And All the

Stars

by Andrea K Höst

And All the Stars

© 2012 Andrea K Höst. All rights reserved.

www.andreakhost.com

Cover design using stock art: Andrea K Hösth

Promotional Edition

Published by Andrea K Hösth

All characters in this publication

are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

Description

Come for the apocalypse.

Stay for cupcakes.

Die for love.

Madeleine Cost is working to become the youngest person ever to win theArchibald Prize for portraiture. Her elusive cousin Tyler is the perfectsubject: androgynous, beautiful, and famous. All she needs to do is pin himdown for the sittings.

None of her plans factored in the Spires: featureless, impossible, spearinginto the hearts of cities across the world – and spraying clouds of sparklingdust into the wind.

Is it an alien invasion? Germ warfare? They are questions everyone on Earthwould like answered, but Madeleine has a more immediate problem. At Ground Zeroof the Sydney Spire, beneath the collapsed ruin of St James Station, she mustmake it to the surface before she can hope to find out if the world is ending.

Acknowledgements

I BLAME THIS BOOK ON

FLANNERY AND WENDY DARLING

and thank them for it.

Additional thanks to Dr Jennifer Elliman, Dr ChrisFellows,

Julie Dillon, Lexie Cenni,and Estara Swanberg.

Author's Note

Spelling is Australian English.

Chapter One

Madeleine Cost's world was a tight, close space, a triangulartube tilted so her head lay lower than her feet. Light reflected off metal, not enough to giveany detail, and there was barely room to squeeze one hand past the slicksurface, to explore face and skull and find powdery dust and a throbbinglump. Dull pain also marked uppershoulder, hip, thigh. She felt dusty allover, grimed with it, except her lower half, which was wet. Free-flowing liquid drained past her head.

She could smell blood.

Ticket barrier. Thosewere the rectangles of metal above and beside her. Madeleine could remember reaching for herreturned ticket as the red gates snapped back and then – then a blank spacebetween there and here. Thursdaylunchtime and she'd been at St James Station, planning to walk down toWoolloomooloo to wait for Tyler, just off the plane and sure to be strained andtired and all the more interesting for it.

The noise the water made suggested a long fall before it hit somewherepast her feet, close enough to spatter her ankles before draining past her. The ticket barriers were a generous doubleflight of stairs above the platforms, or had been. How far above them was she now? Had it been a bomb? Gas explosion? She could smell smoke, but it wasn'toverwhelming. The blood wasstronger. Smoke and blood and fallingwater, and how far was it falling? Howbig was the drop, and how–

"Hello?" Madeleine called, just a croak of a voice,anything to shut off that line of thought. The effort made her cough.

There wasn't room enough to shift to hands and knees. She could barely squirm onto her stomach, thesmall pack she wore catching on the withdrawn gates. Stretching one arm forward, she followed thepath of the water down, and found an edge. But she had no way to measure the size of any gap beyond. Reaching back with one sandalled foot, sheexplored damp channels in powder, and grainy concrete. No edge. Not willing to just lie there, she tucked her elbows in close andwriggled back an inch.

The ground shifted.

Freezing, Madeleine waited for the plunge, but nothingfollowed except a faint rocking motion. She – the slab of concrete with its burden of ticket barriers and girl –was balanced on a downward slope. Another shift of position and she could send the whole thing plunging,and would fall and fall, and then the blood would be hers.

Eyes squeezed shut, Madeleine tried to calm herselfdown. She'd always thought herself acomposed sort of person, but black panic clawed, demanding an urgent response –screaming, running, leaping – however impossible that might be. It was only the itching in her throat,setting her coughing again, which pulled her back.

Could she drink the thin flow of water running past her? It didn't smell – not stronger than the bloodand smoke, at any rate. The tumblingsplash was so loud, a solid belt as it hit the concrete near her feet. St James Station was underneath Hyde Park,the ticket barrier level just a few metres below grass and trees. The strength of the water's impact suggesteda drop to the platform level.

Up. Down. Stay. Three choices which felt like none in the blood-scented dark.

Her phone, tucked in the outer pocket of her backpack, letout the opening notes of her favourite song. Prone, elbows tucked in, hands beneath her chin, she couldn't just reachback. By the time she'd scrunched herself into the tiny extra space on thetilted border of her world, and worked her opposite arm back, the smoky voicehad eased into silence. She stillscrabbled for the pack's zip, ignoring the burning protest of her bruisedshoulder and side, and caught the heavy rectangle between two reaching fingers.

As Madeleine brought her arm painfully forward, the clearwhite light from the phone conjured hazy reflections of girl in thesilver-metal sides of the two ticket barriers. These faded as she turned the makeshift torch forward to revealwhiteness and a crosshatching of dark lines. Bars.

Madeleine stared, confused, until she recognised thegreen-painted railing which edged the upper level and the stairs to theplatform. They were warped and twisted,but still looked thoroughly solid, forming another wall to the cage capping theslab of concrete. There was no wayforward.

It was difficult to see beyond the railing, but the whiteresolved itself into dust, pale mounds of it, through which she could glimpse athird silver rectangle, this one twisted and torn, the tickets it had swallowedspewing from its innards across dust and chunks of concrete.

Her raft lay on one of the flights of stairs, which did notmake sense. St James Station had onlytwo lines. The tracks sat parallel,perhaps fifty metres apart, their platforms joined by a broad expanse ofconcrete full of pillars which held up the ticket barrier area. The ticket barriers sat over this centralarea, while the stairs were to either side of it, close to the tracks. To be on the stairs she and her metal cocoonwould have had to fall sideways.

Whatever the case, at least she was near the bottom, even ifshe would still need to risk moving backward to get out.

But before that… Turning her phone around, Madeleine found a missed call from hermother. Her parents thought she was atschool, and had no idea she was skipping to start work on the portrait ofTyler. There'd been no point embarkingon Round Five Thousand of the Grades v Art argument when Tyler's mildwillingness to oblige a cousin didn't extend to altering his schedule in anyway, and the cut-off date for the 2016 Archibald was in less than a week.