It wasn’t always like this: wheelchair, virtual reality, sticky heat waves.

  It used to be: unbreakable soles, an insatiable thirst to jump on every mattress, and a family that still had its third person.

  They were still there, like distant stars, somewhere.

  Oily green bristles scratched against the windows. Nagia used a stick to close it. That was a long time ago, though, the things that happened to her and her parents. It no longer came easily. The nightmares have finally stopped, too, barring the occasional screaming headlights that would awaken her in the dead of night.

  Then, about ten years ago, the world of the cosmos was opened up for her, and it was like everything Nagia had experienced was nothing, just a whisper of a previous existence that didn’t matter to anybody. She was made to traverse the stars. She would again, for real, she was sure.

  Gloves on. Detergent. Sponge. Rinse. Dry. Done. As the cold water drained the bubbles from her hands, Nagia hummed a tune she’d half forgotten. That world, her world, was torn asunder by war and greed, but it was still hers, and it was better than anything that was happening outside it. She couldn’t wait to go back, even if it was in desolation after the Terrans blew up half the galaxy in their desperate attempt to win.

  It wasn’t great, but compared to the stars, the mundane furniture of reality was a dull distraction at best. Nagia wheeled out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house. She thought about that dragon. Brianna, wasn’t it? A strange name for a human, stranger still for a celestial. And then there was the way she spoke of the world, as if it were moving on from the strife that had still so recently divided it. Either way, Nagia had not met another dragon in at least three years, ever since the fall of the celestial home systems. Any interaction that wasn’t violent or dangerous was a welcome sight, worthy of cautious excitement.

  Sara Nakamura was still at the table. She had been scrolling on her phone, but put it down when Nagia came by. ‘I thought we could play a board game tonight,’ she said hopefully.

  She might as well have asked if Nagia wanted to sit down and start pulling out each other’s teeth. ‘No thanks,’ Nagia replied.

  ‘Cards, then? I’ve been practicing.’

  ‘I’m busy, Mom.’

  It was hard to ignore the disappointment on her mother’s face, but the last thing Nagia wanted to do was waste time. She wheeled straight past the dining table, pivoting around the edge with the expert precision honed from years of being in the same place, doing the same thing.

  ‘What if we watch some television?’ Sara asked, not giving up this charade. ‘Maybe there’s a movie we can rent? My coworkers have been talking about this action one that just came out last week, about a guy on a train, or something. I think he’s a superman.’

  ‘Superman is one guy, and no,’ Nagia laughed bitterly. ‘I’m done with movies, Mom. If you want to poison your mind with soulless slop, do that by yourself, please.’ She wheeled away, couldn’t, and looked back to see her mother’s hand grasping the wheelchair’s handle.

  Whatever Nagia had said had made Sara angry. She started to talk, then shout, then scream, her words bouncing off the side of Nagia’s face. ‘You’re not going to high school. You’re not getting a job. You don’t do anything else but sit there all day and all night in that fake world of yours. You want to talk about poisoning minds? How about you take your brain out of that machine first?’

  Nagia snapped back, ‘You think I want to be stuck in this stupid chair?’

  ‘You can still go to those places with wheelchair access,’ Sara insisted. ‘There’s a shop one station over that still had a ramp. I know the owner.’

  ‘A ramp,’ said Nagia. ‘Do they also have cotton candy machines and ball pits, and they’re just dying to hire a cripple with no brain cells and even fewer working muscle fibres?’

  ‘You better hope they do because I told the owner you are going for an interview tomorrow!’

  ‘Fine!’

  ‘Wear your new dress. The one with pineapples on it.’

  ‘You know I won’t do it now that you’ve said it!’ With a yank, Nagia got free and angrily stormed off. Or rather, her equivalent, which was wheeling away slightly faster.

  Down the hall was her room. It was the last door at the end, and barely opened wide enough for Nagia to get through, thanks to the huge amount of external gear that accompanied the VR station. Nagia had to tuck her arms in and do a sort of shuffle to get the wheelchair’s clunky frame past the doorway.

  There was no lock on her door, so to make sure she wasn’t going to be disrupted this time, Nagia dragged the corner of her desk and stuck it under the handle. She was sweating by the time she managed this. The house, like this world, wasn’t designed for wheelchairs, and Nagia was getting sick of being reminded of this. The good news was that she didn’t need to go to school anymore, so she had more time than ever before to try to forget herself.

  With a push of a button, she did.

  Light, blinking between supernova and emptiness, welcomed her.

  A whisper of white words popped up as rushing blood filled her ears:

  Good morning, celestial.

  Time passed since you last woke… 3 hours, 32 minutes, 10 seconds.

  You are in… The Void.

  Be considerate of yourself and your kin. Do not mistake what is real and what is not. May the gods watch over you.

  That was all the cosmos told her. That was all it needed to. The rest was in Nagia’s head. She was there since the beginning, when the stars were expanding, her fellow celestials populated the spaces between the galaxies, and the Terrans had not even left the solar system. She was in elementary school when the first humans took to space, and the day she moved on to junior high coincided with the first time Terran and Celestial met.

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  The lasers fired from those colossal spaceships still scarred the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn to this day. Nagia witnessed firsthand the destruction wrought by Terran might, and by the gods, she would be there to see its empire fall.

  A deep drumming passed between her ears, followed by the shaking roar of the cosmos coming back to existence. Pinpoints of starlight pushed through the blanket of darkness. Nagia breathed in the void, her senses coming alive, becoming many times more than her human body ever could be. Her evolved eyes opened to drink in the new spectrum of colors and waves. When she let the stars trickle from her gills, the space around her elongated body filled with steam. Within a fraction of her ancient heart beat, the vapor cooled into a sea of ice crystals.

  She yawned, teeth snapping. She was alone. Nothing moved against the streams of converging stars. No vibrations fell against her forest of horns. The only thing that had changed in this part of the sky was the demolished planet from yesterday. Its pieces had drifted off into the void, becoming one long stream of debris. What remained formed a new asteroid ring around the red giant that allowed its system to be.

  Nagia wriggled, moving little. Her deep blue scales shone from the light streaming past the black hole’s spherical reach. She watched the beautiful spinning mass of stars and data. The end loomed against the endless nothing, waiting for the day it devours her.

  ‘Boo,’ went Brianna.

  Nagia screamed, her voice manifesting into a cloud of golden flames. She whipped around to face the other dragon’s grinning maw. Angry, she demanded why the rainbow dragon was here.

  Brianna’s bright voice echoed inside Nagia’s head. ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Why?’ Nagia asked.

  ‘Because you’re cute.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Yeah. Who calls themselves a name like The Keeper of Secrets these days?’

  ‘You forgot the first part,’ said Nagia.

  ‘I don’t remember the first part,’ said Brianna, floating out of Nagia’s annoyed swipe, then just like how she had taunted the dragons chasing her yesterday, she stuck out her tongue.

  Nagia reigned in her rage. Without her wings, she had as much chance of catching Brianna as a mortal Terran had of touching Luna. She turned her back to the rainbow dragon and prepared herself for the mocking that no doubt was to come.

  It didn’t. Brianna slid around Nagia and rose to meet her gaze. ‘Sorry, I’m not here to upset you,’ she said with a bashful smile. ‘I actually wanted to thank you for earlier. If it weren’t for you, I would have thought something was wrong with me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nagia asked.

  ‘It’s been crazy,’ the other dragon answered. ‘Everybody I’ve met since I started this game has tried to kill me or capture me. The dragons are insane. And the humans are just mean. Those ships and blasters… It’s like gnats biting the flesh underneath your fingernails. You know, the soft places?’

  The way Brianna described the Terrans was more creative than anything Nagia had heard. This was how the colonists had always been. Sure, the violence did not truly escalate to system-ending disasters until the last few years of the conflict, but the relationship between the earthlings and the star-citizens had never been amicable, and the resulting carnage made the survivors bitter and selfish. It was by design, and anyone who didn’t know this was either new or an idiot.

  So which one is she?

  Nagia inched back to study Brianna’s celestial form. The rainbow scales, the clear naivety, it was all pointing to something unnerving. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

  Brianna hesitated. ‘Old enough to play this game,’ she said. ‘Why? How old are you?’

  ‘Two and a half centuries.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘I am. And don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Don’t call this a game. It’s not.’

  Brianna blinked, then scoffed. ‘Whatever, nerd.’

  The audacity threw Nagia. Regret was seeping in. Regret at having so badly wanted to meet her unexpected guest again. This dragon was wholly too immature for a setting such as this. What was worse was that Nagia couldn’t even get away. Stuck as she was with a broken body, the only way to be alone now was to get rid of the other dragon. She imagined how she would do it. Blasting Brianna to dust with a well-aimed breath or slashing those rainbow scales to pieces with her claws?

  Those thoughts perished when Brianna did something unexpected. She reached across the stars and grabbed Nagia’s wrist. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘I’m getting bored with all this pretty nothing.’

  Nagia didn’t move.

  ‘I just want to show you something cool,’ Brianna said, ‘and that’s not a euphemism for my dick. I don’t have one, not that it’s any of your concern.’

  ‘That’s not -’ Nagia pulled against the other dragon’s grasp. ‘I mean, no. I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t be like that. I wasn’t making fun of you earlier when I called you a nerd.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Nagia said. ‘I can’t move from here. From anywhere.’

  Brianna didn’t seem to understand, but she glanced behind Nagia and was reminded of the tattered flesh hanging from behind her back, and something clicked. ‘That’s not an aesthetic choice?’ she asked.

  Nagia shook her head. ‘My clan was in orbit of the Ka’hagnya system when its sun exploded. The blast threw me across the galaxy and tore my body half to shreds.’

  ‘Whoa.’ Brianna’s golden eyes widened. ‘Its sun did what?’

  ‘The Terrans injected a bomb into the heart of the red giant,’ Nagia explained. ‘It was one of the thousands of systems that blew up three years ago when the war got- do you know nothing about what’s been happening?’

  ‘Is this the war everyone talks about on the forums?’ Brianna asked.

  ‘Yes. Wait. Forums?’

  ‘You’re hilarious,’ Brianna laughed.

  Nagia didn’t know what to say to that.

  ‘Couldn’t you get this fixed?’ Brianna asked. ‘Have one of the devs take a look and heal you? Or just ditch this body for a new one?’

  ‘I’m not broken,’ Nagia snapped. She had been caught off guard once again, and it all added up to become anger, lacing each word she sent into the rainbow dragon’s mind with venom. ‘Do you think we should be allowed to just throw out our bodies and shop around for one you think is better? Is that how we should treat the hand we are dealt? And what makes you think I don’t enjoy being here all alone? That everything was fine without you needing to inject yourself into it?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Brianna, holding up her claws. ‘Okay. I got it, Miss Keeper. Just chill.’

  ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously, then go away.’ The words left with a stream of ice that dissipated from Nagia’s nostrils. She hadn’t wanted to explain herself, and now she knew it was a mistake. Someone like Brianna clearly wouldn’t understand the fortitude of spirit needed to be an ancient celestial. Heck, she might just be a seven-year-old with a crazy rich family and no parental oversight.

  In that case, it wasn’t fair for Nagia to take her annoyance out on someone who obviously had no wisdom or understanding of the world. ‘Look, Brianna,’ she sighed, turning to apologize, but there was no one around her to receive it.

  Nagia looked around, at the stars, the vast void between each sparkling dot, but there was nothing. Not even a flash of color.

  She was alone again, just as she wanted.

  Wasn’t it?

  She leaned back into the void. All these stars, this endless death spiraling into the unknowable black hole, tasted like ash on her tongue. When she gazed out at the black hole, its familiarity was off-putting, and when she took off her headset, the bare walls and encroaching night were like watching the same movie play out, time and time again.

  Taking in a deep breath, Nagia put back on the headset, and then, because she was alone and this was the only thing she had, she started to sing softly, a song only she and the stars knew.

  ‘Hey, whatchu doing?’ Brianna asked from behind her, and Nagia answered by screaming.