Starglass (11 page)

“I should go,” he said, his words coming out in almost a whisper. “My parents.”

“Sure,” I said. I stuffed my hands down into my pockets. I didn’t know what to say or how to look. So I just forced a smile. “I’ll see you later, Koen.”

He only gave a small nod, then rushed out ahead of me, disappearing into the dark.

S
oon the first frost came. On that cold morning I rose early, bundling myself beneath layers and layers of clothes. When I arrived at the lab, I found Mara already buried in her work. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and muttered about cellular damage, while peering through the microscope.

I headed for the bookshelf, ready to grab one of the field guides and head out again. But her cool gaze snapped up at me.

“Hold on,
talmid
.”

I turned, my hand lingering on the spine of the book.

“I’m meeting with the captain today,” she said. Then she reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a scrap of paper. I took it hesitantly—it was stained with soil and bore her cramped, tiny handwriting. Three titles, each one written in Old American. They’d taught us how to read it in school. Most of the students struggled—the letters had shifted in five hundred years; the vowels had changed, creating the language we now called Asheran. But I’d always been good with dead languages. I read the titles easily:
Joy of Cooking. The Essential New York Times Cookbook. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Cookbooks? What’s this have to do with botany?”

“It has to do with keeping you out of my hair while I meet with Wolff.”

“Oh,” I said. I stared down at Mara’s cramped handwriting as if I could divine some sort of answer from her scratchy print. “What . . . what are you meeting with her about?”

“One of the probes we sent out to Zehava was due to return yesterday. We should be getting soil samples. Atmospheric readings. Five hundred years of building theoretical models of the plants we might sow on that damned planet. It won’t be until we get those probe results that our
real
work can begin.” She paused, bemused. “And I don’t have time to deal with a
talmid
scuttling about under my feet.”

“Don’t worry,” I mumbled. “I’d rather not be around for it. Captain Wolff gives me the creeps.” I grimaced, regretting my treasonous words the moment they passed my lips. But Mara only let out a bark of laughter.

“Good. Never trust politicians. They don’t understand the work we do and don’t want to. They twist science to their own ends. If you learn anything from me, I want it to be that.”

“But, Mara,” I said, smiling faintly. “I don’t understand. Cookbooks?”

“Use your brain, girl,” she said. “Figure it out for yourself. Now off with you. Go.” She shooed me toward the door.

•  •  •

The library’s spicy perfume of book glue and leather covers greeted me. It was a familiar smell—the scent of all of those hours spent reading by light filtered through stained glass. The tall, colorful windows depicted scenes from our history: the asteroid’s approach, the boarding of the
Asherah
, the signing of our contract. From the cracked blue-green globe of Earth, the atrium light came spilling through.

Mara’s list of titles clutched against my palm, I approached the checkout desk. Van Hofstadter was right where I expected him to be, clacking away at the computer terminal. But when I saw he wasn’t alone, the blood drained from my fingers.

Koen was there too, his arms crossed over his chest, loose laughter
playing at his lips. I couldn’t believe it. They were whispering to each other like old friends. But as I stepped close, both boys fell silent.

Koen’s expression changed, flattening. I felt a stab of something, a sour feeling in my chest that I couldn’t quite name.

“Hey,” I said to him. Though I’d lowered my voice to library levels, he
must
have heard me. But Koen only cast his dark eyes toward the ground beneath his feet. He pawed his neck with his hand.

“Can I help you?” Van asked. When I glanced over to Koen, he looked away, so I passed Van the list of books. My fingers trembled, but we both ignored it.

“I need these.”

“You can’t take the originals out of here.” Van spoke to me like we were strangers, like we’d never spoken before. Like this was only business. “You have to read them in the library.”

“I know!” I said, too loud, then scowled. I lowered my voice. “That’s fine.”

Van’s mouth tightened, little lines forming around his lips. Without another word he disappeared into the closed stacks behind him.

The silence was unbearable. It seemed to ring out, cutting right through my body. Koen’s long neck was turned away from me; his unruly bangs shadowed his face. I thought of all those suppers with my father—thought of the way his arms had felt around me only a few days before.

“Did I do something wrong?” Worry mounted in my voice. Koen winced, his features contorting as though in pain.

“I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I just wanted to take care of—”

He cut off midsentence, his head snapping up. Van had returned, a stack of books in his arms. I stared down at the counter as Van began to enter the call numbers into the computer terminal.

“My name is Terra Fineberg,” I said, my tone hazy. “And my cNumber is—”

“I know who you are,” Van said. His upper lip lifted like I was a piece of rancid meat. “You’re Terra Fineberg. The girl who can’t keep her mouth shut.”

It was like he’d found a seam in my skin and torn it open with his fingernails; all my breath came out in one long hiss.

But then Koen spoke up. “Van! You promised.”

Van glowered. But Koen wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at me.

“Don’t worry, Terra,” he murmured. His voice almost broke. I’m sure if I spoke, mine would have too. “Van promised me that he wouldn’t do anything. I told him you wouldn’t tell anyone else, that you can be trusted. Right?”

My cheeks burned. My mind was filled with a cacophony of questions and not a single answer.

“I don’t understand. Why can’t we tell someone?” I demanded.
But when my gaze swept between the boys, I saw how closely both watched me. Van’s eyes smoldered, silently threatening. When I spoke again, my words came out high and weird. “I won’t tell anyone. There’s nothing to tell anyway, right?”

I saw Koen crack a thin smile.

“See, Van?” he said. “I told you we could trust her.”

The corner of Van’s mouth twitched up. He pushed the books toward me across the counter. I grabbed for them.

“If you say so,” he said. Then he turned away from me.

I gave Koen a small, brave smile. He solemnly looked back. Hefting the books in my arms, I started for the second floor, where the study desks waited. But their voices trailed after me as I made my way up the spiraling staircase.

“If she told you,” Van was saying, “there’s no telling who else knows.”

I felt my grip on the books tighten until my knuckles turned white. He didn’t trust me to keep a simple secret—and why should he? I was nothing but a weak little girl. A snitch.

Shaking my head at myself, I hurried up the stairs.

•  •  •

Over supper that night I watched as my father forked potatoes into his mouth and chewed slowly, the way that sheep in the atrium fields chewed the long grass. Pepper circled the legs of my chair, meowing incessantly, but we both ignored him. I waited for my father to speak.
When he didn’t, I set my fork down at the edge of my plate and cleared my throat.

“I saw Koen today,” I said, desperate to find any words with which to plug up the silence. “In the library.”

He didn’t look up. “What were you doing in the library?”

“Mara sent me to do some research.”

My father took a long drink from one of the dented metal tumblers, set it down again, took another bite. I let out a sigh. Without Koen around, talking to Abba was like slogging through some sort of muddy field—I wanted to move forward, but the soles of my boots kept getting stuck.

My father finally paused in his chewing. “I gave him the day off. I suppose that Stone was trying to get you out of her hair as well? I saw her skulking around the captain’s stateroom.”

“That’s right. She said you were getting probe results in today. From Zehava.”

My father wiped the back of his broad hand against his lips. “That was the plan. Captain Wolff said that there’s been some sort of delay in the probe’s return. They’re sending out a second one.”

I stared at him, thinking about how Mara had said she’d been waiting for the results—waiting her whole career, from the sound of it. “That’s strange,” I said.

My father shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe there were storms on
Zehava. Maybe the original coordinates were incorrect. There’s no telling.”

I nodded uncertainly. My father narrowed his eyes at me.

“The library. I hope he wasn’t schmoozing with that librarian again.”

“Van Hofstadter?” I said faintly, fixing my hands to the edge of the table. But their grip felt uncertain; my palms had begun to sweat. “Why, what’s wrong with him?”

My father didn’t answer. He only picked up his fork again, then rapped the tines against the table—one time, two, three. The gesture was made all the more nerve-racking by the way the vein on his forehead bulged.

“There have been rumors,” my father said. He spun his fork around, stabbing his overcooked potato with it.

“Rumors?” I asked. But my father only grunted through a mouthful of mushy tubers.

“I forget sometimes,” he said at last.

I almost didn’t dare to breathe. “Forget what?”

“That you’re not your mother.”

With that, my father put down his fork and rose on heavy feet. He crossed the galley and came to stand just behind me. Reaching down, he touched the blue cord on my uniform. His trembling hands moved slowly.

“If you’re a good girl, Terra,” he began. His voice sounded
strained, pinched. “If you stay out of trouble and do your duty, and if you’re kind to Koen and treat him well, then I’m sure everything will be fine.”

There was a long silence. A lump was rising in my throat. I didn’t want to try to dislodge it. I thought doing that might break the spell.

“Koen’s my student,” my father went on. It was hard for me to hear his words over my thrumming heartbeat. “And you’re my daughter. I care about you both, very much.”

“I know,” I lied, my voice a hollow rattle in my chest.

“You need to be careful of who you get mixed up with. Both of you.”

“Okay.”

He lifted his hands off my shoulders. One of my own hands darted up, rubbing the warm, clammy spot where his fingers had been.

“Good,” my father said. Even though his plate was still half full, he started toward the stairwell. Then he paused at the bottom, grimacing. I couldn’t be sure if he was talking to me or to himself.

“I won’t lose you too,” he said.

“Lose me?” I asked. But by the time my words moved past my throat, my father had disappeared upstairs, Pepper padding up into the darkness behind him.

•  •  •

The next morning Mara was a whirlwind of fury. I watched from the doorway as she stomped from one end of the lab to the other, pulling
books from their shelves, then tossing them over her shoulder. They spun, then landed on the ground, splayed open. Her heavy boots trampled right through a tray of seedlings, but she didn’t even seem to notice.

“Good morning?” I called as the door shivered shut behind me. Across the room the little woman let out a desperate laugh.

“I wouldn’t call it
that
!”

Mara’s forehead was a mess of wrinkles. She rubbed her hand over her brow as if her fingers could smooth them out.

“It’s not you, Terra. The probe didn’t come in yesterday. Or so the captain says.”

“I know,” I said. I hung back by the door, feeling more than a little afraid to come close. “My father told me. They’re sending out another one. I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

She laughed again, but there was no humor there. “I’ll bet you a million gelt that that one goes out and doesn’t return either.”

“They pay you well.” I snorted. “But not that well.”

I expected Mara to laugh. It had happened before—well, not
laughter
. Not quite. But I’d gotten her to smile at me once or twice. Now, nothing. Silence crackled between us.

“I don’t have time for this,
talmid
,” she said at last. She riffled through the papers on her desk. “Take a sick day. Go home. You’re not wanted here.”

I started to turn toward the sliding door. But I stopped halfway, peering over my shoulder at the botanist.

“Diet,” I said, softly but clearly. I saw her angle her chin up at that, saw how she was listening. So I went on. “You had me read those cookbooks to demonstrate the variety of diet on Earth. It was nothing for them to have animal proteins in their recipes all the time. So obviously they weren’t just slaughtering their goats and chickens when they were old, like we do. And sugar—I had to look that one up, but cane sugar was in everything. We use honey. Because the bees do a double duty, helping us pollinate, too. It saves us field space for protein-rich vegetables. They had all sorts of stuff I’d never even heard of. Food was abundant for them. They could just go to the market and get whatever they wanted, whether or not it was in season. And they had no idea.”

Mara’s back still faced me, but her shoulders sagged a little. Like my words were softening her resolve.

“It’s like you were saying on my first day,” I continued, “about the fruit salad. As our botanist, you do a lot more than figure out what trees they should be planting down in the atrium. It’s diet and it’s balance, and you have to think about climate and soil and oxygen and what kind of wildlife we need to help carry the seeds. And the funny thing is that people who are cooking—most people—don’t even think about it. They don’t even realize how our food has changed
since we left Earth, except for complaining that they can’t get anything besides potatoes down at the shops.”

From behind I watched as Mara’s shoulders shook. At first I had the terrifying thought that she might be
crying
. But then I heard her dry, hiccuped laughter.