The following night, Bee snuck out to meet Heych in the shadow of a dead tower. This time, he carried a box that he could plug his insectile forelimb into, and it spoke for him with a crackling artificial voice. This tower — Ak’aruk, Bearer of the Mirror-Lens, Heych had explained — was once a great observatory. He was an astronomer, and Heych was one of his disciples. That meant that they watched the stars, which struck Bee as a very strange thing to do, at first. Sestchek was once a city of philosophy and learning, or so he said.

Heych had let her peek inside the corpse. It was filled with gleaming metal machines with lifeless black screens. It was different to the city as she had come to know it, but he did not give her the chance to stay and look around. Instead, Heych asked Bee to help him carry a portable telescope up to the rooftops. She was weak, that much she knew as she wobbled with it in her arms, but her body seemed much better suited for carrying the scope and its tripod mount up the countless steps than Heych’s squat form. He was struggling enough with his voice box, but they had to hurry because the starburst wouldn’t wait for them.

They took a route through an adjacent building. As they walked, Heych explained that this open-air forum was where teachers visited from across the world to debate their lessons below the stars. It was empty now, and only their steps stirred the misty air.

Upon the wall, Bee recognised a banner of red and gold from her mother’s hall, hanging most prominently alongside a white-on-black standard, with smaller flags of all motley colours and ragged shapes around them. The display caught Bee’s eye, but Heych hurried her along. He insisted they had no time to waste, though Bee suspected he didn’t like what she saw.

They passed through wide corridors, ones that were supported by skeletonised braces, grown in place to shape a living building to fit this purpose. Up shelled steps they circled, spiralling towers with windows that showed the city as it was, the sheathe of an endless slug in its death-throes. In the distance, it still thrashed, a rolling horizon. Lights still shone in those far reaches, but not here. Now, in this section of the city, there was only the dim glow of the night sky, as even the biolights had choked out.

Finally, they emerged onto a wide balcony, high over the rest of the city. The moon hung low in the sky above them, without obstruction now. It made Bee’s heart race. Her chest tightened as it loomed there, glowing sanguine and hot. She closed her eyes and felt heat radiate from the celestial body, warming her face even as the cool wind swept through the night.

“Did you tell the Vat-Mother you’re here?” Heych asked through the box.

“No. I didn’t," Bee quietly admitted.

“That’s for the best.”

Bee opened her eyes and considered the freak. Having set down the telescope for him, he was positioning its tripod legs into a wide stance and turning its length towards the dark sky. Taking a set of wires, he plugged them into his voice box and then into a motor on the telescope’s stand. It began silently rotating, turning itself according to some minute and inscrutable instruction programmed into the metal device.

Turning away again, looking up into the expanse above with her own eyes, she saw flashes of light streaking across the heavens. Shooting stars dazzled her, burning bright, screaming out in defiance of their short lives that lasted only a fraction of an instant.

“What’s that?” Bee asked.

“Star metal,” Heych explained as he worked. “They are gifts that fall from the heavens, delivered to the desert, for us.”

“For us?”

“Yes — ours to reclaim, as we always have.”

“So who is sending them?”

“The stars themselves, or so I think. Though it’s often debated.”

Bee frowned as she considered the meteor shower. Hundreds — maybe even thousands — of the shooting stars flashed bright arcs across the night sky. It was eerily silent but for the whisper of the wind against her ears. She blinked away an uneasy feeling and considered the burning moon, which sparkled as she watched.

“Why is the moon like that?”

Heych looked up from working the device, antenna twitching, compound eyes shimmering. His body tipped as he followed Bee’s gaze toward that evil entity above.

“Like the desert, it’s struck with star metal. But without the blanket of the sky protecting it, the metal hits it hot and explodes.”

“That’s why it looks like that?”

“It is. Yes.”

“It’s pretty.”

“The night sky is beautiful,” Heych said through his voice box. “That’s why I wanted you to see this. Ak’aruk’s devices, delivered to him from those on high, allowed him to prophesise the eruption of the stars, using invisible waves that travel space and time. Before ruin came to Sestchek, this was his last prediction. Now he’s dead, I don’t know when we will ever be able to see anything like this again.”

Bee stepped close to him. She could see the sadness in his body language, even though the crackling voice box didn’t convey it properly.

“Okay. I’m here.”

Heych had turned up a hinged screen from his voice box, showing the pixillated image of a star trembling only slightly from atmospheric ripples. He checked it and rechecked it before raising one of his hairy insectoid feet to gesture to the eyecap of the telescope.

“See for yourself.”

So Bee did, leaning forward and peering through the lens. When she positioned her eye just right, the image was crystal clear. A twinkling star alight, soft contrasting shades of yellow and blue, infinitely distant and delicate, picked out in the centre of a circular field for her to see. It was like a little secret, teased out of the vast expanse of the sky, uncovered just for her.

“Oh wow,” Bee murmured, taking in the sight.

“Here it comes.”

The star blossomed outwards like an iridescent flower, unfolding again and again. Its soft edges swirled around, each petal a halo surrounding darkness. Bee was speechless as she watched eight loops of light collapse into two, casting out a shimmering aura of greens and reds, then leaving behind a black region ringed twice over with a deep orange glow. It looked so tiny and whisper-thin.

“What happened here?” Bee asked. The suddenness of the question surprised even her. “I mean, to the city — to Sestchek.”

“I don’t know.”

The electronic voice paused. Bee looked from the eyepiece to Heych, who stared transfixed on the computer screen, his compound eyes shimmering.

“You don’t know?”

“There was suddenly fighting. The Axiamati turned on the Xenozygote. Sestchek was called disloyal.”

“What does that even mean?”

He looked at her.

“The Wire-Witch returned to Sestchek and destroyed it. They say she made it, and she came back to end it. Just like that. I don’t even know why.”

“The Wire-Witch.”

Heych mistook that for a question.

“A holy half-human. They say she’s a Goddess. She’s a sister of the Vat-Mothers,” he explained.

“I’m going to meet her tomorrow — the Wire-Witch.”

Shocked, Heych turned to Bee. They stared at each other. Perhaps he saw her in a different light, now, here, beneath the burning moon. After a while, Bee brushed her dark hair back and looked at the sky again with her own eyes. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see that distant flare, that unfathomable explosion across the gulf of remote space.

“Is that what they were called?” Bee asked. “The dead men dressed in red, I mean, in my mother’s home.”

"The Xenozygote cult."

“The way you look at me — were they that bad?”

Bee felt her lip tremble. It wasn’t her fault. Why did it feel like it was?

“They didn’t think anyone deserved to live, not unless they’d been remade in the Vat-Mother’s urns. They were bullies. They were tyrants.”

“And their fighting hurt that many people?”

“It did.”

Squeezing her hands into tight fists, Bee found herself holding her breath. She was so angry. She was shaking as she looked out over the dying city. It wasn’t Heych’s fault, though. He was a victim in this, just like everyone else. She turned away and swallowed it down, blinking away tears of frustration, annoyed at herself that she couldn’t stop them.

“I’m going to go home.”

“Of course.” The voice box crackled. “Good luck, Bee. If I don’t see you again, I hope you find Paradise.”

With that, she turned back and managed to give him a smile despite the hurt.

“Thank you.”