For Darkness Shows the Stars (20 page)

Dear Kai,

I have tried and failed to write this letter four times now. Your father was a good man, and everyone here cared for him. He raised you, and that makes him a great man in my eyes.

I know things are bad right now. I have heard from the servants at the house that all the Posts on the estate are getting together to hold a memorial service. I would like to attend, if no one thinks that is odd. My mother has given me permission.

I am so sorry for your loss,

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

Honestly, Elliot? I’d rather you didn’t come. Everyone will stare. But after it’s over, I would like it very much if you came and visited the pyre with me. We can bring Ro as well.

Is there any news about where I’ll go?

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

I understand. My mother told me that you will stay in the barn. We all want you to take your father’s place as a mechanic. My mother knows you are young, but you were your father’s apprentice, and you’re the closest thing we’ve got right now.

I am so sorry, Kai. I’m so sorry about everything.

Your friend,

Elliot

A
S SOON AS SHE
could, Elliot escaped to the barn. She could not avoid discussing the accident with Tatiana, nor Benedict, nor her father. In her version, Olivia had accidentally slipped and fallen down the cliff face, though she doubted her ruse would last more than an evening or two, as the story spread.

And when it did spread, how long would it be before people started to wonder how the Posts had done it?

As she entered, Elliot’s gaze slid to the knothole in the door and she reprimanded herself. Would the ritual never die? For four years she looked, though she knew Kai was gone. And now she looked, even though he was home and he hated her. The habit had been imprinted on her brain for all of her life—she was doomed to stare at empty knotholes for eternity.

Elliot went to the loft and sat before her work desk, but couldn’t push away the thoughts in her mind. Those two years she’d spent developing her strain of wheat, she’d deluded herself into thinking it was all right. It was safe. That what she’d created was not as bad as the abominations of the Lost. Tonight, she reread all of her notes on the wheat—each indefensible, aberrant, heretical page. In every line, she read hubris; in every word, she read defiance. She’d convinced herself she was only defying her father. But that wasn’t true. She was defying nature itself. She was doing exactly what Kai and the other Fleet Posts had done.

She was courting death.

What had she been thinking? It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it, even to save a single life. The protocols were in place for a reason. Yes, it could make lives easier. Yes, it could save people when nothing else could. But it wasn’t worth it. Humans were not meant to play God. They couldn’t play God, or they’d wind up as something less than what humans were meant to be. They’d be Reduced.

Her father had been right to trample her wheat if he suspected what she’d done. She was surprised he hadn’t gone further. He could have turned her in to the Luddite tribunal for reprimands or worse. After all, she was eighteen. Granted, it was just wheat, but even that—who knew what it would become inside the humans who ate it? Who knew if it would never grow back, or if it would infect the other crops with a plague, or if it would turn to poison? Before the Reduction, the Lost had enhanced crops to use them as weapons. They could make enemies sick or destroy countries’ entire ecosystems.

And not always on purpose, either. Long before the Reduction, people had killed off entire species of food by attempting to improve it, just like Elliot had done. The ways of the Lost had brought only death and destruction. Elliot knew that. She was a Luddite, charged with protecting the survivors of the Reduction—human, animal, and vegetable—from the horrors that lurked in the heart of their own twisted DNA.

Only God could make a tree.

And only God could make a man. Only God had the right to decide how far a man might leap, or how well a man might see. If these Posts had done what she suspected . . .

Never mind all that. She knew they’d done it. She’d looked into Kai’s eyes—eyes she’d once known as well as her own—and she’d seen the truth.

And he knew it, too.

At last, she left the room. She locked the door behind her. She walked back down the hall and descended the stairs, and she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to see Kai waiting for her at the bottom.

He stood in darkness and didn’t even squint when the lantern hit his eyes. Now that she finally saw the truth, it was all she
could
see. His pupils didn’t contract in the glare of the lantern, and strange lights danced in his irises. His face was utterly flat.

“I need to know,” he said. There was no
Elliot
this time. And why should there be? He hadn’t come to apologize.

“How is Olivia?” Elliot asked instead. “Has she woken up yet?”

But Kai didn’t answer her question either. “The knowledge I suspect you possess can be very dangerous.”

“I suspect the thing you bear is more dangerous still.”

“So you do know.”

“Only that the things I saw today were actions that could not be performed by the boy I knew.” But the man who stood before her was not the boy she’d known. Wasn’t that what he was always saying to her? “Or by any natural human.”

“I am a human. I am a
most
human of humans.”

A dozen generations of her ancestors recoiled at the thought. “I know what you are. I know what you did.” Her voice was very soft, her tone very grave. It was the sound of the Luddite speaking to the liege, but she couldn’t help what slipped out next, Elliot to Kai. “How could you?”

He seemed to grow several centimeters. Was it a trick of the light, or some other kind of trick, some monstrosity she’d not yet discovered? “I will not stand here and be judged by a Luddite who knows nothing of my life.”

There was no point in continuing the conversation. Yes, she was a Luddite. There had been times she’d doubted it, but the proof lay in every churn of her stomach as she thought of what he’d become. For weeks now, Elliot had told herself there was no way Kai could hurt her anymore.

Every day, she was shown to be wrong again. He hurt her when he looked her way, and when he did not. He hurt her when he spoke to her with derision, and when he ignored her.

But now . . . now, surely, it was over. For this man—this Malakai Wentforth—he’d killed her Kai. Overwrote his very DNA.

It was ERV. She’d never seen it, but she knew the signs. They’d been the stuff of nightmares since she’d first learned them in her nursery. The insidiousness of ERV lay in its very simplicity. You didn’t need to replace your body with computerized parts. You didn’t need to insert tiger or jellyfish or hawk genes into your spinal fluid. ERV simply reached into your DNA and flipped a few switches. Anyone could do it, and once, long ago, nearly everyone had.

He was Kai, and yet not Kai. More than Kai, better than Kai,
different
than Kai. All this time, she’d thought it had been his years of living free that had brought him back to her so strong, so swift, so fine. But it was more than that: he’d mucked around with the body God had given him. Didn’t he care about the risk? Didn’t he care what he might have done to his descendants?

“You don’t know what it’s like, down in the enclaves.”

Elliot shook her head. “I surely don’t, you’re correct about that.”

“It’s not just stories the Luddites tell to scare their Posts into submission. There are desperate people there. They do desperate things.”

“And that’s what you did?” she asked him. “Something desperate?” Her voice broke on the words, shards of hope bursting through the skin of her anger.

Was this how frail her entire upbringing was? There was no excuse. None!

“I would have been desperate if I hadn’t taken this risk,” was what Kai said. “There are people who’ve done things far worse than this. When you’re hungry, when you’re cold, when you’re
alone
—I consider myself lucky that this was what came along and not something worse.”

“There’s nothing worse,” Elliot insisted.

“There is. You know people who could tell you about it.” Kai’s face was cold, his jaw set. “There are bad people in the enclaves. There’s opportunity, yes, but a lot of danger. People whose slavery is worse than that on any estate. I learned to start measuring risk on a different scale. You can’t judge me. You weren’t there.”

Her skin burned. No, she hadn’t been there. Was this her fault? Could she have stopped him, if she had been there? Or would she have been just as desperate? Would she have been willing to risk her values, her future children, her life?

“So I did it. Me, and Andromeda, and Donovan. We were all part of an experiment, and it succeeded. We have faster reflexes, stronger stamina, keener vision. It’s what makes us such extraordinary pilots.”

“And what makes you still Kai?”

“I told you not to call me that.” His face might have been made of marble, it showed so little feeling. “You must know by now that I am not that person anymore.”

“Oh yes, I know.” Everything she was raised to believe had taught her that what he’d turned himself into was an abomination. A dangerous one, that if allowed to live, to thrive, would bring about another disaster, a second Reduction.

She knew it, and still she didn’t care. Elliot hated herself for that, but she couldn’t deny it. He could have come to her in a tin body with glass eyes and a metal heart, and she’d still know him for Kai. Always always always Kai.

“Will you betray us?” he asked.

“You know me better than that.”

“I know you are a Luddite,” he said. “And that what I have become must disgust you.”

Then he didn’t know her at all. For she was something less than Luddite, and she felt so much more than simple disgust. “I don’t know how you could do it,” she said instead, staring into eyes that were so much like the ones she knew, and yet so different. “How you could take that risk. You say your experiment was successful. Were there others that were not? Other subjects who wound up Reduced? Dead?”

He was silent for a long time, and Elliot began to think she didn’t want to know that answer.

“How could this be worth it?” she asked. “To what? See in the dark? Sail your ship with a little more finesse?”

“Is there a reason you’d find acceptable?” he asked. “Can you not imagine what could drive a person to break the protocols?”

Her jaw grew tight. “Not to become a better pilot,” was all she trusted herself to say.

“What about to save a life?”