A Map for Stars We Haven’t Yet Marked

Chloe N. Clark

When I was maybe five or six, my mother let me get lost in the woods. She took me on a hike and walked ahead of me. Her legs were so much longer, her stride more determined, and I was already the type to stop every few feet to look at a tree, watch a squirrel creeping through dead leaves, find any small distraction. It must not have taken long for me to lose sight of her. But I didn’t panic, not at first, because I knew that parents came back. That’s what they did.

But my mother didn’t. I began to follow the path, imagining I’d see her around the next corner, but she never appeared. I started to get scared, to feel the itch I got at the nape of my neck whenever I woke up after a nightmare. I yelled for my mom. No response. I kept yelling. No response.

I ran between the trees, forgetting the path completely. At some point, exhausted, I sat down at the base of the nearest, biggest tree, played my fingers into the moss on the ground. It was so soft, and so I rested my head on it. The smell of the earth overtook me. The feeling of the tree, alive and against my skin, felt safe.

Eventually, though I don’t know how long this took, my mother returned to get me. Years later, she told me that she wanted me to know how to get lost, how to give in to fear. She said, one day, Talia, you’ll be glad you know what fear is.

I’m lost and I can’t get out.

What?

Eredon Station had abruptly stopped outgoing transmissions on a Sunday. Everyone thought it was likely a computer malfunction and so no one panicked. By day seven, the longest period we’d gone without contact, a mission was planned. A ship would leave Paragon Station and head to Eredon with the goal of gathering information and executing a rescue mission if necessary. The ship never returned, contact was lost moments after it reached Eredon.

Another mission was sent. A single pod, meant to record the station, and then return. The mission guidelines were strict: no one from the pod was to board Eredon. The pod returned, but their footage showed nothing. Eredon looked functioning. No sign of damage. But when the pod hailed them, there was still no contact.

So a final rescue mission was planned. I wasn’t supposed to be on it originally. But when they found out I was coming to Paragon for a six month stint, I was added to the mission roster. They hadn’t planned on including a Crisis Officer but my showing up made them think it was kismet or something close to that.

There were seven of us at the beginning. We were on a BNS1-900.

The week before I left for Paragon, my husband and I couldn’t stop touching one another. In the kitchen, as I was at the counter chopping vegetables, Kieran would come up behind me and put his arms around my waist, gently pressing his body into mine. I’d climb into the shower with him in the mornings, before work. At night, we’d kiss until our mouths ached, our bodies trembling in anticipation.

The night before, he held me and whispered into my ear, “you don’t have to go.”

And I wanted to tell him that I’d stay, that I wouldn’t go into the stars again, but instead I held my mouth closed, pretended I was asleep.

I’m lost and I can’t find a way out.

The day before we reached the Eredon, everyone ate together. We tossed around different ideas about what was going on. Each of us knew pieces of what the Eredon station was—bits of gossip picked up from former crewmates, a girlfriend, someone’s cousin. The urban legends of space had a way of carrying themselves through ships.

“I heard they were doing something secret,” Virginie said. She always spoke abruptly, every sentence distinct from the last as if she were reading poetry very seriously in front of a large crowd. “Like with something from another planet. Studies.”

“Yeah, plants.” Kesi said. He was the one I knew best of the crew and could call my friend, though we were more like close acquaintances—two people who enjoyed each other’s company while having nothing but our jobs in common. We’d trained together years before. He’d been at my wedding, wearing a crimson suit and charming everyone who spoke to him. “I heard from a guy who did a research stint there. They have all these greenhouses in the station filled with plants from Earth in soil from other planets. Or something like that.”

“And how do you know that? If it is secret,” Virginie leaned forward in her seat.

Kesi shrugged. “People like to tell me things.”

And I knew that was true so I believed him. I had a memory of him sitting with a group of us in training, the way he so casually brought out everyone’s stories while never giving one of his own. I remembered him at my wedding leaning against a wall, watching me, and so I’d gone up to talk to him. He’d asked if I was happy to be getting married and I’d said yes, of course. He had looked serious for a moment and asked me why.

“Plants? Why build a whole station just for plants?” Mel, our medic, asked and it snapped me out of remembering how I’d answered Kesi.

I thought of a station filled with plants—of the lush heat of it. I’d once gone to a botanical garden with Kieran and he’d pointed out each plant with a kind of awe I’d never been able to find for anything but him. As he walked from plant to plant, in the overheated dome, the sun pouring through the glass windows, I’d watch a bead of sweat slip down his neck, resting for a moment on his clavicle, before sliding under his shirt. I’d wanted to trace the line with my lips, even then, in public, surrounded by people laughing and talking, each so happy to be surrounded by all that blossoming life.

Eredon was in front of us, a hulking mass. But I knew it only looked so ominous because of what I had heard about it. Everything looks ominous when you’re already telling a ghost story about it in your head.

“What’s that?” Mel asked. She pointed at the hull of the station. There was a darkness inking its way across the spot she had pointed at. It looked so familiar.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was vines,” Kesi said from behind my shoulder. He leaned forward to look better. “Dark vines.”

And they did. I remembered vines wrapping around trees in the woods. Symbiotic or parasitic, I couldn’t remember what the relationship was.

Marlon, our communications officer, walked up to us. “We’ve hailed them again but no response. Not that we were expecting a response. Captain says we’ll be lining up to dock in fifteen.”

As a Crisis Officer, I’d be on the team leaving the ship to board initially. I’d gone through training, so many simulations of emergencies and disasters, but never the real thing. The closest I’d known to crisis was the accident when I was a teen. My mother’s hands twisting the wheel of the car so sharply. My sister screaming.

I’m lost and I’m scared.

I’d never been on a quiet station before. There was always that thrum of activity, of movement, even if it was just the electronics system. Eredon was completely silent. Walking inside, fully suited, we tested the oxygen levels first. Safe. Good. Removing helmets, I heard the absence fully.

“Jesus,” Mel whispered and it sounded so loud, like someone screaming in a church filled with bodies in prayer. She lowered her voice even more, “it’s so damn quiet.”

I pressed my hand against the wall, expecting to feel the thrum of machinery, wires, systems, vibrating soft under my palm. But there was nothing. “I think systems must be down. But then, how is it staying in place?”

“There must be something, some kind of backup. Your hand can’t tell everything, Talia,” Marlon said. I gave him a look, the kind of sharp glance I’d spent a lifetime giving to people. But he was already walking away. I wished the captain had boarded instead of him. The captain rarely said much, just nodded when she thought we had said something smart or done something well. It was a style I appreciated. But she’d stayed back with the ship and the pilot. A protocol that was known by all and observed by almost no one.

“Talia, Mel, we’ll take this side. Marlon and Virginie that side,” Kesi said. He had motioned down the pathway to the right for us. Mel and I both glanced toward Marlon, expecting him to chide Kesi for making the call, but he nodded agreeably.

As we walked further into the station, Kesi said, “I can’t stand that guy, you know?”

“He’s just old school,” Mel said. “Have you worked with many crews, Talia?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“You always been a Crisis Officer? Or did you start in Auratics?” Mel asked. She didn’t call it by its real name, the technical one, but no one did. People didn’t even understand that there was a mockery in the term, as if we were reading the aura of the ships instead of just understanding all of the senses of them. An Auratic is trained, but no one can be trained to be one, was the saying one of my teachers had used at one of our first lectures. You had to have an inherent ability to use your senses in a way no one else did.

“Yeah, I was trained there. Not much call for it. People don’t like relying on it, really.” I glanced at Kesi. He’d never acted as an Auratic, though he’d been in my training class. He didn’t like the way it made people notice him, he’d said. He liked to blend in, become part of a crew without the weight of strangeness that Auratics held.

“I think it’s cool,” Mel said.

I didn’t think of how to respond. How to say something that seemed light, easy, when I was thinking about how it felt to know something was going to go wrong before it did. The shift in my mother’s face. The arc of sunlight as it hit my eyes.

But I didn’t need to respond. Our attention went elsewhere. There were plants growing in the hallway, as we took the first corner. All kinds of plants. The ground was dense with moss. I stepped on it, unwilling to trust my eyes, and the soft squish beneath my foot, like stepping on a thin pillow, sent a shudder up my skin.

Vines snaked along the walls, flowers burst out of vents in furious blooms.

“This can’t be right,” Mel said. She touched a vine, gripped her hand around it, and pulled. “It feels so fucking real.”

Kesi bent next to a patch of flowers, purple petaled and small, violets. Kieran would point them out when we were hiking. His mother used to make a cough syrup out of them. I’d like thinking about that, imagining the sweetness of a child, a mother feeding him spoonful of syrup for every sore throat.

Kesi took a deep breath in. I saw the way his body stilled, as he breathed in, his training kicking in. “They’re real.”

We walked forward into the foliage.

I’m lost. Find me. Find me.

I met Kieran on a hike. I used to go into the woods and get as lost as I could and then I’d find my way back out. I didn’t ever want to get lost again and not do anything. My mother would have been proud. She would have said, you didn’t let the fear win, Talia. And I didn’t. I’d seen what letting in the fear could do.

It was a woods I’d never been in. And the day was hot. I hadn’t brought enough water or food and I got more lost than I’d expected. I felt a panic under my skin. That itch. I tried to tap into my training, listen to my surroundings, find the way the light hit the trees. But the itch was blocking my thoughts.

And then Kieran had stepped into view. “You okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah, just getting my bearings.”

He walked up to me, but slow, as if to show me that he meant no harm. He stopped a few feet away. “I have water?”

And I’d taken some, said thank you. He’d started telling me a story about the forest, some legend about it from when he was a kid. And by the time the story was finished, the itch was gone, and I could hear the way out.

We walked together and I offered to buy him dinner once we were out of the woods.

“What for?”

“For helping me get out,” I said.

He smiled. “I didn’t. You’d have found your way out; I just sped things up.”

Later, once we were in love, once he knew my secrets, when we would get into bed, he’d let me press my palm against his chest. Every night. And for a minute we’d sit in silence as I felt his heart beating, listened to his breathing, felt the way his body was so alive and intact. It was the only way I could fall asleep. When he had to go on trips for work, he’d call me every night, press the speaker to his chest so I could hear his heart.

Deeper and deeper into the station we moved, the plants growing more dense Kesi had a map of the station pulled up on his wristvid.

“That should be the main research bay door coming up on our left. That might be the best place to look.”

“Why can’t we just go back?” Mel asked. “We see no one’s here. We know something’s so wrong that my brain literally hurts thinking about it. Let’s go back.”

“What if there are people who need help?” Kesi asked.

Mel shook her head. Her years as a medic overrode her instinct to flee. “Just the research bay. That’s it. Then we go.”

We missed the door twice. On the third try, Kesi found the slightest crack in the wall.

“Virginie. Marlon. Come in.” Kesi said into the comms. But there was no response. Just a buzz of electronics losing signal. “I guess we just go in.”

It took all three of us to get the door open, pulling against the plant life. Inside the research bay was a forest.

The wide open space was filled with trees, fully grown and covered in vines and hanging mosses. The ground was lush with life.

“Not possible,” Mel breathed.

She turned to go back out, as if leaving and re-entering might change what she was seeing. But there was a single sharp scream from within the trees.

“Virginie?” Kesi said. I couldn’t tell if it was disbelief or if he was asking me to confirm that it sounded like her voice. It had.

Another scream, longer. Something close to anguish.

Kesi took off into the trees. Mel and I waited a second before following him in. He disappeared behind a tree and I couldn’t help thinking that it was as if the forest was swallowing him up.

My mother called her version of “the itch” her “trembling.” She said it crawled up under her skin and filled her head with voices and she couldn’t stop it until she felt something real. I’d seen the scars along her skin. She said she was always scared of it, and that I shouldn’t be scared of it. Control it, she said. You have to learn to do that.

When she’d found me in the woods, tucked into the tree base, she’d said, “you look so calm. How did you do that?”

I was five. I didn’t know how to answer her. I didn’t know how to explain how I’d felt once I’d pressed against the tree, how everything living that was nearby had pulsed with gentle signposts of how to get out, how I could hear the birds chirp, and see the sun lighting up the air, and smell the road not so far away. How I knew that if I just rested, I’d be able to find my way out. So I’d just said, “the trees.”

And my mother had shook her head, a sadness in her face I’d never be able to not see. She’d taken my hand and we’d walked back to the car in silence.

In the forest in the station, sounds weren’t what they should have been. I realized that I’d never been in a woods where I couldn’t hear animals, insects, the sound of water or wind. There was only silence.

“Kesi!” Mel yelled. Every time she did it, her voice got higher and more strained from her throat constricting with panic.

And then we found Kesi. He was sitting on the ground, staring at the trees. I saw the rise and fall of his back with each breath. I sat down next to him. Mel stayed upright, bobbing from foot to foot.

“Kes?” I said, reaching out to gently touch his back.

“Don’t move,” he said. He said it so quiet, through gritted teeth and clenched jaw, trying to make the least amount of movement.

“Mel. Sit down!” I said.

It happened in a second, she looked at me as I spoke, still bobbing on her feet, and then she was being yanked away from us. A vine twisting up her leg. She screamed and even after I couldn’t see her anymore, behind the trees, into the darkest, she stayed screaming. After a point, I realized she was only still screaming in my head.

“Kes,” I whispered. “How do we get out?”

“We can’t,” he said.

I risked a slow turning glance around. I already couldn’t tell which side of the trees we’d come in from when we spotted Kesi.

“We will,” I said. As I spoke, I felt a movement near my foot. A patch of moss was creeping over my boot. I looked at Kesi’s feet and saw that his boots were already covered. In the back of my head, I felt the stir of fear. The itch of it at the base of my skull. I breathed in. Breathed out.

I’m lost. I’m lost and I’m scared. I remembered saying it into the phone. After the crash. The tumbling down the side of the hill. Blood dripping down my face, getting in my eyes.

Find me. Find me. I pleaded with the operator on the other line. She kept assuring me help was on its way. But no one came. And no one came.

We can’t pinpoint where you are. You need to get somewhere with a stronger signal. Can you do that?

And so I’d climbed, climbed the rocks, climbed towards where I thought the road might once have been. My vision was just bluzz and blood. So I relied on every other sense to lead me closer to somewhere that they could find.

I’ll help you find me. I said. And I did.

Why are you happy to be getting married, Kesi had asked me, on my wedding day. And I’d looked over at Kieran, saw him talking to a friend of ours. The way when he told a joke, he’d always start laughing too when people enjoyed it, unable to contain his delight at their delight.

“I know I have something to find my way back to,” I said.

Palm. Heartbeat. Find me. Blood. Trees. Find me. Palm. Heartbeat. Blood. Trees. Find me. Listen.

“The door,” I said. We were able to open it. It meant something in the station was still working. Otherwise a barrier would have completely locked it for safety reasons. That meant if I could find the vibration of that system, I could get us back to the door. I dug my fingers into the moss, shoving my hand under, under, feeling my fingernail crack, until I hit the metal of the station floor. I pressed my palm flat and I listened with everything I had.

“Door?” Kesi said, but he wasn’t really hearing me or taking it in.

I stilled my body. I thought of heartbeats. Of light. Of the smell of somewhere near. My body listened. And then the faintest thrum. I knew the direction it pointed me in.

“Follow me,” I said. “We have to get up slowly, quiet. And then we have to run. You have to follow me, as fast as you’ve ever gone.”

I slowly rose up, each movement incremental. I waited for Kesi. The moss was up to his thighs. He stood slowly, gently pulling it from himself as he did.

I whispered, “one, two, go.”

And we ran in the direction I’d felt. I ran so fast that I forgot where I was. It was just me and the woods and no station at all. When I saw the door, it took a split second for my brain to click into place, to remember. I grabbed Kesi’s arm and we leapt through.

The hallway was even more filled but we knew where to go. We kept running. Running until we reached the docking bay. Until we were back on board our own ship. I knew even in my sleep, I might keep running.

That night, heading back to Paragon, as three instead of seven—the captain believing our story so quickly and completely that I knew she must have had some kind of briefing about Eredon, some knowledge beyond what we’d been told—Kesi came up to my bed.

“It let us go,” he said.

I nodded. I’d seen it too, how when we were running, the vines had begun to follow us and then had stopped. They’d curled in on themselves as if being wound back up. We’d kept running, but it had already decided our fate.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t think this is a secret we get to know,” I said. And we left it at that.

I got early leave. Retirement if I wanted it, too, with honors. I just wanted to be on land, to be under the stars, to be with my husband.

Kieran didn’t ask me what happened. He knew I’d tell him at some point, that I’d let my secrets spill out of me and into him.

In bed, the first night, before I could reach my palm to his chest, he already had his on mine. The warmth of his skin against mine. I pressed my palm against his chest. In silence, we felt each other’s heartbeats. Every beat a marker leading me out of the dark.

About the writer

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Escaping the Body, and more. Her forthcoming story collection, Patterns of air it, will be published by Baobob Press in 2023. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes