And All the Stars (2 page)

Tucking her phone away again, Madeleine lifted both hands and
brushed cautious fingertips against the surface. She expected it to be cool, slick and damp,
like limestone in caves, but what she touched was velvet. Astonished, she pressed her hands against
warm, smooth stone, sensuous against her skin. It felt as solid as marble, but somehow alive, as if waiting would bring
a pulse, the beat of a buried heart.

And then light flashed, and she was picked up and thrown
backward into the dark.

Madeleine lay suffocating in dust and near misses. Broken leg. Steel bar through her back. Broken neck. So many things she
could have done to herself. Worse was
measuring what damage she had actually done. She'd landed flat on her back, fortunately square on one of the deeper
piles of dust, which had erupted like a geyser around her. Her already-painful skull was screaming
protest at new abuse. But it was a
reluctance in her arms and legs, a disconnect between want and ability to move,
which spun her into terror. Paralysed. Was she paralysed?

Pins and needles. They
arrived in force, swept through her, the whole of her body jolting with a
hornet swarm's stinging assault, but her spasmodic curl in reaction showed her
that she could move, even though the most she could manage at first was to curl
further, to clutch knees, elbows, and try to breathe through lungs which buzzed
and burned, while somehow not inhaling powder. It smelled like an approaching rainstorm.

Madeleine did not quite lose consciousness, but when the
stinging receded she lay numb while a new layer of dust sifted down. She'd nearly killed herself. Thrown away the unspeakable good fortune
which had given her a protective cocoon of metal when however many others at
the station had nothing to shield them. She had too much to do, too many images in her head which deserved
release, and she had almost denied herself that. Sabotaged her own future just because of
something strange and beautiful, velvet beneath her touch.

Her phone, still tucked behind the padding of her bra, lit
up. The singer's crooning murmur was far
from a spur to action, but Madeleine did manage to pluck the device from her
chest and tell it hello.

Her mother's crisp voice, crackling with static. "Finally!
Maddie
, I'm on my
way to the school.
Stay inside
. They say the cloud's heading our way, but we
should have time to get you home and seal the doors. Don't hang up – I'll let you know when I'm
there."

"Cloud?" Madeleine blinked. "What are
you talking about?"

A familiar, exasperated sigh. "Always in your own world. Look, they think it's some kind of bio-weapon. A cloud of dust, coming from a black tower in
Hyde Park. It's happening all over the
world – black towers and dust. They're
saying it's aliens or – oh, what does it matter? Just stay where you are until I get
there. Are you closer to the Strickland
or Walpole Street entrance?"

The glow of Madeleine's phone lit up glittering swirls in the
powder still settling after her fall. Her throat itched, and she wanted nothing more than to be saved. And her mother was out trying to do exactly
that, driving to school instead of home keeping herself safe. Riding to the rescue.

"I'm at the Gallery, Mum."

The background noise of the call changed abruptly, and then
her mother's voice came clearer, no longer on the hands-free set. "You're where?"

"The Art Gallery of New South Wales," Madeleine
said, making the lie resigned, apologetic, with no hint of dark and bruises, of
broken things and dust. "I was
waiting here till Tyler's plane got in."

"You..." The
word trailed away on a small shaking note, as unlike Victoria Cost as it was possible
to be.

"I'm probably safer than you," Madeleine said, to
fill the silence, to hear something other than that strangled word. Her eyes stung and she had to swallow, to
work to make her voice sound casual, a little guilty, a touch disbelieving, as if
she couldn't credit the idea of black towers or bio-weapon attacks. "I'm in the Asian art section – it
doesn't even have windows. Are the
animals okay?"

"That damn painting," Madeleine's mother said. "You – Madeleine, why do you
always..."

"Is Dad home?"

"He's on his way." Her mother's voice was regaining its usual brisk pace. "You stay where you are.
Don't
go to have a look outside. Find the door to that section and shut
it. Don't worry about what the Gallery
staff say. Stay as far away from outside
doors and windows as possible, for as long as you can. Even when the air seems clear, use something
to cover your mouth and nose. The roads
are going insane, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get in to where you are,
but I'll call you back when there's news and you can head to Tyler's. You've still got that pass-key?"

"Yes, Mum." The familiar reeling off of instructions helped Madeleine conjure a
shadow of a smile, made it possible to respond with the right note of weary
patience.

"Good. I'll call
you when it sounds like it's safer for you to head to Tyler's. Or if it looks like you should try to spend
the night there. Don't let anyone try to
make you leave before it's clear."

"I won't. Mum..."

But her mother had hung up. Madeleine laughed, then coughed, and gingerly levered herself into a
sitting position. Her back and head did
not love her, but her mother did, even if they'd had a lot of trouble talking
to each other the last few years. Now
all she had to do was overcome a little matter of collapsed exits, and get
herself down to Tyler's.

And then? She could
pretend to her mother all she liked, but whatever the dust did, Madeleine was
surely going to find out. She must have
exceeded any minimum dose a thousand times over. Breathed it, swallowed it, had it in her
eyes, ground it into her skin.

But that only made her want a bath, to clean herself off, to
not be this filthy, fumbling, near-blind creature. "If you want B, finish A," her
goal-oriented mother was always saying, and just now that was advice Madeleine
was willing to take. Time to get out.

"But first check for other people," Madeleine
reminded herself, and sighed.

Lifting her phone, she used it again as a torch, surveying a
dim landscape of severed support pillars, broken stairs, and deceptively soft
mounds below a wall of stars. Her train
had departed as she'd walked up the stairs, and both platforms – what remained
of them short of the wall of stars – stood empty. In the middle of the day the station had been
far from busy, but there'd been a few people about. She could start with the small control rooms
where the station staff retreated after signalling trains to depart, and the
elevator–

No, not the elevator. Nothing could be alive in that compressed wedge of glass and metal.

The platform control rooms were double-entrance boxes, not
much larger than the elevator. Madeleine
headed left, focusing on the nearest doorway: a dark, empty square. A phone began to ring as she approached, and
Madeleine edged into the room to a jaunty proclamation of
I'm Too Sexy
. A man lay near-buried in the dust, sprawled
face-down across the threshold of the far doorway. Madeleine couldn't see any blood, any obvious
injury, but the layer of dust didn't seem disturbed by any rise or fall of chest.

As the phone switched to screaming about messages, she made
herself touch his shoulder, shake him, press her fingers to his throat, but
chose not to turn him over, to discover what had left him so still. Instead, she moved to the edge of the
platform, raising her phone to peer up at the shadowy curve above and the
darkness which swallowed the track in either direction.

"Anyone there?" Madeleine called. "Hell–" A new spasm of coughing ripped through her,
reviving the pounding in her head. It
was impossible not to kick up fresh clouds of dust as she waded through it, and
inhaling sharply had been a definite mistake.

If anyone was going to call for help, they would have done so
already. All she could hear was falling
water. Best to be methodical.

Reluctant to go near the starry wall again, Madeleine merely
peered along the shortened platform, then turned to begin picking her way in
the other direction. Almost immediately
a rounded shape turned under her foot and she nearly went down, dropping her
phone into a drift which glowed and sparkled unexpectedly.

"Welcome to the Glitter Mines," Madeleine muttered,
digging to retrieve her phone and then investigate what she'd stood on. A scatter of soft drinks, escapees from a
tumbled vending machine. That was
serendipity, and Madeleine immediately picked up the nearest bottle and twisted
the cap. The contents erupted into her
face, but even a sticky orange bath was better than dust on dust, and she
gulped down the remainder, till her throat no longer felt coated. Discarding the bottle, she wiped her phone,
then tucked a few spare drinks into her backpack.

Moving more cautiously, she decided to follow the very edge
of the platform, since little of the rubble had reached the track itself, and
the curved arch above it was still intact. The platform extended further than the central connecting section, and
she walked all the way down to the end and peered along the track as it
disappeared into the tunnel to Circular Quay.

No visible damage, and far less dust. The twin overhead lines which powered Sydney
trains seemed intact, though she supposed they must be severed by the starry
wall. It would be easy for her to climb
down and walk out, but she still had a lot of area to check.

About to turn away, Madeleine caught sight of a depression in
the dust and, disbelieving, angled her phone for a better look. Footprints. Barely visible, since another layer of pale powder had settled on top, but
definitely footprints. Three, maybe four
people, had climbed down to the tracks here.

She wasn't angry at being left. People were like that. And it released her from further searching.

The drop to the track was nearly as tall as Madeleine, but it
wasn't difficult to lower herself off the edge to the chunky gravel which
surrounded the rails. Then she hesitated
at the mouth of the tunnel, trying to see more than a few feet along the track
before turning to stare back at distant pinpricks, remembering the feel of
velvet beneath her fingertips, and then the jolt. Her hands weren't damaged.

"Focus." Now
was the time for getting out, not speculating.

Madeleine began to walk, holding her phone up high in case of
something more unexpected than dust. The
area between the rails was easy to walk on, with only stray lumps of clinker to
look out for, and she followed the gentle curve until the only sign of dust
were sprinkles which may have come from those who'd gone before her. Stopping to study a dusty print, she
suddenly found her coating of grime intolerable.

Shedding her backpack, Madeleine pulled loose the wooden pin
she used to hold her crinkle-curling brown hair in a knot at the nape of her
neck, and ran her fingers through it over and over, showering an enormous
amount of dust onto the rails. She was
wearing a strappy sun dress, chosen because of Tyler, and not something she'd
ordinarily wear while painting. Shaking
and patting it with her hands added to the cloud around her, and she moved a
few metres further before trying to beat her backpack clean.

It was impossible to get it all off, but she did manage to
reduce her coating to a light powder, and cracked another bottle of soft drink
to sip as she walked, fighting off the persistent itch in her throat. The clinker crunched beneath her feet, and
occasionally she heard sounds which made her pause, poised to run, telling
herself it was only rats, and far from reassured by that since she
hated
rats.

Aliens or rats, whatever it was stayed away, and eventually a
point of light appeared ahead and the tunnel began to lighten. Soon Madeleine didn't need her phone to find
her way, and she picked up her pace even as she noticed a fine layer of powder
covering the track and clinging to the walls. Circular Quay was not an underground station, and a thin coating of dust
had settled over it, including on the train – a double-decker
Tangara
type, big and blocky – which sat on the track at
the station platform. Fortunately it was
not right up against the tunnel exit: first came a short section of track like
a bridge, with a walkway along the side. Madeleine stepped up on this, and immediately looked out to what should
be a sweeping view to the Sydney Harbour Bridge across the ferry terminals.

The only trace of the Bridge was a dim grey line. Years ago a great storm of red dust had
picked up in Australia's desert heart and swept across New South Wales all the
way to Sydney, blanketing the city in a fiery haze. Madeleine had missed it, had woken only to a
family car which needed a good wash, but she'd seen pictures of the Bridge
hidden almost as completely as this. When her mother had told her that a tower in Hyde Park had let out a
cloud of dust, she'd imagined a billow of smoke building to a cumulonimbus,
something with edges. Not an entire
desert's worth of haze, to hide all landmarks and coat every surface white.

In the muted sunlight she noticed a faint purple tint to the
cloud, and the whole thing sparkled, brighter motes catching the eye as they
drifted. An alien attack which came in
shades of lavender. Beneath this pastel
blanket lay a city hushed, unmoving. Usually there were buskers playing down in front of the ferry terminals,
their music threading through the chunk and clatter of trains and the rush of
cars from the Cahill Expressway above. Today Madeleine could hear only a hum from the
Tangara
sitting at the platform, and maybe one or two cars creeping at a snail's pace
along the road overhead.

Slipping around the metal gate which divided the walkway from
the platform, Madeleine headed for the escalators to ground level, glancing at
the train's lower row of windows as she moved. Through the film of dust she met the eyes of a half-dozen people staring
up at her.