Terminal Radiance

TW: death, grief.

Athryn was in the very last seat of a packed transport.

The general mood around her hummed—a giddy energy. Why wouldn’t it be? They’d pulled through the forcefield into the “Port of Lights,” the crystal capital of Gliese-12b. A once crystal mining planet turned port city turned tourist hotspot. Beyond docking, crystal towers rose high into the air, their multi-colored surfaces scattered rainbow refractions through the hazy amber light of the nearby red dwarf star.

Casino lights pulsed from within, the beat of it near-blinding at its apex. As if yanked from somewhere long-dark, Athryn heard Marc’s voice in her head, making a quip about shafts compensating for something.

She scrubbed a hand over her face.

Athryn leaned her head against the hard plastic panel surrounding the transport’s small window. Unlike everyone, her eyes weren’t fixed hungrily on the stores and bars just beyond the etched crystal archway. Watching the people below, she wondered what it would be like to recognize the faces she came home to. A churning sea of different beings—not a single one she found the comfort of familiarity in.

The transport jolted and clanked as it clicked into the dock. A hiss like a sigh sounded through the cabin as the door seal was broken and unlatched, station air mingling inside. It carried the scent of spices, roasting meat. The throbbing beat of lights became tangible with the distant cadence of drums.

Suddenly, the atmosphere felt charged. It slid over her skin, slick and oily.

Around her, people stood, energy buzzing. Outside, workers began to unload cargo from below, the luminous crystals strapped to their heads like light bugs in the dark.

Movement pulled her gaze upwards. A long metal arm slid along the ceiling tracks. Tips jointed and flexible, they reminded her of fingers uncurling from a nominal palm. They disappeared into the depths of the transport. The ship shook.

The man next to her stood; collected his things.

He grunted at her, then left, footsteps receding with the others.

From below, the arm pulled a rectangular box, an air tray, from the transport. The whole thing was wrapped in a thick, translucent film. The edges of the film were caked with frost, the contents inside packed with dry ice for the journey. Workers moved around it like this was any other day, though a few gazes lingered as the arm gently placed the box on the waiting flat of a hovering bier.

Stamped across the top of the box, clearly visible under the film in hard edged red lettering was:

BIOHAZARD

Cryotube—Organic Remains

Handle With Extreme Care

MARC CIRRO

Jaw clenched, she looked away from the window as her eyes started to burn; took a moment to gaze, sightless, at the dim overhead lights.

You always knew this could happen, she chastised herself bitterly, rubbing her chest.

She’d just begun to pull her bag from under the seat in front of her when someone in the aisle said, “Dr. Cirro?”

Athryn looked up, blinking rapidly to clear her vision.

A young man stood there, mouth turned down in a slight frown.

“Ma’am,” he continued, “funeral services are waiting for you on dock. They have forms you need to sign before we can release the body.”

When she only nodded, he turned to go. He hesitated before turning back to her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “I was a fan.”

Forcing a smile, Athryn nodded again.

☽☾

Ciza rolled something Athryn couldn’t see between his hands, lips moving as he muttered to himself. His gaze was fixed on the floor. He didn’t look up; didn’t seem to notice as she came in.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Athryn wouldn’t mention anything about how her old access code was still activated, or how she’d entered it before she even thought to knock.

Rubbing the exhaustion from her eyes, she settled into the chair across from him, tucking her feet under her.

She wanted tea, but knew better than to ask—there wouldn’t be any.

Clearing her throat made Ciza look up. He blinked at her, eyebrows pinched for an instant as he registered her presence.

“He’s here, then?” he asked. Ciza took a large bite of the thing in his hand—a plum, turned out—before sitting back to regard her. The fruit squelched between his teeth. “How is he?”

Athryn flinched at the question. Dead, she wanted to say—but Ciza already knew that.

Their son was dead.

Every time she blinked, all she could see was the hazel-eyed boy who’d jump off cabinets just to see if he could fly—the one who had so many demerits on his school records for being heedless the screen had been almost entirely red. She saw his kind heart, heard the rolling thunder of his laugh. The pieces of it didn’t seem to snap in place with the man he’d become, the radiant diver who dove headfirst into stellar anomalies.

Stupid, reckless boy.

She shook the thought from her head, wrapping her arms around herself.

“They collected what they could,” she answered stiffly.

Ciza grunted, noncommittal.

Athryn knew what he was thinking just by the way his eyes went glassy and a little upwards, like he was looking above the ridgeline of the crater the main city was set into. Towards the heavens, as he would have said once, before the rhetoric had grown tired and she became short with him. His thoughts had no doubt drifted to the bylaws of some long-lost, old earth tied religion that said Marc wouldn’t find peace unless he was… whole.

They’d had this fight countless times over the years. So many it was morbid to think about—Marc’s death a thing of controversy while he’d still been alive; healthy. Had they spoken this into existence?

Athryn bit the broken, inflamed skin around her thumb nail. Her gaze moved across the room as she thought of what to say—threadbare, but functional. The shelf beside the wallscreen she knew to house a picture of Marc on the day he got his skiff license was bare.

She squinted.

No, not bare. The frame was resting facedown.

Athryn pulled the tablet from her briefcase and sat up.

“I’ve spoken with the flight that extracted him. They relayed the rites in which divers are given and would like to scatter the remains in the upper atmosphere—to, in their words, ‘return him to the light he chased.’ However,” she clicked the tablet screen. She was about to continue when she glanced up, finding Ciza’s gaze still distant. Athryn tapped his leg once, and he looked at her, eyes slow to focus. She continued, voice soft, “I know it’s important to you that his remains are prepared here, where he was born. The compromise we’ve come to is this: refractive cremation.”

She handed him the tablet.

Ciza’s eyes moved over the words describing how their son’s remains would be vaporized using focused crystal lenses that refract stellar light. It would be luminous—public. It wouldn’t leave much for him to add to that shelf with Marc’s picture.

It almost surprised her when he nodded after a few heartbeats where Athryn had held her breath, fortifying herself for a fight. Her shoulders relaxed as he used his finger to scribble his name across the line on the bottom.

Robotically, numbly, he handed it back to her.

Ciza didn’t say anything as she packed her tablet to leave, half-eaten plum forgotten in his hand. Eyes glassy, he stared off into nothing as she shut the door behind her.

☽☾

Athryn dressed stiffly in funeral reds. She hadn’t considered, after the death of her mother, then her father a year later, that she’d need to get them dry cleaned for this exact moment. They were deeply wrinkled at the place where her elbows bent, reminding her that it hadn’t been that long since she’d worn them.

They hung lower, loosely draped over her back, than they ever had, brushing the back of her heels lightly as she walked. She swiped mascara on her eyelashes, then changed her mind and scrubbed it off. Dark circles bruised her pale complexion; she did nothing to hide them.

Ciza by her side, and somehow, lightyears away, she put on a brave face.

Barefoot, they walked the crystal road.

Under her feet, the golden crystal was warm—worn smooth over the years. It stretched before her in a golden line. The floor to the left and right, expanding out wide in either direction, was covered in a thin layer of water. It rippled with the invasion of bodies, the stalactites above reflected in its surface like dancing comets.

The music faded here, deep in the catacombs. The light around them, too, was dim, provided only by the soft internal glow of the crystals around them, and the veins of amber and violet that worked their way through the wall.

Two pallbearers carried the cryotube, supported by thin beams resting on their shoulders. Mourners stood to the side, reaching up as it passed to press their fingers to the cool metal. The beings’ uniforms were muted, black to match the darkness between slashes of light. It made the metal tube—brushed by the soft hues of crystal in every color—look like it was floating. Those behind, too far to touch, stretched their fingertips as far as they could reach. Tear tracks glittered down their cheeks.

As Ciza and Athryn walked, suppressed sobs and brokenhearted wails filled the room behind them as the mourners trailed the procession. Water splashed softly in the shallow pool. The smell of salt wafted past her, dancing with tendrils of her hair in the breeze from the cavern’s opening. Their cries became a chant, a sort of high pitched barking.

She recognized it; couldn’t place it, not as it started to echo back along the high, rounded walls.

She knew these beings, had known them, but only as those who passed on lore of the radiant divers—Blessed Radiants. Fans. Faceless, nameless beings who idolized the ‘falling few’ as if they were gods. Who knew the expected variance of their lives was low and worshiped them anyways.

Pressing her nails into her palms until it hurt, Athryn fought the urge to turn. She wanted to tell them to shut up—that they had no respect, barking like dogs in a chamber that should be silent. She should hear the song of the crystal with more than just the soles of her feet.

Athryn wanted to shame them for making this kind of death beautiful when it was her son they’d sacrificed for their entertainment.

Her breath came short, pulse spiking. A thought, dark and thorn-edged, wheedled its way into her head.

With all the strength she had left, she pushed it, and the flashing red light that accompanied it, away. Closing her eyes, she shook her head. Her palms ached under the assault of her fingernails.

Screaming that they’d killed her son was… untrue; nor would it make her feel better.

A large crystal archway curved above, carved with the first people’s landing. It bottlenecked the procession, forcing the mourners to slow to near stillness as Athryn passed through. It opened to a smaller chamber. Here the floor and ceiling had always felt flipped to her, like she’d tipped into the beyond and was traversing a different plane. The ceiling was deep black, the floor covered with scattered stalagmites, evenly spaced.

She filled her lungs with the damp air.

The stalactitic crystals that lined the path every few meters lit the smaller room and the beings within—their faces frozen in peaceful sleep, albeit distorted from all the places it was half-absorbed by the still forming crystal. Their heartbeat hue was rust—more magenta than orange—the same hue their star cast over their planet.

These faces she did look at.

They were familiar, beings she’d grown up with before the planet’s surface vibrated with inorganic, rhythmic bass unceasingly. She clung to the little comfort they offered. It was a testament to how long she’d been away, to how long Marc had been old enough to leave the planet on his own, that the stalactitic crystals now stretched so far, the room a modicum brighter than it had been once when she was a girl. The faces within had grown old; some parents of friends, some she knew from school.

Athryn knew it was right, that Marc’s legacy should end with him among the light, but something in her heart broke as the pallbearers placed the cryotube on the plinth.

Beyond today, she’d never again see her boy.

It was as the metal met crystal, as they stepped back from the beams that had held her son for the last time, that the mourners stopped howling altogether. Silence blanketed the room, but solace didn’t come. It was then that she realized what the sound was—what their intention had been.

They’d been wailing in approximation of the emergency alarm that had filled the background of Marc’s last broadcast, as his skiff spiraled, and he’d died.

All the air left Athryn’s lungs, and she fell to her knees.

She’d heard it once, and only briefly, but the sound had so thoroughly ingrained itself into the ridges of her heart that played in her head every night when she tried to sleep. Shaking, she wrapped her arms around herself, her body rocking as tears spilled down her face.

Then, she felt the press of beings around her, creating a wall.

A hand was on her arm, another just under her elbow, and a third pressed firmly into the small of her back.

Through her blurry vision, a slash of curling purple over a sharp cheekbone.

Athryn blinked.

Lifting her slowly from the golden floor was the diver she recognized as the one who had recovered the remains of Marc’s skiff and his broken body—his wingmate, Tecri. Around her were the rest of his team, all six with the same swirling face tattoo that her son had, laced with nanos that made it move. They all swirled in time with each other.

Tecri gave her a sad smile. A mirror to the one she’d had plastered to her face for days, she imagined. Gently, he pressed the red sleeve of his tunic to each of her cheeks.

He looked to the plinth for a long, lingering moment, before his gaze came back to her. “Will you help us?” he asked. Then, he winced. “It won’t be—”

Athryn put up a hand, stopping him. “I identified his body. I’m his mother. Yes.”

Tecri nodded and, with a glance around, began to move.

None of the divers lifted their hands from where they rested lightly on her as, slowly, they all made their way to where the cryotube rested on golden crystal. Only when they were forced to make a circle did they let her go.

The lid to the cryotube hissed as it released.

The two pallbearers stepped forward once more to lift the lid, moving it smoothly out of the way. Leftover vapor from the dry ice poured from the egg-shaped container, slowly revealing what lay within.

Athryn’s breath caught.

Around her, the divers whispered, “Brother.”

Marc was wrapped in burial orange, pleats neat and traditional. She once remembered Marc saying that he was the only one of the crew from Gliese-12b—that, at first, the cultural differences had caused a rift.

She knew no one in the crystal city had touched him. Not since they’d sealed the cryotube for transport.

His face had been tended; dried blood and soot washed away. The nanos in his tattoo had died along with his heartbeat, but someone had smudged a luminescent violet paint over the curved lines, making it glow in the dim light. Above his head, the tattered remains of his flight suit had been folded, his helmet with the broken visor placed overtop.

Wordlessly, they lifted him together, placing him softly on the warm crystal.

Only now did Athryn see how the violet light from the tattoos of the divers played across his face. His face, in death, that looked like nothing but at peace. If she didn’t look too hard, she could almost imagine he was sleeping.

Athryn ran a finger over his forehead, then down the length of his strong nose—just as she’d done when he was little.

“To the light we chase,” the divers said in unison, placing the tips of their fingers lightly over their eyes. “To the light we return.”

Their hands fell slowly to their sides.

Beside her, she felt Tecri lift his gaze to her, patient.

Athryn swallowed, put a hand over her heart. She bent down and kissed Marc lightly on the forehead. To him, she whispered, “I love you, I have always loved you.” Athryn straightened and turned, facing the crowd of mourners. “From the crystal we are born, and to the—” she looked to Tecri, his eyes brimmed with tears, “—light my son returns.”

They stepped slowly away from the plinth. Athryn turned once more to her son, placing a kiss on her fingertips.

From the bottom of the stairs, they watched as a skylight opened in the ceiling. The lenses lit with the light of the dwarf star, soaking the room in starlight. Athryn covered her eyes with a hand, shielding herself from the bright light. The air was briefly hot, and then the skylight was shut with a low snap.

She stood like that for a long moment.

A hand touched her elbow.

Tecri looked defeated, his eyes as bruised and tired as hers. He wiped his wet face with a sleeve.

“If it gives you any solace, he lived doing something he loved.” Tecri looked up. Athryn followed his gaze to the black ceiling. Finding nothing, it fell back to him. He was already looking at her, a soft look on his face that almost looked like regret. “He was laughing when he died. He was happy.”