The Alchemy of Ivy Mae
The Things That Fell From the Sky
(From the collected fragments Jas keeps)
Jas always collected what others dismissed.
They said it was a habit from before — from the time when information still came in pieces, when truth had to be assembled by hand. Paper scraps. Offline drives. Old books no one bothered to update.
After the Storm, those habits mattered.
They found the first satellite record in a drawer that hadn’t been opened in decades — a stack of clippings yellowed at the edges, brittle as leaves. Headlines half-mocking, half-awed.
“Record Number of Objects Now Orbiting Earth.”
“Near Miss in Low Earth Orbit Avoided.”
“Satellites Designed to Burn Up Safely.”
Safely.
The word appeared again and again, like a charm meant to keep fear at bay.
Another clipping showed a grainy image — a chain of lights stitched across the night sky, celebrated as progress, photographed by children who were told they were witnessing the future.
Jas turned the page.
A later article was shorter. Quieter.
“Unusual Re-entries Reported Following Solar Activity.”
No panic. No urgency. Just language smoothed down to avoid disruption.
Tucked between the papers was an old device — a tablet that shouldn’t have survived. Its screen was spider-cracked, its casing scorched along one edge. Jas powered it on only once.
The video file had no title.
It showed a sky at night, shimmering strangely, not unlike an aurora — except wrong. Too sharp. Too fast. Streaks of light peeling away from something unseen, burning as they fell.
A voice off-screen whispered:
“Are those stars?”
Another voice answered, uncertain:
“No. Stars don’t move like that.”
The clip ended abruptly.
Later, in a margin written by hand, someone had scrawled:
They built a second sky and forgot it needed tending.
Jas understood then.
The satellites hadn’t fallen all at once. They didn’t crash in fire and noise like the movies promised. They failed the way everything else did — quietly, incrementally, politely.
Orbits decayed. Signals collided. Debris made more debris. Warnings were logged, deferred, absorbed into reports no one read aloud.
And when the sun surged — when it reminded Earth of older physics — the machines above were as fragile as the ones below.
The last note Jas found was written in pencil, almost erased by time:
When the sky became crowded, it stopped being protective.
Jas folded the clippings carefully and slipped them back into their pack.
Above them, the night was darker now. Clearer. The false stars were gone.
And for the first time in a long while, the sky belonged only to itself again.