For Darkness Shows the Stars (9 page)

E
LLIOT HOPED TO BE
free of further interactions with the Posts after Tatiana finished her tour of the sanctuary, but she wasn’t granted the opportunity. As soon as Olivia was back on the surface, she started dropping heavy hints about taking a spin in the sun-carts, and before Elliot knew it, she’d been conscripted into a cart along with Tatiana and the Phoenixes. Kai drove the Groves and Felicia Innovation in the other cart.

The carts consisted of three-wheeled platforms, with a long bench seat in front and two tiny bucket seats in back, right before the panel of angled, golden mirrors that supplied the carts with their power. Metal frames arced over their heads for support and handholds, but the carts were open to the air. The control panels, to Elliot’s eye, were no more complex than she might find on one of the estate’s ancient tractors.

“If you’re planning a long ride,” said Elliot, climbing into the shotgun seat, “perhaps you can drop me off at the barn? There are some things I need to see to yet today.”

“Certainly,” Andromeda replied. She signaled to Kai to take the road toward the barn. He frowned but complied, and they were off.

Tatiana gripped the handrails firmly. “I have things to see to this afternoon as well. My hostessing duties have, I’m afraid, forced me to fall behind on some pressing household matters.”

Elliot wondered what those could possibly be. New flower arrangements for the table?

“Is that how you divide up your work on the estate?” Donovan asked. “You manage the household while Elliot takes care of the farm?”

Had their duties been a topic of conversation among all the members of the Fleet?

“My father, as head of our estate, manages the farm,” said Tatiana. “He controls all the movement of the workers and the crop planning.”

To their detriment, Elliot wanted to add.

“Elliot just likes to play at gardening. She’s much like our mother in that way.”

Elliot looked out over the fields and toward the sea. Contradicting her sister would only embarrass them all.

Up ahead, Kai had turned the controls of the sun-cart over to Olivia, and the machine noticeably slowed, moving in awkward jerks and jumps as the girl got a handle on its operation.

Donovan sucked a breath in through his teeth. “Wentforth’s got to be going crazy watching her ruin the transmission like that. She can’t push the brakes at the same time as the accelerator.”

“Perhaps,” Andromeda replied as they swerved off the road to pass the other cart. “He probably has more patience with the sister than he would with the brother, though.”

“Knowing him,” said Donovan.

Elliot grimaced at the Post’s words.
Knowing him
. When she had known him, he’d been nothing like that. Or had he? Did she just never notice because
she’d
been the recipient of his attentions?

Elliot looked away from the other cart. It was silly to make anything of it at all, no matter what Andromeda had said to her in the caves. She hadn’t been jealous of Ro’s scarf, and she wouldn’t be jealous of a sun-cart lesson and a conversation, either. Still, Andromeda knew this new man that Kai had become. Perhaps she knew what it looked like when Kai was interested. Perhaps, now that he was a famous explorer, he was
interested
quite a lot.

Tatiana piped up. “Olivia is still a child. She has been given far too much liberty ever since the death of her parents. Horatio is a good man, of course, but he does not know how to raise a teenage girl. He was made the head of his household at seventeen, and she has been the lady of the house since she was eleven. They have some . . . strange ideas. Look at the way he allows her to dress.”

Elliot was pretty sure that Andromeda steered them
into
the next puddle. Tatiana shrieked and drew back to avoid the splash of mud. Elliot barely managed to hide her smile. Tatiana had also been made the lady of the house as a young teen.

“There are those who’ve been holding their own since they were that young,” said Donovan. “Like my sister. It’s been eight years since she and I left our estate—she was only twelve, and I was eight. We made it all right.”

Tatiana’s eyes widened, but she remained blessedly quiet.

As they passed, Elliot got a quick glimpse into Kai’s cart. His hands were covering Olivia’s as he showed her how to work the controls. Elliot focused very hard on the horizon until the grinding noises coming from the other cart faded into the background. When driven properly, Elliot realized, the carts made almost no noise at all, just a soft whir as the wheels spun and a clank whenever the shocks moved over the bumpy dirt road. This was much better than the smelly roars of the tractor.

Andromeda spoke again. “Would you like to give it a try, Miss Elliot?”

Elliot looked down at the controls the Post was offering her, and then up into the other girl’s strangely bright eyes. As usual, she could read nothing. Was Andromeda hoping to embarrass her, too, or was she trying, in some odd way, to even the score with Olivia? It had been a long time since Elliot had viewed the operation of machinery as anything more than a chore. She’d spent too many hours driving the thresher and tractor around in the heat of the midday sun.

And yet she found herself taking hold of the controls. The cart needed a light touch, she discovered quickly, as her first attempt to put pressure on the accelerator sent the machine careening over the next hill. In the backseat, Tatiana squealed and jounced into Donovan’s lap. He gently pushed her off.

“Sorry,” Elliot said, correcting the speed. The setup, she noted, was surprisingly similar to the tractor she’d grown up using. Because of this, she found her way around the controls with ease and was able to keep the cart going at a swift but steady clip until they arrived at the barn.

Elliot pulled the cart to the side, expertly parking in the shade of the barn. She handed the controls back to Andromeda. “Nice cart.”

Andromeda smirked. “You aren’t what I expected, Miss Elliot,” and left Elliot to parse those words as she joined her brother on the grass.

Much to Elliot’s chagrin, they decided to wait until Kai and the Groves had caught up to leave her alone in the barn. Tatiana took Elliot by the elbow and led her out of earshot. “Do you think . . . Were they insinuating that Captain Wentforth might have . . . designs on Olivia Grove?”

“They met less than an hour ago,” Elliot replied firmly. It was the only true thing she could bring herself to say.

“Horatio would never allow it,” Tatiana stated. “
Should
never allow it. A Post? It would do irreparable damage to their family’s reputation.”

“And if they did get together, it would do incomparable good for the estate’s finances,” Elliot couldn’t help but point out. “I gather that all these Cloud Fleet Posts are extremely wealthy. Probably far more wealthy than the Groves.” It would also do good to remind Tatiana that whatever fear she had for loss of reputation due to Post influence, the
Norths
had been the ones to accept their money—not the Groves.

“You don’t think they’d
marry
!” Tatiana exclaimed in horror. “But they’re Po—” And then she must have remembered what Mrs. Innovation had told her yesterday—that free Posts did marry. Nevertheless, the word seemed to curdle Elliot’s blood, even if it was for a different reason than the one that so disturbed her sister. “Well,” Tatiana continued, shaking road dust from her pale blue skirt. “She’s only fourteen.”

Elliot knew too well how little that meant.

The girl in question bumped and jostled her way up to the barn, cutting it quite close to the other machines. Horatio, in the backseat of the cart, was barely holding on to the rails and his breakfast, in that order. Kai’s expression was one she knew well—carefully veiled frustration. Perhaps he wasn’t as enamored of Olivia as everyone seemed to assume. And yet a moment later she watched him laugh and put his hands around Olivia’s waist as he helped her down from the cart, and Elliot averted her eyes. He’d grown so much more graceful in the past four years. He moved now rather like one of the machines he used to fix—every motion swift, precise, and perfect.

Perfect.
What words she was tossing around! She was pathetic.

As always upon entering the building, her gaze instinctively shot to the knothole, and then she ducked her head in embarrassment. Kai wasn’t looking, but she wondered if he might have caught her doing so.

If he had, he gave no indication. Perhaps he’d forgotten their ritual entirely, or perhaps he preferred to triumph in secret over the fact that she hadn’t. Elliot couldn’t decide which option she preferred, for they both burned inside her.

Dee had already removed the dairy equipment, but Kai still found fault with the arrangement of the stalls, in the few bits of machinery still fastened to the walls, even in the stench. Tatiana’s nose wrinkled as she gingerly picked her way across the hay-strewn floor.

“Yes, it stinks in here,” Kai said. “Too bad for Innovation’s horses—I mean, Baron North’s horses. Can you imagine having to spend any length of time in here, especially in the summer?”

Tatiana shuddered. Elliot wished to sink through the earth. Had it really been so wretched? And if so, why had the thirteen-year-old Kai begged her to let him stay in the barn rather than go to live in the Reduced children’s barracks or Mags and Gill’s cottage? Had it only been the lesser of two evils?

“Elliot practically lives here,” Tatiana said. “I don’t understand it, personally.”

Now Elliot wished her sister would sink through the floor alongside her. Kai was not looking at her, but what else could he be thinking of except that locked room above?

Olivia was busy recounting, in breathless detail, their adventures on the sun-cart. Andromeda and Donovan were listening, their wry expressions so similar that it left no doubt of their relation. Elliot watched them with a mixture of awe and jealousy. She had never once seen Tatiana’s face mirror her own. What would it have been like to grow up with a sibling she liked? What if Tatiana had been a girl she could trust, could count on, could have turned to when their mother died and things got so confusing?

“Our ride with Elliot was much smoother,” Donovan said at last.

“I don’t doubt it!” Olivia’s eyes were shining, her face flushed. “She has far more experience driving than I do. She can even drive this tractor.” She kicked at the tires of the rusted-out bulk. Its chipped paint and curling metal edges looked all the more pathetic after the time they’d spent in the gleaming, lithe sun-carts. “Well, when it’s working, that is.”

“It doesn’t work?” Every syllable of Kai’s words buffeted her like swings from an ax.

“Rarely,” Tatiana sniffed. “We haven’t had a decent mechanic around in years.”

Elliot nearly groaned at this. How could her sister be so blind?

“Let me take a look at it,” Kai said, and heedless of his fine coat, he crawled beneath the axle, as he’d done countless times before. “This is a mess,” he called from the shadow of the machine. A moment later he was out again, brushing the dust off his coat. “Who has been working on this?”

The Luddites looked at Elliot, who refused to confirm the answer only Elliot was aware Kai already knew. Why wouldn’t they just go away and leave her alone?

“Can you fix it?” Olivia asked.

“Yes,” he said, and Elliot was glad for once that he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “But what good will that do? It’ll fall to pieces again once I’m gone, with no one here who knows the first thing about upkeep.”

Elliot balled her hands up inside the pockets of her skirt.

“They should really have a dedicated mechanic around here,” Kai added.

Horatio kept glancing at her, but Elliot refused to speak. What could she possibly say to
Kai
on the subject that wouldn’t sound ludicrous?

“The Norths have had some recent difficulty with staff,” Horatio said at last, clearly trying to be careful. Elliot narrowly resisted tackling him to the ground to make him shut up. “They have lost several of their Posts in the past few years.”

“Really?” Andromeda asked, in a tone that bore no real curiosity.

Tatiana gave a haughty shrug. “I can’t imagine what is so attractive to them about the enclaves.”

“I imagine, Miss North, that it’s the opportunities for advancement they would not have here on your estate,” Felicia said. “It’s why I left my estate twenty years ago.”

But Tatiana was never one to take a hint. “You are a special case, Mrs. Innovation. Surely you can’t deny that the vast majority of these wandering Posts do not achieve the success that you and your husband enjoy.”

“That is true,” said Felicia. “But it does not change my mind.”

Tatiana’s eyes widened. “Really? But I have heard such terrible things. Too many Posts who leave the safety of their estates wind up as beggars, or worse. I for one would not be willing to take such a risk, were I in their shoes.”

“How fortunate for you, then,” said Andromeda in an icy tone, “that you were born a Luddite.”

“Yes,” said Tatiana, clueless. “I think so, too. I pity the Posts who have left this place.”