An Accident of Stars Read Free

idea how she lived her life, which made the act of lying to them more chore than holiday. And yet she was glad to have visited, if only because it left her that much happier to return to her (dangerous, wonderful) reality. She’d kept in contact with Trishka through the dreamscape, however patchily – and now, at last, she was going back to help fix the mess she’d made. Those were the facts, but just at that moment, they didn’t stop her from feeling as if she’d slunk off with her tail between her legs.
    Guilt, after all, was the rightful province of people who’d had a hand in ruining whole countries, whether they’d meant it or not. Rationality didn’t enter into it. Her lips quirked in private irony: her son, were he privy to her thoughts, would doubtless see things differently. But then Louis had chosen a life stranger even than Gwen’s, and though she loved him dearly, she didn’t always understand him. Which was doubtless true of most parents, for all that she’d raised him in somewhat exceptional circumstances, even by the standards of the Many – or had she? Certainly Louis himself had seen nothing unusual in it, and if he harboured any resentment on that point, he’d never brought it up. Not for the first time, Gwen wondered if children, even when grown, weren’t inherently more complex than the multiverse, and decided, now as always, that some questions were better left unanswered.
    Like water flowing downstream, her thoughts turned from Louis towards the white girl – Saffron – and that parting look of gratitude on her face. Helping her in the moment had been easy, but as with so much else, Gwen hadn’t really changed anything. That awful boy would likely still continue to bother her, and the school’s apparent indifference to the problem would persist.
    I was still right to help .
    It was a small comfort, but against the looming weight of Leoden’s coup and Kena’s complexities, Gwen would take what victories she could find.
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    S ighing , Saffron put her head on her desk and stared sideways at the clock. Her last class of the day was Personal Development, Health and Physical Education, also known as PDHPE, also known as a complete and utter waste of time, partly because she’d be dropping it next year, but mostly because the kind of sex education deemed suitable for state school students was vastly less accurate, detailed or relevant than anything she could find on one of a half-dozen sex positive YouTube channels run by people who, unlike Mr Marinakis, could say penis without twitching.
    I need to find her, Saffron thought. I need to say – well, not thank you , because she’d already said that, but… something. She wanted to explain herself, or ask the woman’s advice, or maybe just spend five minutes in the company of an adult who might actually take her seriously. It was irrational and pointless and she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and when the last bell finally rang, she ended up walking towards the bus lines in a virtual fugue state.
    â€œSaff! Hey, wait up!”
    Saffron stopped and turned, smiling as her little sister, Ruby, came running over.“Didn’t you hear me?” Ruby asked, glaring. “I had to call you, like, five times!”
    â€œWell, I’m hearing you now. What’s up?”
    They started walking together, Ruby launching straight into a lengthy description of her day. But as much as Saffron usually enjoyed her sister’s acid observations about high school life, she couldn’t quite focus; she was only half-listening, still scanning the school for the mystery teacher.
    â€œâ€¦so I told her, look, this isn’t a Monty Python sketch, there aren’t any strange women lurking in the nature strip, and she said–”
    â€œWhat?” said Saffron, suddenly jerking back to the moment. She stopped, a hand on Ruby’s arm. “What about