For Darkness Shows the Stars (3 page)

This news, of course, had been greeted with mixed reactions from the Luddite community, who frowned upon any technology they hadn’t already been using for centuries. But as many disapproved, there were other Luddites, not quite as fastidious, who had declared the machines nothing more than an innocuous, long-forgotten form of transport, and turned the sun-carts into a hot commodity. The Norths, of course, had not indulged. They couldn’t afford to.

And now this Admiral Innovation wanted to build himself a new ship—and using the Boatwright facilities, too! This would be a tricky proposition to get by her father, but if she could manage it, it would certainly solve their financial woes. Innovation must be very wealthy to be able to rent the whole shipyard. Elliot wondered if the money would be enough to sway her father, or if he would view such matters as too tawdry for his taste.

Maybe she could find another incentive, though. Admiral Innovation had more than just money to offer, and her father did have that splendid new racetrack.

Dear Kai,

I’m sorry I can’t come see you today. In school last week, we had to write a paper about the Reduction. I don’t know what I wrote that was so bad, but the tutor told me she had to give it to my parents, and now we’re all four of us having a “conference.” My mother said it’s probably best if I stay away from the barn for a little while. It was hard enough getting this letter to you.

I’m really scared. Last year, when my cousin Benedict got sent home from boarding school, my father beat him. My father yells at me a lot, but he’s never hit me before. I can’t figure out what I put in the essay that was so wrong. Can you?

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

I hope you are okay. I read your essay and it sounds like what we learn too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I don’t know why you would be in trouble. The only thing I never heard about before was the part where you said that the Posts were a sign of forgiveness. They never say that to us at services. Do you think that’s true?

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

I am grounded. I had to bribe Benedict with my dessert to send you this letter. I hope it gets to you and he doesn’t read it. My mother says he’s a very naughty boy and I shouldn’t spend too much time with him.

It was the part about the forgiveness that made my teacher so worried. She and my parents explained to me that we don’t have the right to decide when God has forgiven you and your ancestors, which I guess makes sense. But at the same time, doesn’t it seem like He must have? For so many years, the Reduced only had Reduced children. But now there are people like you and your father. If I were God, and I wanted to show that I had forgiven the Lost and the Reduced, that’s what I would do.

But when I told my father that, he got very angry and slapped my face. It’s the first time he’s ever hit me, and I hope it’s the last. He said I also don’t have the right to pretend I know what God would do and why. Although, if that’s the case, then how is it that we know that the Reduction was a punishment from God? It’s so confusing.

Since I’m grounded, I can’t pick up letters in the knothole. If you write me back, try to get the letter to the housemaid Mags. She likes me ever since I gave her baby one of my old dolls. I trust her way more than Benedict.

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

I hope your grounding ends soon. I miss you.

You’re right, it’s very confusing. I asked my da what he thought and he just stared at me for a really long time without saying anything, then told me to go clean out the stalls. I hate cleaning out the stalls. I’d far rather work on the machines than with the farm animals.

But what you wrote made a lot of sense to me. After all, God never tells us what he’s thinking. At least, he never tells the Reduced or the Posts. I think that’s supposed to be part of our punishment, right?

It’s really unfair, I think, being punished for something I didn’t do. If I was going to have to be punished, I’d at least like to have the fun of being fast and never tired and having superhuman eyes and super smart brains and everything first.

DON’T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THAT.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

Your secret’s safe with me. But I’m glad you sent this one through Mags and not through Benedict. Mother tells me I’ll be done with my grounding next week. Please find something fun for us to do. I’m going crazy stuck here in the house.

Your friend,

Elliot

E
LLIOT
B
OATWRIGHT’S HOUSE WAS
located on the border between the Boatwright lands on the tip of the island and the North estate. It was covered in flowers during the spring, but now dying russet vines crackled in the breeze as they crawled up the eaves and arched over the door. She’d hoped to make some improvements to the place before the Fleet’s arrival, but time had been in short supply recently. Harvest was coming on, and even with the influx of money from the Fleet’s rental of the Boatwright estate, it was vital that she produce as much grain as possible.

Perhaps the Innovations and their staff would consider these unruly vines pleasingly rustic after their years spent in the Post enclave down in Channel City. This was the home where Elliot’s mother, Victoria, had grown up, and she always liked to remember the way her mother had cared for the garden, pruning the hedges and trimming the flowers twining over the railings of the porch.

The Boatwright had three nurses to tend to his needs. They were all Reduced. A few years ago he’d had a Post housekeeper as well, but now they didn’t have enough Posts to spare for the care of Elliot’s grandfather. Once there had been fifty, but ever since the bad time, there were scarcely ten adult Posts to share between the two estates. Still, she knew her grandfather preferred this state of affairs to moving in with her father and Tatiana. Elliot liked to think that he wouldn’t have minded so much if it was just her.

The Boatwright himself was seated on the porch now, and his good eye narrowed as she came up the path to greet him. “Good morning, Grandfather,” she said. “This is the day, you know.”

He grunted at her and seemed to sink down into his chair. Elliot sighed. So it was to be an obstinate morning.

“We talked about this, remember?”

The good side of his mouth frowned, and he did his best to look confused, but Elliot was not taken in. The strokes had destroyed his body and his speech, but not his memory.

“You know we’ve rented the house to those shipbuilders.”

He stamped his good foot against the floorboards of the porch.

“Grandfather, you can’t stay here. They need the room.” And we need the money. She almost added it aloud.

But Elliot Boatwright was no fool. He made the sign the Reduced used for “father” and then the one for “mistake.” She cringed. Luddites did not sign to each other—it was a mark of the Reduced. For her grandfather to use signs in reference to Baron North was as good as an epithet in the mouth of a man who could speak.

“My father did not rent out your house,” Elliot said, even if he had made it necessary. “I did. If you want to be mad, be mad at me.”

The good side of her grandfather’s face smiled and he shook his head. No, he’d never be mad at her. She did what she ought, just as her mother had. Which was all well and good, but it still meant that her ailing, aged grandfather was losing the only home he’d ever known.

She brushed past him into the house, where, sure enough, she found his trunks waiting by the door, just as she had instructed the Reduced nursemaids to do several days before. The house had been cleaned and aired, and vases of fall flowers stood everywhere, ready to welcome the Cloud Fleet. Elliot took a quick tour of the house, checking to see that all the linens were laid out on the beds brought down from storage, that the larder was stocked with food quite as good as the kind they had at the big house. Her father had been insistent that the visitors would not think the North estate lacking in opulence, even as he loudly complained about sharing his supplies “with CORs.” He’d even had ice delivered. Ice, this late in the fall, while Elliot was worried about how to keep the laborers in bread and coal this winter. She shook her head.

Her father had kept her tutors until she was sixteen, just as he had with Tatiana before her. They’d received the standard Luddite curriculum: history, music, literature, religion, and art, but as to what she’d need to know to keep the estate on its feet—that was trial and error. That was luck. That was whatever she could scrape together on the side.

Perhaps it would have been different had her father been raised to take over the estate, but it was her uncle who was supposed to be Baron North. Elliot’s father had never liked anything but horses and the comfortable trappings of the Luddite lifestyle. The North estate had been paying for his disinterest ever since her uncle’s death. Elliot’s mother had done what she could when she was alive—raised a Boatwright, she had her father’s work ethic—but she’d died four years earlier.

At the time, Tatiana had mourned the fact that her mother’s death prevented them from traveling to Channel City for her debut, but Elliot feared worse than a deferred holiday. Her mother’s death left two estates in peril: the one belonging to Elliot’s invalid grandfather and the one her father had never bothered to maintain.

Elliot had been fourteen. She hadn’t even been finished with school, but she had learned enough to know that only one thing mattered: the hundreds of people—Luddite, COR, and Reduced—who depended on the estates to survive.

Down on the porch, the Reduced were fighting to get the Boatwright loaded into the litter that was to take him to his new home, and he swatted at them with his cane. Elliot stood by the window and shook her head. She hated removing him, but this was the only house on the estate suitable for someone of the admiral’s station. They could hardly put the Cloud Fleet in a Reduced cottage, and Elliot shuddered to think of the daily indignities they would be forced to suffer as guests of Baron North. Elliot’s father would not care that these were free Posts, nor that they were paying him good money to rent his land and labor. Station was station to Zachariah North. He’d refused even to stay and greet the Fleet, but had instead left those duties to Tatiana and Elliot, while he rode out the “indignity” of being paid and saving his workers from starvation with a prolonged visit at the estate of one of his Luddite friends.

So much the better. Though Admiral Innovation’s letter had been all that her father deemed proper, Elliot hoped to see the Fleet settled here before Baron North returned and was forced to deal with the reality of Posts over whom he did not have complete control.

Elliot placed her hand on the yellow plaster walls. This house needed people again. The admiral was bringing his wife and a large staff: shipwrights and metalworkers and captains of the Cloud Fleet. She hoped they would enjoy this house; enjoy the vines and the bright, sunny rooms; the shiny, worn wood floors and the creaking staircase. Elliot wondered what they were like, these free Posts who’d found success beyond the confines of the indentured estates.

For four years she’d waited for Kai to come back, too, but he never had. Nor had he ever sent word of his whereabouts. In her dreams, she liked to imagine he’d ended up like one of the admiral’s men, content and employed. With his mechanical talent, he’d have made an excellent skilled laborer. But she’d heard too many stories of the things that happened to Post runaways. She’d heard of the dangers in Post enclaves. The brothels and the workhouses, the organ trade and the people who sold their bodies for illegal experimentation.

Elliot let her hand drop and curl inward. She brushed her left fingers over the back of her right hand, touching each knuckle, tracing the path of each vein. She couldn’t bear to think of Kai like that. She would stick to her fantasy of him being a safely employed mechanic somewhere—though that was a hope she kept to herself. She hadn’t even shared it with Dee. After all, Thom was out there, too, and he was Dee’s common-law and the father of the woman’s babies. Kai was only a friend. Nothing more.

One of the Reduced nursemaids appeared at the door. The Boatwright was ready to go. Elliot nodded. Somehow she’d make it work. She always did—she managed the farm, she managed her family, and she managed her own heartbreak.

But perhaps . . . perhaps some of the Posts coming here were runaways who’d found a place of their own. Perhaps one of them had heard something of Kai and could tell her at last where he’d gone. Perhaps he was somewhere in the world, safe and happy, somewhere where a girl like her was straightening a picture frame or smoothing a bedcover in hopes of making the Post that slept there feel more at home.