an ending

I don’t know whether it was because of divine intervention that I found that abandoned cabin in the woods, but I’m glad I found it.

A day and a half beforehand, I had finally succeeded in something I had come to accept as the grim task that only I could do. I was to murder my once-beloved teacher and make it look like an accident. She was a willing controller. Willing to sacrifice an entire planet’s freedom just for her idea of justification. I understand that she truly believed she was doing a good thing, but I could never accept it after seeing all those people.

Those people, including the twin sister of the boy that my heart ached for.

In the time between my first witnessing of those cages, and the night my teacher decided to take me to that mall to teach me how to drive and ‘to de-stress’, as she put it, my mind ran over many scenarios. She was too paranoid for poisons and weapons, and so was the slug. And frankly, those were too easy to get caught with. I considered becoming the lioness and mauling her, but that would be too conspicuous.

But that night, the rainclouds loomed overhead as she led me to the car. I knew it was then or never, because to let her take me there was to possibly be lured right into a trap, and to be made a controller myself. And if I, with access to the things I know, were to let that happen, it would be game over. I had to act. And I had to act soon. We buckled up, and I pulled out of the driveway as the first drops began to fall. I noticed a crow watching me from the roof, but didn’t think anything of it at the time.

It all came to me relatively quickly, as I slipped into the meditative state of driving. The rain soon became a pouring deluge, and the car became harder to steer. I didn’t have trouble, but the rain had gotten the better of more practiced drivers than me. If I veered to the right, if I spun us out, I could annihilate the passenger’s seat and easily make it look like an accident. She would never suspect a thing. The slug would never suspect me, and the person would die believing I had simply lost control. I’m not a good liar, but I am a good actress.

When we hit a quiet, car-free stretch of road, I knew it was time.

I zig-zagged the car and pretended that I wasn’t able to control the wheel, and spun the right side of the vehicle – and my teacher – into a tree. I heard the sickening snap. She died instantly on impact. Blood sprayed onto me from the broken glass embedded into her body. It was hot, and wet, and uncomfortable. But in the midst of the accident, I realized that I’d made no plans to get myself out afterward. Moving my right arm hurt badly, and I smelled the acrid odor of gasoline.

That’s when I heard the sound of something scraping at metal. The door was ripped open by a tiger. An odd sight, and I was startled, before realizing there was only one way a tiger would be loose outside of the zoo. She changed back in front of me and tugged me out of the wreckage, shortly before the driver’s side burst into flames, and pulled me out of sight of the road.

We had a long talk. She told me she followed me because she saw the resignation in my eyes and thought I might be planning to hurt myself. I told her my plan, and how I needed to make it look like an accident so that she’d never suspect. As we talked, I came to the conclusion that I would disappear before the police arrived to the scene. We carefully made sure no blood trails were left from her dragging me off to the side.

And then, I decided I didn’t want my last act to be murder.

I told her I wanted to do one last thing before I skipped town. I told her I was going to masquerade as the boy I fancied, and lead his entrapped sister aside. Then, I would bind her down, get in whatever car I had access to, and drive as far as I could before I ran out of gas. It would get me out of town. It might even get me out of the state. Far enough that I would be able to starve the possessor out of her.

She decided she wanted to disappear with me. After three days had passed, after I starved out the controller, after I was able to find a safe place, I would call her. Meanwhile, she would monitor the brother, and bring him to me when I called for her. That way, he would be safe, and he would know his twin was safe. And if he was a controller, the same method would starve the bug out. If I did this, I knew they would never be able to go back. But I knew once they knew, they wouldn’t want to.

We discussed what this would mean for our families, and decided it didn’t matter in the end. To keep the illusion up, we would have to vanish without a trace. It would be easy to make everyone believe I died in that car crash, and as sad as it was, that she had killed herself. The sister would have to vanish without a trace, and he… would have to choose for himself what he decided to do. Maybe someday we would be able to reveal our gambit, but for now, we had to become un-people.

I changed form into the shape of Jack Hayward, and the two of us picked up some decent-looking men’s clothing from her house. No one would buy it if I walked up to her wearing my usual attire, and never before had I considered that it might be sorely uncomfortable to try to squish a penis into underthings that weren’t built for one and were also a size or two too small. The last time I had done this I hadn’t been wearing clothes and it wasn’t a problem.

When I arrived at the mall, after ducking out of sight to refresh the timer on my shift, I saw her car in a secluded area, somewhat away from the parking lot. It was emptier than usual here because of the driving rain. That was good. It meant I could make a clean getaway. And the fact that she hadn’t parked in the open was convenient. There were no cameras here. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that.

When I got inside and found her, she seemed surprised to see me here. Well, I suppose more accurately, she seemed surprised to see her brother here. I was lucky to have caught her alone enough, sitting next to an entrance with nearly no one around, and definitely no one paying attention.

She asked me if I had seen my teacher, because she was supposed to have shown up with her student by now for their supposed community club. Nice try, slug, I thought to myself. I shook my head and told her I had seen something terrible on the way here, and that I needed to speak to her in private. She asked how important it was, I told her it was intensely personal. Like reading off of a script, I told myself. This is acting, not lying.

I led her back out to the parking lot, and when we were next to her car, I pinned her down and tied her up. It wasn’t hard to perform a takedown on her, and it wouldn’t have been hard for me even if I wasn’t six feet tall and a guy at the time. I can still hear the remark the slug made, that it didn’t know we were that kind of twins. I shivered, but otherwise brushed it off. I took her keys from her, shoved her in the back, and got in the driver’s seat.

“Where are we going?” it asked, confused and even a little scared.

“Out.” I replied, not even bothering to put on the accent anymore. Not that it would matter with one word.

At first, the chatter was sassy. It gave me lip in exactly the way he always said she did. When we passed the still-burning wreck, where they were just pulling my teacher’s body out of the rubble, the chatter grew worried. If she was dead, where was her student? I thought to myself, this slug is in for a surprise as soon as we hit the city limits. You’re not worried about me, and I know you’re not. You’re worried about losing a potential slave.

When we passed the city limits sign, the chatter became terrified. When I was sure I wasn’t being followed, I pulled over to the side of the road, and I released my grasp on Jack’s form, returning to normal. Then it went from chatter to vitriol. Something about being one of the betrayers, or whatever. At that point I didn’t care. I let it say its piece, and I turned up the radio to drown it out.

Don’t Lose My Number, by Phil Collins. Perfect.

She grew quiet after a while of ranting and raving. My phone would ring sometimes. Emil’s ringer, or Jacob’s, or my sister’s. But never Reva’s. Reva already knew. Sometime in the middle of the night, the calls stopped all at once. My phone hadn’t died, but they had probably finally received word about the crash.

It wasn’t until sometime the next day when either of us spoke again.

“Did you really think it’d be that easy?” I asked, openly, “You honestly thought it would be simple, didn’t you. That girl has no confidence. That girl loves her teacher. She’ll cow her into even being willing, I bet! Is that what you thought?”

“Quiet, Anda-”

“Andalite scum. Yeah whatever. Shut the fuck up. I’m not afraid of you slug freaks anymore. I knew what she was doing. Do you think I’m some kind of idiot? Of course you do. You and the Andalites both think humans are stupid, stupid animals.”

“That’s not true, we think-”

“Then you think we’re meat puppets. Nothing but soldiers. Well this meat puppet caused that accident. She never saw it coming. She never knew what I was doing. She died thinking I lost control of the car.” I paused to collect myself. It still hurt. “Do you, as a collective, even know what this war is about anymore? Or do you just blindly follow orders? Do you think I’m blindly following orders by doing this?”

“But we can’t live without-”

“Without hosts. Have you ever thought to ask? To not assume direct control? Hey, guess what. Most humans hate being trapped in their own minds. It happens to me every other day and I have never been a controller. Now, I never will be. Tell me, what is she thinking in there? Is she sympathetic to you for taking her body by force and locking her in a cage when you needed to feed? Or is she screaming and begging you to free her?”

“But-”

“Save it.”

By nightfall, we were in the middle of nowhere. Any conversations beyond that went largely the same way. I knew I wasn’t making friends or converts this way, but I knew I needed to get away. I needed to save her. Sometimes, it would spit an insult at me as if it mattered to me, but I kept driving.

I pulled off the empty road onto a dirt trail sometime in the middle of the next day. I don’t know what possessed me to do it. I spotted it, and it felt like it called to me. The trail was long and overgrown, but nothing the car couldn’t handle. It turns out, it led to an old, decrepit cabin somewhere deep in the woods. It didn’t look like anyone had been there for years. But it was perfect for me, and I was nearly out of gas, anyway. I shut off the car, picked her up, and entered.

Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust, and we both sneezed as I trudged through it. But despite the dust, it looked cozy and workable. I could live out of this for a while.

It spoke again when I set her down on a soft-looking couch.

“Why.”

“You know why.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“No one does.”

“You’re with them. The vissers always told us they’d kill us on sight. Starve us out. It’ll hurt.”

“I’m not with them. I’m one human who knows way too much.”

“But you have-”

“Just because I have it, doesn’t mean I’m with them. Funny enough, we humans are capable of independent thought and decision-making. Amazing, isn’t it? That I think they’re just as wrong as you are.”

“Then why did the damn, dirty hypocrites trust you with-”

“Because we found a scared child that night in the woods who didn’t know what else to do. If I had my choice that night, I would have killed myself right then and there. No one trusted us with that power but a child.”

“Why are you telling the enemy all of this? I can just-”

“I can tell you this, because I know you can’t get away. I know it’s only us here. Us and the trees. If I let you go now, you’ll die anyway. Even if you did make it back in time, why would I risk my neck letting you go in the first place? That’s the cost of war and I’ve had to accept it. I had to accept it the minute I ran into that tree and killed her. I’m in too far, now.”

“You- you’re a sociopath.”

“… No, I’m really not. That would imply I don’t feel anything for what I’ve been doing. It couldn’t be more incorrect. I’m in agony right now. I’m just good at acting. Maybe even still a little numb.”

There was a tense pause.

“I’m scared to die. Starving for us is terribly painful. It’ll be painful for her, too.”

“...We’re all scared to die, on the inside. Fear of death is what reminds us we’re alive. When I took you, I didn’t think about it. The adrenaline from the fear of death was still there. And adrenaline is a funny thing. It can make you able to lift a car, or it can make you so shaky you can’t hold a pen straight. It can give you that moment of clarity, or it can blind you to your own actions. In my case, it did both. When I was pulled out of that crash, I just knew I didn’t want my last act to be murder. I wanted to save somebody from this war, no matter what.”

“She can’t go back. They’ll know.”

“I know that. I can’t go back now, either.”

“Her brother will miss her terribly.”

“I have a plan for that.”

“Do you plan on kidnapping him, too?”

“Not nearly something that brutal, no. My best friend and I agreed to disappear. I have to tell him, and then he won’t be able to go home either. Because they wanted him, didn’t they? Like they wanted me.”

“… Yes.”

“So he isn’t, then.”

“No. Not yet.”

“She’s following him. To be sure of that.”

“There must be some way I don’t have to die. Please. I’m scared.”

“...I know you are. And I’m sorry. If I could jerry-rig one of those devices that makes the light, I would. But I don’t have the technology.”

“Please. I can teach you.”

“And if the materials don’t exist on earth, it would be futile, wouldn’t it? There is no technology out here. I’m sorry.”

That was what made it pause.

“If you can’t make one… then make it painless. Please.”

“Will you leave your host then, so that at least one of you will live? If I can’t spare you, I want to at least be merciful. Maybe that’s why I chose vehicular homicide. Neither of them felt it. They truly believed it was out of my control. I am a murderer. But I’m not a torturer. Never.”

“Fine.”

“I never expected to make friend or convert by doing what I did. It never mattered to me. This war was not Earth’s war, it was brought to us. I am not on their side. I am on the side of the civilians that were forcibly dragged in. Because I am one, just as much as she is.”

“What… is a civilian?”

“A non-combatant. Somebody who doesn’t fight in a war, and just wants to live their life. The mothers, the siblings, the children who not only don’t fight, but sometimes cannot fight.”

“It sounds… nice. We don’t have civilians.”

“I guess that makes sense. I don’t know what side my friends are on. I never will, now. I am dead to them by now. No matter how much my sister fervently denies it. But I know what side I’m on. And I know why I did what I did. I don’t know if I will ever be able to fully live with it, but I don’t know if there was any other way. I could never take her in a full on fight.”

“Her… she was a soldier. That’s why she was willing.”

“...I know. She has never known what it is to be a civilian. To have ignorance- no. Innocence. To know peace. I don’t suppose you have, either.”

“No.”

“Then let your final day be peaceful. I can’t save you. It’s too late for that, and I’m sorry. I am a woman of impulse and I’ve paid for it. It’s not fair that you have to pay for it too. But if I can’t do that, I can give you peace.” I began to rifle through cabinets that had been closed for years, and came away with a small ceramic bowl, which I held out. “Leave her. Let her rest. Give her the mercy I’m giving you. It’s time for all of us to rest.”

There was a long pause. I looked into her eyes and I saw the pain of two beings at once. But eventually, she tilted her head to one side, and a gray creature slid out of her ear.

<I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want her to suffer either.> The voice spoke directly into my mind. It was still such a weird sensation.

“Then if I can do anything for you, let me make you one promise. You won’t suffer. Let me make one thing clear. You are not a prisoner of war. Not anymore. You are a prisoner of my own thoughtless impulses. For that, I can do nothing but apologize and hope you have the grace to accept.”

I set the bowl down on the table and looked at the girl I had stolen. She seemed out of it, staring off into the distance with an empty gaze wracked with weeks, maybe longer, of torment. Maybe this wasn’t the first one she’d played host to. In other situations, I could imagine one wouldn’t be so kind. With the gentlest hand I could offer, I removed the ropes I had bound her in, and took a seat next to her.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Thank you.” there was a tension in her voice that told me otherwise. Of the two of us, my sister was the liar. It had made me good at telling when people weren’t telling the truth.

“You sure?”

“I think… I’ll take a walk.” She stood up before I could say anything, and headed for the door. It was a sort of stiff, robotic walk. The kind of walk that somebody who’s running on autopilot has.

<She’s going to hurt herself.> I heard in my mind. <I heard it while we were talking. Humans think that’s bad, right?>

“Shit… I think I know what needs to be done. I know you don’t have much of a choice, but wait here.” I stood up, and changed shape again. If she wouldn’t listen to me, she’d listen to her brother. She hadn’t gotten far by the time I got outside, and I followed her, noting the trail carefully. I caught up to her, and stopped her in her tracks.

“Shana. Don’t.”

“You aren’t my brother. I know you aren’t.”

“I’m not. But right now, I need you to listen to me like I am. You are safe. You are here, and you are in control of yourself. And you are brave, and you are strong. You matter.”

“I’m not brave and strong. They caught me, and I couldn’t do a thing.”

“No one could in that situation, love.”

“I was trapped. I was afraid. They were going to use me to take you- I mean... him...”

“But they won’t. They can’t. Not anymore.”

“And during the drive, it was… begging. Pleading with me to get away. It knew I knew how, but it couldn’t do the movements on its own.”

“No one wants to die. Not really. Accepting your own demise is difficult. And I don’t think you want to die, either.”

She leaned against me, and soon I felt hot tears soaking into my shirt.

“I’m so tired...”

“I know, love. Let’s go back to the cabin, and we’ll rest.”

Now that everything had worn off, it seemed apparent just how tired she was. She struggled to walk on her own power after the autopilot wore off. I carried her there, and for the moment, I could feel that she was more than happy to believe I was her brother.

When we came back inside, the slug was still sitting in the bowl, waiting. I moved the ropes and laid her down on the couch, and tossed over her some throw blankets that were lying around in here. She fell asleep near immediately.

<I thought all humans needed a certain amount of sleep, but you haven’t for days now. Why?>

I became myself again, and sighed. “What’s keeping me awake now is the sheer force of determination that comes behind knowing that my work isn’t finished yet. Humans are as stubborn as we are brutally violent.”

<Why all this work? For one person?>

“It’s not just one person. My best friend, who’s just as entangled with this as I am… and her brother.” I motioned to the girl sleeping on the couch. “Once I spun out that car, I knew I could neither go to the hospital nor give a statement to the police. With no offense meant to you, none of your kind would have given me anything but torment. To go to the hospital would mean facing down your visser, and having to explain to them why my arm isn’t broken anymore. To give a statement to the police would mean to bold-faced lie, and I’ve never been good at that.”

<You knew about the visser.>

“I know about them, and how cruel they are. I know about that beam they have. I know who they are.”

<You made a wise decision.>

“Either path would lead me either down to those pools myself, or to death. So I took a third option. I decided to disappear entirely. I would become a cryptid. You fell asleep at one point on the road and I stopped to buy a burner phone. I shut my actual phone off to save the battery. I’ll use it once I’m ready for them to know I’m alive. But I couldn’t just leave. If I was going to leave, I knew I needed to take someone out of the fire with me. So I did. I chose her. Because in choosing her, I could choose her brother long before he was dragged to the pits. I knew they weren’t going to leave without each other.”

<You seem fixated on him.>

“Fixated is one word. Maybe it’s even a good word. But I would call it something more like… smitten. Attracted.”

<Human love is strange. She liked to tease him about it. About you.>

“...Really?”

<Yes.>

“...Heh. That’s kind of flattering.” I took the burner phone out of my pocket, and stared at it. “...By the time they get here, you’ll be gone. I’m so sorry.”

<I just don’t want to suffer.>

“It’s the least I can do. To give you that.” I sat myself down on an old-looking chair nearby. “To make it as easy as I can. Truth be told, I don’t know where we are. I spent a lot of that time driving in a trance. Didn’t pay attention to road signs. Didn’t have a destination besides ‘away’. Just chalk it up as another thing I regret.”

<You have a lot of regrets, don’t you.>

“… Yeah. If I weren’t in such a clutch circumstance, maybe I would have been able to talk to her. Maybe I would have been able to speak to her on an even level, just like this. Maybe it would have made me feel less like a monster.”

<… I don’t think you’re a monster.>

“That’s surprising to hear considering the ride here. I feel like one.”

<You offered me mercy, even after all that. That’s more than anyone has shown me.>

“Heh...” I stopped to think for a moment. “… Once upon a time, there was an old, wise human named Carl. He taught us about the great beyond. About space, and the vastness of the universe. And he didn’t know that you all were out there. We had no way to know about other life forms. We hadn’t, and still haven’t, advanced that far yet. But he taught us how small we all are compared to the size of the universe before us. It’s something that I don’t think most people think about as much as I do.”

<I guess the universe is a very big place.>

“It’s very big, and despite all the habited planets out there, it’s very empty, too. There’s a famous picture of Earth from the perspective of a probe that was about to leave the solar system. In that picture, Earth is nothing more than a tiny, pale blue dot. That was us. That was home. That’s a lesson I think everything and everyone could serve to learn. No matter how big your galactic empire is, no matter how far you can travel, you still came from this one tiny place.”

<Huh...>

“It might be a pale blue dot, or it might be green, or gray, or red. It doesn’t matter. The odds that life exists at all are miraculous, in a way. There’s a lot of pale dots out there in the universe. Everyone, from the most high and mighty deer-looking son of a bitch, to the most ruthless visser, to the most desperate human, is so much smaller than those pale dots. And those pale dots are so much smaller than the rest of the universe. Just motes of dust, suspended in sunbeams.”

<I never viewed it like that before.>

“And all the wars, all the conflicts, they’re insignificantly small. All our posturing, all our imagine self importance, the delusion that any of us have any privileged place in the universe, are all challenged by that picture of that pale blue dot. To the universe, they don’t matter. To all those other pale dots, they just leave a bad taste. They are temporary.

“And we all shouldn’t stay to ourselves, no. Because we have no one else in this universe but the other pale dots. But to bring war and conflict to them? Why? Why make enemies of everyone else out there? To him, it underscored our collective responsibility to deal with one another more kindly and compassionately, and to preserve those pale dots, the only homes we’ve ever known. After all, we’re all made of the same things.”

<What do you mean?>

“Deep within the glimmering dust clouds known as nebulas, stars form from primordial star stuff. Around those stars, more star stuff coalesces into planets and asteroids, which eventually, are the cradles for all life. You and I, the vissers and war princes, the vore worms and blade lizards… we are all made of the same thing. We are all star stuff.”

<That is profound.>

“Carl Sagan was a wise man. Now that I’ve been able to sit down, I’ve been able to think about it again. We are all star stuff. And that’s why I want to detach myself and these few others from what we’ve been dragged into. I want to give them the peace they deserve on our pale blue dot. In a way, I suppose I want to give you that, too. In a way, maybe I was giving her that.”

<You talk a lot.>

“Hah. You should hear my sister go at it. I guess all I really can do now, is talk...”

<I know the feeling.>

“I guess you do. I believe that we all come back one day. Our souls do, anyway.”

<What… is a soul?>

“That’s kind of an esoteric question, huh. It’s… the consciousness of a person, maybe? Our thoughts, our hopes, our very essence. The thing that makes us who we are. I believe that consciousness moves around. When the body dies, it lingers. It makes a new body for itself. It might not remember its old life, but it’s still around somewhere.”

<Do I have a soul?>

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t. You could be anything in your next life. Maybe we’ll meet again, and maybe when we do, we’ll have peace.”

<I would like that.>

Things went quiet after that. I still wonder if I blew its mind that night. Shana slept through it all. I found a dusty old guitar, and I kept the place from getting too quiet with an old song I knew. And I thought. I thought about that pale blue dot, and the vastness of the universe. I thought about reincarnation. I hoped that all of them would find new life somewhere. They deserved it.

The entirety of the next day was nearly silent, beyond the sounds of my guitar, and some quiet conversations. I wondered if Reva would think I sounded like Anya for all the profound speech giving I did the night before. Every so often, I would turn into the lioness despite my own discomfort and hunt down a deer. And come sundown, I had managed to find a meat cleaver in this old cabin. If I were to perform an execution, this would be the swiftest way to do it.

When that three days was up, I took it out of its little ceramic bowl, and I placed it on a nearly-overgrown stump outside.

<I’m ready. It’s starting to hurt.>

“I promise you. One day, you’ll find your way back here. When you do, you’ll have peace. When you do, I’ll be waiting.”

<… Thank you.>

I knew I couldn’t stall any longer. I brought that cleaver down as hard and as fast as I could, cleaving the poor thing in two. And then, my mind was quiet.

Somewhere in a clear spot, I picked up some assorted seeds and dug a small hole. I gingerly placed the two halves of the body in the hole, and scattered the seeds on top, before burying it beneath the soil.

“May you give back to this Earth you’ve come to, even as you begin life anew somewhere, on one of those pale dots.”

I went back inside after that, and washed the slime off of my hands. I sat down on the edge of the couch where Shana still slept, and watched her for a few minutes. How much of the last day had been sleeping, and how much had been just laying here? She hadn’t eaten a damn thing. We were lucky the electricity to this old place still worked, because I had been keeping her meals in an old, empty fridge.

Soon, I called Reva. I told her it was time to bring him, and she told me he was clean, as far as she could tell. Since Shana had disappeared, he hadn’t left his house except to search for her, and she’d been able to keep tabs on him the entire time. I told her the slug was dead, and that she wasn’t doing well. We needed him here. I gave her what little directions I could remember. Get out onto the interstate, and drive until you see a dirt trail along the road. She told me she would be there with him as soon as she could.

The next day and a half was just as quiet as it had been before. I used Jack’s form to get Shana to at least nibble at something. It had been three and a half days since her last meal, and a lot of that was my fault. Occasionally, I would talk to her, through him. I could tell it was both frustrating and comforting at the same time. She knew I was not him, but to hear him brought her ease.

During the times she slept, I went outside, sat by the little grave, and thought long and hard. About those pale dots out there, and how some things never change. I looked up at the night sky and counted the constellations for the first time from a place on Earth that wasn’t clogged by the light of a nearby city. I thought to myself, would all these aliens see the stars the same way I do? It never really occurred to me before how uniquely human the idea of the constellations are.

We as humans have watched the stars since times immemorial, wondering and imagining. We thought and dreamed for so long that we saw reflections. We made connections. We wanted to believe so much that there was order in the vastness around our pale blue dot that we started telling our myths and stories with the very stars in the sky. Orion and Andromeda and Hercules and Orpheus’ lyre, to name a few. Those were stories that we put in the sky so that our children will always know where they came from.

A small, lamenting part of me knew that my sister would never, could never, think about things like this. She was so fixated on being another being from another one of those dots that she had forgotten what it was to be human. And if I hadn’t chosen to disappear, maybe I would have never gotten the chance to reflect on it either. To me, it felt like despite knowing about this war and all its baggage, a sense of wonder had been breathed back into me.

Because I knew that war wasn’t all that was out there. I knew that on another pale dot, another girl in this same situation might be sitting in the backwoods thinking this same thing. And maybe her constellations weren’t the same as mine. But she still dreamed of peace, and of a place beyond the stars where somebody like her might be sitting, thinking the same thing.

And I wondered what all on Earth I hadn’t seen yet. I hadn’t traveled much out of the city. I had barely traveled out of the state before. It was freeing to think about. I was legally dead. I could do whatever I wanted. Forge a new identity. With nothing to tie me down. No obligations. I never had to go back to school, and Anya could never hold me back again. I decided I wanted to travel. I wanted to learn what I would have missed on the road. I wanted to explore this pale blue dot.

It was sooner than I thought when the second car pulled up to the old cabin. They found me with tears in my eyes as I stared up at the sky in wonderment, and wondered if I was okay. I didn’t notice them until they were both wrapped around me.

“You’re alive...” I heard Jack say, with a breath of relief in his voice.

“Yeah. I’ve been alive the whole time. And I asked Reva to bring you here because I needed to show you something. Something important. I need to tell you something, too.”

I led him inside, and brought him to the couch. I watched him go stock-still when he saw her. He went to her side faster than I could blink. He urged her to wake up, and she said to stop using his voice. I told her I wasn’t, and told her to listen to where my voice was coming from and where his was coming from.

When she realized who it was, they embraced. And they cried, for a long while.

And I breathed in deep. And I began to recount what had happened to me, to us. I watched Shana’s face. It hurt her to know as much as it hurt me, and telling it all again made that ache seep back into my soul.

So, as I spoke, I thought about that wonderment again. And the wonder and the heartache fought a battle in my mind, and the wonder won out. And I realized just what a powerful shield I had against the pains of what I’ve had to do.

And they assured me, I did what I had to. I heard the spite in Reva’s voice when she spoke about my teacher, and I understood where she came from. But I just couldn’t muster the spite myself. At this point, it was done. It didn’t matter, in the scheme of things. I was just happy to see her again.

The four of us had a long talk about what we would do now that none of us could go home. I disappeared after the accident, they would be hunting Shana down, now Jack knew too much, and Reva left a note that read like a suicide note. We had two cars, and Reva brought along a few spare gas cans. Jack had his cards. He was lucky he was the only one who didn’t need to disappear entirely.

But with that all combined, we realized we could go wherever we wanted. We were free.

We decided that we would find a way to forge a new home to settle in. He wanted somewhere warm with a lot of sunlight, and I wanted somewhere remote, where we would never be dragged into something like this again. Shana wanted somewhere close to nature, and Reva just wanted us all to be happy. I proposed that maybe the best way to find somewhere like that was to just get lost. Get out the atlas, pick a direction, and just drive without a destination in mind. Someday, we’d find a home for us all. But in the meantime, we had each other.

We came to the consensus that it was time to tell my sister that we were alive, just to give her the closure we all really knew she needed. I finally turned on my phone again, and gathered up all of us into a group by the couch. I took a picture of the four of us, and attached a message. It was a simple message, but I thought it was powerful.

“We lived.”

We all set off the next day, in Shana’s car, after stripping Reva’s car of anything useful, and anything one could use to identify it. The sight of the vast world before us restored a hope to the eyes of everyone I was driving with, and I wondered if it was hitting them too, just how much of this pale blue dot we hadn’t explored yet.

And as I wondered, I realized that I was finally out on the open road, with the people who meant the most to me.

And to me, that was a wonderful feeling.