“What are you doing?” Jean-Pierre inquired.

Van rose from his bow, bright and happy. He began to glow a little.

“I am greeting my King.”

His voice became less squeaky and his gaze changed. He was smiling.

“How are we going to get there?” Jean-Pierre repeated the question. “Do we go up like you?”

Van began to rise slowly upward.

“Here, everyone can fly. If you still think you have bodies, perhaps you should take off some of your clothes.”

Dr Capri began to look at his clothes in wonder. He took off his jacket and looked questioningly at Van. He made a sign to drop it. The doctor threw his jacket to the surface, a moment later the jacket simply disappeared.

“Here you are what you want to be, and you do what you want to do,” his voice sounded loud, but his body was no longer visible.

The huge flying castle was already almost over the heads of the travelers. The upper part of the city, which looked like a medieval citadel made of some kind of metal, was covered by the base of the flying island. From below, it looked like an unhewn rock that had been torn from the surface of the Sun. A huge stream of light burst from the center of the city downward, piercing the surface of the Star with force. The flow ignited the bowels, feeding them and heating them.

The earthlings threw their heads upward and stared in fascination at the impending island. The powerful roar of the ray grew stronger. It was approaching like a great tornado.

“What do we do?” hoping that someone had a plan, shouted Jean-Pierre.

“I don’t know,” David shook his head.

“We left our bodies on Earth,” Dr Capri said quietly so that no one could hear him, “the laws are different here. We need to understand what it’s like to fly.”

“Hey You! It’s time to tell us how to fly,” Jean-Pierre began to shout and looked around for shelter.

Suddenly, Van spiked from on high and shouted:

“Just take off after me! Otherwise, you will burn! No one can withstand this heat.”

“We can’t!” Jean-Pierre shouted. “We have never flown before.”

He looked at the fire stream tearing up the surface, turning it no longer into the lava, but into a moving volcano. All the travelers began to rush in different directions. Yulia cried out, David panicked:

“We have to run!”

“Run where? Look how big it is,” answered Jean-Pierre.

The pillar of fire was bubbling two hundred meters away from them. It was more than a kilometer in diameter, and it filled the space in front of the travelers, carrying the raw, searing, roaring energy from the overhead rock to the very heart of the Star.

The pillar was approaching rapidly, and running was pointless. It was impossible to hide from such unbridled and immense power. This deadly light was like a fiery tornado or a sheer cliff stinging with sparks.

Panic and fear drowned in the heat. Jean-Pierre looked around. David stood beside him, mesmerized. Yulia covered her face with her hands. The doctor was all clenched up with tension and impending pain. “We can’t escape,” Jean-Pierre thought. He shifted his gaze to Debby. She smiled sadly at him and nodded. Jean-Pierre was surprised to see her lips moving, but he couldn’t make out the words. He lowered his head closer to her and heard her sing a lullaby:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are…”

She was looking somewhere through the wall of fire. Debby had already been dying for a few hours, and now she was just trying to calm her friends down. She was thinking about her kids at school, about Sango, about Nika of Samothrace’s wings, and how amazing and unfathomable it all was.

The hum abruptly fell silent and the looming wall froze at the words, “He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so.”

Only Van continued to whirl around the petrified earthlings and squeak an extended “Aaaaah!” He looked like a bee that had lost its orientation and was spinning in an imaginary circle. Debby finished singing and put her hand on the head of Yulia, who was crying beside her.

“It’s okay,” Debby said gently, “it’s going to be okay.”

Audrey sat in the room with her eyes closed. There was no emotion on her face, she was breathing deeply and trying to concentrate. The world grew smaller with each breath. First, the sounds of the city disappeared. Then the sounds of the neighbors upstairs faded away, then the feeling of the room. Audrey was left alone with her breathing, but she felt each breath hit a huge, dark rock of sadness. There was no way she could overcome it.

Suddenly, she felt goosebumps run through her body. A wave of warmth and tenderness enveloped her. Audrey felt the blackness turn first into brown, then into red and orange light. She smiled and grinned at the pleasant sensation. Tears came up and Audrey opened her eyes. The room was filled with bright sunlight. It seemed to be an unfamiliar room, someone else’s, from another planet. Audrey felt that she was there and that beauty too. Then she dismissed the thought and turned to the window. The sun had found a thaw between the thick clouds, but another cloud had already obscured it, swallowing the glowing orb.

The room cooled and faded. Audrey lay down on the sofa, feeling very tired. She wanted to sleep, even though she had woken up a couple of hours ago.

“Oh,” Audrey blew a stream of air through her pursed lips.

Thoughts wandered and couldn’t find themselves or Audrey in her and Jean-Pierre’s flat. They hung in the air like weightless dust and just like that, uselessly filling the void. Audrey remembered talking to her mother and Jean-Pierre’s mother.

His mother was crying. Not sobbing, but somehow quiet and sad. Audrey thought that Madame Julie was ready for those tears, they were kept in a safe place, somewhere very close. And then she realized that Jean-Pierre’s mother was not mourning her son, but pitying her. “I’ll call you back,” Audrey replied to this compassion.

Audrey’s mother didn’t cry, she was quiet for a while, said a few comforting words, and then shattered the fragile hope with a simple question, “What will you do next?” Audrey felt cold and hard at those words. There was a challenge in that question, but she wasn’t ready to face it. “What will I do next?” Audrey repeated to herself with tears in her eyes.

“Nothing next,” she blurted out aloud.

She cried, but after a minute the tears dissolved into a viscous and formless sadness.

The phone rang and Audrey wearily reached for it. “Bernard Bajolet” was written on the screen. Audrey imagined the conversation and pressed her lips together.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Audrey!” a joyful voice came through the speakerphone. “Audrey! He’s alive!”

Audrey froze. She felt the shivers run down her body again. She looked out the window, hopefully. The sky was covered in clouds, but somewhere out there the sun was shining.

Van stopped shouting and landed beside the earthlings. He bowed again in front of the frozen wall of fire. The beam was blazing with energy, but stood still a few meters away from the terrified aliens. No heat could be felt, but a kind of radiation showered everyone from head to toe.

Doctor Capri was only now able to open his eyes, closed by fear. He looked up at the frozen column of fire and noticed something slowly descending towards them from the upper level. Dr Capri pointed an object:

“Look.”

Seconds later, the travelers saw the smooth bottom of the flying vehicle, which was slowly approaching the surface and reflecting the entire company in a mirror-golden belly.

The flying machine stopped beside the travelers, a few centimeters above the surface. In it stood a young man of the usual size, as the earthlings. He had curly blond hair and a light yellow tunic. He bowed to the earthlings and invited them up onto the flying machine with a gesture.