Chapter 15 The Eventual Collapse

The second pattern resolved on a Tuesday evening, three weeks after the meteor shower, and it was different from the first in ways that neither Elias nor Mira had anticipated. The first pattern had been a confession, a statement of feeling written in the language of stars, and it had been enough. The second pattern was a warning, a prediction of something that was yet to come, and it was not something either of them wanted to face. What the chart showed, once Mira coaxed it into a projection, was two long trails of starlight bending away from each other like the arms of a compass drawing an arc too wide to finish. There was no violence in it. That was the unsettling part. Endings in the movies came with music and fire; this came with the calm of geometry, lines separating at their own pace, on a schedule written in light-years and indifferent to anyone's plans. Elias watched the trails separate and understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that the stars were not threatening them. They were briefing them. "The pattern is about change," Mira said on the night it resolved, her voice quiet and steady, the voice of someone who was trying to be brave in the face of something terrifying. "It is about the end of something and the beginning of something else. It is about —" She stopped, and she looked at Elias, and he saw the fear in her eyes, the fear that she was trying so hard to hide. "It is about us," Elias said. "Is it?" She nodded. "It is about us leaving. About you going to college. About me going somewhere else. About the observatory closing. About everything ending." Elias felt a coldness spread through his chest, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the observatory and everything to do with the future, with the choices that were being offered to him, with the life that was being pulled apart at the seams. He had not thought about college. He had not thought about the future. He had been so focused on the present, on the stars, on Mira, that he had not allowed himself to consider what came next. But the stars had considered it. The stars had always considered it. And now they were telling him that the end was coming, and that he had to decide how to face it. He looked at Mira, at the fear and the hope and the love in her eyes, and he knew that he would not let her face it alone. Whatever came next, whatever challenges lay ahead, they would face them together, just as they had faced everything else together. "We will face it together," he said. Mira nodded, and tears spilled down her cheeks, but she was smiling, and Elias knew that she was smiling because she was afraid, and because she was hopeful, and because she knew, as he knew, that they were stronger together than they would ever be apart. For a while neither of them moved to leave. The chart glowed on the laptop, patient as tide; the heater ticked; outside, a car passed the school gates going too fast, its headlights sweeping the dome ceiling like a searchlight finding nothing. Then Mira wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, laughed once — a small, wet, genuinely annoyed sound — and turned the laptop back toward herself and started writing in the log as if her life depended on accurate record-keeping, which, she would have argued, it did. When she finished the entry she dated it, and beneath the date wrote a single word — pending — and boxed it twice, hard enough to bend the nib. The meteors continued to fall around them, streaks of light crossing the darkness, each one a tiny death, a tiny burning, a tiny transformation of matter and energy, and Elias thought about how beautiful it was, how every ending was also a beginning, how every fall was also a flight, how every star that died was also a star that was born. He thought about Mira, about the way she looked in the starlight, about the way her hand fit in his, about the way her heartbeat matched his, and he knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with data and everything to do with love, that he was exactly where he was meant to be. He did not say any of this aloud. Some thoughts were load-bearing, and speaking them felt like tapping a pillar to see whether it was real. But he held the idea for the rest of the night, through the cold and the counting, and it warmed him more efficiently than the thermos did. When the shower finally petered out near three, the roof was a wreckage of sleeping bags and drained thermoses. Elias carried the folding chairs down by himself while Mira totaled the official count — two hundred six meteors, plus one satellite somebody had wished on by mistake. At the landing he stopped her with the question he had been assembling since midnight. "If the second chart really is about endings," he said, "I want the timeline. Not the mood. A date." Her breath fogged while she thought it through. "Radiant drift scales with how fast the earth crosses the debris stream. Give me tonight's offset and tomorrow's, and I can bracket it. Weeks, not months." Weeks. He carried the word home past the shuttered pharmacy, past the corner streetlight laying down its one long shadow, and at breakfast he told his father he intended to file the early application for the state astronomy program, postmark deadline November first. His father set down the sports section, considered him across the eggs, and said, "Then take the good pen," sliding the fountain pen across the table the way a quartermaster issues gear for a long expedition.