Starbreak (33 page)

A gift?

I sat straighter in bed, kicking the blankets back. There was only one thing I wanted. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I wanted
him
, too, thousands of nights with him, time to grow old, to have our first fight, to sleep beside him as humanity put down roots on Aur Evez. But barring that? The only thing I really wanted was a home. A small patch of land all my own.

They’ve agreed to let us stay?
I asked. But Vadix pulled back, smoothing his lips.

No. They’ve agreed to let you speak to the senate. A hearing. First thing tomorrow morning.

The senate. I’d only glimpsed it through the antechamber glass—rows upon rows of gold-robed Xollu, hundreds of Ahadizhi all talking at once. Me? Speak to
them
? I’d hardly been able to speak to my own people.

I—I can’t!

I will be with you,
he said gently.
They have agreed to let me translate for you. After what happened with Aleksandra, they will not hear anyone else. But I vouched for you. I told them of your character.

I grabbed my blankets in both fists, tugging at the soft fabric. This wasn’t what I’d expected, not at all. Vadix didn’t even try to hide his disappointment.

I did this for you! Your people! Your future and your safety. You will be the first animal to ever speak in the senate room. The first! I know your words will move them.
He paused, feeling the warmth of the sun as it began to crown the sky overhead.
They have done much to move me.

Even in the cool dark of the empty room, I felt my cheeks heat.
Thank you,
I said. I felt something rumble back in response. A tiny crackle of something—laughter.

Do not thank me yet, zeze. We have much work to do still.

T
hough I would be the only human allowed in the senate room, Vadix suggested I bring a team of advisers with me to Raza Ait. For me the choice was easy. That morning I’d board a shuttle with Mara Stone and with Mordecai. My teachers, who had taught me more in my years on the ship than anyone else. I couldn’t imagine departing again without them. We planned to travel alone, the three of us and a shuttle pilot. Vadix assured me that we needed no guards, and besides, they were occupied that morning. With their
sonic rifles in hand, they gathered the children who roamed the streets of the ship and herded them toward their homes—accomplishing in a few hours what the Council had failed to do in days.

But we were surprised that morning when we went to board our shuttle and found someone waiting for us. Standing tall in white wool, the rank cord vibrant against his shoulder, was Silvan Rafferty.

“What are you doing here?” Mara demanded, her craggy voice hard. Silvan only put his hands on his hips.

“The peace you’re brokering concerns us, too. We need to divide the ship’s resources fairly. The Asherati need a say.”

It was the first time I realized that, after this, we would no longer be Asherati. We’d be something else—Zehavans. Colonists. Different. New. I put my hand on Mara’s shoulder and pulled her gently away.

“He’s right,” I said. “He’s their leader, and they deserve a voice too. He can come.”

“Are you sure, Terra?” Rebbe Davison asked. I looked at Silvan, at the proud, firm set of his jaw. And nodded.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

On the long journey over we tried to prepare him for what he’d find in Raza Ait. We told him about the copper city, domed against the impending winter. We told him about the beasts that roamed the mountainous wilds. Mara explained how the plants there were different from ours: motile rather than grounded; purple, not green.
Silvan nodded. He seemed to understand. But for some reason he had trouble with the idea of the people there.

“Talking plants,” he said, snorting through the glass of his flight suit helmet. “It makes no sense. It has to be a joke. It just has to be.”

“It’s no joke,” Mara said peevishly. “And you’d better not go saying that around our hosts. Until they decide we can stay, we’re going to be guests on this planet, you know. We need to act graciously.”

Beneath the glass of his helmet I saw Silvan go a shade paler. I don’t think he’d ever been called out like that before, not by someone like Mara Stone. After a moment of visible discomfort—eyebrows knitted up, jaw tight—he relaxed and let out a burst of laughter.

“Fine! Though you’re one to talk about niceties, Mara Stone. ‘As hard as a rock,’ that’s what Abba always said about you. I can see that he was right. You do your job, and you do it well. We’ll be sad to lose a good specialist like yourself. A fine worker. And a fine citizen.”

There was a gleam in his eye. And hers. She pursed her lips, but I couldn’t say she didn’t look at least a little flattered.

“Oh, come off it,” she said.

•  •  •

The workers had brought their boats in for the winter. The pier itself was blanketed in gray. If, once, the edge of their cloistered world had seemed open to me—ocean and sky, stretching on forever—that had been lost to the season. The world’s curving lip had disappeared
behind a thicket of fog. Though it wasn’t snowing now, it might as well have been. That’s how dense the air seemed as we stepped out of the shuttle.

I couldn’t help but think that this was how it should have been from the beginning. Careful. Planned. Not the insane quest of a half-drunk girl, her heart full of fear and her mind running wild. Beneath my flight suit I wore the robes I’d borrowed from Vadix, their downy-soft fabric hugging my body tight. I may not have been dressed like a senator, but I hoped I looked like someone worthy of entering the senate chamber. My hair was combed, my eyes bright, even after eight hours of voyage through the silence of space. I’d put on makeup, returning to the ritual that I’d adopted during the era of my romance with Silvan Rafferty. It had been a comfort to me then; it was one now, too. And I needed everything I could get to calm my nerves that day. After all, I was about to see Vadix.

I knew he was there waiting for me. I could see the world through his gaze—the end of the long pier as he hustled down it through a rolling fog. In the murky distance he spotted a flash of light. Was it faint yellow sunlight against the water, or the gleam of a white hull, long preserved within the belly of our ship? I waved away Silvan’s hand, pulling myself out of the shuttle alone.

I’m here,
I said.
It’s me!

Vadix headed a pack of lesser senators, each one garbed in a silver
shade that seemed to disappear into the cold of the world beyond. But he wore blue, vibrant and bright. It matched his skin, his hands, his lips, which parted at the sight of me.

“Who’s
that
?” Silvan asked. Mordecai gazed at him sternly.

“Our ally. Our friend,” my old teacher said.

Vadix ran toward me. I knew it hurt, in this cold, to make his limbs move this fast, to push himself closer and closer to me across the length of the foggy pier. I could feel it, splintering the cells in his arms and legs. But Vadix didn’t care. I was here, and I brought with me hope—hope for the future he never believed would come to fruition. Hope for a new city on Zehava.

“Terra,” he said when he finally reached me, “you have painted your face. You are a clever hunter.”

Before I could answer, he swept me up in his long arms. His body may not have been warm, but it shielded me from the world beyond. I pressed my face to the soft, sweet plane of his neck, leaving a trail of kisses along his earslit. His arms enveloped my lower back, as tight as a vine as he lifted my feet straight off the pier. I thought my heart would burst through my chest. I thought I might cry at the way that his body fit mine, like we had been made for this. I thought I had never felt such joy in my life as seeing him again.

“Her lover,” Mara Stone added at last, her tone teasing as Vadix bent me in a kiss. There was no reply at first, only the whistle of the
wind and the sound of the waves breaking against the pier. Then, as Vadix’s mouth met mine, as I tasted the sweet truth of him, the wild smell faint in the impending winter, came Silvan’s grunted answer.

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

•  •  •

We gathered in the senate antechamber that afternoon to plan our approach. While the senators milled about below, Vadix sat at the head of the round stone table, explaining our situation:

“Tomorrow morning they are convening on several matters of local import. Terra must come forward to speak to them before their interest begins to wane. Each representative will be eager to have his or her voice heard on problems pertaining to his or her constituency. We must be fast. We must be direct.”

“What are these local matters?” Mordecai asked, his hand flat on the stone table. They’d piled it high with food for us—burned beast legs, as thick as tree trunks and sliced into blackened disks. But no one had touched it.

“Zoning,” Vadix replied without hesitation. “Water treatment. Funding for new crèches. The usual politics.”

Beside me Silvan flinched. My
bashert
turned to him, looking more like a curious bird than a plant. “What is the problem, Mar Rafferty?”

“We have a ship full of waiting citizens,” he said as he leaned forward in his seat. “People who traveled five hundred years to reach
this planet. And you’re telling me that your government is more concerned about issues of water treatment?”

I felt my stomach clench at the anger that underscored his voice. But Vadix was patient. He lifted up his fingers, pointing them toward the sky.

“I tried to dissuade the senate from disregarding your problems so hastily. But to them what remains is only a technicality. They believe they have already dispensed with ‘the human problem’—that soon you will be only a memory, consigned to the darkness of space. We must understand that this is just a small disruption of their normal daily lives. And they have little room in them for . . .” He trailed off. His brow furrowed with worry.

“Aliens,” he concluded at last.

“Aliens.” Silvan’s lip curled. “We’re not aliens. We’re
people
. You can’t just throw us away.”

Vadix looked at me. His black eyes were calm as he considered. “I agree. I don’t intend to throw you away. Tell us what your ship would need, Mar Rafferty, so that if my mate settles here, she can live in peace.”

My cheeks warmed under his gaze. Silvan, watching, lifted his lips in a slow smirk.

“We can split the library,” he said. “Rachel has plans to curate a collection of religious texts. And as for the hatchery—” He hesitated.
That’s when I realized how well the Council’s secrets had been kept.

“They don’t need it,” I said, feeling the blood drain from my cheeks. “Or at least, not all of it. The Council boys haven’t been sterilized.”

When Mordecai drew in a breath, Silvan only pressed his lips together. Nodded. “Not the last dozen clutches. And those older than that have already had their children. Only those common-born citizens who join us will need the eggs, and even then, not many. If we stop sterilizing our boys, we should be able to survive without the hatchery within a generation. We’ll need to be fruitful to have the ship back up to working capacity, but we can do it. Rachel says—”

Before we could find out what Rachel said, Mara Stone threw her hands up into the air. “Of course. Rachel says. I’m sure you boys are fertile enough, eh?”

Silvan didn’t blush. He only angled his chin up in proud assuredness.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure we are.”

Mara rolled her eyes, then turned the conversation back to more pressing matters. “We’ll need land enough for a small hatchery of our own, then. And space to build a library as well. Labs. A school. Living quarters. Fields for our crops.”

Vadix pulled out a long scroll of paper from his robe. It had handles carved in the shapes of wild beasts, each one so real-looking I thought
they might walk across the table as he unraveled it. Ahadizhi work, surely. As he pulled them apart, he revealed continents. White-licked seas. Zehava. Or Aur Evez, depending on how you looked at it. He pointed to an area in the south close to the wide central ocean, a long peninsula of dark vegetation and apparently little else. But because I knew Vadix, I knew that there were dangers waiting there for us. The native Ahadizhi. The beasts. The long ravages of winter.

“We call this place Zeddak Alaz. The lost land. I will ask the senate to give you this place,” he said, and then his black eyes flitted up at me. Once I would have called them unreadable, but now I knew the passions—the fear, the hope, the intensity—that lurked behind them. “But the decision is up to them.”

•  •  •

We plotted well into the evening, long after all the senators had returned to their homes for the night. Vadix explained the intricacies of senate procedure, and detailed, with a flourish, the contentious relationship between the Ahadizhi of the southern continent and their northern counterparts. Though Ahadizhi learned language far faster than any Xollu—a facility I’d seen myself over my days in Raza Ait—those in the south were ascetics. They saw no need for the lavish city dwellings of their northern counterparts and so had no reason to speak to the Xollu, either. And no Xollu had broken the language barrier that stood like a wall between them. For thousands of years
they’d been at a stalemate. No new Guardians, and none willing to cross the wild sea, straying far from their sprouted fields. So no new cities, either.

“You will have to recruit northern Ahadizhi,” Vadix said. “And have them train you in the role of Guardian before your departure for the southern continent. Perhaps someday the southern Ahadizhi could be persuaded to join the thirteenth city, but this would take time and skill. Diplomacy.”

It would be easier if we had you there to translate for us,
I thought. Then, when Vadix looked sharply at me, I clamped a hand down over my mouth. Of course, he was the only one who had heard. The others merely gazed at me, puzzled. Mara let out a tired sigh.

“I’m sure we’ll manage,” she said. Vadix rose to his feet.