Sidnye (Queen of the Universe)

By Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Sidnye Dupree was going on thirteen years old when she broke the Bishop's nose with a dodgeball and dreamed the dream of the shooting star. But even if she'd known then what was happening to her, it would have been far too late to stop it...

* * *

Life is complicated enough when you live full-time at boarding school because your parents are dead, and when the other students around you are mostly idiots, and when you're doomed to spend the rest of your existence in cafeteria detention because you just can't stop annoying the people in charge of your life.

But that's when you discover the headaches you've been having aren't just a part of being thirteen and feeling the weight of the world hammering down on you.

That's when you realize the dreams you've been having are more than dreams, and the people you thought you were closest to are less concerned with caring about you than with keeping you from knowing the things they don't want you to know...

* * *

EXCERPT

Even as she closed her eyes to try to escape the screaming, Sidnye remembered the dream.

Sidnye rarely remembered her dreams, which made them unique enough that she recognized this memory at once for what it was. The image split the fractured darkness of her sight, unfolding in her memory the way ice crystals spread across winter windows. In the dream, she was scared and she was moving. Darkness rose around her as she ran. Image fragments shuffled past her like the fast video cuts Emmet liked to use, no scene held onto long enough to figure out what it was. Then around her, a flare like dawn erupted from the shadows, brighter than anything she'd ever seen before. Pillars of light pulsed fast, heat and cold crashing in.

Rising slowly above her, Sidnye saw a thing that couldn't possibly exist. This was the thing she'd been dreaming of when she woke, and which had frozen her voice in her throat. As it uncurled from shadow, its six legs gleamed like black steel. Its eyeless head jutted out from no neck, looming over her as she fell back, arms up as if she might protect herself that way. The thing's insect shape was steam and darkness, a haze clinging to it as it slammed toward her, too fast for her to escape...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Insane Angel Studios
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781927348284

Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive good) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games — all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. He shares his life in the Western Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a number of animal companions. More info on him and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.

Book preview

by

Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Cover, Design, and Typography

by (studio)Effigy

Published by Insane Angel Studios

insaneangel.com

Copyright © 2013 Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Smashwords Edition

Title Page • Dedication • Epigraph

PROLOGUE — Things Best Not Remembered

Chapter 1

PART ONE — The Bishop’s Nose

Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4

PART TWO — The Student from Silesia

Chapter 5 • Chapter 6 • Chapter 7 • Chapter 8

PART THREE — Dark Dreams by Daylight

Chapter 9 • Chapter 10 • Chapter 11

PART FOUR — Last-Minute Save

Chapter 12 • Chapter 13 • Chapter 14

PART FIVE — A Test of Fire

Chapter 15 • Chapter 16 • Chapter 17

EPILOGUE — The Way It Was Before

Chapter 18

Fiction by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Colophon • Copyright

For Shvaugn and Caitlin

who will always be Sidnye

What could she do who would not cast away magic and leave the home that an ageless day had endeared to her while centuries were withering like leaves upon earthly shores, whose heart was yet held by those little tendrils of Earth, which are strong enough, strong enough?

— Lord Dunsany,

The King of Elfland's Daughter

SIDNYE DUPREE WAS going on thirteen years old when she broke the Bishop’s nose with a dodgeball and dreamed the dream of the shooting star. But even if she’d known then what was happening to her, it would have been far too late to stop it.

In her room in the dormitory, Sidnye slept soundly because sleeping soundly was a gift she had. No matter how much noise came from the television in the lounge at the far end of the building, no matter what death-and-mayhem war game was being played on the computers in the study area of the common room, Sidnye didn’t so much sleep through it as slip into a short-term coma on a nightly basis. This was a good thing at certain times. For instance, most of June, when the heat hit hard and the air conditioner on the roof above the cafeteria made a noise like a lawnmower cutting frozen meat. However, though that noise echoed straight across the parking lot and in through Sidnye’s window, she could sleep through it without a care.

Sitting atop a stack of library books on her bedside table, the clock showed 12:05. Sidnye had already slept through the water fight in the primary bathroom, just across from her door and a little after she’d fallen into bed at 9:30. She’d slept through the sports highlights carrying down from the lounge at an ear-splitting volume before the lights-out for the older students at 10:00 p.m. She’d slept through the gang of idiots from one of the public high schools deciding to have a rumble on the frozen Manor soccer field a little after 11:30, then she slept through McCune getting all dorm-supervisor-serious and running them off.

Sidnye’s ability to sleep through anything was less welcome when the alarm went off in the morning. She only rarely heard it through her unconscious stupor, usually clawing her way out of bed only when Emmet shouted from the corridor that she was late. However, even as solid as her sleep normally was, Sidnye flinched in unconscious shock this night, clutching at the covers when the dream hit.

In the dream, she was staring upward to watch a brilliant blaze of stars burn in a cloudless sky. Though she couldn’t know it, the view was a lot like the sky outside her window would have looked if she’d woken up to see it. In the dream, through the silent winter air, a single point of light among all the uncountable points of light blazed brightly. Then it began to pulse. Slowly at first, an erratic flare of light rippled through the cold. It reminded her of the way Venus had looked the one time when Emmet showed it to her. Only this was higher up, far from the flat dark of the prairie horizon.

Like a lot of things no one else cared about, Emmet was heavily into the stars. He had a telescope he liked to take up to the gym roof on weekend nights, setting up across from the NO TRESPASSING ON THE GYM ROOF sign. Over the previous spring break, in an ongoing attempt to try to convince Sidnye of the coolness of his dweeb hobbies, he’d kept her up late to show her a bunch of stuff. For whatever reason, though, the sky all looked the same to Sidnye’s eyes, which remained profoundly unable to pick out all the connect-the-dots zodiac shapes Emmet swore were there.

Venus was the only thing she really remembered from that night, hanging bright where it sunk down along a path following the setting sun. She’d remembered to watch for it over the following few weeks, but managed to lose it over the summer. In September, she remembered to ask Emmet about it, and he told her Venus had moved and she’d have to wake up before sunrise to see it again. So that ended that.

In the dream, the point of bright light was almost directly overhead in the sky that all looked the same. As Sidnye watched, its pulse began to quicken, the flare points along its edges sharpening like knives. She didn’t know what was going on or why she was watching, but even as the brief thought came to her dreaming mind that she should look around and see where she was, she found herself unable to turn away.

The light was moving. She hadn’t noticed before. Then the darkness fractured and the sky was on fire. As the star dropped from the night sky, a deep thunder boomed, the wind screaming in its wake. A fireball the brightness of the sun twisted as it fell, a dozen smaller points of fire suddenly spiraling out and spinning off it, like burning seeds scattered on a storm wind.

Then it was gone.

In bed, Sidnye stirred without waking. Her hands were trembling as she pulled the duvet tight to her chin.

As the clock flashed to 1:15, she rolled over. Then the dream was forgotten by the corner of her mind that had watched it, and which understood how to recognize the things best not remembered.

THAT MORNING, SIDNYE missed the alarm as usual. It took Emmet pounding on her door to drive her groggily from under the covers, and she sat up to hear the pounding of feet in the corridor that marked the rest of the dorm kids heading out for breakfast. They numbered nineteen this year, mostly students from Moose Jaw’s outlying farm communities who lived in residence for the week and headed home each Friday afternoon. All of them except her and Emmet, that is.

Sidnye’s black skirt and sweater still hung on the back of her chair where she’d changed out of them yesterday within moments of the afternoon bell. They were standard issue for the Manor’s uniform dress code, which was traditional but not unbearable. The boys in their blazers and button-up shirts had the worst of it, Sidnye had always thought.

As she changed, she tried to remember where she’d tossed her keys the night before. Her room was small like all the rest of the dorm bedrooms, and as hard as she tried, Sidnye had never been able to control its condition of advanced clutter. At least that’s how McCune referred to it each time he made his monthly rounds, surveying the bookshelves stacked high with fantasy paperbacks, and the dresser stuffed to bursting with unfolded clean clothes. The top of the dresser was piled even higher with dirty clothes, underneath which Sidnye’s phone and her iPod and her laptop were turned off and perpetually charging because she could never be bothered to use them.

The clean underwear that should have been in the top drawer of the dresser usually ended up in the top drawer of the small chipboard desk beside the door instead. This had freaked Emmet out one time when he slipped in to borrow a pen. The top drawer of the dresser where the underwear should have gone overflowed with art supplies, because the dresser sat next to the corner where Sidnye liked to paint. Sketchbooks, pencils, and battered tubes of acrylic colors overflowed there like a chromatic geyser, next to the spot on the wall where she tacked her paper onto an old bulletin board. Her cramped quarters had no room for a proper easel, so newspaper covered the walls like it covered the floor there, building up endless layers of errant spatter.

She found her keys in the desk underwear drawer eventually, slipping the lanyard around her neck and underneath her sweater as she sauntered along the now-empty corridor. Sidnye had the one key for her room like all the other dorm students had, but she also had one for the outside doors because she was special. Emmet had an outside door key as well, which technically also made him special, but Sidnye found it easy to ignore that.

It was twenty meters or so along the edge of the parking lot to the cafeteria entrance. When the breath-stopping south Saskatchewan cold settled in for the winter, most dorm students ran the distance as fast as possible. This year, however, winter had decided to alternate between bone-chilling nights and days that were downright balmy. The sky was bright blue, streaked by cloud coming in from the south. The snow that had fallen intermittently through October and November was all but gone now, and the bumper crop of dead grass and garbage that normally came with the spring thaw was already pushing its way into view.

Even without the global warming Emmet was always yammering on about, Sidnye had never been bothered by the cold. For as long as she could remember, winter had been just like any other season weather-wise, except for chapped lips and boots that never properly dried out. This morning was only a half-dozen degrees below freezing, which might as well have been the middle of July to her as she walked carefully along the top of the parking lot snow bank.

On the opposite side of the parking lot, Sidnye saw McCune exit the school at the backstairs doorway. His ski fleece was zipped up tight as he cut across toward the dorm.

Hey, he called cheerfully. Get your stupid coat on or get inside.

It’s not cold, Sidnye said.

I say it is. I also say it’ll be snowing this afternoon.

So what?

So I’m older than you, and you should listen to me.

Age slows the mind.

So does frostbite.

As McCune passed the cinderblock wall around the school’s car-sized propane tanks, he started whipping snowballs at her. Sidnye stuck her tongue out as she ducked under his first shot with little effort, then sidestepped his second. But he got the last laugh when she had to evade a barrage by breaking into a sprint for the cafeteria doors.

To everyone else, McCune was the Manor’s school physician and dorm advisor and guidance counselor. As some strange combination of all three, he’d also been Sidnye’s professional legal guardian for going on seven years now, which she was sure must seem strange to other people, but which she’d gotten used to a long time ago.

McCune also taught seventh-grade social studies on the side, which Sidnye was looking forward to next term more than she ever expected to look forward to anything educational. Not because she expected any excitement from the curriculum, but because out of all the teachers and other staff at the Manor, she liked McCune the best.

As she reached the cafeteria entrance, she stuck her tongue out at him again. McCune returned the gesture from the dorm doors as he slipped inside.

Along the edge of River Park at the southeast corner of Moose Jaw, Elm Manor School was a private academy of two hundred first-to-eighth-grade students, dedicated to academic excellence and good citizenship on three acres of grassland, aspen, and evergreens. At least that’s what the school brochures said. However, nobody who spent any time there, students or teachers, called the school anything other than The Manor. It had a sister high school called Oak Orchard Collegiate on the north side of the city, to which the Manor students were bussed for big concerts and special events. All the times she’d been there, Sidnye had never seen anything resembling an orchard. But that made sense, considering that the Manor resembled an actual manor as little as any building possibly could.

The school and dorm were an adjacent pair of slate-roofed semi-Victorian bunkers with the parking lot between them. Covered in what had once been straight-line pine siding, both buildings had weathered now to a point where it would be hard to find a straight line anywhere in their warped boards. Both had probably been white once, but in the couple of hundred years since they’d last been painted, the endless prairie seasons had darkened them to the same shade of grey that would take over a tuna sandwich left under your bed for four months.

Sidnye knew that with certainty because she had, in fact, left a tuna sandwich under her bed for four months at the beginning of the term. It wasn’t on purpose or anything, but that hadn’t made much difference to the rest of the dorm students when they finally figured out where the smell was coming from.

As she wandered into the cafeteria, most of those other dorm students were finishing breakfast. No one greeted her as she scoped out Emmet sitting alone at the corner table the two of them usually shared. Ms. Alephson, the youngish cafeteria cook, was bopping behind the counter in the same white-sweatsuit-white-apron-white-earbuds combo she always wore. She met Sidnye with an oversized helping of French toast, hash browns, fruit, orange juice, and a smile.

Hey, kiddo.

Hey, Stacey, Sidnye said, because Ms. Alephson told everyone to call her Stacey. This was against the school policy that said all staff were to be addressed with a Mr.-and-Ms./sir-and-ma’am mock formality, but Stacey got away with it like she got away with avoiding the Manor’s dress code. Sidnye managed a smile in return, but it didn’t carry a lot of enthusiasm. She was on cafeteria duty detention that morning, as she was most mornings, and having a meal served to you was less fun when you had to clean up after yourself and eighteen other people afterward.

As he ate, Emmet flipped through a battered copy of Sky and Telescope magazine, one of the stack he’d proudly claimed at a garage sale a few months back. Sidnye glanced at the field of stars on the magazine’s cover alongside a publication date of 1993 as her tray hit the table.

Isn’t that a little old?

Space doesn’t change much, Emmet said.

Even as she sat and felt herself searching for a snappy retort, Sidnye blinked. Her eyes were drawn toward the starfield, its haze of light and shadow reminding her of something. An image twisted through her mind, unexpected. She remembered staring upward at the night sky, but she couldn’t remember where she remembered it from.

Hey.

She blinked again. She was still staring at the magazine. She had a straw in one hand, held motionless in midair like she’d stopped in the middle of stabbing it down into the orange juice box in her other hand. Emmet gave her an odd look as he snapped his fingers in front of her face.

You seem a little heightened, he said.

Whatever. Sidnye shrugged as the not-memory passed. She stabbed the straw into her juice, draining half of it with a loud slurp as she tried to clear her head. She needed to focus in on the thing she’d been psyching herself up for since going to sleep the night before, which she knew meant her brain was probably doing its best to avoid focusing. Sidnye’s brain was like that.

Emmet was still watching her as she glanced around, as if making sure no one else was listening.

I need to tell you something, Sidnye said.

Whatever. Without looking, Emmet reached over and snared a piece of her French toast with his fork. He doused his plate with another layer of syrup.

Sidnye glared as she responded with a fast strike on one of his hash brown patties. You can’t tell anyone else.

Whatever again.

You can’t tell McCune.

Would you get on with it?

Sidnye looked around again. Still no one listening. I found a dog, she said.

Who lost it?

Nobody. Well, I mean somebody probably did, because she’s a stray. But nobody I know. I found her Monday out back by the dumpster.

Emmet had a face of hard lines and dark hair overhanging his forehead, which Sidnye often thought might grow into something like rugged a few years down the road. These days, however, his look tended to stop somewhere short of bored/menacing. He glanced up, mumbling through a mouthful of French toast and sausage.

Are you insane?

No, Sidnye said.

You’ve been feeding it?

Yeah.

Why?

Because she’s hungry, stupid. Sidnye grabbed another hash brown patty from Emmet’s plate, even though she’d eaten only half of the first one. She was annoyed that he was failing to get into her exciting conspiratorial mood.

Do you know how many diseases a stray dog can carry?

How many?

A lot.

Can you be a little more vague? Sidnye speared the last of Emmet’s sausages. He stabbed down with his fork but was too slow to stop her.

You want to know how many altogether, counting every little thing? I mean, like the dog could have a cold or German measles?

How about just the dangerous ones?

Just the diseases that can kill you?

Yeah.

A lot. Emmet forked another piece of French toast from Sidnye’s plate. A trail of peach preserves arced out across the table between them as she grabbed his second carton of orange juice.

Don’t touch that, he warned her, so she jammed the straw in. He sighed. Look, a stray dog is a wild dog. It’s living on its own, hand to mouth, at one with nature. When dogs are pets, they see people as the master species and don’t mess with them. But once they lose that, suddenly they come out for dinner one night and forget the difference between the main course and the cook.

"It’s she, not it. And dogs don’t have hands." Sidnye slurped.

Emmet stared. What?

You said she was living hand to mouth. Dogs don’t have hands.

Paw to mouth, then. Whatever. When you wind up as stray mutt smorgasbord, I’m taking your laptop. With a fast move, he tried to grab the orange juice back, but Sidnye locked her grip. A spray of juice erupted from the straw, landing dangerously close to Emmet’s phone on the table beside him. He glared as he moved it farther off.

Sidnye smiled sweetly. What does that even mean, anyway?

You don’t know what smorgasbord means? Emmet’s voice was reaching the pitch of exasperation that generally started to attract attention.

No, Sidnye said, hand to mouth. You said the dog was living hand to mouth. What is that?

Hand to mouth. Like without any social or civilizing effects. Raw nature. Survival of the fit. Eating only what you find. You pick it up with your hand, you put it in your mouth. Emmet illustrated on the hash brown patty Sidnye had stolen from him in the first place, then waved her off his fruit salad cup with his knife.

But dogs don’t eat with hands. So instead of living hand to mouth, shouldn’t they just be living to mouth?

Emmet gave up. Whatever you say.

You said it. Don’t blame me because you don’t make any freaking sense.

See you in class, Emmet said as the 9:00 a.m. early bell rang. He stuffed the magazine and his phone into his backpack, scarfing the fruit salad in a single gulp as he rose to take his tray to the counter. This set him apart from the other dorm kids as they loudly fled, the remains of their meals strewn across the tables in a field of syrup pools and crumpled napkins.

Fridays always tended to catch the dorm students at the peak of their uncivilized worst. However, with Christmas break a week away, it seemed to Sidnye that everyone was getting into an even more annoying seasonal insanity. As she watched, Brendan Duvalier and a couple of the other dorm gamers knocked over a row of chairs as they vaulted their way out the door. She shook her head as she followed to pick them up.

Hot water foamed against stainless steel as Stacey prepped the morning’s pans and danced to her unheard tunes. Behind her, Sidnye staggered in under a mound of trays as she tried to remember what specific infraction had gotten her cafeteria detention that morning. However, all her violations of school rules, all the meetings in the office, and all the decrees of punishment in the aftermath had a tendency to blur in her mind. Most of the time, she had no idea how many days she had left to make good on any particular punishment. Secretly, she hoped the Bishop was just as forgetful, but it didn’t seem likely.

The Bishop was the principal, academic counselor, basketball coach, and general taskmaster at the Manor. Though his real name was Dr. Leslie Robinson, only the first-graders and anyone who had to talk to him face to face ever called him that. Whenever anyone did talk face to face with the Bishop, they generally found that most of the talk came from his face anyway.

When she was younger, Sidnye found it strange that she was supposed to call the Bishop Dr. Robinson, even though he wasn’t a real doctor who could fix a broken leg or something. It was especially confusing because McCune was a real doctor who could fix your leg. However, working on the same sense of casualness as Stacey in the cafeteria, he told everyone to just call him McCune.

Sidnye’s very first run-in with the Bishop had come when she sliced her thumb on a pair of so-called safety scissors in first grade. Mrs. Donnel, her teacher that year, had told her to go see the doctor at once, so Sidnye dutifully trotted down to the Bishop’s office. She dripped blood on his carpet for the couple of minutes it took him to figure out why she was there, then send her to McCune. As McCune patched her up a few minutes later, she suggested to him that Dr. Robinson should think about going with Mr. instead. McCune told her that was an excellent and insightful suggestion, and promised he would bring it up sometime.

Two constant rumors followed the Bishop around the corridors and classrooms of the Manor. The first was the relatively innocent tale of how he’d gotten the nickname The Bishop. That involved a long stint as teacher and headmaster at a parochial school in southern Ontario, even though to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he was never actually ordained or anything.

The second, darker, and consequently much more talked about rumor concerned why he’d stopped teaching in that parochial school in southern Ontario. This made the rounds of new students each year, taking the form of whispered warnings of how three kids had died during one of the Bishop’s phys ed classes when a 10k run went very, very bad.

True or not, the practical fallout of the story was that most of the student body obeyed the Bishop’s will in a state of mortal dread. This was something the Bishop seemed to like an awful lot.

Sidnye’s most recent run-in with the Bishop had been Monday the week before, when a snowball fight she had nothing to do with had somehow migrated from the front field into the first-floor foyer. At least she had nothing to do with it until she stepped unknowingly from the bathroom, at which point Stefani Celina pasted her one in the back of the head. Sidnye’s response, scraped up from the mass of snow accumulating in the corridor, naturally missed the generally obnoxious Stefani just as the Bishop trundled unaware up the stairs from the parking lot. His expression as Sidnye’s shot took his ski cap off was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

As she packed in the last of the trays, Sidnye reflected that her biggest problem was always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But though she’d tried to run that line of defense past the Bishop as he watched her mop the foyer floor for the balance of that previous Monday morning, his own opinion had run more along the lines of her acting a little too smart for her own good.

I’d be happy to have you show me how to act less smart, sir. Sidnye had realized it was the absolute worst thing she could say, but only about a second after the words left her mouth.

The Bishop had these small eyes that shrank into his face the angrier he got. Sidnye could barely see them as he said, Add a week to whatever cafeteria detention you’re already serving, Dupree.

I’m not sure how long the detention I’m already doing is supposed to run.

Then start showing up at lunch as well, until I tell you to stop.

As Sidnye finished up now, she glanced to the clock to see she was running late, which had always been her other biggest problem. It usually took her twenty minutes of the half-hour between breakfast and class to clear the tables, then scrape and rinse the plates so Stacey could load the cafeteria kitchen’s monstrous dishwasher. If she scrambled, she usually made it to class just on time after a fast run to the dumpster, then five minutes back to the dorm to wash up and brush her teeth. All this week, though, she’d been late.

All done, Sidnye called out. She waved as well, because she knew Stacey could barely hear her. Stacey smiled as she waved back.

Sidnye grabbed up the garbage bags, along with the margarine container she’d hidden carefully behind them. All the while she was scraping French toast remnants, potato patty leftovers,