Rust-Belt Constellations

On the roof of a dead mill, with the Perseids streaking overhead, Sammie and Charlie see something that doesn't belong in the sky. It sees them, too.

“There’s one,” Charlie said, pointing. A silver scratch appeared for a second above the skeletal frame of the old water tower, then vanished. “Make a wish.”

Sammie didn’t look. She was lying on her back on the old blanket, hands behind her head, staring straight up into the deep violet of zenith. “You don’t wish on meteors. That’s birthday candles and eyelashes.”

“Same principle. Cosmic dust incinerating in the mesosphere. A dying star. Very poetic. You should wish for them to cancel A-level results.”

“I’m not worried about my results,” she said, and it was true. Physics, Maths, Further Maths. She’d be fine. Her place at Manchester was secure. The worry was a different shape entirely, a hollow feeling that had been growing all month. It felt like this rooftop, a wide-open space with a hard edge you could fall from.

“Of course you’re not,” Charlie sighed, flopping down beside her. The blanket wasn't quite big enough for two people to lie down without touching. His shoulder pressed against hers. “You’ve probably already got your entire university programme colour-coded in a spreadsheet.”

“It’s a flowchart, actually,” she deadpanned.

He laughed, a low rumble beside her. “Knew it.”

They lay in silence for a few minutes, watching the sky perform. The Perseids were putting on a good show tonight, a steady trickle of bright, fleeting streaks. It was their last proper night. Tomorrow, his family was driving him down to Bristol to move into his dorm. He was doing automotive engineering. He loved taking engines apart, figuring out how things worked. Sammie loved figuring out how everything worked, on a galactic scale. For eighteen years, their orbits had been aligned. Now, a final gravitational slingshot was sending them in opposite directions.

### A Dot That Did Not Behave

“That’s a bright one,” Charlie murmured, pointing again. “Satellite?”

Sammie’s eyes found it instantly. It was bright, a steady point of light, brighter than Jupiter on a clear night. It was moving at a satellite’s pace, a slow, deliberate crawl from west to east. “Probably the ISS,” she said, her voice full of casual authority. “It’s due for a pass around now.”

She watched it, tracking its familiar path. But then, it did something unfamiliar. It stopped.

Not slowed down. Not changed trajectory. It just stopped, dead in the sky, right over the town.

Sammie sat up straight. “What the…?”

“Whoa,” Charlie said, sitting up beside her. “Did it just… brake?”

“Satellites don’t brake,” she said, her mind racing through possibilities. A helicopter? No, no sound, no rotor lights. A high-altitude drone? Maybe, but she’d never seen one that bright, that high. The object hung there for a long, impossible moment. A star that shouldn't exist.

Then it pulsed.

A single, brilliant flash of blue-white light, sharp and precise. Then a pause of two seconds. Then three more flashes in quick succession. Pause. One flash. Pause. Three flashes.

It was a pattern. Unmistakable. A signal.

“Did you see that?” Charlie’s voice was a whisper.

“I saw it,” she said, her own voice tight. Her brain, the one that loved order and testable hypotheses, was screaming. This wasn’t right. Nothing in her knowledge of astronomy, of physics, could account for this. An object in a stable orbital path couldn’t just stop. It couldn’t hover. It couldn’t signal.

The pattern repeated. Flash. Pause. Flash-flash-flash. It was aimed downwards. It felt like it was aimed at them.

“It’s… it’s talking,” Charlie breathed, a note of awe in his voice that unnerved her.

“It’s not talking,” she snapped, more harshly than she intended. “It’s a… a weather balloon with a faulty strobe. A military experiment.” She was throwing explanations at the phenomenon like stones, hoping one would stick. None of them did.

The object pulsed through the sequence one more time. Then, as suddenly as it had stopped, it moved. It shot sideways, accelerating at a speed that seemed to defy inertia, covering a huge swathe of the sky in a heartbeat. And then it was gone. Not faded, not flown over the horizon. It just blinked out of existence.

The sky was empty, save for the indifferent stars and the occasional, normal meteor.

---

The silence it left behind was heavier than before. The night felt different, the stars colder. The easy camaraderie between them had been replaced by a thrumming, nervous energy.

“Okay,” Charlie said, turning to her. His face was pale in the dim light from the town. “You’re the expert. What was that?”

“I don’t know.” The admission felt like a failure. She was the one who was supposed to have the answers about the sky. She had star charts memorised, she could talk for hours about stellar nucleosynthesis. But that… that was not in any textbook.

“It was a signal,” Charlie insisted. He, the sceptic who’d rolled his eyes when she’d brought her shortwave radio up to the roof ‘just in case’, was now the believer. “It was aimed right at us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was miles up. It wasn’t aimed at anything on the ground, let alone two teenagers on a roof.” Even as she said it, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was right. The flashes had felt personal, precise.

“One, three. One, three. What is that? Morse code?”

“‘A’ is dot-dash. ‘I’ is two dots. ‘S’ is three dots. ‘U’ is two dots and a dash. That pattern doesn’t fit.” She knew Morse code; it was part of her amateur radio hobby.

Charlie stood up and walked to the edge of the roof, looking out over the sleeping town. “For my whole life, you’ve been the one looking up there, telling me about nebulae and red giants. And it was all just… background noise to me. Pretty, but noise. But that was a voice, Sam. That was somebody saying hello.”

The sincerity in his voice unsettled her. It was easier when he was making jokes. She wanted to argue, to rationalise, to shrink the event back down to something manageable. But she couldn’t. She had seen it too.

She picked at a loose thread on the blanket. Her scientific mind was desperately trying to build a box around the experience, to label and contain it. Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. That was the official term. A sterile, boring name for something that had felt profound and terrifying.

As she sat there, a new sound cut through the quiet hum of the night. A crackle of static.

Both of them turned. It was coming from her radio, a vintage shortwave receiver she’d brought up mostly for atmosphere. She’d had it tuned to a dead frequency, enjoying the faint, oceanic hiss of cosmic background radiation.

But this wasn’t a hiss.

It was a rhythmic burst of static. Crackle. Pause. Crackle-crackle-crackle. Pause.

It was the same pattern.