[From here.]

It’s a little like being picked up on a wall of sound, soft but all-encompassing, an orchestra, a reverb, fading and echoing back. A buffeting, murmuring wind that fluffs her ruffles and plaits new tangles into her curls. She can feel it, hot and dry on her skin, stirring dust at her ankles. She can breathe it. The heat is red-bright against her eyelids after the darkness of the nighttime alley. Slowly, and with a gloved hand lifted to shade them, Subamara opens her eyes to view the world that she is named for.

She does not come with strong expectations for what an asteroid of coffee might be like. She’s seen sci-fi shows, both the shiny platinum and rusted metal kinds, she’s imagined planets with impossibly tall turrets and long glass walkways. But space travel is not as she had anticipated, and nor is the land. Wonder displaces nightmare. She doesn’t remember this place, but knows it just the same.

She’s in a field, rows upon rows of curled branches, dry and sapless in the warm wind. They tower over her in a neat line, and would block out the overpowering sun if they were alive. Some last dead leaves still cling to the branches, casting spade-shaped dapples on the dusty ground. Dry leaves are caught in the hollows, ancient and lace-thin.

It’s very still, except for the wind. No birds, she notices or even insects.

“Coo-ee!” she calls. Something she learnt overseas, a cry that will carry across great distance. The sound drifts around and laughs back at her, bouncing off the low, distant hills like it’s part of a game. No other voices answer.

The ground runs in even dips and plateaus, though higher hills ring the horizon. It takes her some time to discover they are parallel lines, troughs like a farm, evenly spaced. If it was a farm, there should be a farmhouse, she decides. She begins running down the long aisles of trees, scanning the landscape for something different.

For a second – just a breath – she’s running through a vault of vibrant green that allows only a sliver of bright blue sky at the apex. Busy people at the edges of her vision, and a protest as she bumps into someone’s basket, scattering bright red berries all over the path, shiny as beads. The scene is gone before she can drop to her knee for a closer look. Half-buried in the dust by her foot, there’s a small, round familiar shape, a coffee bean, baked dry and impotent in the ambient heat. It crumbles when she touches it, all but indistinguishable from the rest of the dirt. It’s disturbing to see the little symbol of her power fall to dust like a youma.

It’s too hot and too sad to keep exploring. Subamara curls up in the dubious shade of the ancient trees, pulling out her phone again to begin reading through the Primer, careful and slow like there’s going to be an exam. She wants to reach through the little device and hug all the people who have so carefully put the file together, with the information and encouragement she hadn’t found when she’d been given her pen. There are even contact details for who to go to for more help. There, one name stands out, and she rubs her fingers over the phone display. Sailor Athene, who saved a young girl once, and walked her home. Maybe he can help her again, now she needs a different form of assistance. He was in her dream too, she thinks. She hopes he lived. There’s a lot to go through, but not a single mention of the nightmare world she woke from only a few hours earlier and five years from now.

She’s wasted so much time, letting it be everyone else’s problem. She won’t let them down again. She won’t die again. The tears are back, but this time she’s completely alone, no-one to wake up and worry about her, so she lets them fall and they darken the dry Subamaran ground with salt water.

She’s been out in the sun too long, and a headache is starting up a slow pounding beat just above her brow. It’s crept around the back of her neck and up behind her eyes, almost unnoticed until it starts up full thrum, out of tempo with the wind.

The phone is cool. She smooths her fingers over the surface, the coffee-bean picture on the screen. The clock says ten to seven. She needs to be getting up soon. Subamara closes her eyes, rubbing the heel of her hand against her forehead, trying to massage the drumbeat into something bearable. Her focus shifts, and she lets the little phone dial her back to the alley, back to her house before her mother can worry more than she already is.


[Oct 13, 2014]