Hello my fellow ao3 mourners: while you wait for our beautiful archive to return from war, please consider checking out storiesbythomas.neocities.org. Not only is this website still online, it also contains Point A To Proxima Centauri B, which just might be your new favourite original sci-fi speculative fiction story about a young mother who seeks to leave Earth behind for a new planet, but must first track down a missing friend and confront the reasons she wants to leave. New chapters are posted every Monday on Tumblr, Neocities, and Substack, and if you head to the pinned post on my blog you'll find a directory for the posted chapters, along with every character portrait and every playlist I've painstakingly crafted for your viewing/hearing/reading pleasure. Happy reading, and please consider reblogging this post or any other associated with Point A To Proxima Centauri B to help my audience grow!
The most reliable path from Akwesasne to the city was six-hundred-and-forty kilometres, and an unburdened traveller could cover the distance in a month. Between the infant Mal carried on her back and several unplanned detours, she arrived in Delany, the city’s southernmost quarter, a week behind schedule. Niña, an interstellar craft bound for the exoplanet Proxima Centauri B, would be launching in only twenty-two days.
She paused at the top of Delany’s Head Hill, swaying on her feet as she took in the view. It had been nine years since she had last seen the city, and if anything had changed it was obscured by the rusty orange particulate in the air and her poor eyesight: the bay was still in the middle, and in the distance she could just see the edges of the surrounding peninsulas disappearing into the smog. The view only got worse when she settled her clear-framed glasses onto the bridge of her nose — another little grief amongst all the others. After ten years of passable vision, she was now just as blurry-eyed as she had been in her youth.
She pushed the frames out of the way and instead lifted her camera to her eye, zooming in on the craft that lurked in the bay. Besides its towering height, outclassing the buildings just beyond the nearest shore, it didn’t look much like the preceding Pinta, sleek as a skyscraper and twenty-four years gone: instead, Niña’s body was broad and boxy, narrowing into a kind of finned tail at the head and opening up like a wide, hungry mouth at the base. It was a more cost-effective design to reflect a smaller budget and a smaller workforce — for all that the Pinta had successfully launched and was projected to arrive on Proxima in the next year, her troubled production had killed most of the city’s construction workers, and the survivors were quick to warn people away from this new project. Mal’s own father had forbidden her from signing up, even though it was the only sure way to get a seat: he had lost everyone but his sister on Pinta’s shipyard.
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Point A To Proxima Centauri B (69461 words) by d00m_d4ys
Chapters: 28/39
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Original Fiction, Science Fiction, Semi-Dystopian, Imprisonment, Poverty, class warfare, War, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gun Violence, Physical Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Minor Character Death, Parenthood, Mild Gore, Blood and Injury, Explicit Language, References to Miscarriage, references to pregnancy/childbirth, Cross-Post, and now for the themes!, the reasons people might leave earth vs the reasons people might stay, Class Differences, the ways that resources will be hoarded in a space-travel setting, how flaws and agency are often denied to the dead thus denying them their humanity, how we romanticize the idea of 'the one' or 'soulmates' and let these concepts obscure and diminish the genuine connections we have with other people, now with original character portraits drawn by the author
Series: Part 1 of Point A To Proxima Centauri B, et al.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Using the cues of her body's exhaustion and hunger, Mal's best guess at the current time was somewhere near the twelfth floor's lunch hour, which meant she had been wrestling with the studio door's magnetic lock for almost five hours. It had the slightest bit of give, and when using all of her weight she could budge the door about half an inch before it snapped shut again with a mocking whir; attempts to jam it open with anything long and thin were futile, and often sent painful shocks through her fingers. After an unfortunate slip of the hand that left her staggering back with black spots floating in her vision, she decided that the door had bested her for now, and that she would come back to it later. She turned her attention to the studio at large, leaning against the wall for balance: in a further renovation, Render had managed to cram a soft-looking bed into the space opposite of the kitchen corner, and had left a basket of strawberries on the counter like a peace offering. The fish-eye camera was where it always was, looking over the room imperiously, and the clock over the darkroom's door had been removed.
She ignored the strawberries, even when her aimless circuit of the room took her back to the kitchen. She had regained her balance and the majority of her vision, and her limbs felt loose and confident as she dragged a dining chair into the centre of the room, her body having already decided on a plan even as her brain lagged behind. Almost without conscious thought, she climbed onto the precariously spinning seat and reached up towards the camera, fingers digging unerringly into the housing, ripping out the eye and half a metre of assorted wires with brute force. She stared down at the black dome in her hands for a moment as she contemplated what to do next, long enough that the white dust settled gently on the dark glass; finally, her body took over once more, the cradle of her hands falling open to allow the camera to shatter against the floor. She climbed down and carefully toed through the wreckage, feeling a contrarian kind of relief when she found no audio pick-up; Render would never be satisfied with incomplete surveillance, and as long as she had a task to occupy herself she could stave off the panic for a while longer.
***
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Point A To Proxima Centauri B (92642 words) by d00m_d4ys
Chapters: 34/39
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Original Fiction, Science Fiction, Semi-Dystopian, Imprisonment, Poverty, class warfare, War, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gun Violence, Physical Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Minor Character Death, Parenthood, Mild Gore, Blood and Injury, Explicit Language, References to Miscarriage, references to pregnancy/childbirth, Cross-Post, and now for the themes!, the reasons people might leave earth vs the reasons people might stay, Class Differences, the ways that resources will be hoarded in a space-travel setting, how flaws and agency are often denied to the dead thus denying them their humanity, how we romanticize the idea of 'the one' or 'soulmates' and let these concepts obscure and diminish the genuine connections we have with other people, now with original character portraits drawn by the author
Series: Part 1 of Point A To Proxima Centauri B, et al.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mal rubbed her itching eyes as she stood outside the crematorium with the other mourners, almost dislodging Gwenh's glasses from her face. Kaia had grabbed the wrong pair out of her bag, placing them on her head while she was getting Clover ready for the day — by the time she knocked them onto her nose, they were already halfway-gone and running late, and she had decided to just push through it. The sudden switch back to a weaker prescription had her eyes strained and over-sensitive, and taking them off altogether didn't help. She pulled them off of her nose anyway and folded them into the collar of her shirt with a rushing exhale, grinding the heel of her palm into her eye.
Kaia squeezed her shoulder. “Are you in pain?” They were dressed in a white pleated blouse with the high, long collar and ribbon epaulettes, long hair hanging in freshly-styled waves around their shoulders — overly casual, for an Akwesasne funeral, but eye-wateringly fancy for the surrounding crowd. She should have told them to dress down, but it was nice to have someone else draw all the attention, for once: they bore it with better grace anyway, quietly preening every time they caught someone eyeing their clothes, even as their fingers absently plucked at the fabric that no longer fit close to their hip. A stab of guilt lanced through her at the lingering evidence of the frantic pace they had set to catch up with her, the lost fat and the listless exhaustion and the pained, betrayed eyes.
"I'm fine." Not that she would say, if she wasn't, not when Tai-Song had been waiting long enough to be put to rest. Funerals waited for no one, not even ones who still carried a stabbing pain in their gut. Clover snuggled closer as she shifted her weight to keep the cramps at bay, the hard edge of the baby-sized snorkel digging insistently into her shoulder. She kept rubbing her eyes, and the ends of her recently-cut hair tickled against her chin.
Kaia had been quiet when braiding her hair that morning, tying it off once at the end and once at the nape — for once, Mal was happy to let the quiet linger, even when it made her sharp inhale obvious as they reached for the sharp scissors waiting on the counter. They had paused, meeting her eyes in the mirror to check in, and when she shakily nodded they squeezed her shoulder once before cutting the braid down to the root. The cut hair was now coiled in her palm, waiting to be buried with Tai-Song's urn.
***
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Point A To Proxima Centauri B (66123 words) by d00m_d4ys
Chapters: 25/39
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Characters: Original Characters
Additional Tags: Original Fiction, Science Fiction, Semi-Dystopian, Imprisonment, Poverty, class warfare, War, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gun Violence, Physical Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Minor Character Death, Parenthood, Mild Gore, Blood and Injury, Explicit Language, References to Miscarriage, references to pregnancy/childbirth, Cross-Post, and now for the themes!, the reasons people might leave earth vs the reasons people might stay, Class Differences, the ways that resources will be hoarded in a space-travel setting, how flaws and agency are often denied to the dead thus denying them their humanity, how we romanticize the idea of 'the one' or 'soulmates' and let these concepts obscure and diminish the genuine connections we have with other people, now with original character portraits drawn by the author
Series: Part 1 of Point A To Proxima Centauri B, et al.
The bunks had been dark and still for hours by the time Mal finally made herself crawl out of her bed, gathering her trove of hidden things — blanket, radio, Gwenh's last cigarette — and heading for the bathroom. She drew her blanket tighter around her shoulders like a shield as she inevitably passed the last bed, where the drone was sitting upright and appeared to be in a resting state, the orange glow in her chest barely visible. Mal flicked a folded-up note onto the pillow without losing her stride, and the bathroom door was swinging shut when the orange light began to brighten.
Wait ten minutes, then follow me. Hopefully the drone could read English, though with the way Mal's heart was thumping throughout her body it might be a boon if she couldn't. She shut herself inside the stall furthest from the door and climbed onto the toilet to wait, drawing the blanket closer around herself with a shiver, radio held gingerly in her lap. The whole room was freezing, and she kept expecting to see her breath pluming in the air as she tuned the dial to the frequency of Kawehno:ke’s Partridge Radio, soothed by the wheel's segmented, sturdy clicks. The familiar strains of bluesy music were clouded with noise and static, trapped under hundreds of kilometres and interfering pollution like three layers of blankets; she could hear most of the song’s last few words if she cranked up the volume, and the smile in Nick’s voice as he came back on the air was audible no matter the signal's strength. “Fast approaches the end of the day-program, my friends, but don’t turn off that radio just yet: arriving soon is Old Man River, who will be your graveyard-host as long for as his daughter is out of town and can’t stop him from working nights. As always, playing me out is some Logan Staats — and with that, I bid you lovely folks goodnight.”
She forced a shiver and rubbed her arms as the song swirled some peace in with her thoughts, leaning back against the tiled wall with a sigh. If not for the chill, it would feel like the many nights she’d spent curled up on the couch in the radio station’s lounge, dozing under the on-air sign’s ghostly light while waiting for her dad to finish up his shift — she could have probably fallen asleep here too, cold be damned, but the day's events still gripped her with a much deeper chill. The cigarette she rolled between her fingers smelled rancid, poised six inches from her face and whispering, you could have done something — why didn't you do something?
Maybe if she hadn't told Render that she was pregnant, she would have had a spare pack of cigarettes to keep things civil. Maybe if she hadn't let Isaiah stand so close to her, he wouldn't have triggered Gwenh's protective instinct. Maybe if she had put the pieces together sooner, if she had forced herself to see past the person she loved and focus on the tool she had been groomed into being, Mal wouldn't have to actively suppress the little voice in her head that whispered, maybe he deserved it. She felt worse than useless, fingers itching without the task of preparing Isaiah's body for burial, while her brain fixated on what he had plainly told her days ago, and how wrong she had known it to be even then: she’s all bark. The cigarette fell from her fingers onto the floor, and she had no will or desire to pick it back up.
***
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The most reliable path from Akwesasne to the city was six-hundred-and-forty kilometres, and an unburdened traveller could cover the distance in a month. Between the infant Mal carried on her back and several unplanned detours, she arrived in Delany, the city’s southernmost quarter, a week behind schedule. Niña, an interstellar craft bound for the exoplanet Proxima Centauri B, would be launching in only twenty-two days.
She paused at the top of Delany’s Head Hill, swaying on her feet as she took in the view. It had been nine years since she had last seen the city, and if anything had changed it was obscured by the rusty orange particulate in the air and her poor eyesight: the bay was still in the middle, and in the distance she could just see the edges of the surrounding peninsulas disappearing into the smog. The view only got worse when she settled her clear-framed glasses onto the bridge of her nose — another little grief amongst all the others. After ten years of passable vision, she was now just as blurry-eyed as she had been in her youth.
She pushed the frames out of the way and instead lifted her camera to her eye, zooming in on the craft that lurked in the bay. Besides its towering height, outclassing the buildings just beyond the nearest shore, it didn’t look much like the preceding Pinta, sleek as a skyscraper and twenty-four years gone: instead, Niña’s body was broad and boxy, narrowing into a kind of finned tail at the head and opening up like a wide, hungry mouth at the base. It was a more cost-effective design to reflect a smaller budget and a smaller workforce — for all that the Pinta had successfully launched and was projected to arrive on Proxima in the next year, her troubled production had killed most of the city’s construction workers, and the survivors were quick to warn people away from this new project. Mal’s own father had forbidden her from signing up, even though it was the only sure way to get a seat: he had lost everyone but his sister on Pinta’s shipyard.
Of course, she wouldn’t have to contend with such things if her parents had boarded the Pinta as planned, but there was no changing the past, no arguing with the inherent risk of losing a pregnancy in transit. The error would be corrected soon enough, and being sore about it now was a waste of time. She took a half-step to the right and turned her body to catch more of the smoggy horizon, swaying all the while to keep the little one quiet. The light caught on the long cracks branching over the lens of her camera, encircling Niña and the polluted water in a shape halfway between a longhouse and a tipi. She zoomed in sightly, focussing in on the polluted water churning into its gaping maw, the clean water filtering into the engines and the pollution pouring right back into the bay. She snapped the picture and dropped her camera back to her chest, turning away from the water to keep walking.
It had been a long time since Head Hill was a true hill: the city ran on hydrogen fuel derived from the great quantities of serpentinite found in Delany’s spine, and over the years all the mineral had been systematically mined out. All that was left was a thin layer of dustbowl earth over shattered, treacherous bedrock that slid and skated underfoot — a graveyard long before the first Untouchable’s ashes were entombed there. She bowed her head respectfully as she passed the cholera graves, only a fraction of the lives claimed by the decade-old outbreak: there were twice as many in the devout cemeteries of Nassau County, for those who wanted their remains buried intact.
She stooped to pick up a piece of foul trash on the path and tucked it into a bag on her belt, and a stone marker caught her eye, one of the few that bore an epitaph alongside the name: Nicole Crane, 36. To all who ask, I am here; for all who leave, I will remain. There was a symbol carved underneath, a circle divided into four equal pieces, and suddenly she remembered Nicky Crane — she had been a formidable presence in the resistance that Mal grew up with, and was known for her heroics. The symbol on her headstone mean that she had given her life to save four others, and that she would be dearly missed.
The unfairness of it all swelled up inside her chest all at once, and died down just as quickly: death and justice existed on two entirely different axes, and rarely colluded. She turned away from the grave and kept walking; each name she passed scrawled itself on the inside of her ribcage and then fell away, making room for the next. Step by step she took on and discarded every one of the countless names, until she was suddenly at the edge of the memorials.
Her footsteps faltered for a moment, before her internal compass kicked in and tugged her toward one particular marker. Gwenh’s painting was nearly unrecognizable after years of acidic rain, only the broad strokes remaining: a blush of reddish-brown for her hair, a deeper syrup shade for her eyes, a dark purple pigment for the port-wine stain that had taken up half of her face. Mal looked out east, where Gwenh’s brothers were buried — Sulien dead from a fall before she had ever met him, Rowan dead by way of whisky. There was space between them should their little sister ever come home, but the painting was the only presence she would have here. Her body had been taken into Midtown, the northern area of the city where the wealthiest lived and worked, safe from the dirty air and water: its boundaries were heavily blockaded to prevent living Untouchables from getting in, or the dead ones from getting out. Gwenh’s body was somewhere deep in enemy territory, and there she would stay until they tired of waiting for payment — she would then be buried in an unmarked grave and summarily forgotten. That was the way of things in this city: an Untouchable’s body was always forfeit, and the price to retrieve a body was always higher than anyone could pay.
She sank to her knees, feeling embarrassed and weak for her immortal, aching grief. Even with nine years to heal, even when it was now customary to speak to the grave and make peace with what had happened, the apologies still caught in her throat like a bad cough. It was easier to accept that this was how it would always be, that she would always feel fifteen years old, that the wound would always burn like a raw scab. She couldn’t even bring herself to cut her hair, not when it happened and not in the interim years; how could she, when it was her fault that Gwenh was dead, that there was no body to bury?
She looked to the overcast sky with a sharp, steadying breath, and accidentally knocked the back of her head against the cradleboard. Her daughter gurgled, alert and ready for a break from her swaddle. Mal pushed herself upright with a groan, shoving down the feelings to be dealt with at a later date, and made for the stone-cut gazebo overlooking the rest of the graveyard.
Pillowy moss stubbornly sprouted from crevices in the rock, the one plant that grew wild in the city. It had spread to the ground in her absence, a soft place to rest as she laid the cradleboard across her knees; her daughter stared reproachfully up at her as she carefully unpicked the leather cord, her glower clear even with half her face covered by an infant-sized respirator.
Even through her fog of exhaustion and near-constant anxiety, Mal could appreciate that Clover was the most perfect baby ever to exist. Her round, chubby cheeks dimpled when she laughed, and the thick and curly hair she had come out with was getting longer every day. She didn’t have Mal’s monobrow yet and wouldn’t until puberty, but she had inherited her deep, downturned eyes, her round face and ink-coloured hair. Her hawk nose and warm brown skin came from her donor parent, left behind in Akwesasne, but no one was sure where she had learned to be so expressive at only six months old — it was one thing to already have a signature smile, but her withering glare was something else entirely.
And her tantrums were nothing small, either. She was happy enough to have her snorkel removed and the condensation swabbed from her cheeks, but the moment the mask went back on she was screaming her heart out. Mal sighed and pulled her out of the swaddle, intermittently shushing her and cajoling in Kanien’kéha, “I know, my girl, I know — it’s just for a little while longer.”
Clover was unconvinced, and it wasn’t like Mal loved how her snorkel was pressing hard lines into her face, or that her less-than-sweet breath was starting to overpower the crushed herbs lining her filters. She glanced again at the ship’s blurry shape, feeling a familiar kind of turmoil over the one-way journey ahead. It was hard to leave behind everyone she loved and everything she knew, but at least Clover would be oblivious, for the first few years. That had to be kinder, to leave before she could remember anything. She hoped so, at least — it was easy to doubt everything she knew about parenting when she couldn’t even get her daughter back into the cradleboard.
Finally, she sighed and lifted her up to look her in the eyes, bumping their rubber noses together. “You know, Grandma Vi worked hard on that cradleboard. She’d be very sad to see that you don’t like it anymore.”
She blew a raspberry. Mal rolled her eyes and hauled herself upright, setting out for the final leg of the journey. Outside of Head Hill and heading northeast for Silver Lake, the roads were rubbled into boulders and cliffs, all the more difficult to navigate with an angry baby on her hip. It was a relief when the road finally became level again, but a short-lived one: between her heavy breathing and Clover’s crying, she didn’t hear the Hammerhead until it rounded the corner at the end of the street.
Muscle memory overtook her body like a leading dancer, waltzing her into the safety of a nearby alley as she wrapped Clover in her blanket and tucked her into an alcove that a suspicious eye would pass over, leaning a piece of corrugated tin over the hiding place. After a moment of deliberation she placed her camera with her daughter — it was supposed to be safe to carry a camera in this part of the city, but a patroller’s mere presence here meant that things had changed.
The drone motored past her alley, just missing her as she ducked out of its periphery. Her fingers closed around a rock as she rose and followed close behind, watching its snaking body sway in counterbalance to the swivelling of its wide, flat head. She was lucky: Hammerheads had no combat capabilities, narrow lines of sight, and were easy enough to take by surprise. The danger lay in their eyes and ears — if one drone overheard a ciphered war strategy in Silver Lake, another on the front lines could anticipate the operation and counter it. If this particular drone got a good look at Mal’s face, she would be back in the Database before she could bash the thing’s skull in.
The rock skipped off one wheel, toppling the drone to the ground with a crunch and petering whine of machinery. It flopped helplessly on the gravel as it tried to writhe back to its feet, motors kicking up as she placed a boot on its head to pin it down, blocking its camera-eye. The tip of her chipped knife brushed against an exposed wire as she leaned down to sever the tendon cables; the shock travelled up her arm and flung the knife from her hand, just out of reach. She grumbled and massaged the tingling from her fingers, unwilling to risk the drone getting back up while she recovered her weapon.
Just then, the drone heaved a strange, robotic sigh. She glanced down with a furrowed brow: drones couldn’t so much as sneeze outside of their pre-programmed parameters, and they certainly couldn’t sigh like that. She pivoted her boot to get a better look at the back of the drone’s head — the Midtown repositories bolted their drones together for easier maintenance, but the seam beneath her sole had been melted together with a lumpy weld. This drone belonged to an Untouchable, and she owed them a visit for nearly giving her a heart attack.
She took another rock and surgically damaged the drone’s antenna, enough that it needed to be repaired but not so badly that it couldn’t navigate its way home. She stepped back as the machine righted itself and swung around to face her, her heart in her mouth until she saw that its eye had been covered with bright orange paint. Its muddled voice chirped endlessly, damage, transmitter/receiver, damage-damage-damage; finally, it executed a three-point turn northwest and headed back the way it came, whistling a familiar tune that she couldn’t quite place.
Check out storiesbythomas.neocities.org every Monday or AO3 every Tuesday for further updates!
Finally, a new milestone: storiesbythomas.neocities.org has reached over 3000 visits, and the listing on ao3 has broken 300! Very exciting debut numbers, and I'm so grateful for the reception so far as we go into the final stretch. Thank you to everyone who tunes in every week, and to all the new readers who have recently taken a chance on me — in the past seven months you all have treated me extremely well, and I'm hopeful that you'll continue to enjoy my work as I develop. As always, a very special thank you to @hannahcll, @mx-time-bunny, @harleyquillao3, and @pantylace for reblogging posted chapters and helping to get more eyes on my work!
But all good things must come to an end, and PATPCB will be wrapping up on June 15th, 2026. My next story, which is sitting in my WIPs folder under the name 'Puck's No Good Terrible Very Bad Day(s)', still needs a significant amount of revising and editing, so the earliest that it will publish is Sept-Oct 2027. It may take longer, but I have every intention on continuing to publish my work online, so please be patient! I will still be semi-active on social media in the meantime, so no one will be deprived of my stunning commentary on movies that no one else has seen; feel free to come and talk to me! After the last chapter is posted, I will probably write up one last monthly update, which will outline what the posting schedule will look like going into my next project, what I plan to do differently, and maybe a teaser blurb of dubious quality/accuracy. Stay tuned, I love you.
In between updates, you can find me on Tumblr @d00m-d4ys or on Bluesky @d00md4ys.bsky.social, and if you have the cash to spare, it would mean so much to me if you joined my Patreon! Because all donations will be split between me and my chosen causes, you will also be supporting a Gazan family in need and the Kanien’kéha community in addition to an independent author. Even if you choose not to join my Patreon, please consider donating to one of these causes independently: if you have even $5 to spare, you have the ability to make a difference in someone’s life.
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Thank you all again for your support, and I hope you continue enjoying the story. Happy reading!
After a long and uncharacteristically quiet dinner — during which Jay and Etienne were not speaking to each other, leaving Sabine, xyr partner Ifedimma, Mal, and Clover to carry the sparse conversation — Mal finally extracted herself and her daughter from the table, holing up in the nursery to contend with Goose’s detailed instructions on how to modify her radio.
It took twenty minutes, not including the incremental breaks to close her eyes and breathe deeply, dispelling the frustrated urge to throw it all in the garbage, but she managed to get everything in place. Once all the wires were connected, she flipped on the radio and adjusted the antenna, and had to pause to take another deep, steadying breath: the static noise sent her right back into that freezing bathroom in Midtown, and the tightness in her chest lingered even after she came back to the present.
The tether between microphone and radio didn't allow her to stray further than five feet away as she paced in tight, nervous circles with Clover balanced on her hip, sending exploratory pings through the microphone held loosely in her hands. She braced for disappointment as she pressed the button in three-second intervals, thumb aching with the pressure — between her lack of expertise and the sheer number of wires and converters involved, there was no guarantee that the signal would even reach the edge of the city. Even if it got as far as Kawehno:ke, there might be no one home to answer.
The call picked up with a sharp click. “This is River, based in Akwesasne. Who am I speaking to?”
Clover perked up and squealed in delight as Mal hurriedly sat down, turning up the volume and clearing out the static from the transmission.
"I repeat: this is River, based in Akwesasne — is anyone there?"
She sniffled, cleared her throat, and pressed the button on her side. “Hi, Dad. Can you hear me?”
“Mal! Oh, shit—" Something clattered on his end, like he had sent his chair and everything on his desk flying in his shock. The open mic caught his cursing for a few seconds before he settled down. “Okay, okay, coming through loud and clear — how are you? Are you safe?”
She nodded, before she remembered that he couldn't see her. She'd forgotten how much she hated talking over radio, hated not being able to see someone's face, hated how both sides had to stiltedly time their responses instead of talking over each other. “We’re good, we’re safe. Say hi, Clover.” Clover babbled as she tried to grab the mic. “She wants you to stop being stingy with your gravy recipe.”
“She can have it when she’s eighteen. Are you keeping out of trouble, little one?” Clover whined glumly in reply, turning her attention back to Mal’s buttons. “Isn’t that just the way? Hang on, I gotta talk to your Istá for a minute — still there, my girl?”
She nodded again, and hurried to add, “Still here.”
She bit her lip — her parents had always gotten the most of her meagre supply of honesty, but what good would the whole wretched story do now? She didn’t want to admit that she had gotten herself captured, that she had endured all threats of danger and violence for a mission that was doomed from the start, that she had been too late to save Tai-Song, and had left Gwenh behind yet again. “Kaia’s here. I wasn’t expecting them.”
Dad's long pause was astonishingly guilty, for how nonchalant he managed to sound when he finally spoke. “Oh, really?”
She rolled her eyes. “Did you send them?”
“No, no, it's just— they were going to follow you regardless, and Baba and I wanted to make sure they wouldn't accidentally wander too close to Midtown, looking for you.” He paused, and cleared his throat. “I know you had your reasons, but—“
“I’m glad you told them.” She would tell him why, one day, but the simple fact that she was grateful would have to be enough, for now. She couldn’t bear to think of what might have happened, if Kaia had been just a few days late. “I’ve been acting like a child. It wasn't right for me to leave everyone behind like that.”
He didn’t answer right away, though he kept the call button pressed on his side, enforcing some silence while he gathered his thoughts. Instead of probing about her sudden change of heart, he gently asked, “Do you want us to come down there?”
“I—“ She jerked her head in another thoughtless nod before clearing her throat, rocking Clover in her lap as she whined. “You won’t make it here in time.”
“Let us worry about that. Would you like us to come down?”
"I don't know." She had never felt so useless in her life, unable to make a decision even when there was only two possible choices, incapable of answering a simple yes-or-no question — where was the person she had been in the MEC, capable of at least pushing through the uncertainty? “I’m sorry, I just don’t know—“
“Hey, hey, you don’t have to know, it's okay.” His voice was soft and soothing, and she desperately wished that her parents could indeed fold space and time to be with her right at this moment. “We'll be there soon, okay? We’ll set out as soon as we can find some transport — me and Baba don’t have the gumption to walk all that way like you kids, but we'll figure something out.”
"I rode on a boat, for a while." Her eyes were overflowing, tears pouring down her cheeks, thankfully leaving her voice mostly untouched. “Is Baba home?”
“Soon, se’ll be here as soon as se can.” She heard a frenzied tapping on the other end as he pinged the second microphone, the one that connected to the radio in Baba's work-gear. "Se's been roped into helping smooth down the roads, and you know how things go when Logan's in charge. And it's been so chilly lately, Kaia's mother had to stop by and make sure we knew how to work our wood-stove. She was so worried about offending us, I had to tell her, 'Vi, you know we'd be dead on the side of the road without you, just show us how to unblock the chimney!'"
Mal snorted in the pause he left for laughter, content to sit back and let him talk. After a few more anecdotes on the comings and goings of Kawehno:ke and her many interesting characters, he turned the direction of conversation back over to her:
“So, is our little one speaking in full sentences yet?”
Clover responded to the question with a string of babble. “Not yet. She’s eating some solid food, though — she likes puréed pears the best. Right, my girl?” She chattered in prim agreement, gesturing in a manner she had definitely learned from Jay. “She says ‘And squash, too.’”
“Good, good, and how’s she sleeping?”
“Pretty well, she only wakes me up once or twice a night. Uncle tried to sleep-train her, while I was— while I was away, but it didn’t really take.”
“Well, I told Jay that we don’t let babies cry it out in my family, back when you were a baby. His mind must be going, if he’s forgotten that argument.”
“Be nice, Dad. He’s putting me up with a bed while I’m here.”
“Mm." A single syllable somehow carried gallons of skepticism. "I hope he didn't grill Kaia too badly, you know how he can be with new people.”
Her stomach turned, and she hurried to change the subject. “Sabine taught Clover a song — she has the melody down perfectly, just listen.”
Clover perked up as Mal hummed the tune of the old French lullaby, joining in with an approximation of the words; after a few seconds, she got bored and turned back to trying to climb over Mal's shoulder.
“That’s all for now, I guess. She needs to save her voice for opening night.”
“Of course, of course, I’ll be in the front row throwing flowers." On the other end, the house’s kitchen door squealed open, boots stomping against the mud-mat. "Oh, I think—"
“Is she still there?” Clover squealed at the sound of her Grampa's voice, wriggling closer to the microphone to say hello. "I tried to get away fast, did I miss her?"
“She's still here, come quick—“
“Move before I bowl you over, then!" The mic caught the noise of a brief scuffle over limited chair-space, before Baba breathlessly came back on the call. "Baby, how’re you doing? Are you eating?”
“A lot better now — and we're both eating tons.” She hitched her daughter up against her chest and kissed her cheek. “Can you sing a little more for Rakhsó’tha and Gramps, my girl?”
***
An hour later, the static eventually began to overwhelm the transmission, and the conversation ended with a hasty farewell and a promise to set out soon. Mal turned the radio off and carried Clover's snoozing body over to the crib, humming idly as she laid her down for the night, gently petting back her hair to kiss her forehead. She glanced over at the door as it opened, framing a silhouette defined by stark, blue light, and froze down to her breath. She stared at Render’s paper-thin figure with raw, petrified eyes, trying to think of where she could hide, trying to make herself do anything but stand there and panic — and then Jay said,
“Mal, can you come out here for a minute?”
She blinked, returned to the present where the light from the kitchen was soft and amber, where the silhouette was tall and broad, and nodded her head. Jay turned away, leaving the door ajar, and she took an extra few seconds to steady her breathing and slow down her heart before following. Sabine and Ifedimma were washing the dishes, speaking quietly amongst themselves: Sabine's face was drawn and sad, and xe leaned xyr head against Ifedimma's when she offered, pressing xyr cheek against her close-cropped natural hair. Mal didn't know Ifedimma at all, her being a new addition in her years away from the city, but she had spent dinner making Sabine laugh like a chipmunk and pulling silly faces for Clover's entertainment, so Mal was inclined to like her already. Etienne was nowhere to be found, having left as soon as dinner was over.
There were two mugs waiting on the table, one filled with coffee and the other with tea that she already suspected was inferior to the Kawehno:ke blend. She took a sip out of politeness as she sat down, and set it aside. “What’s up?”
He sat down across from her, expression uncommonly reserved. “I need you to get serious about leaving.” His voice was quiet, not quite beseeching, but close.
“I am serious.” The knee-jerk lie was obvious even to her, and under the table the muscles in her thigh began to nervously flex and twitch. She slipped her hand into her pocket to steady herself, fingers brushing the last of her strawberry candies — she forced her fingers away, reminding herself that she was saving it for Gwenh. "We have time, Uncle."
“Not much. Niña could be done fuelling at any moment in the next week; I need to know that you’re not going to choke, when the time comes. Are you even packed?”
She most definitely was not: the list of things she couldn't live without grew longer by the day, scattered throughout the city, and wouldn't fit in a suitcase besides. She bit her lip, glancing back at the nursery door, and shook her head.
"I'm trying to be patient with you, Munchkin, but there's just no time—"
“I think I want to stay,” she finally admitted, speaking at a whisper, half-hoping it would be lost underneath the clatter of washing dishes. The promise of a better life on Proxima seemed so ephemeral and weightless, accountable to no one if it turned out to be hollow. She wanted something as solid as the ground beneath her feet, the kind of promise that Kaia could stand to believe in. She wanted the kind of promise that she could have a hand in keeping, not just dumb luck and chance.
“That’s not an option.”
For a moment, all she could do was stare at him in shock. “What?”
He shook his head definitively, expression unchanged, as though it was already a done deal. “I’m not going to let you make the same mistake that I— that your parents did.”
Her knee began to bounce. “My parents are happy.”
“They would have been happier on Proxima. Doesn't Clover deserve that?”
“You don’t know that for sure—“
“I know my own family,” he told her sternly. “Clover deserves better.”
Her fists clenched against her thighs, voice beginning to shake with anger. “I decide what’s best for her, not you.”
“Mal—“ He cut himself off with a harsh sigh. “You trusted me to care for her in your absence. Do you really expect me not to step in, when you’re making the wrong call?”
“It’s still my call." This felt like the end-stages of a nightmare, rapidly spiralling out of control — but the front door was where it always was, so she was most definitely awake. "For the first time in my life I feel like there might be a place for me here, on Earth. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“Believe me, Mal, I understand—“
“You wouldn’t be arguing with me if you understood—”
“You’re overwhelmed, and you need to calm down—“
“Speak to me like an adult, Jay.” She didn’t remember standing, but she had risen out of her chair at some point, clawing back some of the height disparity. "I am not a child anymore, Uncle. My obligations do not start and end with what will make you happy." Despite her steady voice, her fists were tightly clenched and shaking — the candy that had somehow migrated into her left hand would surely crack under the pressure. “It’s no wonder Baba wanted to leave.”
The background noise suddenly ceased, like the silence after popping a balloon. Sabine turned to stare at the two of them, face slack with shock, looking like xe might intervene; Ifedimma had her hand on xyr shoulder, trying to communicate something to Mal with just her eyes, but whatever she was trying to say was lost in their lack of familiarity.
Jay's demeanour had changed on a dime, his voice low and angry: “I’d like you to think long and hard before you continue that train of thought, Mal.”
She scoffed and stepped away from the table, pushing in her chair. “Goodnight, Uncle.”
"Where will you go? Back to Kawehno:ke?"
"Maybe."
"You were miserable there." His voice had turned desperate. “And do you really believe that Kaia followed you all this way, only in the name of friendship? The minute they arrived, they tried to take your daughter from me, they’ve been badgering you to stay — if you go back there, things will only escalate. They’re overstepping their bounds, and I don’t trust them. ”
“Well, I do. There’s a reason I asked them to help me have Clover, before anyone else.”
“And what if they decide that they want more than what you’re willing to give? What if they want to get married? What if they want custody of Clover, and they’re willing to manipulate you to get it?”
“Oh, like you?”
His mouth closed with a sharp clack of his teeth, eyes narrowed and angry. “I just want what’s best for you both. Being with Kaia isn’t it.”
“No shit, that’s why they’re rounding second base with Goose right now.” She shook her head with a sigh. “I know you think I’m making the wrong choice, but it’s mine to make. I wouldn't be staying if I didn’t think there was a chance of Clover having a good life here.”
“Then why were you so eager to leave, when you came back home?”
“Because this isn’t my home, Gwenh was still dead, and I thought it was my fault.” She turned away from the conversation, heading back to the nursery to gather up her things. Despite her assertion to the contrary, Kaia and Goose were almost certainly not in the throes of heavy petting, but hopefully they wouldn’t mind sharing a bed — she and Clover would be needing a place to crash in the next thirty seconds, and she was well past her floor-sleeping days. She paused with her hand clasped around the doorknob, and turned back to the room. “I'm sorry that we have to say goodbye like this. I'll miss you all very much — I'll make sure everyone gets to say goodbye to Clover before we head out."
There was an edge of begging in Jay's voice, as he interrupted Sabine and Ifedimma's quietly returned sentiments. “What kind of life will Clover have here, Mal? Be honest with yourself: what are you going to do, when you realize that you’ve made a mistake and it’s too late to fix it?”
Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. There are more places to go besides here and Proxima, she wanted to say, the world is such a big place, there's room in it somewhere for us. Instead, she opened the nursery door and stepped through, leaving the it ajar as she called over her shoulder, “I’m going to do the best that I can. Don’t you dare say that you could do better.”
***
Thank you very much for reading this latest chapter! You find the rest on storiesbythomas.neocities.org, AO3, or Substack, and if you want to do me solid, reblog this post and help me grow my audience!
