For Darkness Shows the Stars (7 page)

Dear Kai,

I was sorry to learn what happened to your father today. These pills are the medicine they gave to my grandfather after he had his strokes. If you give two a day to Mal, it might help. I know you’re still mad over our argument about the Wars of the Lost, but I hope you know I’m thinking of you. Please tell me if there’s anything else I can do.

Your friend,

Elliot

Dear Elliot,

Thank you for the medicine. I hope it can help my da. They’ve taken him away to the healing house—I hate that name. They never do any healing there. People just go there to die. It’s hard to see him. This is the man who taught me to read and write and fix engines, and now he just stares at me like one of the Reduced.

He must hate that. He used to tell me how hard it was for him growing up. It wasn’t like now. He was one of the only Posts on the whole estate. They didn’t even have a name for what he was growing up—they hadn’t started calling us CORs yet. He loved his family—his parents, his brothers and sisters who were Reduced, but he wasn’t one of them. He spent his whole life proving that. And now he’s trapped, he’s mute, he’s just like them.

And that made me think of the wars. If there was a war tomorrow, would your father send the Reduced out like they did in the old days? Would you send out my uncles and cousins? Would you send out my da, now that he can no longer speak or work for you?

I will tell you the truth. The truth is I was angry at you. The truth is that you’re my closest friend, and I still felt like there was no way I could possibly make you understand what it’s like to be me, what it’s like to be my da. The truth is that my da is dying, and because he’s a COR, he’s shoved away to be forgotten in the healing house, while your grandfather gets medicine and nurses who wait on him hand and foot. The truth is, if there was a war tomorrow, everyone I know would be forced to do exactly what your father wants, just like they forced my father to go into the healing house, just like they will force me to go work as a foreman in the fields, because I’m not old enough or educated enough to keep being a mechanic if my da’s not there to teach me.

The truth is that I’m scared to even write these things down and send them to a Luddite to read. Even if that Luddite is you.

Your friend,

Kai

Dear Kai,

You are my closest friend too. And I promise I will do everything I can to help you and Mal. I will talk to my mother. I will talk to my father if I have to. You may not know everything you must to be our mechanic, but you know enough to apprentice at it, and my father will have to admit it would be a waste to track you into a foreman job. My mother knows who you are, and she knows what we owe you and Ro since your mothers died on the day we were all born. I know she’ll help us.

I wish the shipyard were still open. I think you’d have liked it there, even if I’d’ve missed you. And my grandfather is a good man. They say he even had a Post as his first mate, back when he still traveled up and down the coast.

Is the medicine helping at all? I’m going to go sit with Mal in the healing house, since I know you have to work.

Your friend,

Elliot

T
HE STAR-CAVERN SANCTUARIES COULD
be reached only through a tunnel in the North cellars, which helped the family restrict access to those they deemed worthy. A few Reduced housemaids were allowed down for cleaning purposes, but generally the space was reserved as a monument to the Luddites’ great accomplishment: perseverance.

Elliot had always been in awe of her ancestors. They’d possessed the strength of mind to fight against the tide of their society. When everyone else was putting their faith in scientists like Gavin and Carlotta and getting the ERV procedure, the Luddites had their doubts, as they did about corporate foods whose very genetic codes killed competing vegetation, about computer chips designed to make your brain run faster, about living among people who’d filled the air and water with toxins. They’d saved the world by rejecting it all.

How could she abandon what they’d fought so hard to achieve?

The space was softly lit by sconces as they entered the sanctuary, and the predominant sound was Felicia’s gasp of wonder. “It’s even more spectacular than I’d thought.”

The cavern’s earthen walls sloped upward into vague shadows, and where the walls weren’t marked by murals depicting the skylines of ruined cities and monuments that Elliot had only seen in antique books, they were blackened by the smoke from ancient fires. Here and there stood other artifacts from the Luddites’ time underground. Elliot tried to imagine what it had been like for her ancestors, living their entire lives underground, kept from the turning of the seasons, from the feel of the sun on their faces or the smell of the fields.

Perhaps this was what she’d been missing. Perhaps her father was right, that she should spend more time in the sanctuary to reflect on the true weight of her heritage. Her forebears had spent untold years living in this darkness, subsisting on fish from underground streams, mushrooms, and stockpiled food, because of the horrors that genetic manipulation had visited upon their world. And now, because of a few lean years, she had chosen to tread down that same, dangerous path. Of course, her wheat grafts weren’t ERV, but the idea was the same. Gavin and Carlotta had introduced Endogenous RetroViruses into the Lost in order to trick their God-given DNA into turning on only the best and most powerful expressions of their genes and delivering those same traits to their offspring. Elliot’s grafting methods hadn’t been nearly so intricate, but the result was the same: horizontal gene transfer and a transgenic wheat that produced thicker, heavier seed heads far sooner in the season.

She’d told herself it wasn’t the same. She hadn’t been mucking around with microscopes and DNA strands. It was safe, hardly any worse than the type of cross-pollination that occurred naturally when one plant sat too near another in the field. Of course, that was God’s plan, same as when he’d cursed those with ERV and caused the virus to mutate within their genes and Reduce all their progeny. Elliot had manipulated this wheat herself. And she doubted her Luddite ancestors, who’d experienced much leaner times than this in their years spent huddled in the caverns, would accept her excuse that she’d been desperate to find a way to feed the people on her lands. She felt her cheeks burning in humiliation, and was glad for the dim lights that hid her shame.

Elliot braved a glance at Kai, wondering what he thought now that he saw the North star cavern for himself. He was staring straight up at the darkness in the ceiling, just like the Phoenixes, with an amused expression painted across his features. “So this is all of it.”

“Fascinating,” Andromeda said softly. “Well, at least I can say I have honestly never seen anything like it.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” said Olivia Grove. “Shall we turn out the lights, Tatiana?” She leaned over and extinguished a nearby sconce when Tatiana nodded.

Elliot and the other Luddites began putting out the lights. As the cavern dipped into twilight, she looked back at Kai, waiting for the moment when the miracle overtook him, but his expression did not change.

“Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into utter darkness, “were forced to take refuge during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction. They destroyed technologically backward countries that didn’t have the money for the enhancements. They attacked each other, too, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.

“For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.

It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.

Olivia began to sing, a soft Luddite hymn they’d all known since childhood. And as her voice grew, the stars glowed brighter, twinkling down on them with promise. As a child, Elliot had been amazed by this—that the stars in the cavern responded to human voices, when the ones in the sky did not. Now, even when she knew the truth, the effect was still quite beautiful.

“In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.”

It was more complicated than that, though. When Elliot’s ancestors emerged, it was into an unrecognizable world. A world where even some of the machines the Luddites were willing to use no longer worked. A world where there was no sign of life beyond the islands, where the needles of compasses spun uselessly, where there was no direction at all save the stars. All the Luddites knew was that they were alone, and that they alone bore responsibility for gathering up the shards of humanity.

“Amazing,” whispered Felicia.

“Interesting,” said Andromeda, her tone pedestrian.

“Ann,” Donovan warned under his breath.

Elliot, standing close to the Phoenixes, heard the girl shift in the darkness. “Miss Grove,” Andromeda said. “That’s a very pretty song. You should hear my brother sing. It would no doubt blow you away.”

“I would like that,” Olivia replied. “He could sing now. The stars glow brighter with song.”

“I wonder why that is,” Kai said. “Do you think they suppose their food is closer and they hope to attract it into their webs?”

Tatiana made a choking sound. “How . . . do you know?”

Kai sounded bored. “That they’re bugs? I thought it was common knowledge.”

It wasn’t. Elliot had told Kai herself, years ago, when she’d learned the truth about the glowworm “stars” her family venerated in the sanctuary. They
were
bugs—tiny, bioluminescent insects that crept into crevices in the rocks and attracted prey through their glowing lights.

“Really?” asked Olivia sadly. “I was so disappointed when I learned the truth. I was ten years old.”

“I can imagine,” Kai replied. But he didn’t need to. Elliot had been disappointed back then as well, and so had Kai, though he’d never seen the stars for himself. Still, the knowledge of the truth behind the miracle didn’t take away from the wonder of the sight, nor from the importance—even more so because it was natural and not manmade—that the appearance of the “stars” had held for Elliot’s ancestors.

“I don’t mean to belittle it,” said Kai. “It’s stunning. Not like the real thing, of course—nothing can compare to when you’re out at sea, nothing around you but stars, shining above, reflected below.” The Phoenixes murmured their agreement. Elliot gazed up at the sanctuary firmament and tried to imagine what it would look like. “These . . . well, they look like bugs.”

“They look like stars!” Tatiana exclaimed.

“Not to my eyes,” said Kai.

“Nor mine,” Andromeda added. “Nor yours, right, Donovan?”

“I must admit they do not,” Donovan said, his tone reluctant.

“I’m sorry for that,” Felicia broke in. “If you cannot see the wonder in this sanctuary, then your superior eyesight has done you no favors.”

For a moment the three captains were silent, as if Felicia had scolded them like children. Finally, Andromeda spoke. “To be fair, the real stars don’t even fascinate me as much as when I was . . . younger.”

“I am sorry for that, as well.” Felicia’s voice was sad.

What did Felicia Innovation have to apologize for? It was hardly her fault that her young friends were unimpressed with the Norths’ most sacred possession. Indeed, she suspected Kai’s response was on purpose.

“It’s especially disappointing,” Felicia went on, “when you consider those who will never see this miracle with
any
eyes . . .”

Elliot heard Donovan’s harsh intake of breath. Beside him, Andromeda mumbled an apology.

“It’s quite all right,” said Felicia, but her tone was so flat, Elliot felt sure that it was anything but. “Miss Norths, you must forgive these young captains. They have seen so many wonders beyond the shores of these islands, they forget the beauty of the wonders here at home.”

“I would love to hear more of what you’ve seen,” said Olivia. “I’ve long wondered what else is out there.”

“Have you?” asked Kai. “That’s an unusual desire for a Luddite. Even when I’ve heard them express it, they’ve never been sincere.”

Elliot bit her lip and stared up at the stars until they blurred before her eyes.