Starbreak (29 page)

“Go in health,” she said.  And, with that, we did.

•  •  •

We hustled through the districts together, our hands stuffed down into our pockets to keep them from the biting cold. Just like in the old days, before we were to be wed, our words stuck and froze before they could burst through our lips. The first lights of dawn made the panels overhead glow a feeble blue. In their illumination the angles of his face were as sharp as the edge of a shard of ice.

In the old days, when we made our plans for marriage, it always seemed like he was holding something back.  A joke.  A secret.  A hidden pain. His long spine had often been slumped—his shoulders hunched up from nerves. He walked differently now, taking wide, confident steps. Even as he glanced around him, mindful of the sound of footsteps in the distance, of the children who roamed the alleyways, liberated from the chains of formal schooling, he walked proudly. It was as if he’d somehow grown into his own skin.

I wanted to tell him that I was happy for him. He’d found his place in Van’s home, even if it wasn’t the normal, perfect life the Council had once planned for us. But it didn’t feel right, not quite. Koen clearly didn’t need my approval.

But that didn’t stop him from beaming at me.

“You’ve changed,” was what he said.

“Changed?” I asked carefully. With Rachel I’d been quick to agree. But Koen and I had never had the same kind of friendship that Rachel and I had enjoyed. And even Rachel hadn’t taken my news well. What if he drew back in disgust at my love and the way it had transformed me?

He blew hot air into the cup of his palms, letting out a burst of laughter. “It’s true. You have. You can’t hide it from
me
, Terra!”

I stopped beneath the flickering illumination of a streetlamp. “I—” I began, groping for words.

But I didn’t need to stammer and mumble. I didn’t even need to explain. Koen’s chestnut-colored eyes were filled with a warm amber light.

“You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you? I’m so happy for you!” And just like that, I was buried in a hug—warm and full and wonderfully real, so different from the strange, stiff embraces we’d shared when we were going to be married and our lives were full of lies.

He still smelled the same, though. Cedar boards and dust. I breathed it in, laughing too. “You are?”

“Of course I am.” He rocked me in his arms. The words seemed to echo inside his chest, right through his corduroy jacket. “I always wanted you to be happy. I’m sorry I couldn’t love you like you needed.”

“Oh, Koen, no,” I said, pulling away from his embrace. “Don’t apologize. You were doing your best.”

“It wasn’t good enough—”

“For who? My father? The Council?” I held his cool fingers in my fingers. He gave my hands a weak squeeze.

“Well, yeah!” he exclaimed. I shook my head.

“Maybe our mistake was trying to live by their rules,” I began, holding his fingers firm. “The Council gave us rules to live, but they couldn’t see the light of your love. There were no words in their vocabulary for it. You tried to live a good life, but how could you?
Your very nature fractures their world. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, Koen. That means they are.”

Koen let out a loose titter of laughter as he pulled away, running those long fingers through his hair. “I’m glad you’re not angry with me.”

“I couldn’t stay mad. Not now.”

He arched an eyebrow, examining me for a long time in the growing rosy light. “Terra, who is it that you’ve fallen for?”

The cold was back again, ruddying my knuckles. I drew in an icy breath of air. “He’s . . . different, Koen. Really different. If I have my way, we’ll be back on that planet soon. And you’ll get to meet him—to see for yourself.”

Now both eyebrows lifted. Not in dismay—Koen wasn’t Rachel, and despite the place he had stolen in my heart, he never would be. But he was surprised. His mouth formed an
O
.

But before he could respond, something happened. Something terrible. Something that had never happened before, not in all my years on the ship.

The lights went out. The world around us was black, pitch black. In the distance, in the dome, I could see a thin line of purple illumination. But otherwise the universe was blackness, shadows, and the distant barking of someone’s dog. The creature yelped over and over again, assuring us that he was just as afraid as we were.

Koen’s icy fingers found mine. I heard my breath, my heart. I was just about to say something, to remind myself that I was still here, still alive, in all this darkness, when there was a great whir. The lights came on again, one at a time, revealing Koen and how his brow wrinkled in worry.

“It’s been happening for days,” he said. I watched the light flicker against the planes of his face. “The ship’s just falling apart. And all we can do is wait and watch while it does.”

I shook my head. Someone had to do something—find us a place on the planet and restore peace to our people before our whole world crumbled before our eyes.

That someone was me. But as the lights blinked out again, then winked back to life, I had no idea how I would do it. The problem was so much bigger than me, than Koen, than all of us.

“We’d better go,” I said, still clutching his hand in mine, holding on more tightly than I’d ever held on to anything else in my whole life, as I gave his arm a tug and dragged him toward the safety of my brother’s home.

L
unch, then supper, with my brother and his wife and daughter. We listened to the steady
thump thump thump
of rocks against his front door, watched the lights overhead flicker on then off then on. And we talked about none of it, pretending that this was normal. I guess after a lifetime of ducking the flat of my father’s hand, my brother and I could ignore almost anything. Not Hannah, though. Every time another stone rattled the windows, she jumped, clapping her hands over her daughter’s ears.

“Not again!” she cried, rising to her feet after a particularly raucous
crack
. She lifted the curtain back, glimpsing with a scowl the long fissure that ran from one end of the window frame to the other. “Why doesn’t anyone
do
something about them? Get those children under control!”

Ronen gazed at me, his eyebrows lifting mildly. “That’s a good question,” he said.

I pushed my chair away from the table and hustled up toward the guest room, ignoring the heat behind his gaze.

Stiffly I lay down in my bed. There was nothing to do but wait now—wait for our meeting in the school that night; wait for Vadix to make any headway with the senate. The lamp by my bedside table flickered so wildly that I would have never been able to even draw. So I folded my hands across my belly, closed my eyes, and let my mind stretch and stretch. Somewhere below, Vadix waited for me.

Where are you?
I asked. His mental voice came swiftly back.

Home, of course
. There was laughter in it, like it was some kind of joke. But I wasn’t laughing. I turned toward the gray wall, watching my silhouette appear, then disappear, then appear again as the light went on and off and on.

When I’m here,
I began,
it feels like you don’t even exist. Like you’re something I only dreamed up to keep from feeling lonely. Like I’ll be stuck up here forever, alone and in the dark.

A pause. Long, too long. In the city below, Vadix stared at his reflection in his bathroom mirror. He wore no shirt. His torso was bared to the open air. So many scars, small and white. Like a thousand comets, streaking their way through blue space mottled red by solar flares.

You don’t really feel that way?

Now it was my turn to fall silent.
No. No, I don’t,
I said finally.
I’m only afraid.

Of what?

I closed my mind, thinking of the long road ahead. If I couldn’t convince the rebels to follow me, it was all lost. If  Vadix couldn’t convince the senate, it was all lost. If I couldn’t convince Silvan . . .

I’m afraid of failing.

In a house in a copper city on a planet far above me, Vadix gave the spigot a tug. He splashed water over his shoulders, his face, drinking it in through his pores. Then he sat down on the cold tile floor. He could still see his own reflection refracted in the dozens of tiny, opalescent tiles. It seemed broken, strange, as alien as I felt.

I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,
he said.
About life beyond the one you’ve always known. It was unusual, hearing those words in someone else’s mind.

Pepper came snuffling along my bedsheets. I reached out to him, pulling his soft body against mine. And held him close.

What do you mean?

I used to say the same thing. All the time. To Velsa.
Vausi xodsak zhieselakh, xedsi zhieserak.
“We must hope for a tomorrow better than the one that we know now.”

My cat purred, kneading his claws into the blanket. I buried my face in his fur.
She had doubts about your plan? But I thought it was something that you dreamed together.

It was.
He paused, leaning his shoulders back against the tiled wall. I could feel the cool bite against his skin.
Eventually. I—I think sometimes I may have talked her into it. I said it was all for her, to build her a city big and beautiful and new, a place where our seedlings could spread long after our lives were over.

But?

But sometimes I fear I lied to myself. Lied to her. Perhaps it wasn’t about Velsa at all. Perhaps it was about me. My boredom here in Raza Ait. My line has roots here that stretch down deep, thousands of years walking these same streets, paired and safe. My ancestors stopped dreaming about the lands beyond the walls of the twelve cities generations ago. But from the moment I sprouted, I imagined new cities, sprawling in directions I cannot predict. A cupola new and shining, not cobwebbed by ancient cracks. I picture new Guardians, humming new tunes to themselves—tunes I haven’t yet translated but that my very soul understands.

I thought of the craggy, wild shape of the continents I’d once sketched in the margins of my notebook. I thought of my own desperation
to leave this ship, this dome, this life that had been planned for me, where nothing was ever new or fresh or surprising. I thought of my father, all those times he told me to be dutiful, to be
good
, while inside, my temper burbled and roared. It wasn’t just that I’d been angry. It was that I knew there was more for me—somewhere, somehow. But so long as I was imprisoned by these walls, this glass, then I’d be nothing more than a shadow of an ordinary girl.

I used to think my only hope for a new and different life was one far from the land where I was sprouted,
Vadix went on.
But now I realize: you are new. You disrupt the balance of our city, yes. But you will transform the path ahead with your very presence. Once, I would have had no future ahead. I would have been a lousk, a walking specter. Dead already, if not in flesh then in spirit. Now . . .

Now?

Now I might have a future, too.

I bit my lip, holding the smile in. I wanted to ask him if this meant he was staying—staying with me, staying alive. But before I could respond, the door angled open. A clear bolt of light was cast down over my face, jagged and bright. I shielded my eyes with my wrist.

“Terra,” came my brother’s voice, low and urgent. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Rebbe Davison?” I asked, sitting up straight. It must have been nearly nineteen o’clock. “I didn’t hear the bells.”

“Probably because the clock keeper is waiting with him. Van Hofstadter, too. Where are you going, Terra?”

I gazed at him. My eyes had adjusted by then. I could see him press the edge of his cheek against the doorjamb. He looked nervous—hesitant. But I couldn’t shield him from the Children of Abel. Not anymore.

“There’s a meeting. We’re gathering to discuss our plans for facing the Council.”

My brother watched as I stuffed my feet down into my boots and laced them. But he was silent.

“What is it, Ronen?” I asked, pulling the laces into bows.

“I’d like to come with you.”

I only let out a soft laugh at that, groping through the dim light for my old winter coat. My brother—Council husband, the contract-abiding man that my father always wished he himself could have been. But he cleared his throat, squaring his shoulders in the yellow hallway light.

“I mean it.”

I flashed up my gaze. Ronen’s eyes were hazel, just like my eyes. But when I gazed in the mirror, I saw that my own stare had hardened—gone flinty and sharp. My brother’s had a softness, a sadness. He might have been the older one, but I worried about him.

“You shouldn’t. It’s dangerous. If something happens to you, what will happen to Hannah and Alya?”

His lips parted. He glanced down the hall. But then he gave his head a shake, setting his jaw determinedly.

“I talked to Hannah. We’ve both agreed. We’ve changed our minds. There’s no use in hiding like her parents. What good is safety without freedom? A voice? The Council doesn’t care what we have to say. Silvan Rafferty won’t listen.” He paused, taking the time to cross his arms over his chest. “But you will, Terra. I know you will.”

I sighed as I buttoned up my coat. “Fine,” I said at last. As I walked down the stairs toward the galley, I spoke over my shoulder at him. “But you know that Abba’s gotta be turning in his grave right now.”

Ronen clomped down the stairs after me, laughing a little with every step.

“Good,” he said. “Let him.”

•  •  •

The old oak doors of the ship’s school were unpolished, and yet they shone in the evening light from the thousands of hands that had touched them on the way to class each day. Back then we’d been proud of our place here—buzzing from classroom to classroom like worker bees, happy to pollinate the world with the Council’s lies. Now we flocked to the school under the cover of uneasy night. Though the planet was radiant in the glass overhead, sparkling with the electricity of the twelve cities that sprawled out across the northern continent, our steps were heavy, fearful. Tonight, here, in the place
where we’d all been inculcated into life on our ship, we would finally decide how to leave it behind.