Father Liam wakes before the bells.

 

He always does. The silence just before they toll is the holiest part of the day. Then the bells ring, echoing through the cratered valleys of Nova Santiago. An endless drone to wake the faithful in waves.

 

By the time he steps out of his residence, draped in his lead-lined cassock, the entirety of Nova Santiago is already glowing with radiation.

 

He blesses it all anyway.

 

When he walks the line of the gathered miners before they descend into the veins of tunnels threading just below the surface of the planet to pull radium from stones, he offers prayers that double as a kind of insurance policy.

 

“Curie eléison,” he murmurs, marking foreheads with ash and zinc.

 

The ash is from the filters burned at Mass last month, scraped from the church’s ventilation fans, and ground down into a soft, silvery powder. The zinc is mined from the outer ridges and applied in a thick paste. The company claims it slows the absorption of heavy particles, although no one truly believes it.

 

Father Liam certainly doesn’t, but he applies it anyway, in the shape of a cross.

 

Symbols matter. They always have.

 

The miners accept it all: the faith, the dust, the zinc, the burn in their joints.

 

They don’t mind the risk too much anymore. Here on the edge of the galaxy, radiation is wealth, and radium glows in the bones of the planet like marrow, nestled into pockets left behind by stellar collapses.

 

They call it stardust, but really, it isn’t as pretty as it sounds. It eats you slowly, sure, but it pays well.

 

Everyone knows someone who has bled radiation.

 

* * *

 

Father Liam never meant to be a missionary. He'd studied astrophysics once, back on Earth, before the sky turned orange and the oceans climbed up the Vatican steps. He fled like the rest of the human population who could afford to leave — not as a priest, back then, but as a refugee. A modern-day Exodus.

 

When the Church called for shepherds to minister to the stars, he had volunteered easily. He hadn’t expected to find the miners already half-Catholic when he arrived.

 

People in desperate situations reach for religion. The Church has never had so many new members.

 

They had built shrines inside the mines: crude figures made from drill casings and burned-out helmets. They had fashioned a Madonna out of lead sheets and called her Our Lady of the Core.

 

They prayed without books. They sang the oldest songs in Latin, a language dead on Earth long before humans ventured out into the stars. Kyrie eléison, they’d chant in the dark. Lord, have mercy. Somewhere along the way, Kyrie became Curie, after the woman who discovered radium back on Earth.

 

This discovery gave the miners jobs. It gave them a death sentence. Curie eléison.

 

This planet is rich with radium, laced into the mantle like nerves in flesh. Exposure is par for the course. Nothing can block it entirely. The company knew this when they built the colony, but the profits outweighed the risk, and the people came anyway.

 

The pay is high. The Earth is dying. The stars are holy.

 

And always the refrain: Curie eléison.

 

Curie, have mercy. Protect us.

 

* * *

 

There is a girl named Elira who works shaft nine. She’s seventeen, with scars on her palms from work in the mines and a rosary tattooed around her wrist. She has never been to Earth. She was born in a vacuum, baptized in water pulled from a recycler, confirmed with irradiated oil.

 

Father Liam performed all her sacraments himself. He sees her weekly at Mass and daily for confession.

 

One evening, after a double shift, she finds him polishing the metal chalice and says, casually, like it’s nothing, “I saw the Virgin in the mines today.”

 

He looks up.

 

“She was in the cave wall. The radium lines traced her cloak. She didn’t have a face, but she smiled anyway.”

 

The next day, other miners follow her down and see it too. Or, at least, they say they do to Father Liam that week at Mass. They describe lines in the stone glowing faint green, bending in the shape of arms, a hood, a halo, something holy.

 

He had never been one to deny the dying their faith.

 

So they built a shrine there. No digging allowed near it.

 

The Company lets it stand. Shrines are good for morale.

 

* * *

 

The Company, officially, is secular. Unofficially, however, it pays for chapels. It encourages worship.

 

A miner who believes in salvation is less likely to crack when their fingertips rot or their skin becomes so thin the white beneath it starts to show.

 

Father Liam hears confessions of decay from behind his screen. Later, he matches voices to melting skin, nails curled backward, hair falling out. He anoints foreheads when their scalps blister, when their breath smells of ozone and blood.

 

* * *

 

When the explosion happens, it is not entirely unexpected. There are few, if any, safety regulations this far from Earth.

Something in the mine fails. It could have been a stray spark from a drill, a thermal spike, or maybe just the planet itself rebelling. Shaft nine collapses in on itself, then supernovas outward. For a moment, the entire ridge glows brighter than the stars that surround the planet.

 

Twenty-seven miners are lost.

 

Elira survives.

 

At least, at first she does.

 

She walks out after the explosion, silent. Her eyes are gone, her hair is burnt at the ends, and her suit is fused to her torso in lace-like webbing.

 

Over the next two days, her body decays in impossible ways. When Father Liam touches her hand, it burns through the glove.

 

On the third day, her heart stops.

 

They bury her bones in a lead coffin. Like Marie Curie.

 

Like a saint, still glowing with stardust.