Jasmine (continued)

Next, seeking light and hope, Ennui turned her eyes to heaven where the sun slouched, the slit of a silvery eye in the profile of an ebony lynx. Her heart brimming with loneliness, Ennui stood and stretched her arms as if to embrace the universe. “Where are you?” she cried.

Realizing how foolish she would appear to anyone gazing at her from the observatory and cognizant that she could never reach even the nearest star, she hung her head in frustration and shame. She climbed down from the asteroid, feeling empty and sad. When a single tear splashed the toe of her boot, she bent to wipe it away with her gloved hand, but the tears flowed. Frustrated with her own fragility, she kicked a rock - and uncovered an asymmetrical crystal. She picked it up and examined it.

Jasmine had seen many crystals on Ceres: inside her own cave, in the dark mines below the surface, and lying in the lapping waves along the seashore, but this one was different. While most of the crystals she had seen were clear, pale yellow, or translucent pink, this one was emerald green. Smaller than a hen’s egg, myriad smaller crystals were encased deep beneath the multi-faceted surface, floating, revolving, and glowering in the twilight. Impulsively, Jasmine raised the crystal to intercept an intrepid ray of sunlight that had penetrated a cloud.

The effect was swift. Trapped, intensified, and refracted by the crystal, the ray of sunlight was transformed into a rainbow that seared her vision and seemed to envelope her. Indistinct shapes, human forms, appeared before her. She felt no emotion. She felt that she traveled, but her feet did not move from the asteroid.

“Take courage. Take joy, Jasmine,” a voice murmured. “We are with you always.”
The vision receded as swiftly as it had appeared, and she gradually lowered the crystal, awestruck.

If Jasmine wasn’t so enthralled by her discovery of the crystal, so entranced by the indistinct vision it had etched in her mind’s eye, she would have noticed the long, white tentacle inexorably snaking around her ankle, the beady eyes staring at her from the place where they had emerged from the sea. The creature was wrapping its tentacle around and around her lower leg like a rubbery winter scarf, suction cups firmly fastening themselves to her boot.

She would remember when she regained consciousness in the observatory’s infirmary, her clothes soaking wet, her hair dripping, her face bleeding and scraped, her lungs gasping painfully, that her foot was yanked from behind and that the backward impetus caused the crystal to fly from her hand.

Suddenly her chest slammed the asteroid as the tentacle dragged her across the rocky shore and into the roiling ocean. The scientist’s young assistant had been watching, and he rescued her with the machete that hung, always ready, near the observatory door.

Jasmine woke in the clinic, feverish, her throat dry. Her hands groped the bedcovers. “The crystal, where is it?” she wondered. Her head ached. Her ribs hurt. Her mother’s voice drifted into the room from the corridor. Jasmine listened to her conversing softly... with a male voice? There were few men - and no boys - on Ceres. Who could it be?

The scientist’s young assistant stepped into the room first. "She's awake," he said, and smiled, relieved.

Jasmine's mother reached out for her hand.