Starbreak (7 page)

“People!” Ettie cried. She began to run ahead, her dark hair tossing against her shoulders. Calling her name, Rebbe Davison took off after her. The others followed. But I just stood there, frozen on the path, the gun clutched in one fist and my pack a saggy lump low on my back. My hands were slick with sweat against the metal barrel of the rifle. My heart beat hard. One of the voices was strange, new. But one spoke with familiar clarity. It was a woman’s voice, strong, commanding, without a hint of doubt. It was a voice that hadn’t cracked even when she’d struck her mother down.

Aleksandra Wolff. Aleksandra Wolff was
here
on Zehava. I cast my head back, as if the golden evening sky could offer me escape. It couldn’t, of course, though the trees reached their naked branches out like arms to embrace me. It was like they wanted to bolster me, keep me safe. Maybe I could have fled deeper into the forest. But the boy had said that there were animals there, animals that could harm me. Would they bring me greater harm than the people who sat in the grove ahead? My mind was spinning wildly; I couldn’t pin it down. I was still gaping up at the sky when Laurel appeared at the mouth of the clearing. The grin across her mouth was wide and toothy, like all her worries had been washed away.

“Terra!” she called. “Aleksandra Wolff is here! She’s going to save us!”

I stared at Laurel, at the gleeful smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth. Of course. Laurel was a rebel—Aleksandra, the leader of the rebels. It was only natural that she’d be glad to see her. Not terrified that Aleksandra’s long, narrow blade would soon find itself buried in her belly.

“Terra?”

There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I took staggered steps toward Laurel. As I walked, I held my gun against my chest, hoping that it would hide the way that my hands shook, and the way that I was unable to keep them still.

T
hey’d set up their camp on the edge of a bubbling stream, where their shuttle sat, bobbing and bright, in the water. It looked like it had been a smooth landing. Aleksandra was unscathed, and not a scratch could be seen on either of her two guards, who were dressed, head to toe, in flight gear. They’d built a fire, a wide tower of freshly chopped logs that smoldered as they burned, unlike the fists of brittle detritus we’d gathered for our own fire the night before. I winced to think of it—one of those still-living trees struck down like
it was nothing. But I suppose to the guard who had felled it, it
was
nothing. What did he care that the trees stretched and reached as if their branches were human arms? It was all the same to him. Now the guards’ motions were efficient, robotic as they doled out dinnertime rations.

I stood at the mouth of the camp, unable to make my feet move. There was Aleksandra, knelt down beside the fire. Her helmet sat on the log beside her; her long, black braid snaked out to one side. She didn’t hold a knife, not anymore. Now she wore a gun in her belt, and while I had one too, I felt sure that she’d be better at using it than I was.

She hadn’t noticed me, not yet.
Maybe,
I thought,
if I just stay real still, she won’t.

“I can’t believe she’s here.”

I turned toward the familiar voice. Rebbe Davison leaned in close, holding his bowl of rehydrated stew against his chest.

“We were in the same clutch, you know,” he said. “In school we passed notes back and forth, like you and Rachel Federman used to. After we found out about the Children of Abel, it was like a fire lit inside her. She wrote so passionately about our cause.”

“Our notes were always about boys,” I said dully. I was hardly listening to him. My eyes were fixed firmly on Aleksandra as she flicked her braid back over her shoulder to keep it away from the fire.

“Ours were about rebellion,” Rebbe Davison said. “She decided she didn’t just want to fight for our liberty. She wanted to lead the cavalry. That was always our plan. I’d be the brains behind the outfit, and Aleksandra—she’d be the brawn. After all those years of wrestling with her mother for control, she should be up there on that ship. Not
here
. I was drunk when I left, but Aleksandra . . . I don’t know why she came.”

For me,
I thought.
She came for me.

At long last she lifted her brown eyes up. They shone like a pair of moons. When she saw me, she smiled hungrily. I felt the blood drain from my hands. I dropped my rifle; the metal clattered over the frozen ground. Rebbe Davison looked sharply at me. They all did, pausing over their meals to watch me tremble where I stood. She’d been there when they’d struck down Ben Jacobi. Then she’d been the one to draw the knife across her mother’s neck. I was surely next. When Aleksandra rose from the log, I thought I might wilt right there in the middle of the forest.

I waited for her to take up her own rifle, cocking the safety back and pressing its barrel to my head. But she didn’t. Instead she only bent over, taking my gun in her free hand and passing it back to me.

“Terra Fineberg,” she said, a smile cold on her lips. “I think you dropped this.”

Then she turned to Rebbe Davison. Her finely plucked eyebrows
were arched, as if he’d just told her the funniest joke in the world.

“Mordecai,” she said. “My old friend. Come, break bread with me. We have a lot to talk about.”

•  •  •

I sat as far away from Aleksandra as I could, pressed on a log between her pair of guards. The others ate and ate—without any care for the supplies that might one day dwindle down to nothing. But I’d lost my appetite. Sitting beside Rebbe Davison, she looked so clean, so composed. Her hands made swift motions through the air as she spoke. The others were all enraptured. Laurel gazed up at her as Aleksandra described the rebel victory. Deklan wore a proud smirk. Even Ettie listened, one ear tilted up as Aleksandra told her story.

“Once it was clear I had unseated the Council,” Aleksandra was saying, “I knew we could no longer hesitate. We had listened to their lies about the probe results for too long. It was time to see the planet for myself, to assess the situation for
my
people.”

Her smile didn’t falter one bit as she wove her words into a bright fabric. So urgent was their journey, she said, that they’d taken off that very night. She didn’t mention chasing me down through the fields and pastures, or riding the lift in hot pursuit of me. She didn’t mention that she’d been the one to kill her mother—even as Captain Wolff begged her for mercy—or that she’d followed me here to make sure
I
died too.

“But, Alex,” Rebbe Davison said, massaging his fingers over his worried brow, “what about the Asherati? They need you—need a leader. Without your mother to lead them—”

Her words came, too fast, too fierce. By the firelight I could see the emotion that flamed beneath her cool visage. “My mother was a traitor to all of us. Though I mourn the loss of her in the riots, you will
never
speak of her to me again. Do you understand, Mordecai?”

I sucked in a breath. In our musty library meetings it had been common for the rebels to speak ill of Captain Wolff. They called her a cow, pinning all the ship’s woes on her. But I knew better. She’d done her best for our people, even when her best wasn’t good enough—sending out probe after probe to Zehava in the hopes that the planet would support us and be our home. Each probe had been lost, but it hadn’t been her fault. She’d been shocked when she’d discovered the truth of the missing probes; she hadn’t been hiding them from us at all. I remembered her face, gnarled and scarred, and the story Rebbe Davison used to tell about her. How she saved a boy from a thresher when she was young, the first of many noble acts she’d undertaken for us.

Rebbe Davison swallowed hard. “Of course, Alex,” he said, still clinging to her childhood name. I wondered what it would take for Alex to die for him—for her to become Aleksandra. “I just can’t help but wonder what’s going on up there on the ship.”

“No need to wonder. I have this.”

She reached for something on her flight suit belt, a square of rusted metal with jutting antennae. Fiddling with the controls, she flipped a switch. A burst of static came back.

“This is Wolff,” she said into the mouthpiece. “Give me an update on the ship’s status.”

There was a long gasp of white noise—so long that I thought they’d never answer. But then I heard a garbled voice.

“Rafferty continues to make his threats, but the coward still hasn’t moved to action.”

“Rafferty?” I said. I thought of Mazdin, the doctor who had killed my mother. I thought of his sweat-slick face on the night the
Asherah
reached Zehava. I’d done that to him—poured poison in his wine. But I’d hardly thought about him since. I was too busy running, too busy working to stay alive.

Aleksandra stared pointedly at me. She still held the radio up in one hand, letting the static stream out. “He means Silvan,” she said. “Your intended.”

She’d wanted me to murder Silvan, to get him out of the way so that she’d be free to lead. But I’d been a bad rebel. Disobedient.

Aleksandra shut off the device.

“It’s funny,” she said, though her tone suggested that it wasn’t
really
funny at all, “how much of this could have been avoided had you followed your orders.”

I remembered that night. Feeling the weight of the poison in my coat pocket after Mazdin had told me about killing my mother. He’d said that we were weak, helpless—no threat to him. I’d been desperate to prove him wrong.

“Alex, we have the ship,” Rebbe Davison said. “What more do you want?”

His voice sounded hoarse, fearful. Aleksandra clipped the radio to his belt. She studied his face—his thinning hair, the wrinkles that formed parentheses at the edges of his mouth. And then her own mouth softened.

“Nothing, Mordecai.” Her lips spread into a wide grin. It was a politician’s smile—charming, trustworthy. “I’m as happy as a clam.”

He hesitated—nodded. But as he turned away, her eyes caught mine. Her expression? Went as cold as ice.

•  •  •

“We’ll go east,” Aleksandra said as the fire began to fade. By then the sun had pressed deep into the mountain ridge. Two of the three moons were rising. Akku and Aire. I saw how we’d strayed from the path in our quest to find the source of the fire, drifting farther and farther into the woods. But how could I come out and tell her we were going the wrong way when all eyes were on her, shining with admiration? The words caught at the base of my throat.

But Rebbe Davison spoke for me. “What’s east?”

There was an intensity in his question that was new; it made me sit straighter on the log. Aleksandra sat forward too, her eyes as dark as the smoke that whispered around us. Suddenly she stood, grabbing a slender twig on a nearby branch. The twig undulated in the open air until she snapped it off and it was still. Dead. She pressed the narrow end into the crust of snow and began to draw a jagged line with it.

“This is the coastline,” she said as the others scrambled to gather around her. I stayed where I sat, glimpsing her rough diagram from between their shoulders. “Before we departed for the planet, my mother received a transmission from the shuttle crew. It originated from here, near the largest array of lights. They said that the inhabitants are hostile. At least one crew member was injured.”

Hannah, my brother Ronen’s wife. Council-born daughter. Cartographer. The last time I’d glimpsed her pretty features, they’d been streaked with blood. She’d sounded so
afraid
. I clenched my hands between my knees, wondering if the cold that bit through my flight suit gloves came from the chilly evening or from within.

“The next closest light cluster is here,” Aleksandra said, jabbing the stick higher along the coastline. “East of our current location. I’m hoping that the inhabitants there will be amenable to negotiations if the others aren’t.”

“Negotiations,” Rebbe Davison echoed faintly. He glanced eastward as if he could see the city straight through hundreds of
kilometers of forest and mountain. “What makes you think they’ll be willing to talk to us? We’re strangers to them. We’re nothing.”

Aleksandra stood tall. She thrust the stick into the embers. We all watched as the flames leaped up, enveloping it. “You remember what we learned in school, Mordecai,” she said, a smile curling her lips. But it was a fond smile, teasing, without malice. “The planet Earth was fractured. Many cities. Many cultures. Even on the
Asherah
, we’ve had factions. The Children of Abel on one hand. The Council on the other.”

“Diversity,” Rebbe Davison said. “You’re right. It’s unlikely that we’d find a monoculture here. But even so, that doesn’t mean that we’ll even be able to speak to them—”

“Maybe we won’t,” Aleksandra agreed, tucking a hand inside the open flap of her flight suit. On a knife’s hilt, I realized. She carried the ceremonial blade of a guardsman with her even now, so far away from the culture of our ship. But she’d carried it not only for ceremony but also for the death it could bring. “There’s a chance that any alien life forms we encounter might be hostile. But the eastward settlement is closer, and smaller. We need to be patient, and we need to be on guard. If we’re going to conquer these lands—”

“Conquer these lands!” The words spilled out before I could stop them. I firmed my jaw, gazing into the blue-tongued flames even as Aleksandra turned her attention toward me.

“Yes, Terra?” she said. This time her smile had teeth.

“They’re not our enemies,” I said fiercely. I thought back to the boy, to the way his arms enveloped me like vines on a wall. I felt so
safe
inside them. But Aleksandra didn’t know that. She only let out a short, dry laugh.

“You saw the transmission,” she said. “Care to tell the others what you saw?”

“The aliens,” I said, weaker now, as she found my cracks and fixed her fingers into them. “Their bodies move like grass in the wind. Their eyes are black. A night without moons or stars.”

“Tell them about Hannah,” Aleksandra prodded. I drew in a breath, held it. Finally I drew my gaze down to my knees.