil had never once, not at a birthday, not at a bedside, not at the bottom of a wishing well, made a wish.
It wasn’t superstition. It wasn’t protest. It was that every time he tried — every time he stood where wishing was done and reached for a want to put into words — something in him flinched back from the act like a hand from a stove, with an instinct so old and total it didn’t feel like his. Don’t. It costs too much. You know what it costs.
He didn’t know what it cost. He’d never bought one.
June was waiting on the library steps when his shift ended, sitting with her chin on her knees, and Lucas knew before she said a word — from the too-bright way she waved, from the smell of the cheap suppressant patches she wore doubled even though her tier barely needed them — that she’d had a day.
“Interview?” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Mm.” June was a Comet — omega, fifth tier, the bottom of the sky, which the temple hymnals described as brief and bright and employers described in other ways. “The position was filled. It became filled while I was in the waiting room. I watched it fill. A Moon walked in without an appointment and the position achieved fullness.”
“Their loss.”
“It is, actually,” June said, without heat, which was the worst part; she said it the way you’d read a weather report. Then she knocked her shoulder against his, done with it, cauterized. “Anyway. Tomorrow. You’re coming.”
The cold weight in his stomach turned over. “June—”
“Nope. Milo and I voted. It was unanimous.”
“There are three of us. It can’t have been unanimous.”
“You weren’t there, so.” She held up her hands, helpless before democracy. “Lucas. It’s Reunion Day. The whole city goes. There’s fried bread, there’s music, June wants to buy a paper star and make her annual doomed wish about the housing lottery — and every year, every year, you invent a reason to be somewhere else. Last year you cleaned your oven. You told me that with your whole face like it was normal. Nobody cleans an oven on festival night.”
“It was really dirty.”
“You’ve never even seen the statues up close. You’ve lived here your entire life.”
