Starcrossed

friend.
    If she was going to turn and fight, she wanted to be under the broad, low sky of the uninhabited parts of her island and not hemmed in by the quaint shingle-sided whalers. She went west, across the northern side of her island, the calm waters of Nantucket Sound sighing somewhere off to her left, and Lucas and Hector calling her name from behind. They were gaining on her.
    Helen crossed Polpis Road, skirting Sesachacha Pond until she saw the true Atlantic, not its calmer cousin, the Nantucket Sound, but the wild water at the end of the continent. She needed to hide, but the land was flat and open and the air was clear and bright. Helen looked out over the dark waves sparkling like inky tinfoil in the moonlight and begged for some kind of mist or haze to come and cover her. That damn ocean owed her for almost taking her life as a child, she thought hysterically, and it should pay. After a few more huge strides, Helen’s plea was miraculously answered. She ran north up the coast, out onto the uninhabited sand spit on the northern tip of the island, into a damp, salty fog.
    In the wet air, Helen could hear her pursuers even more clearly, and she knew they could hear her better, too. Panicked and exhausted, she blindly tossed herself into the fog and asked her body to go even faster. On the edge of collapse, she felt her body grow light and her labored breathing unexpectedly eased up. The jarring impact on her joints and spine from her gargantuan strides ended abruptly. She was still moving, but she no longer felt anything except the cold and the wind that spun her hair into whips. She burst through the edge of the fog and saw nothing but darkness and stars around her. There were stars everywhere. She looked down.
    Below her were twinkling lights outlining the edges of a familiar sideways comma in the middle of the ocean. Looking around for the airplane that would normally be housing her body at this altitude, Helen saw her limbs floating in the air, buoyant and sinuous as if they were submerged in water. She looked down again and realized that the twinkling comma was her beautiful little island home. Her vision contracted into a narrowing tube of blackness. Without a sound, she fainted and fell out of the sky that had so recently claimed her.

Chapter Six
    I  t was nighttime in the dry lands. Helen was surprised that there was such a thing as time here. It confused her so much that she glanced around, uncertain as to where she was. After a few moments she decided that, yes, she was in the dry lands, but this time the hilly terrain was flatter and more open. The dark, empty sky seemed lower and heavier somehow. Then she looked over her shoulder. It took her a few moments to understand what she was seeing.
    Miles away, there was a line across the land and sky, where the flat nightscape turned back into the more familiar, hillier dayscape. The different time zones sat next to each other like two paintings in an artist’s studio—unmoving, unchanging, and both equally as real. Here, time was a place and it never moved. Somehow that made sense.
    Helen walked. It was cold in the night version of the dry lands, and her teeth chattered uselessly. In the dayscape, there was no relief from the heat, so Helen knew that in the nightscape there would be no warmth no matter how much she rubbed her arms and shivered. She saw someone up ahead. He was panicking.
    She hurried forward until she could see that it was Lucas. He was on his hands and knees, feeling around as if he were blind—grabbing at the sharp stones, cutting his hands on their edges. He was very afraid. She called out to him, but he couldn’t hear her. She knelt down next to him and took his face in her hands. He flinched away from her at first and then reached out blindly with relief. He mouthed her name, but no sound came out. In her arms, he felt very light. She made him stand up even though he was so frightened he hunched over on shaking legs. He cried silently, and Helen knew he was begging her to leave him behind. He was too frightened to move, but Helen knew she couldn’t heed him or he would never leave this dark, dry land.
    Even though he screamed, she forced him to get up and walk.
    Helen was in terrible pain. She wanted to groan but she didn’t have the strength to make any noise. She could hear the ocean close by, but she couldn’t move or open her eyes to see where it was. She felt her head bob gently up and down, as if she were lying,