And All the Stars

And All the Stars
© 2012
Andrea K Höst
. All rights reserved.

www.andreakhost.com
Cover design using stock art:
Andrea K Hösth
Promotional Edition
Published by
Andrea K Hösth

All characters in this publication
are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

Description

Come for the apocalypse.
Stay for cupcakes.
Die for love.

Madeleine Cost is working to become the youngest person ever to win the
Archibald Prize for portraiture. Her elusive cousin Tyler is the perfect
subject: androgynous, beautiful, and famous. All she needs to do is pin him
down for the sittings.
None of her plans factored in the Spires: featureless, impossible, spearing
into the hearts of cities across the world – and spraying clouds of sparkling
dust into the wind.
Is it an alien invasion? Germ warfare? They are questions everyone on Earth
would like answered, but Madeleine has a more immediate problem. At Ground Zero
of the Sydney Spire, beneath the collapsed ruin of St James Station, she must
make it to the surface before she can hope to find out if the world is ending.

I BLAME THIS BOOK ON
FLANNERY AND WENDY DARLING
and thank them for it.

Additional thanks to Dr Jennifer Elliman, Dr Chris
Fellows,
Julie Dillon,
Lexie
Cenni
,
and
Estara
Swanberg
.

Author's Note

Spelling is Australian English.

Madeleine Cost's world was a tight, close space, a triangular
tube tilted so her head lay lower than her feet. Light reflected off metal, not enough to give
any detail, and there was barely room to squeeze one hand past the slick
surface, to explore face and skull and find powdery dust and a throbbing
lump. Dull pain also marked upper
shoulder, hip, thigh. She felt dusty all
over, grimed with it, except her lower half, which was wet. Free-flowing liquid drained past her head.

She could smell blood.

Ticket barrier. Those
were the rectangles of metal above and beside her. Madeleine could remember reaching for her
returned ticket as the red gates snapped back and then – then a blank space
between there and here. Thursday
lunchtime and she'd been at St James Station, planning to walk down to
Woolloomooloo to wait for Tyler, just off the plane and sure to be strained and
tired and all the more interesting for it.

The noise the water made suggested a long fall before it hit somewhere
past her feet, close enough to spatter her ankles before draining past her. The ticket barriers were a generous double
flight of stairs above the platforms, or had been. How far above them was she now? Had it been a bomb? Gas explosion? She could smell smoke, but it wasn't
overwhelming. The blood was
stronger. Smoke and blood and falling
water, and how far was it falling? How
big was the drop, and how–

"Hello?" Madeleine called, just a croak of a voice,
anything to shut off that line of thought. The effort made her cough.

There wasn't room enough to shift to hands and knees. She could barely squirm onto her stomach, the
small pack she wore catching on the withdrawn gates. Stretching one arm forward, she followed the
path of the water down, and found an edge. But she had no way to measure the size of any gap beyond. Reaching back with one sandalled foot, she
explored damp channels in powder, and grainy concrete. No edge. Not willing to just lie there, she tucked her elbows in close and
wriggled back an inch.

The ground shifted.

Freezing, Madeleine waited for the plunge, but nothing
followed except a faint rocking motion. She – the slab of concrete with its burden of ticket barriers and girl –
was balanced on a downward slope. Another shift of position and she could send the whole thing plunging,
and would fall and fall, and then the blood would be hers.

Eyes squeezed shut, Madeleine tried to calm herself
down. She'd always thought herself a
composed sort of person, but black panic clawed, demanding an urgent response –
screaming, running, leaping – however impossible that might be. It was only the itching in her throat,
setting her coughing again, which pulled her back.

Could she drink the thin flow of water running past her? It didn't smell – not stronger than the blood
and smoke, at any rate. The tumbling
splash was so loud, a solid belt as it hit the concrete near her feet. St James Station was underneath Hyde Park,
the ticket barrier level just a few metres below grass and trees. The strength of the water's impact suggested
a drop to the platform level.

Up. Down. Stay. Three choices which felt like none in the blood-scented dark.

Her phone, tucked in the outer pocket of her backpack, let
out the opening notes of her favourite song. Prone, elbows tucked in, hands beneath her chin, she couldn't just reach
back. By the time she'd scrunched herself into the tiny extra space on the
tilted border of her world, and worked her opposite arm back, the smoky voice
had eased into silence. She still
scrabbled for the pack's zip, ignoring the burning protest of her bruised
shoulder and side, and caught the heavy rectangle between two reaching fingers.

As Madeleine brought her arm painfully forward, the clear
white light from the phone conjured hazy reflections of girl in the
silver-metal sides of the two ticket barriers. These faded as she turned the makeshift torch forward to reveal
whiteness and a crosshatching of dark lines. Bars.

Madeleine stared, confused, until she recognised the
green-painted railing which edged the upper level and the stairs to the
platform. They were warped and twisted,
but still looked thoroughly solid, forming another wall to the cage capping the
slab of concrete. There was no way
forward.

It was difficult to see beyond the railing, but the white
resolved itself into dust, pale mounds of it, through which she could glimpse a
third silver rectangle, this one twisted and torn, the tickets it had swallowed
spewing from its innards across dust and chunks of concrete.

Her raft lay on one of the flights of stairs, which did not
make sense. St James Station had only
two lines. The tracks sat parallel,
perhaps fifty metres apart, their platforms joined by a broad expanse of
concrete full of pillars which held up the ticket barrier area. The ticket barriers sat over this central
area, while the stairs were to either side of it, close to the tracks. To be on the stairs she and her metal cocoon
would have had to fall sideways.

Whatever the case, at least she was near the bottom, even if
she would still need to risk moving backward to get out.

But before that… Turning her phone around, Madeleine found a missed call from her
mother. Her parents thought she was at
school, and had no idea she was skipping to start work on the portrait of
Tyler. There'd been no point embarking
on Round Five Thousand of the Grades v Art argument when Tyler's mild
willingness to oblige a cousin didn't extend to altering his schedule in any
way, and the cut-off date for the 2016 Archibald was in less than a week.

The phone's clock told her it was nearly one pm – maybe
fifteen minutes since she'd arrived at St James – and the signal was strong,
but she couldn't get through to her parents. It wasn't till she called triple zero that she had any kind of response,
and that was a canned message which boiled down to "Everyone is calling
emergency".

Trying to reach her voicemail messages didn't work, so she
gave up and texted: "Can't get through – will talk later".

Without knowing more about what happened, she couldn't be
sure whether it was more sensible to wait for rescue, or try to make her own
way. Shifting about could trigger a
slide or collapse.

Out in the dark someone else's phone rang – one of those joke
ring tones, growing louder until the phone was shrieking. No-one picked up. How many people were in the station, lying in
the dusty dark? Calling out brought no
response, but the ringing told her there must be someone.

Tucking her phone into her bra, Madeleine explored behind her
again, cautious toes still finding only dust turning to mud, and wet
concrete. An inch back, and
nothing. Another inch, and the ground
shifted as it had before, but this time Madeleine didn't freeze against the
see-saw's tilt, and almost immediately it settled. The settling didn't surprise her – resting on
rubble on a stairway, her raft was hardly going to tip upright – but the
sensation of it was strange, not as firmly solid as she would expect from
concrete stairs.

Feeling a sudden urgency, she wriggled several inches, her
feet pelted by liquid as she moved closer to the falling water. And then her questing toes found the far
border of her raft, another rough edge. She slowed down, backing inch by inch, until she was half out of her
metal tube, part-lying and part-kneeling, then reached with her foot hoping to
find the straight edge of a step, or at least firmly packed rubble.

Tickling softness.

She jerked her foot away, gasping and then coughing. Brief and strange as that contact was, she'd
recognised instantly what her foot had touched. Hair.

It was a person, and all around her was the scent of their
blood, and whoever it was had not moved, or spoken, or reacted at all to
Madeleine's foot in their face. She and
her raft were on top of someone's body.

The chance that this was not so, that she was crushing
someone too badly injured to react, made it impossible for Madeleine to stay,
to quiver or quibble or spend one moment longer where she was. She stretched out her other leg, trying to
reach as far as possible, and this time met cloth, and a warm and yielding
wetness, and though this left Madeleine in no doubt that the person beneath her
was not alive, it gave her even less reason to slow down, as her foot found
something solid beyond and she thrust herself up and back, with a temporary
agility worthy of a gymnast, onto something which was step and only step, with
a railing she could clutch while she sobbed and gulped to keep down the
scalding liquid which rose in her throat.

Her foot, the whole lower part of her leg, was sticky-wet,
and when she could move at all the first thing she did was hold it out, back
towards her raft, and the water which fell so steadily. She wanted to stand in the narrow stream, to
be certain nothing remained, and to be free of her thick coating of dust. But she couldn't bring herself to cross over
the crushed, mangled thing lying invisible in the dark, any more than she could
turn her phone on it and capture a sight to burn her mind.

Still clutching her railing, Madeleine looked about for the
source of light which made the darkness not quite complete. There were no sturdy exit signs or miraculously
enduring fluorescents: instead a field, a wall, of luminous motes, shining and
glittering.

It made her dizzy, for it was the sky, the sky at night with
muted stars and yet it was here and to her right, not above, despite the
direction gravity proclaimed to be down.

These wrong-way stars did not produce nearly enough
illumination to truly see through the thin mist of settling dust, but she could
make out shapes, black against coal grey. The ticket barriers. The
railing. The stair which had been severed
above the wide mid-flight step where she stood.

The glimmer was not enough to reveal any details of the
platform below, so Madeleine had to resort to her phone, to gauge the
eight-foot drop and then decide to work her way along the outside of the railing,
keeping her head turned away from what lay upon the stair. She looked for the reflective strip which
lined the edge of the platform instead, but couldn't make it out through the
powdery white mounded everywhere.

The climb down was relatively easy, the severed railing firm
despite the absence of the upper half of the stair, and then she was on the
flat expanse of the platform, a treacherous landscape of concrete and
projecting rods of metal beneath concealing dust. Ridiculous amounts of it, some piles higher
than she stood, and even the gullies between those mountains were knee-deep.

Madeleine guessed the entire ticket level had fallen down,
but that did not explain what looked like an explosion in a chalk factory. Nor the stars. They drew her, a moth to the moon, her free
hand held over her mouth and nose to keep out the fine haze of floating
particles. Up close, unobscured, the
stars blazed in a wall of black: galaxies and nebulae and fiery novae,
stretching up and to either side of her in a faintly curving wall which
bisected the broad lower expanse of the station and disappeared through the
cracked and buckled cement at her feet.