Starglass (6 page)

Her words sank into me like a stone. I guess I shouldn’t have been mad. It was true, wasn’t it? I spent most of my time rolling my eyes at other people’s passions, not talking about my own. But still, a small spark of defensiveness lit up inside me. I found myself rising to my
feet. My hands bumbled blindly through my bag, shoving aside the torn papers and notebooks until I found my sketchbook, the old familiar pages rough and curled. I thrust it at her. My heart sounded in my ears. But as she thumbed through it, something changed. Rachel’s mouth fell gently open.

“Oh,
Terra
!” she breathed. “These are . . . well, they’re not perfect. But they’re
good
.”

I felt the heat rise to my face. “Um,” was all I managed to say.

But Rachel hardly noticed my stammered answer. Instead the corner of her mouth edged up, revealing a dimple. “But you know, Terra, if you didn’t want to be a botanist, maybe you should have drawn something besides trees.”

Rachel’s dark eyes seemed to dance as she watched me.

“I
couldn’t
draw anything else,” I protested. “Abba hated how I wasted all my time drawing. I had to go outside where he wouldn’t catch me. . . .”

“And draw flowers and plants and vines,” she said. I sighed, clutching the book to my chest.

“I guess it’s my fault, then.” I tried to sound lighthearted about the whole thing, but I’m not sure Rachel bought it. She knew me too well for that. “I showed the counselors my sketchbook. They must have thought I was saying I wanted to work with plants.”

“There are worse things that could happen.”

“Like what?” I demanded. “I don’t know the first thing about
botany
.”

“Oh, I don’t know. They could have made you work in a
shop
.”

The heat returned, this time spreading over my neck and ears. “I’m—I’m sorry, Rachel,” I stammered.

But Rachel only let out a laugh. “I was only kidding!” she said. I studied her face. From the crinkles around her eyes, I could tell that the laughter was genuine. So I laughed too.

“I’ll miss you, you know,” she said to me.

“What do you mean? I’ll be around.”

But Rachel looked at me meaningfully, and I knew it was the truth. Our lives were about to change. I wouldn’t sit with her in school every day, whispering, sharing laughter.

I reached out my hand, offering it to her. She took my pinkie in hers. That was our secret signal, the one we had always made to each other when we’d sat side by side in school. When something funny happened, or strange, or sad, we always reached down and linked pinkies. It was our way of saying,
I’m here and I see it too.
It was something we’d done since we were small, and though perhaps we should have long since outgrown it, we hadn’t, not yet. I savored the warm, familiar pressure of her hand.

“I’ll miss you too,” I said at last, and meant it.

W
hen I got home that night, a lumpy package was waiting for me on our doorstep. I prodded it with the toe of my boot. It bore the seal of the High Council—gold wax with a circular imprint that I think was
supposed
to be a pomegranate—and my name in neat calligraphy. I hefted it into my arms and dumped it on the galley table, tearing away the brown paper as Pepper circled my ankles and whined.

The package was filled with unbleached cloth—rough linen that
wasn’t quite funerary white but still depressed me. I lifted the first length of it and held the long lab coat against me. I might be tall, but the sleeves still trailed over my arms. I wondered who it had belonged to before they’d given it to me. Clearly, it was recycled. It definitely hadn’t been cut to my measurements, and the pale color would do my equally pale complexion few favors.

But it was definitely mine. My name was even stitched onto the breast in blue thread.
Terra Fineberg
, it read,
Specialist.
I ran my fingers over the embroidery. Then I reached out and touched the rank cord on the shoulder. The braid was the color of bluebells, just like the one on my father’s coat. But the braided threads were much newer, not dingy and dirt darkened like his. I touched it tentatively, slipping my finger into the loop at the top.

This means something
, I told myself.
This means you’re a citizen, almost an adult.
But I didn’t feel it. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything. With a grimace I thrust the coat down at the table and went to the icebox to fetch Pepper his dinner.

I scraped the leftover meat and bonemeal into his bowl, then watched for a moment as he pawed at it before diving in. As he licked the bowl clean, I went to the sink, where the tower of crusty dishes had been waiting since the night before. I switched the sink on. The pipes clattered and rang before a murky stream of brown water trickled out. I pulled up my sleeves and went to work,
scrubbing the old dented pots and nicked china, letting the rhythm of the water wash over me.

I didn’t hear my father come in. His footsteps were lost beneath the steady drone of tap water and my own tuneless whistling. But I heard the windows rattle when he slammed the door shut, and I jumped, splashing water over the floor. I waited for him to say something about his visit to the hatchery, to comment on how big his granddaughter was growing and what a wonderful father Ronen would be. But he didn’t. He only went to one of our cupboards, uncorked a cloudy bottle of wine, and took a long draw from it. As he passed, I got a nice whiff of him—that sour smell of alcohol and sweat. Drunk already.

“You’re wasting the water,” he said, reaching past me to turn it off. I held my hands tight at the edge of the sink, not wanting to let his skin brush mine. On nights like these I never knew if I could trust him. His broad, age-spotted fingers had backhanded me one too many times.

“Sorry,” I murmured. He gave a grunted response, then crossed the galley and collapsed at the table. For a moment he just sat there, shoulders slumped, turning the bottle in his hands. But then he spotted the pile of flaxen cloth.

“What’s this?”

I put the last dish on the rack, fumbled through the greasy water for the drain stopper, then turned, bracing myself.

“My uniforms,” I said.

He put the bottle down on the table. His fingers skidded across its splintered surface, finally grasping one of the coats by the sleeve and pulling it toward him.

“Specialist,” he said, flatly at first. But then his hand alighted on the cord, and I saw something unfamiliar dance across his mouth. A smile.

“Terra,” he said. He rose to his feet, still clutching the coat in his hands. Then he crossed the galley and crushed me in a hug. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I held them high between our bodies, shielding myself even as my face was pressed against the brass buttons of his coat.

“Mazel tov, Daughter,” he said, rocking me. “Your momma would be so proud.” I started to let my eyes close, to lean into his embrace. He was still my father. I could smell the remnants of the clock tower under the rank stench of wine and body odor. He still smelled like the dust in the rafters and the cedar of the wide floorboards.

Finally he pulled away, holding me at arm’s length. His face wrinkled in a grin.

“You’ve done well,” he said. I shrugged at that—it’s not like I’d
done
anything. “A specialist, like your old man.”

It was true. Abba did more than just ring the clock bells. He was an advisor to the meteorologists and doctors too. It was his job to
help the people of our ship get used to the changes we’d inevitably face when we arrived on Zehava. Longer winters. Longer days. I knew he was proud of his job, of the ratty old blue cord threaded into his double-breasted coat.

“Thanks,” I said. But I couldn’t stand the intensity of his gaze. I turned to the empty sink, starting to wipe it clean with an old dishrag, glad to have something—anything—to distract me from his stare. Meanwhile Abba folded my uniform for me, holding the arms against him like they were another body. Then he gently set it down.

“Botany,” he said. Then he repeated it, more darkly this time. He reached for the bottle again. I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “Botany. You’ll be working with Mara Stone, you know.”

“Will I?” I asked carefully. I’d never heard of her before, didn’t understand the shadow that had fallen over Abba’s words.

“Be careful,” he said finally, smearing his lips against the back of his hand. “I’ve worked hard to see that you grow up right. I won’t see it ruined by
that woman.
”

I didn’t know what to say. So I gave a timid nod. My father sank down into his seat, glowering at the wine bottle like it had insulted him. But he didn’t say anything.

“Um,” I said at last, groping for some words to fill the silence. One side of his lip lifted in a sneer of acknowledgment. I went
on: “I was wondering why you requested a
talmid
. I mean, it’s great, but I’m just . . . It surprised me. And I was wondering why. You requested him, that is.”

My father lifted the bottle again, but it was empty. He let it thud down on the table as he let out a long sigh.

“Because I’m tired,” he said.

Then he rose and trudged up the stairs. His footfalls were heavy. I stayed still for a moment. Both Pepper and I kept our ears cocked toward the stairwell.

Finally it came—the sound of his bedroom door thundering shut.

•  •  •

When I had finished putting the dishes away, I carried the lab coats up to my room. I threw the lot of them into the corner and didn’t even bother to scold Pepper as he settled into the pile of soft cloth.

Even with the light off, within the confines of my narrow bed, I couldn’t ignore them. They seemed to glow up from the darkness, taunting me. I turned over to face the wall. My mind raced. Maybe I should have reached for my sketchbook, my pencils, poured out all my worries across the rough pages. But instead I just stared at the wall, my eyes wide and my body stiff.

I couldn’t help but feel that, somehow, this was all Momma’s fault. If she hadn’t died, maybe I wouldn’t have taken to spending so much time in the atrium alone, looking at trees and sketching the splayed
fingers of oak leaves in red and green. When I was little, it had been
our
place—she would take me walking every night after supper. Girl time, she said. Of course, those walks stopped when she first got sick, a few weeks after I turned twelve.

At first her illness seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. Nearly every winter a rash of flu ran through the ship, and it was almost impossible to stay healthy when we all shared the same air. But Momma
stayed
sick long after the rest of us went back to school and work.
I just feel a little queasy
, she said,
a bit under the weather.
It wasn’t until the end of the season that we finally convinced her to go to the hospital.

In the waiting room I tried to ignore the fact that it was Doctor Rafferty and not one of the normal medics who tended to my mother. The blue cord on his shoulder was threaded with gold. Council member. Ronen noticed it too.

“Why would she need the head doctor for the flu?” he demanded, jostling my father’s arm. “If it’s viral, she should be better already!”

But our father didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Doctor Rafferty had appeared at the door, his olive features drawn.

“There’s a mass on her liver,” he said. “It’s . . . very unusual. I’ve read about this but never seen it. ‘Cancer’ is what it was once called. Uncontrolled cell growth. It seems to have already reached her lymphatic system.”

Doctor Rafferty’s expression was wrong. His lower lip twitched. There was something in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But my father and Ronen accepted the diagnosis without question, so I told myself I must have been crazy—told myself there was no time to worry about Doctor Rafferty. There was only Momma, dying.

A few weeks later she was gone, and high spring came stumbling back. And there was no one left to walk with me.

•  •  •

That night I dreamed of her.

We were walking through the atrium together, down the twisted paths. It was summer, a season I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid. Dragonflies, their long bodies gleaming like ancient amethysts, swarmed the dome. As I followed my mother over the overgrown brick, I swatted insects from my face. But it didn’t do any good. Between the tangle of vines and the fury of wings, I lost my mother down a fork in the path.

“Momma?” I called. I crossed a wooden footbridge where flashes of green caught my eye from over the rail. Turtles milled through the water below. Everything was too bright, too hot. It made me dizzy.

Then I heard movement in the jungle. I stalked forward, squinting through the heat.

“Momma?” I pushed the branches aside.

There, standing in the jungle, was my mother. She smiled at me, reaching out a hand. I pressed forward.

But then she turned, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. A boy stood just behind her. But his face was obscured by a veil of Spanish moss that spilled off one of the tree branches above.

I couldn’t make out his features, but this much I knew: He was tall, taller than Momma. Taller than me. The flowers all turned their faces to him, like they couldn’t wait to soak up his warmth. In turn his thin body bent unnaturally toward me as I stepped close. It was like he had no spine, no bones, like he was just a reed bending in the breeze.

I woke in the pitch dark of my bedroom, my heart doing a wild dance in my chest.

T
he next morning I hustled across the ship, pushing my sleeves up over my hands and listening to the clock bells strike out the quarter hour. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I was late, of course. The labs were practically a world away from the grimy port district where we lived. To reach them I had to make my way through the commerce district, then the fields, then the pastures, then cross the narrow footbridge between the library and school. The concrete buildings that housed the labs rose up out of the ground near the far wall of the ship.