#patpcb

Chapter One

The most reliable path from Akwesasne to the city was six-hundred-and-forty kilometres, and an unburdened traveller could cover the distance in a month. Between the infant Mal carried on her back and several unplanned detours, she arrived in Delany, the city’s southernmost quarter, a week behind schedule. Niña, an interstellar craft bound for the exoplanet Proxima Centauri B, would be launching in only twenty-two days. She paused at the top of Delany’s Head Hill, swaying on her feet as she took in the view. It had been nine years since she had last seen the city, and if anything had changed it was obscured by the rusty orange particulate in the air and her poor eyesight: the bay was still in the middle, and in the distance she could just see the edges of the surrounding peninsulas disappearing into the smog. The view only got worse when she settled her clear-framed glasses onto the bridge of her nose — another little grief amongst all the others. After ten years of passable vision, she was now just as blurry-eyed as she had been in her youth. She pushed the frames out of the way and instead lifted her camera to her eye, zooming in on the craft that lurked in the bay. Besides its towering height, outclassing the buildings just beyond the nearest shore, it didn’t look much like the preceding Pinta, sleek as a skyscraper and twenty-four years gone: instead, Niña’s body was broad and boxy, narrowing into a kind of finned tail at the head and opening up like a wide, hungry mouth at the base. It was a more cost-effective design to reflect a smaller budget and a smaller workforce — for all that the Pinta had successfully launched and was projected to arrive on Proxima in the next year, her troubled production had killed most of the city’s construction workers, and the survivors were quick to warn people away from this new project. Mal’s own father had forbidden her from signing up, even though it was the only sure way to get a seat: he had lost everyone but his sister on Pinta’s shipyard.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Using the cues of her body's exhaustion and hunger, Mal's best guess at the current time was somewhere near the twelfth floor's lunch hour, which meant she had been wrestling with the studio door's magnetic lock for almost five hours. It had the slightest bit of give, and when using all of her weight she could budge the door about half an inch before it snapped shut again with a mocking whir; attempts to jam it open with anything long and thin were futile, and often sent painful shocks through her fingers. After an unfortunate slip of the hand that left her staggering back with black spots floating in her vision, she decided that the door had bested her for now, and that she would come back to it later. She turned her attention to the studio at large, leaning against the wall for balance: in a further renovation, Render had managed to cram a soft-looking bed into the space opposite of the kitchen corner, and had left a basket of strawberries on the counter like a peace offering. The fish-eye camera was where it always was, looking over the room imperiously, and the clock over the darkroom's door had been removed.

She ignored the strawberries, even when her aimless circuit of the room took her back to the kitchen. She had regained her balance and the majority of her vision, and her limbs felt loose and confident as she dragged a dining chair into the centre of the room, her body having already decided on a plan even as her brain lagged behind. Almost without conscious thought, she climbed onto the precariously spinning seat and reached up towards the camera, fingers digging unerringly into the housing, ripping out the eye and half a metre of assorted wires with brute force. She stared down at the black dome in her hands for a moment as she contemplated what to do next, long enough that the white dust settled gently on the dark glass; finally, her body took over once more, the cradle of her hands falling open to allow the camera to shatter against the floor. She climbed down and carefully toed through the wreckage, feeling a contrarian kind of relief when she found no audio pick-up; Render would never be satisfied with incomplete surveillance, and as long as she had a task to occupy herself she could stave off the panic for a while longer.

***

Chapter Thirty-One

Mal rubbed her itching eyes as she stood outside the crematorium with the other mourners, almost dislodging Gwenh's glasses from her face. Kaia had grabbed the wrong pair out of her bag, placing them on her head while she was getting Clover ready for the day — by the time she knocked them onto her nose, they were already halfway-gone and running late, and she had decided to just push through it. The sudden switch back to a weaker prescription had her eyes strained and over-sensitive, and taking them off altogether didn't help. She pulled them off of her nose anyway and folded them into the collar of her shirt with a rushing exhale, grinding the heel of her palm into her eye.

Kaia squeezed her shoulder. “Are you in pain?” They were dressed in a white pleated blouse with the high, long collar and ribbon epaulettes, long hair hanging in freshly-styled waves around their shoulders — overly casual, for an Akwesasne funeral, but eye-wateringly fancy for the surrounding crowd. She should have told them to dress down, but it was nice to have someone else draw all the attention, for once: they bore it with better grace anyway, quietly preening every time they caught someone eyeing their clothes, even as their fingers absently plucked at the fabric that no longer fit close to their hip. A stab of guilt lanced through her at the lingering evidence of the frantic pace they had set to catch up with her, the lost fat and the listless exhaustion and the pained, betrayed eyes.

"I'm fine." Not that she would say, if she wasn't, not when Tai-Song had been waiting long enough to be put to rest. Funerals waited for no one, not even ones who still carried a stabbing pain in their gut. Clover snuggled closer as she shifted her weight to keep the cramps at bay, the hard edge of the baby-sized snorkel digging insistently into her shoulder. She kept rubbing her eyes, and the ends of her recently-cut hair tickled against her chin.

Kaia had been quiet when braiding her hair that morning, tying it off once at the end and once at the nape — for once, Mal was happy to let the quiet linger, even when it made her sharp inhale obvious as they reached for the sharp scissors waiting on the counter. They had paused, meeting her eyes in the mirror to check in, and when she shakily nodded they squeezed her shoulder once before cutting the braid down to the root. The cut hair was now coiled in her palm, waiting to be buried with Tai-Song's urn.

***

The bunks had been dark and still for hours by the time Mal finally made herself crawl out of her bed, gathering her trove of hidden things — blanket, radio, Gwenh's last cigarette — and heading for the bathroom. She drew her blanket tighter around her shoulders like a shield as she inevitably passed the last bed, where the drone was sitting upright and appeared to be in a resting state, the orange glow in her chest barely visible. Mal flicked a folded-up note onto the pillow without losing her stride, and the bathroom door was swinging shut when the orange light began to brighten.

Wait ten minutes, then follow me. Hopefully the drone could read English, though with the way Mal's heart was thumping throughout her body it might be a boon if she couldn't. She shut herself inside the stall furthest from the door and climbed onto the toilet to wait, drawing the blanket closer around herself with a shiver, radio held gingerly in her lap. The whole room was freezing, and she kept expecting to see her breath pluming in the air as she tuned the dial to the frequency of Kawehno:ke’s Partridge Radio, soothed by the wheel's segmented, sturdy clicks. The familiar strains of bluesy music were clouded with noise and static, trapped under hundreds of kilometres and interfering pollution like three layers of blankets; she could hear most of the song’s last few words if she cranked up the volume, and the smile in Nick’s voice as he came back on the air was audible no matter the signal's strength. “Fast approaches the end of the day-program, my friends, but don’t turn off that radio just yet: arriving soon is Old Man River, who will be your graveyard-host as long for as his daughter is out of town and can’t stop him from working nights. As always, playing me out is some Logan Staats — and with that, I bid you lovely folks goodnight.”

She forced a shiver and rubbed her arms as the song swirled some peace in with her thoughts, leaning back against the tiled wall with a sigh. If not for the chill, it would feel like the many nights she’d spent curled up on the couch in the radio station’s lounge, dozing under the on-air sign’s ghostly light while waiting for her dad to finish up his shift — she could have probably fallen asleep here too, cold be damned, but the day's events still gripped her with a much deeper chill. The cigarette she rolled between her fingers smelled rancid, poised six inches from her face and whispering, you could have done something — why didn't you do something?

Maybe if she hadn't told Render that she was pregnant, she would have had a spare pack of cigarettes to keep things civil. Maybe if she hadn't let Isaiah stand so close to her, he wouldn't have triggered Gwenh's protective instinct. Maybe if she had put the pieces together sooner, if she had forced herself to see past the person she loved and focus on the tool she had been groomed into being, Mal wouldn't have to actively suppress the little voice in her head that whispered, maybe he deserved it. She felt worse than useless, fingers itching without the task of preparing Isaiah's body for burial, while her brain fixated on what he had plainly told her days ago, and how wrong she had known it to be even then: she’s all bark. The cigarette fell from her fingers onto the floor, and she had no will or desire to pick it back up.

***

Chapter One

The most reliable path from Akwesasne to the city was six-hundred-and-forty kilometres, and an unburdened traveller could cover the distance in a month. Between the infant Mal carried on her back and several unplanned detours, she arrived in Delany, the city’s southernmost quarter, a week behind schedule. Niña, an interstellar craft bound for the exoplanet Proxima Centauri B, would be launching in only twenty-two days.

Chapters: 38/39

Fandom: Original Work

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death

Characters: Original Characters

Additional Tags: Original Fiction, Science Fiction, Semi-Dystopian, Imprisonment, Poverty, class warfare, War, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gun Violence, Physical Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Minor Character Death, Parenthood, Mild Gore, Blood and Injury, Explicit Language, References to Miscarriage, references to pregnancy/childbirth, Cross-Post, and now for the themes!, the reasons people might leave earth vs the reasons people might stay, Class Differences, the ways that resources will be hoarded in a space-travel setting, how flaws and agency are often denied to the dead thus denying them their humanity, how we romanticize the idea of 'the one' or 'soulmates' and let these concepts obscure and diminish the genuine connections we have with other people, now with original character portraits drawn by the author

Series: Part 1 of Point A To Proxima Centauri B, et al.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The smoggy sky seemed to hang even lower than normal, clinging to the ground like fog and occasionally flaring bright and blinding when light passed through the particulate at the right angle. Hunched over the handlebars of Etienne's bike with Kaia behind her, Mal wondered if it would have been faster to walk: even when she could see more than six feet in front of her, she had to crawl the bike around what seemed like the entire population of Delany as they filled the streets, heading northeast in total silence and a pointed lack of urgency. It was a little better once she got the bike on Narrows bridge, the crowds thinning and smog raising enough to finally see that Niña was primed to accept passengers: a temporary harbour had been set up at the yawning mouth of the craft, showing preference the long procession of Midtown boats and ignoring the rest of the city, those tired and poor who yearned to breathe freely. Aerial drones swarmed overhead, flooding the space between Niña and Midtown with pale, sharp light; those that weren't dedicated to Midtown's safety circled the bay like vultures, spotlights racing over the choppy water, targeting anyone desperate enough to approach from the south with sprays of gunfire. She could already see a fair number of corpses, caught in the eddies and swaying in the chop like driftwood.

Kaia shouted a warning that was half-lost to the wind, probably something about keeping her eyes on the road and not killing them both. She tore her eyes from the water and told herself to look only at what lay directly ahead, steering the bike onto a more stable path and pushing the motor as fast as it would go. The bridges of Bayonne would be sitting unguarded by now, ready for Goose and Zed to sneak the car into Midtown while Mal and Kaia, having taken the route more visible, would hopefully draw all of Render’s attention. Luckily, Etienne had been out of earshot when they came up with that aspect of the plan.

They were halfway across the bridge when the power failed in cascading dominoes: the drones went down first, crashing into the water and plunging the bay into semi-darkness; the generators death-groaned shortly after, killing the lights on the harbour. Mal braked hard before she could accidentally drive off of the bridge: Midtown’s gleaming atmosphere usually gave off enough light for any hour of the day, but there was no longer any bubble to speak of, all extraneous power diverted to get Niña off the ground and out of orbit. With no glow on the northern shores, the darkness was nearly absolute — and Etienne never had reason to bolt a headlight to the handlebars.

As she hunted through the bike's saddlebags for a flashlight and some rope, the brief shock of silence infecting the bay was suddenly pierced through with the inevitable noise of people, faced with uncertainty: shouts of panic, boats overturning, bodies falling into the water. Even with bare moments to mount, certainly less than a minute, the desperation was at a fever pitch before something louder and shriller overtook the noise: the feedback from a microphone, and the tones of a familiar orating voice.

The bike tilted slightly as Kaia leaned toward the bay, staring wide-eyed into the dark as though they could spot Yuen-Fa giving her speech. "I can't hear what she's saying," they said, voice hushed. “Will she let them board?”

***

Finally, a new milestone: storiesbythomas.neocities.org has reached over 3000 visits, and the listing on ao3 has broken 300! Very exciting debut numbers, and I'm so grateful for the reception so far as we go into the final stretch. Thank you to everyone who tunes in every week, and to all the new readers who have recently taken a chance on me — in the past seven months you all have treated me extremely well, and I'm hopeful that you'll continue to enjoy my work as I develop. As always, a very special thank you to @hannahcll, @mx-time-bunny, @harleyquillao3, and @pantylace for reblogging posted chapters and helping to get more eyes on my work!

But all good things must come to an end, and PATPCB will be wrapping up on June 15th, 2026. My next story, which is sitting in my WIPs folder under the name 'Puck's No Good Terrible Very Bad Day(s)', still needs a significant amount of revising and editing, so the earliest that it will publish is Sept-Oct 2027. It may take longer, but I have every intention on continuing to publish my work online, so please be patient! I will still be semi-active on social media in the meantime, so no one will be deprived of my stunning commentary on movies that no one else has seen; feel free to come and talk to me! After the last chapter is posted, I will probably write up one last monthly update, which will outline what the posting schedule will look like going into my next project, what I plan to do differently, and maybe a teaser blurb of dubious quality/accuracy. Stay tuned, I love you.

In between updates, you can find me on Tumblr @d00m-d4ys or on Bluesky @d00md4ys.bsky.social, and if you have the cash to spare, it would mean so much to me if you joined my Patreon! Because all donations will be split between me and my chosen causes, you will also be supporting a Gazan family in need and the Kanien’kéha community in addition to an independent author. Even if you choose not to join my Patreon, please consider donating to one of these causes independently: if you have even $5 to spare, you have the ability to make a difference in someone’s life.

If financial support isn’t a viable option, don’t sweat it! If you like this story, help me grow my audience by sharing the links and telling your friends about Point A To Proxima Centauri B, or make my day by filling the #patpcb tag with your theories, fanart, and longform essays. Word-of-mouth is the best advertising there is, and it’s absolutely free!