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Circle me and the needle moves gracefully,
Back and forth, if my heart was a compass you'd be north.
Risk it all cause I'll catch you if you fall,
Wherever you go, if my heart was a house you'd be home.
Aubrey carries a piece of Sylvain’s heart around her neck.
She shows it to you, once, one night after lying on your backs in the soft grass on the edge of the forest and staring up at the stars. The stars are brighter here than they were in Sylvain—configured sharply into diamonds and bears and women with crossbows, as though stitched together by some great celestial artist. Aubrey laughs, when you tell her that—says the stars are only bright here in Kepler because they have so few lights near the earth to block out the view. And you wonder if the stars were really dimmer, there in Sylvain, or if everything is dimmer in your memory, faded by distance, while here the world still feel shimmering—new.
Aubrey laughs, and points out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, and the Horse with a Hat On and the Vague Cubist Tree and the Oblong Tit, and then she cuts herself off and admits she made most of those up.
“I thought you were a constellation expert, that’s why you said we should come out here!” you say, rolling over onto your side to poke her hard in the shoulder.
She giggles, overflowing—and you are distracted for a moment by her face, the shapes of it, the curl of her eyelashes and the long line of her nose, the shadows where her cheeks meet her ears.
“I thought it would cheer you up,” she says.
And of course you do not deserve this—you twitch your hand, slightly, just enough to feel the ring slide against your finger—but you can pretend for a moment. Watch her eyes sparkle in the starlight, lie back and shift ever closer, lean your shoulder up against hers.
Lift our arm to the sky, and watch as she lifts hers. Your hand is pulled in her direction like a compass towards north.
“I like Oblong Tit,” you say. “That one’s my favorite.”
Aubrey shines in the moonlight. Not so much, not like a neon sign or a silvery patch on a biker’s jacket, but just the faintest echo, a reflection, like the ring around the moon. You wonder sometimes that the rest of them can’t see it—Duck, Janelle, Barclay, the other residents of Amnesty Lodge, the rest of Kelper, hell the rest of Earth—are they blind to how brilliant this girl is, how brave, how she reflects warmth?
And then you wonder if only you can see it. If she was sent here by a higher power, handpicked by some star-scatterer as a homing device. Or if you were.
The night she shows you her mother’s pendant, she stops you halfway back to Duck’s apartment and grabs both your hands in hers. Her hands are bigger, just by an inch or two—just by enough that her thumb fits tight in the space between your thumb and index finger, overlaps, like a link of chain mail.
“Dani,” she says, “I need to show you something.”
And she keeps hold of your right hand with her left, and she reaches beneath her completely-unironic-Evanescence-T-shirt and pulls out a pendant—glittering, reflecting so much moonlight that for a second you think it’s a fallen star.
She pulls your hand forward, slowly, gently, and closes your palm around it. It is warm to touch, like you dipped just one hand in the hot spring to test the temperature, and it pushes against your ring, and—oh. Oh.
“Aubrey,” you say. “This is—”
She nods. “It was my mom’s. And then—and then Ned had it, and now—now it’s mine. I don’t know how our family got it, but I have some ideas, and I need you to know, if there was ever anything—anything we did, anything we took, I am so sorry. I am sorry, and I’m gonna do my best to fix it.”
“Aubrey.” You take her hand, the right one, where it has fallen to her side. Her fingers are cold, pricked with goosebumps. “It wasn’t you. And you’re here now, and you’ll keep being here, and you will be nothing like those ancestors, whoever they were. Okay?”
She dips her head—rests it in the crook of your neck, her curls soft against your skin. She is shaking, slightly but intently, like a tree in a storm—and she is breathing. Breathing. In and out. You realize after a moment that she is matching her rhythm to yours.
The piece of Sylvain’s heart, on a chain around her neck, hangs between you. Cupped in both your hands.
“I feel like I am home when I am around you, Aubrey,” you say. “I mean it literally.”
You spread your arms, wishing you could express—could encompass the space in your heart, the way she fills it. The harmonics of her laughter when you’ve said something dumb, and the steady grip of her hand when you reach out. She came here to Kepler with a pair of white gloves and a flint in her pocket and now she wields a sword of her own forging, now she stands and stands and says I can save us all, and you do not want to walk beneath any constellations unless she is there to name them.
Perhaps some cosmic artist sculpted the universe, then folded it to bring you together. But more likely each person’s heartbeat is a tiny homing magnet, beating, and you just happened to land in each other’s gravitational pull.
You kiss her, soft and gentle, and she pulls you closer and opens—doesn’t care if you’re wearing molars or fangs. You burn there for a moment, wonder if you combusted and shot up into the atmosphere, what would she call this fragile new star—and then she’s gone, bounding out of the Cryptonomica with one last grin over her shoulder as she pushes the door open.
You stand there, listening as her footsteps fade. Put a hand to your lips, feel where they’re still tingling.
You think of the crystal beating beneath her T-shirt, of the fire in her golden eyes. She will live, because you told her to. And then you will pick out Ikea furniture, and you will buy the jumbo bag of Dr. Harris Bonkers’ favorite rabbit food, and you will sit in the grass and laugh at the stars.