Starlight by Cameron Phillips

Her bare feet hit the pavement with desperate force. When she begged me to help, her voice was faint but strong, scared but trusting. She clung to my back as we rode off on my hand-me-down Harley, and I could smell the sterile lab she’d escaped from, the lingering scent of the chemicals they’d injected her with to dull her brilliance.

In the months that followed, she divulged little about where she came from or who she was. I mostly didn’t mind, both out of respect for her privacy and because the mystery added to the allure of her—to the thrill of helping her.

“Why are you helping me?” she asked once, leaning against a gas pump at a station in some backwoods town, tapping absentmindedly at the price sign while I filled up my bike. We were constantly on the move. We had to be. She had a way of leaving an impression, whether she meant to or not.

“Because you asked me to,” I said with a shrug, and even without lifting my head I could tell she was giving me a look like she didn’t believe me. But I felt too embarrassed to admit that helping her was the first thing I’d done in my life that felt like it mattered—and I certainly couldn’t tell her I thought she was pretty.

I found out later that she thought the same of me. We had found a clearing far enough from any roads to stay for the night, and we lay huddled together in a tent in the dark. The faint glow she emitted just barely allowed us to see each other. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” she confessed, and I accepted the compliment despite the distinct possibility that I was the only woman she’d ever seen up close.

Slowly, we got to know each other more. There’s something deeply intimate about being on the run with someone. Even so, both of us still struggled with opening up about our pasts. Drips of each of our stories leaked out from time to time, mixing together and adding to the messy cocktail of us.

“When they cut me, I bleed starlight,” she admitted once, after months of living as fugitives, turning over to look at me with those moonlike eyes. The grass we lay in colored her white arms faintly green and dampened my shirt, turning my back clammy.

Sirens screamed from the road as I reached out to touch the constellations of her scars. She touched me back, beckoning my mind away from the sound of a man’s voice shouting, “Fan out! Find it!”

Her delicate fingers traced their way from my cheek… over my lips… down my neck… in between my breasts… down my stomach… ultimately landing in the left pocket of my tattered jacket. My heart raced. Her breath was hot against my face as she spoke into my ear, “I’ll wait for you here. Please come back for me,” barely loud enough to hear over the footsteps closing in around us.

She disentangled herself from my arms then and stood to face the men who had finally caught up to her. She unfolded the pocketknife she’d lifted from my jacket and darted forward like a comet, screaming and slashing with white hot fury.

Muscled arms and calloused hands wrapped around me, and I clawed, kicked, screamed, bit. My captor complained gruffly but did not yield, gripping me even tighter. As I watched the woman I loved fight for her life, my frustrated helplessness led to angry tears.

Through those tears I glimpsed a gun being raised.

“Don’t! We need it alive!” a voice barked.

Bang!

Too late.

The night sky rushed out of the wound in her chest, filling the empty blackness around us. I was blinded by a combination of her brightness and my grief. The overspray of her starlight splashed across my face, searing into my flesh. When I could see again, her body was gone, and a sharp pain in my own chest made me wonder if I’d been shot, too.

“Where’d it go?”

“You idiot! You shot it! It’s dead!”

“But the body… where’s the body?”

Rocks bit into my knees. At some point, I had dropped to the ground.

One of them jabbed a meaty thumb in my direction. “What do we do with her?”

“Leave her.”

“What if she talks?”

“Who would believe her?”

A month passed before I could bring myself to go back to that place—a month of sleeping alone, hating the world, and trying to process the unthinkable.

I stepped into the clearing—our clearing, bathed orange-gold in the sunset. My knees shook and my breath hitched. I had apparently been holding onto a stupid fantasy of seeing her waiting for me there, completely unharmed. I hadn’t even realized it until the moment I registered the empty clearing and felt something inside me wither.

My knees gave out and I let myself sink into the earth that remained soft and damp from a storm earlier that day. I sat in the dirt and sobbed, just like I had the night she…

I still couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“Don’t cry.”

My head snapped up fast enough to give me whiplash at the sound of a voice I knew so well. The stars that had spilled out of her that night rained from the sky, gathering into the shape of her. For a moment, she was merely an illuminated outline.

And then there she was.

 “I thought you were dead.”

 “Then why’d you come back?”

 “Because you asked me to.”

 “Thank you,” she said, pulling me close for a kiss.