Starbreak (26 page)

I
n the time that we’d been gone, my brother had lain low, hiding amid the cobwebs and the unwashed clothes that now littered his quarters, hoping that the violence outside would soon pass. His home had a musty, human smell, of diapers and crusty food and slept-in sheets. Even with my face pressed to Pepper’s fur as I snuggled him at the galley table, I could smell it—rank and musky.

But Hannah didn’t mind. She bounced Alyana on her knee,
gurgling to the baby about how much she’d missed her. My brother watched, blushing.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said. “I just knew it. Your parents—”

And then he broke off, pressed his lips together, and leaned back in his seat. He was pensive, like his mouth held secrets inside it.

“Are they all right?” Hannah asked, her baby’s fat fingers still wrapped around her own.

“They’re fine.” He paused, waiting a beat. “They’ve left for the ship’s bow with the Council. They wanted us to join them, Alya and me. But I told them I had to wait for you, to make sure you knew where to find us when you returned.”

Hannah gazed at him, her lips gently parting.

“Oh, Ronen,” she said, and the way she said it made my heart lurch in my chest. She was so relieved to be returned to him. Her old face and voice and manners had all begun to come creeping back in his presence, like she was once more being woken to life. “I can’t believe you waited.”

“Of course I did. I kept thinking about what might happen if you were lost to us on the planet. I kept wondering what I would tell Alya about you when she was grown. How her mama just slipped away to Zehava’s surface and . . . disappeared.” My brother’s voice grew choked, as if it hurt him to say those words. “And how we just left her there, as
if she were an old toy forgotten in someone else’s quarters.”

Hannah’s face shimmered in the dim light of my brother’s quarters. But she didn’t get a chance to respond to him, to tell him he was a fool for waiting—and that she was touched by his foolishness too. Because a knock sounded then at Ronen’s front door, a little jittery rattle, so quick that at first I thought it was nothing but the wind. Then again, louder this time. We all turned and stared.

“Might be those kids again,” he said. “Since the riots, they’ve been roaming the streets like hooligans, knocking things over, throwing eggs. Probably best not to ans—”

A third rattle cut him off. My brother still remained seated, and his wife, too. So I rose and put Pepper on the floor. The cat looped my legs over and over again as I made my way over.

“Be careful, Terra,” Ronen warned. And I was. I opened the door just a sliver, peeking through the crack.

A smooth face. A slender neck. Lovely dark skin the color of a chestnut shell that disappeared into the collar of her fine wool coat.
Rachel
!

I threw the door open, and my arms around her. She hugged me back, her face pressed against the silver fabric of my robes.

“Terra, Terra, Terra!” she cried, laughing. “I thought I’d lost you! I thought you were gone. When I heard about the shuttle, I came as fast as I could.”

I gave a fierce shake of my head. I thought of the open door of her parents’ home, and all the broken shards of china scattered inside. I remembered the fears that had risen up inside me: Rachel, dead and gone like Ettie’s parents. A fate too dark for me to even imagine. I’m sure she’d thought the same, imagining my body dashed to pieces on Zehava—she’d seen a future stretch out ahead of her where she was alone, and I was gone.

“No,” I said, and forced a laugh back too. “I’m here. I’m here.”

I took her by the hand and led her inside.

•  •  •

We went up into the empty bedroom on Ronen’s second floor, the room where I’d stayed in the days before the riots broke out. It looked the same as it always had—like a guest room. My single box of belongings sat in the corner gathering dust. The blankets on the bed were scratchy spares that had been inherited from Hannah’s parents, pulled taut across the mattress in the time since I’d been gone. But Rachel hardly seemed to notice the sparse accommodations. She now moved with a measured serenity, her delicate jaw held high. As usual she was dressed stylishly, but her clothes were darker and more conservatively cut than they once would have been. She wore a long black skirt, one that touched the threadbare rug as she walked, and a black turtleneck too. I watched her settle on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her body. She folded the pleats under her. Then she glanced brightly up at me.

“You’ve changed!” she said. I stopped dead in the middle of the tiny bedroom, one hand clutched against my chest. It was true, of course. I had. And nothing announced those changes so well as my lover’s clothes, wrapped tight around my body with a long cloth belt.

“Have I?” I said, sitting too. I could feel the blush over my cheeks, but I ignored it. Maybe it was coy of me, but it was old hat, this patter—the secret of boys, and Rachel, prying them out of me.

“You look so grown-up. What happened to you down there?”

“Oh, not much—” I began, but before I could go on, Rachel squinted at me.

“Have you lost weight? And that robe is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

She reached out and touched the sleeve, her hand lingering on the fabric. I smiled. Rachel could never resist talking clothes—it was almost as important to her as boys.

“It’s not silk. Or cotton. What is it?”

Recyclable synthetics. Plant based,
the voice in my head intoned. I gently tugged the sleeve away, ignoring Rachel’s question.

“It doesn’t matter. Tell me, how have you been? Your parents and brother? I’ve been worried about you, Raych. Stuck up here.” The last I’d seen her, she’d been about to go marry Koen Maxwell. Dressed in gold, flowers in her hair. Beautiful. Delicate. I hadn’t just been worried—I’d been
afraid
for her. “I wish I could have taken you and Koen with me.”

Her expression went dark, pinched. “We didn’t marry,” she said quickly. “I haven’t seen him since the day of the riots. One moment we’re about to be wed, the next he’s running down the clock tower stairs with Van Hofstadter and his wife. Don’t look at me like that, Terra. It was a blessing, really. We never should have gotten engaged.”

I chased away the frown that had begun to tighten the corners of my mouth. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“I know. You warned me. But everything’s worked out now.”

It was Rachel’s turn to let her lips coyly lift. I sat back, examining her. The long, dark clothing—good for moving unnoticed through the hostile space of our ship’s dome—was punctuated by a single flash of color. It was so
expected
on our ship that at first I hadn’t noticed it. A knot of thread on her shoulder, merchant red, declaring her rank.

And a gold cord woven into it, declaring her loyalty to the Council.

“You’ve been staying up in the ship’s bow,” I said, speaking carefully. A realization dawned on me, crystal clear and as bright as morning. Rachel had been loved once, more fiercely and firmly than I ever had been before Vadix. By Silvan Rafferty—the boy who let her down, then turned his attentions to me. What had transpired in the week that I’d been gone?

Her dark skin grew darker. She lowered her gaze, picking up the hem of her skirt and tugging at a loose thread.

“After the riots I heard that Silvan’s dad was sick, and that you
were gone. I went to see Silvan. I thought I might offer him a prayer. I wanted to comfort him. And—and it was like no time had passed at all.”

Staring at her, I found that hard to believe. Back when she and Silvan had tossed and tumbled in the back pathways in the atrium, she’d been soft and giggly.  A girl, really.  And now she was grown; she sat tall, with her shoulders squared and her spine straight. Though that old, familiar smile still played on her painted lips, some dark flame danced behind them. Secrets. No,
wisdom
.

Maybe that meant Silvan had changed too. Maybe he had grown up, transforming from the sullen, proud boy he’d once been into someone with the empathy to lead. I hoped so, at least. I took Rachel’s hands in mine.

“I’m so, so happy for you, Raych,” I said. Her fingers were stiff in mine, unmoving.

“Are you?” she asked. “I thought you might be mad. I know that Silvan cared for you. I know the two of you—”

Her words choked off. She was unable to complete her sentence, but she didn’t have to. I knew where her mind went, to that night when Silvan and I had kissed in the street, our bodies so close that not a single gasp of air could slip between us. Hip to hip, chest to chest. His breath. My breasts.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said quickly, drawing my hands away. Then I
clutched my arms against my body, unsure of what else there was left to say. Because it
had
been like that, hadn’t it? I felt a pressure in my mind, a flood of warmth. Vadix. Letting out a slow stream of breath, I added: “It’s over, anyway. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

The frown between her eyebrows was deep as she considered me. Finally she saw the truth—the love that glowed over my sunburned flesh. “Terra, did you . . . have you
met
someone?”

Inside my mind there was that same familiar sensation of flowers bursting to life, scattering their pollen on the wind. I didn’t answer Rachel. But I didn’t have to. It was as plain as day on my face. I’d fallen in love.

“Who was it? I know a few men slipped away on that shuttle with you. One of Aleksandra’s guards? Not—not Rebbe Davison?”

I wrinkled my nose. “No. You know he’s married!”

“Then . . .”

My smile wavered as I tried to find the words. Maybe I’d spend the rest of my life trying to explain it—how I’d gone to Zehava and met my
bashert
in Raza Ait. How my heart’s twin was an alien boy who slept the winters away and whose skin changed color in response to my touch. In the dim light of my brother’s guest room, my friend lifted an eyebrow, and waited for my answer.

“His name is Vadix,” I began. “I—I don’t know if he has a last name. He’s a Xollu. They’re— It’s difficult to explain. They’ve lived
on Zehava for thousands of years. He’s a translator for the Grand Senate. He’s important to them.” I paused. Waited a beat. “He’s important to
me
.”

The smile hadn’t returned to her lips, not yet. In the room’s canned air she felt very far away.

“An alien. You’ve fallen in love with an alien.”

Once her words would have shamed me, but they didn’t, not now. No matter how much shock dripped from each one, I wouldn’t let it poison what I knew was pure and right and good. Vadix, his arms around me. Vadix, promising to keep me safe.

“Yes,” I said softly.

In a flash Rachel lifted herself to her feet. She walked over to the dresser, staring at the painting that hung on the wall there. A covered bridge—the one on the dome’s lowest level. Once I’d sat on that bridge with Koen and talked about my dreams. Dreams of Vadix, months and months before I’d ever known his name, before I’d ever even been sure he was real. She stared at those brushstrokes as if she could will them to change.

“Silvan and I,” she said in a strong, clear voice, “have talked a lot about the kind of world we want to build for our people. The Council did a lot of things we don’t agree with. Getting in the way of marriages, for instance. So long as his father and Captain Wolff and the rest of them were all in power, our love could never be. It’s not right. I believe
that so long as a husband honors his wife, and provides for her—and as long as she’s dutiful and sweet to him, well then, what does it matter if he’s the captain and she’s a merchant girl? It shouldn’t!”

I could tell from the way that her smile grew, and then faded—from the way that she jutted out her jaw, steeling herself for my response—that Rachel was warming up to something, some argument that she held dear.

“But then Silvan asked me about marriages between two men, like Koen and Van. Or even two women. He asked me to look in the Torah, to find out what it had to say. He’s only just learning, but he wants to understand the world, like I do—what our rituals mean, and how we can do them better.”

My mouth was dry as I watched her. I’d never seen her like this before—so passionate, so certain. She wasn’t even thinking about how her words might hurt me. She hadn’t even considered it.

“I found stories. Sodom and Gomorrah. Two cities, visited by God’s messengers. They were in search of good, honest men. But the men of the city were wicked, and wanted to lie down with them. To
schtup
them. God destroyed them for their depravity.” She gazed at me pointedly, like I was meant to read the meaning between the lines. She wasn’t only calling Koen and Van depraved. In Rachel’s eyes I, too, had wicked desires.

“I’m not depraved!”

My answer came, quick and frantic, but Rachel hardly heard it. She just kept talking.

“You’ll find someone else. We have years and years—our whole lives. Silvan doesn’t want to force people to marry. He wants them to
choose
. You’ll find someone. Maybe not Silvan or Koen, but—”

“No,” I said swiftly, cutting her off. “There’s no one else. It’s Vadix or it’s nobody.”

I hadn’t realized it was true until I said it, how already my image of the future was getting all tangled up with him. But it was. And no matter how hard Rachel tried, she wouldn’t be able to cut those threads. They were made out of steel.

“But you’ll have plenty of time to get over him,” she said. Before I could answer, she added: “The whole trip back to Earth!”

“Earth?” I couldn’t help but scowl at the word. “It’s a fool’s quest! Destroyed, Rachel, and we all know it.”

“But we were spared!” she said. And that’s when I knew that the idea—the whole crazy lot of it—began and ended with Rachel. “It’s happened before, don’t you see? In ancient times God sent the floods to the Earth to cleanse it. But he had a man named Noah build a boat to save his family. And then later we were slaves in the deserts of Earth, but he saved us then, too—just like the people of the
Asherah
were spared the asteroid’s wrath. We’re special, Terra. Chosen. And God gave us a home once. On Earth. ‘I swore to your
ancestors that I would give them this land, and now it falls to you to inherit it.’ ”