Nine on the Hill

Astrid heard him on the gravel before she saw him — one set of footsteps taking the hill at an unhurried pace, the way a person climbs when he doesn't know what's waiting at the top. She was already up on the observing floor, alone with the smell of metal and the day's trapped heat, and she made herself be honest about why she'd come up early.

Not for the seeing. The forecast was clean, but the mirror hadn't finished cooling; the stars would swim in it all night, bright and slightly untrue. Not for the log, either. She had run this dome watch every Thursday since September and could have kept it in her sleep.

She came early because the roster held a single name tonight — the last of the term — and because Daniel's night lecture on main campus ran until eleven, and because she had checked her watch twice on the walk over. Not to count the hours, she'd told herself. It was exactly that.

She had also left the outer hatch unbarred. That fact she set on the shelf with the others, unexamined.

The hatch boomed somewhere below her feet anyway, closing behind him. Then the stair, and his lamp with it: every half-turn of the spiral, a blade of light raked the rail and slid away, climbing. She watched it rise through the stairwell like something surfacing, and by the time he stepped onto the floor and pushed the lamp up off his eyes, she had arranged her face into the patient calm she used on first-years.

It mostly held.

Clouds come in off the ridge, we have to close the dome. House rule. Otherwise the sky's ours until we drop it.
That's the whole briefing?

She nodded at the paper cup riding his hand, steam still threading from the lid.

Black, two sugars. You complained about the break-room machine back in October.

He had kept October. She took the cup — hot, while her own fingers had gone cold an hour ago — and set the small warm alarm of that fact beside the unbarred hatch, unexamined.

I'll keep the log tonight. You just drive the finder — gently. The mirror's still warm; everything will swim until midnight.

They worked the way they had worked all term, which was to say closer than the job required. He leaned in behind her shoulder to sight the finder, and his breath arrived before his voice did. Her black knit had been sliding all evening — gravity, house heat, whatever she cared to blame — and when she bent to the eyepiece it slipped another finger's width. Lamp light found her collarbone and traveled, warm as a hand. She was twenty-nine years old; she knew precisely what her neckline was doing, and who she wanted standing where he was standing. Her hands stayed on the knobs and fixed nothing.

His lamp wavered against the curved wall. His breathing lost its evenness and reorganized itself, twice.

Say the word, Mrs. Hale, and I sight the field, log it, and walk back down.

There were no clouds. That was the trouble. Nothing coming over the ridge, no rule anywhere that would close the dome for her and make the choice the rule's instead of hers. Only the slit full of stars, and eleven o'clock waiting across the valley like a lit kitchen she refused to be early for.

Astrid. If I'm staying until the dome closes, it isn't Mrs. Hale.

She turned from the eyepiece and he was closer than the geometry of the room should have allowed, and every careful distance the term had built between them failed at once. She kissed him first — coffee, two sugars, and the cold of the finder's metal still on his mouth.

Continue this scene in Dome Watch →

No Clouds Tonight

For three months she had been fluent in almost — hands overlapping on the log, shoulders in the stairwell, an entire grammar of nearly. The fluency left her all at once. Their cups ended up somewhere on the desk. His hand found the counter behind her, then her jaw, careful as a slow adjustment, and she made a low sound against his mouth that she would have denied under oath, and stopped keeping track, after that, of what she'd deny.

She tilted into him and let it deepen — her tongue, his answer, her teeth catching his lower lip hard enough to swing the lamp on his forehead, so the dome went yellow, dark, yellow again, her platinum hair gone to brass in the strobing light. Somewhere below, main campus burned with its orderly windows; somewhere on it Daniel drew equations for students warm and awake and elsewhere; and she thought, in a voice that was not regret, eleven, and thought nothing further for a while.

When they broke apart it was by a breath's width, his forehead resting on hers, both of them listening to the telescope tick as it gave up the day's heat.

The sky's still out.

It was. A whole river of it ran through the slit — the Milky Way cut clean by the opening, like water under a door. He was looking at it, then at her, leaving it open for her, the door, the way he had left everything open all term.

She reached past him and laid two fingers on the dome switch. The ring arrived first — a small cold fact between their hands — and rested there one second longer than a mistake requires.

Clouds.

There were none, and he knew it, and she watched him choose to let her pretend. She pressed. Overhead the slit began to narrow — river, ribbon, thread — one last star balanced on the closing seam, then gone.

The dome shut with a sound like a held breath released. After that it was not campus, and not the hill, and not anything with a name yet — only the dark, the cooling metal, the two of them inside it, and Astrid Hale, for once in her careful life, in no hurry to be anywhere at all.