Starglass (9 page)

“You didn’t even know Benjamin,” he said. A note of accusation rang in his voice. I stumbled to my feet, fixing my hand against the metal railing, whose surface flaked off paint beneath my palm.

“I knew him,” I protested, rushing down the steps. “We spoke the other day on the lift. He wanted me to come see him in the library.”

Van pressed his lips together. “He wasn’t supposed to do that. You’re just a child.”

“I’m not a child!” But my words were whined. I think we both knew how false they were.

“You’re not sixteen yet,
Talmid
Fineberg.” And then he added, in case I had any doubts: “And you didn’t see anything last night in the engine rooms.”

Now my cheeks burned. I lifted my chin, looking squarely at Van. He wasn’t very tall, though his shoulders were broad, imposing beneath white cloth. “I
did
see,” I whispered, as much to myself as to Van. “I know I did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He started taking wide steps toward the door.

I waited until his hand closed around the doorknob to say it. Standing tall, I threw my tangled hair over my shoulders.

“Liberty on Earth.”

He froze, his fingers tense against the door. But he didn’t turn or speak.

“Liberty on Zehava. I
heard
, Van. I heard him say it. Treason. Those words are treason. They taught us in school that—”

“Shh!” Van gave a hiss. His eyes were narrowed down to slivers, jaded flints like broken glass. But then the clock tower bells rang out nine o’clock. At the sound, low and droning, Van’s stiff posture began to soften. He started to shake his head.

“Van? Terra?”

We both turned. Standing on the street behind me was Koen Maxwell. His pale cheeks were ruddy, his shaggy hair disheveled. He’d already changed out of his mourning garb, dressing himself in the familiar wool and corduroy of the clock keeper. The heavy coat fit him poorly. His long, pale wrists showed beneath the cuffs.

“Koen. Shouldn’t you be at work?” I squinted at him, wondering what that broad smile was doing lighting up his face.

“Shouldn’t you?” he asked, letting out a small, awkward laugh. I stared at him. This was no time for laughter.

“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose I should.”

Van’s fingers were still curled around the doorknob, but it seemed he couldn’t make his feet move forward. Finally his eyes darted up at me, sharp and hard.

“Remember what I said, Terra. You’re a child. You didn’t see anything.”

With that, he threw the door open and slammed it behind him. Koen watched him leave.

“I wonder what that was about,” he said. I looked at him, at his rumpled hair and his jangly smile. He had the sort of kind, open features that made you want to tell him all your secrets. It was a dangerous sort of face.

“I have no idea,” I said, and hustled down the empty street.

M
y second day at work was hardly any better than my first. Mara kept me running through the greenhouses, snipping branches, pressing them between the pages of the field guide. I kept turning down the wrong corridor. Before I knew it, I stood lost in a hothouse full of fruit trees, or an enclosed field of purple grains. After only a few hours sweat poured down my face in little rivers. Thorns had worked their way into the weave of my lab coat. That morning, after the dreams, and the funeral, and my visit
to the Jacobis’ home, I was exhausted, too, and it felt like my head was wrapped in cotton gauze. When I stopped inside the lab before lunch, offering Mara the heavy tome, I almost didn’t notice how she looked at me—her close-set eyes narrowed, as if she’d been chewing over some idea.

“Did you know him?” she asked, tossing the book onto her desk without looking at it. It fell with a heavy thud.

“Know who?”

“Jacobi. You know.” She waved her hand at me. “The dead guy.”

Her thin lips curled, showing her pale gums. Her pointed jaw was tight. I wondered if this might be a test, sent by Van Hofstadter himself. But I knew that was a ridiculous idea—what use would Mara have for someone like Van? She hardly had any patience for me.

“No, not really.” It wasn’t a lie, of course, so I shrugged and shoved my hands down into the pockets of my coat. Mara studied me.

“Good,” she said at last. “Good. You’re young, Terra. There’s no telling the kinds of wind that might sweep you up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jacobi and his ilk. Rabble-rousers, all of them. Convinced the golden light of justice shines right down on their empty heads.” Mara snorted laughter. Deep inside my pockets I dug my fingernails into my palms, trying to stop myself from remembering the impassioned words that had spilled, quick as blood, from Mar Jacobi’s mouth.

Liberty on Earth . . .

“Don’t worry,” I said, though my throat and lips felt dry, my tongue huge and awkward in my mouth. “I’ve never been much of a joiner.”

“Good!” Mara said, and she gave my shoulder a hearty thump. I swayed on my feet from the force of it. “A woman after my own heart.”

•  •  •

I was surprised to come home that night to find our quarters bright and busy, clouded by the perfume of frying onions and garlic and spice. Hannah stood behind the stove, stirring something into a pan of hot oil. And my brother was at the galley table peeling pale carrots.

“Terra!” Hannah said, smiling wide at my arrival as I hung up my bag by the door. Pepper didn’t run to greet me like he usually did, begging for food as though he might starve to death at any moment. Apparently, his belly was already full—he’d curled up to sleep at the end of the table.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked. I peeled off my mud-stained lab coat and draped it over one of the chairs, watching my brother as he sliced a long, gnarled root in two.

I’d intended my words for Ronen, but he didn’t even look up at me. Instead Hannah gave a happy hum and answered for both of them.

“We thought we’d come by and make you two dinner. Thought
you might need it, after what happened this morning.”

My mind drifted to the memory of Mar Jacobi’s body swaddled tightly in white cloth. As if I could forget it for even a moment. “Oh,” I said. “That.”

Hannah looked at me meaningfully. Then she brought over a bowl of ground lamb and set it before me.

“No one eats free in my kitchen,” she said with a wink.

This isn’t your kitchen
, I thought. But I went and washed my hands anyway.

I worked bread crumbs into the raw meat, mashing it all together with my hands. The rhythm of work felt almost soothing. For a moment I could believe that Momma was still alive, that she, instead of Hannah, stood at the counter kneading bread. But the tenuous peace was soon broken.

“How do you like your job so far?” Hannah asked.

I grunted, letting my hands fall still in the bowl of meat. “I don’t know,” I said. “How do you like
your
job?”

My brother stopped chopping carrots. “Terra!” he said, but Hannah just let out a laugh.

“Oh, it’s no big deal, Ro. It’s not like you loved your vocation when you were fifteen.”

“You didn’t?” I frowned, but he only stared down at the cutting board. Hannah sauntered over to him and scraped the cut carrots into
a dented metal bowl. She let her fingers alight on his shoulder, then gave her eyelashes a flutter.

“Of course not. Your brother whined about it for months. It wasn’t until he started earning his wages that he seemed to see any use in it.”

Ronen’s shoulders lifted, tense. I watched as he squirmed under my gaze. I had never heard him complain about his job, but we hardly ever spoke back then. Not that we spoke much now, either.

“What about you?” I asked, turning to look at Hannah. She was stirring the carrots into the pan, her full lips pursed and thoughtful.

“What about me?”

“Do you love your job? Did the Council find you your
true calling
and all of that?” I regretted my words almost as soon as I said them. Hannah’s
father
was a Council member. I should have known better than to disparage his judgment. But she didn’t seem to care. She just shrugged.

“At first I hated it. Cartography, you know? What kind of job is that? I wanted to design clothes, like that rubbish uniform they gave you.” She nodded toward the long lab coat that hung from the chair. “But after a while I came to like my work. I’ll be one of the first humans to set foot on Zehava. That has to be worth something, right?”

“Sure,” I said softly. “I guess.”

“Don’t worry, Terra,” Hannah said, walking over. She took the
bowl of ground lamb out from under my hands, leaving my greasy fingers frozen over the table. “You’ll come to like your job. It’s not easy for any of us at first.”

I was about to protest that it wasn’t true—that so far as I knew, Rachel had fallen into her new job duties just fine. And what about Silvan Rafferty? Surely taking on Captain Wolff’s mantle was no struggle for
him
. But before I could, our front door burst open again, and my father came clattering through.

His steps were clumsy, hard against the metal floor. He’d been drinking. But he wasn’t alone. Koen Maxwell stepped past him, setting a steadying hand on Abba’s arm.

“Easy, there,” Koen said. And then he lifted his soulful brown eyes, smiling at us. “Hello!”

I rushed over to the sink to wash my hands again, rubbing the sliver of tallowy soap between my palms. We all watched, silent for a moment, as Abba stumbled forward. He surveyed the scene.

“What’s all this about?” he growled.

Ronen and I exchanged a look, our eyebrows lifting in a wordless agreement. We’d keep out of Abba’s way, as we always did when he got like this. But Hannah didn’t know Abba like we did.

“Arran,” she said. “Come, sit. I’m making stuffed cabbage. Your favorite, isn’t it?”

My father grumbled something incomprehensible. He looked up
at Koen, who stood by the door with his hands in his pockets. “You, boy. Get me my wine.”

Koen shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know where it is,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll get it.”

I crouched down beside the icebox to fetch Abba’s wine out of its hiding place. I tipped it into one of our glass tumblers, handing it off to my father.

“We had a hard day,” Koen offered. “We received some bad news from the Council.”

“Oh?” Hannah tilted her head to one side. Her black curls spilled against her collarbone. Then the frying pan gave a hiss, and she scraped her spatula hastily over it. My father drank down a mouthful of wine.

“Winter,” Abba grunted. “They’re moving us back to winter soon.”

We all went quiet at that.

“That can’t be right,” my brother protested. “Spring’s only just started.”

My father stared down into his sour wine, half gone already. He didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t have to. Hannah answered for him.

“Spring as we know it won’t exist on Zehava,” she said. “It’s too cold. The Council must want—”

“—to get us used to winter.” My father finished her sentence for her. Then he wiped his mouth against the hairy back of his hand. It left a purple stain there.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “they still gave us a few weeks of summer. They let us camp out in the atrium.”

None of us spoke—not even Hannah. She stood still over the stove, smoke drifting up into her face.

“Now no spring?” my father asked. And when he spoke again, his voice broke. “Who the hell wants to live on a planet without any spring?”

“No!” I said, slamming my fist against the counter. On the table Pepper jumped. The force behind my words surprised even me. “No, it’s not right.”

“Terra,” my father said, a dark warning in his voice. But I didn’t hear it. I slammed my fist against the counter again.

“It’s not
right
!” I said. I thought of Momma’s flowers, of the walks we’d taken through the dome on spring nights. I thought of the artificial sunlight and how it warmed our faces even as the nights turned to dusk. I thought of never feeling that again. “Why do they get to decide? It’s not right!”

“Enough!” Abba roared. He drained the tumbler in one gulp, then slammed it down against the table. He ambled to his feet, stumbling toward me. “I won’t listen to treasonous words under my roof!”

“But you said—” I began to protest, backing up until my spine pressed against the metal wall. I heard Ronen say my name in a low tone. He was warning me away from Abba, warning me about what waited for me if I continued down this path.

He didn’t have to. I knew the dangers. Before my father could lift a hand to me, I shoved past him. Then I shouldered by Koen, too, groping for the door handle.

“I’m out of here,” I said. “Enjoy your cabbage.”

I slammed the front door shut behind me.

•  •  •

I tumbled past our front gate, my footsteps brisk against the cobblestone. The twilight air was chilly. I crossed my arms tight over my chest to keep the wind away. Maybe my father had already turned the dials up in the clock tower’s control room, moving us toward autumn before we even knew what was happening. I wondered what the birds would do once the frost came in. They’d only just begun to lace their nests with downy feathers. Would their eggs hatch in the winter? Or would the baby birds freeze to death inside their brittle shells? I wondered if the Council even cared.

Liberty on Earth.

The words rang out in my mind. I wondered if this was what Mar Jacobi had died for—for spring and baby birds and the right to live our lives the way we wanted. In school we’d learned about the different forms of government. Democracies. Parliamentary republics. Military juntas. The names stuck out in my mind, but I could hardly recall what they meant. Something about voting, maybe. I’d memorized the definitions only long enough to pass our tests, then I’d quickly forgotten them.

Liberty on Zehava.

I knew the Council was meant to rule long past landing. After all, they’d been the ones to keep our little ship afloat these five hundred years, hadn’t they? Rebbe Davison always said you didn’t change horses midstream. Silvan and his cronies, Council sons all, had shared a hearty laugh. But I hadn’t understood. What would a horse be doing underwater?