“I call it the War on Words,” was the very first thing she said, almost as soon as I found her. Like she was some kind of space hermit, freshly emerged from behind her boulder. All ready to launch her new way of being on the waiting universe.

“It’s a war alright, Jonny,” I replied. Even as the name slipped out of my mouth, I felt a twinge of guilt. I know the terraforming laborers call her that, but I dunno if that means I have to.

To say she’d changed since our time together would be an understatement. Grubby loincloth padded out to look like there was something in there. Loose tunic over what must be a band of cloth holding flat her tiny breasts. Thighs skinny from malnutrition, no giving the game away there. Hair pointing out in all directions, bare feet half-hidden by the film of stardust covering the surface of this lonely rock.

Not the ideal setting for bringing out the feminine. Especially if the woman you’ve been hunting down for the last couple years is hiding out as a man.

Jonny held out a battered old gourd as if it contained the elixir of all life. Probably some relic from one of the old colonies with life modules. Which meant it had to have been kicking around the outer reaches of the solar system for a dozen years or more. No fucking way was I getting my lips around that.

I pushed her hand away roughly, taking a breath from my oxygen mask. “I’m the one who’s gonna be giving out the doses,” I told her. Trying to establish my authority.

She of course pretended she didn’t hear me. I didn’t really give a shit, I didn’t actually have to win her over, all they were interested in back at the Mental Health Commission is whether I could jab her in the arse. Which I planned on doing very soon.

But Johnny Chihuahua was still talking.

“At first, I decided to keep on writing newsletters for the sake of the rest of us hermits scattered across the stars,” she said. “Out of a sense of loyalty, you know? To create some sense of community, a way to atone for my desertion, if you like. As if there’s anyone left for a truly committed hermit to abandon …” Her words petered off into silence.

God knows, I’d felt some of that loneliness myself. As I scrabbled around in my pack trying to find the pre-loaded syringe, my bitter heart softened just a bit. No matter how you look at it, I was more like her than any of those fucks back at the Commission. Except I was still taking my meds. Although they wouldn’t have hesitated to set me loose if that changed.

Probably would do if I couldn’t get that runaway girl to come on home.

“But you know, Seamus,” she said after a while. “With nobody within a few light years to even read my writing, I thought I’d mix things up a bit. Thought I’d try typing in a white font instead. Just for a laugh.”

My fingers were still searching for the pre-loaded syringe. Fiddling around to strip off the protective packaging. I’d done it thousands of times before, back at home, but never with my hand inside a spacepack.

“White letters on a white page,” Jonny repeated, and not for the first time I wondered if this whole thing wasn’t just some enormous jape for her. “At first it seemed like a sweet idea,” she continued. “I could write quicker, there wasn’t so much need to edit myself all the time, and I could go straight from an idea to the printed page.

There, that was it, I’d done it. The naked syringe was in my hand, loaded and ready to go.

“But that first phase didn’t last long,” Jonny continued. She didn’t seem to have any idea of what was coming. At least that’s what I thought at the time, though I’ve since wondered if she was just pretending, if she knew exactly what I was up to.

“Pretty soon I decided to cut out the printing,” she said. “Not really much point since you wouldn’t be able to see the words anyway. There’s precious few readers out here, and besides, my stock of paper was getting low. You know they stopped sending out supplies right around about the time the hermit convention was cancelled?”

Jonny stopped to catch her breath, looked at me as if she was expecting some kind of answer. I don’t know how she managed to talk so fast. I also don’t understand how she found any sustenance in the air up there, my sensors had detected almost no atmosphere on the approach.

“How on Earth do you…” I said. “I mean how on Mars…” I was making a mess of it. But she was pulling me in. Tell you the truth, I let her. God knows she’d pulled me in enough times back in the day. Pulled me into her sweet embrace.

“How on this little asteroid did you imagine you were going to find more than one hermit to be together at a time?” I couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of my question. She caught my smile, and offered it back. Despite her insane get-up, it was exactly the same smile we’d shared for ever.

Which is when I realized I loved that woman more than anything in this… In this… infinite void.

“So what I tried next,” she continued, picking up speed again. “Was to see if I could keep writing even if I lifted my fingertips off the keyboard.” She was looking into my eyes, her warm brown eyes were staring into mine and I was falling. Falling all the way back in.

“You know, trying to keep up the typing movements but not actually touching the keys,” she said with another big smile. “And you know what, I could do it! Much to my surprise, I found I could write even better than before. My output increased, and I found I could write almost as fast as I could think. Faster, maybe. I wrote some of my best novels during that period, twenty or thirty of them. I must dig them out sometime, I just can’t seem to remember where I put them. I used to worry it was amnesia, but now I’m learning to just let it go.”

I’ve never had a stirring down below when I’m looking at a man. That’s just the way I am, I guess. But now I was getting one. But my hand was still on my syringe. There was only one thing getting stuck into my former lover that afternoon, and it was a needle loaded with double-strength Rusparidone.

“Anyway, what I do now,” she said, seeming to catch up with herself again. “What I discovered in the end, is that I can get rid of the keyboard altogether. Recently I’ve found I can even stop moving my fingers. I just write, with the same white letters, but without the paper and without the keyboard. It’s so liberating!”

At this point Jonny became quite animated, almost cheerful. Dancing in front of me like some cosmic scarecrow, kicking up a plume of dust with her feet, it was probably the happiest I saw her in all the time I was there on that godforsaken little rock.

 “And is that it?” I asked her, slowly drawing the syringe from my spacepack. “Is that really how you spend your days without me?”

“Sometimes I come out from behind my boulder,” she said, sinking to the floor once again, down on her knees. “I go looking, I go searching in the rubble for something He may have left behind. Some sign, some signal. A fingerprint maybe, or perhaps a footprint in the dust. Is it possible that he created all of this for us and yet left no instructions?”

Again she broke off her speech to sweep her hand around once more in a circle, to indicate the scope of her search, to suggest that this barren rock in its entirety comprised her world, her domain.

The stars glittered dimly in the background, a dismal backdrop to this battered dusty outcrop floating through space.

Jonny leaned forward, pressed her forehead against me and grasped onto my spacesuit like some desperate penitent. It was my moment.

I lifted the syringe ready for the stab.

Ready for the last betrayal of my lover with whom I once shared everything.

My body, my love, and even my dreams.

My wild, crazy dreams, of somewhere better than this.

I didn’t answer her question. To be more accurate, I couldn’t answer. I realized I was done. I was done with her obsessiveness, done with her denial, done with her wasted life. It was time to get it over with, time for us to be on our way.

But even though I didn’t answer, I thought about it. And in my contemplation, of whether He might have left some instruction for us, that’s when I missed her move.

Gently, almost lovingly, Isabella nudged me backwards. She must have known in advance, my spaceboots had become stuck in the mud beneath the fine layer of stardust, and I couldn’t step backwards. Slowly, slowly, slowly, like the derricks falling away from a rocket launch, I keeled over backwards and landed rather awkwardly arse-first in the dirt.

It wasn’t so bad, but I certainly didn’t feel the earth move.

Then as I looked up, I just about caught a glance. Of one little hermit skittering off into the distance, her steps leaving a trail of dust glittering against the blackness of the perpetual night.