Starbreak (14 page)

“Vadix.” I stretched out the vowels, let the consonants buzz and then stop short on the tip of my tongue. “Vadix. Vadix.”

I couldn’t remember him speaking it. Not even in my dreams, as he wrapped his body around mine and drew his lips down the soft flesh of my neck. And yet still, I knew. He was Vadix, and he was real, and he was
mine
. How long had I lived in denial? Once I had told myself that they were only crazy, embarrassing dreams. Everyone had dreams, right? Rachel used to tell me about hers—she and Silvan, back in the alleyways behind her father’s store. Koen, too, had fallen victim to dreams that shamed him. Hot dreams, he’d said. Wild dreams.

I turned over on my stinking blankets. It was time I admitted the truth to myself. My dreams were nothing like Rachel’s dreams.
And they weren’t like Koen’s, either. Both Koen and Rachel might have dreamed of boys, of kisses, of frantic flesh pressed to flesh. But their dreams had never invaded the waking world with such color or force. They never dreamed of constellations and then, only after, found those stars shining overhead. They never dreamed of boys who then walked into their lives, speaking foreign languages, their alien bodies fragrant as summer flowers. I really
was
different from the other Asherati. I was freakish. Weird.

Aleksandra knew it. She’d seen that difference in me and sneered. But maybe my difference wasn’t only a weakness. Maybe it could be a strength, too. After all, it had gotten us down from that mountain. And it had stopped the Ahadizhi from slaughtering us. I knew things. Things that Aleksandra didn’t. Things that she could never, ever know.

His body. His mouth. His name.

“Vadix.”

As I rose on shaking legs and pulled myself from the condensation-dusted tent, I saw Rebbe Davison break away from the others. He stood over me, staring into the fire—far enough away that it might have been coincidence or happenstance. When he spoke, it was out of the corner of his mouth.

“This is dreck, all of it. She’s going to get us killed.”

I watched her as she stood among them, proudly orating. Their
eyes were wide at the prospect of freedom; smiles lifted their lips.

“Look at her,” I said. “She’s their leader. She was born for it. They’d follow her off a cliff.”

“Someone else could lead.”

His words spilled out into the humid air with all the levity of lead. I turned to look up at him, though his gaze was still fixed forward into the fire.

“What? Me?”

“Yes, you. You were right—you know things about this planet that no one else does. I don’t understand it, but I know how powerful you are. Necessary.”

I snorted. “Necessary? I’m not even a real botanist yet.”

“With the right people behind you,” Rebbe Davison said, his voice dipping down low, “you could be whatever you want.”

When I didn’t answer, Rebbe Davison bent over and tossed another log onto the fire. As the flames crackled and billowed, hiding us from the others, he flashed his gaze to me.

“Just think about it,” he said, then rushed off to rejoin the others.

I did. Me, a leader. I imagined myself dressed in wool, my shoulders squared, my hair combed straight. It was absurd. There had been days when I’d wanted to belong, to be swept up in the tide of the Children of Abel, to feel loved, supported, safe. But I’d never wanted power. I’d never even considered it.

But he was right. My connection to the translator was a sort of power—a gift, unasked for, unearned.

Vadix. Vadix,
I said to myself, the name just as much a question as an invocation.

Funny thing. In my head, I could have sworn I heard another voice come echoing back. Not the murmured, familiar sound of my own inner voice. But a strong tenor with a hint of music somewhere behind it.

Terra?

My eyes went wide. I stared into the flames, and waited.

•  •  •

Soon the Ahadizhi arrived again, brandishing their silver-handled prods. This time they grabbed the women. But we went willingly. Even Aleksandra rose from where she’d been crouched down for more than an hour, flicking her thick braid over her shoulder and lifting her chin up high as she stood. It was all part of her plan—comply for now so that the Asherati attack could catch the aliens off guard. Only Ettie hung back, hiding behind Rebbe Davison. Hannah bent low, putting her hands on her thighs.

“They won’t hurt you, Ettie,” she said, though her own owlish expression had some fear behind it. “They just want to study you.”

Ettie turned to me.

“Aren’t you frightened?” she asked. But I was too busy scanning
the scattered group of Xollu who had gathered around the gate. I didn’t see him there, not at first, but I
felt
him, a steady pull that began somewhere deep in my belly and then tugged upward, through my throat and solar plexus before drawing me out.

“No,” I said at last, as an Ahadizhi spun a length of rope around and around my wrists. One word ran through my mind.
Vadix. Vadix.

Finally I found him—a flash of blue skin at the back of the crowd. I ambled forward, ignoring the sparking prods that stood in my way.

Vadix,
I thought, hard. And just like that he lifted his black eyes up. I studied his features, forcing myself to look at him—really look—for the first time.

His body seemed as strange and boneless as the rest of them, moving with unnatural flexibility and grace. But there was something handsome about him too. He was tall and skinny, richly dressed in opalescent robes. The pleats and folds formed an oil slick of green, and they rippled with purple thread. The lips that murmured orders to the others—
“Zhesedi ate!”
—were thick and full. But serious. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of a smile behind them. When he flashed his teeth, it was only for a moment, and then away again, gone. Hannah was right. He carried his sadness with him. I could see it in the firm line of his jaw, in his studied movements. I imagined I saw it even in the endless depths of his eyes.

Soon I stood in front of him.

“Vadix,” I said, the words floating, strong and clear, between us, “I need to talk to you.”

He tried to look away again, tried to deny it—deny me, deny us. I couldn’t let him. It was either this or go back to the ship’s dome. And I couldn’t do that—my body objected to the very idea.

His fingers were moving as he spoke, but I caught his arm, holding one wrist in the cup of my bound hands. His deep blue skin was cold and smooth. There was none of the fine fur of my own skin, no wrinkles, no warmth of veins beneath. But there was something else. A jolt, raw and live. I hadn’t known fire before I’d come to Zehava, but I knew electricity—the danger of exposed wires in the damp dome, the blue-white light of a single spark.

I startled back. He did too, his lozenge-shaped eyes gone huge and wild. My heart was frantic, thrumming in my chest as one of the Ahadizhi butted me with his prod and pushed me through the open gates.

But I heard Vadix call out to the Ahadizhi grunt, his strong tenor voice lifting a smile to my lips.

“Tatoum dauosoum daidd esedezhi dheseolo ut daosoez xaizu. Dauosoum zadix dheseolo, voze eseouu, aum daosoez zhiahaoloe!”
He added, in Asheran, words that could be only for me, “Bring her to me.”

T
he building they took us to might have been a hospital, but it was nothing like the three-storied square of old brick we knew on the ship. The outside was a narrow tower of green metal that reached up and up toward the sparkling cupola, and it was dotted with a hundred gleaming windows of every possible hue. Between the round panels of glass, violet vines craned upward, coating the sills with their curling fingers. The building branched toward the top into separate compartments, looking as much like a tree as it did any
inorganic structure. But we wouldn’t see the topmost towers—and we wouldn’t glimpse the city below through colored glass.

Instead they took us into a basement. After the searing light of the afternoon, it was strange to step into a shadowed interior space again. The halls were painted white, and they sweat with copper-tinted condensation, leaving green streaks on the curved walls, and our mouths full of the taste of metal.

The Ahadizhi led us down the corridor. Most of the women were silent. Laurel kept her head low, her curls shadowing her face. Hannah just set her jaw, like she was used to every insult the aliens could possibly offer. Ettie cried silently. But if Aleksandra was afraid, she refused to show it. In fact, she wasted no time in finding me. We walked shoulder to shoulder like old friends. But of course we both knew better.

“I don’t know what you’re plotting,” she murmured, “but whatever it is, it won’t work.”

At first her words did nothing to deter me. I walked with my shoulders squared. Then she leaned her arm into mine. From anyone else it would have been a fond, friendly gesture. But she pushed, hard.

My heart pounded wildly as I tried to grab the cool, slick metal of the wall. But before I could answer her, an Ahadizhi nudged me with his stick, whistling a command.

“Dhahare elez!”

I staggered to my feet, groping at the sloping wall with my bound hands. As I hurried to catch up, I shouted out to her.

“I’m not plotting anything!”

“I saw you and Mordecai chatting,” she called back. “Remember who you are, Terra. A petty lackey, prone to fits of rage. We both know what you did to Mar Rafferty. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”

I stopped where I stood, my mouth hanging open. I needed to say something, to strike her back, proving that I could be cunning and dangerous too.

“I saw what happened in that field!” I called, but Aleksandra only flicked her braid over her shoulder with her bound hands and kept walking.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” was all she said.

•  •  •

But of course she did. I’d seen it, in that frost-covered cornfield, watched as red blood sank into the brown earth. Aleksandra was a killer. I was sure of that. And now she seemed intent on leading the rest of us toward destruction too. She glowered as the Ahadizhi separated us, shoving her into a cell. But there was nothing she could do, not yet.

As I sat in my own narrow compartment, I smoothed out my hair with one hand, sat straight and tried to look like someone who hadn’t spent the last several days unwashed. Aleksandra’s words had
only galvanized my anger and my fear into something hard, hot—useful. I would convince Vadix to help us. He
would
be swayed to our side. Unlike Aleksandra, I knew that without the help of the aliens, all hope would be lost. Not just for me, though my stomach clenched to think that I might have a long road ahead alone. But all of us—Hannah and Laurel, Rebbe Davison and Ettie, too.

I shifted on the crinkly paper that covered the table, clutching my hands in my lap. My knuckles were veined with blue and yellow lines beneath the shadow of days of dirt. They weren’t very strong hands. I could think of only one day they’d served me well—the day I shook that poison into Mazdin Rafferty’s drink. But even that had been a tempestuous act. Nothing like that cool, calculated plot of Aleksandra’s, when she drew her mother into that field and slit her pale throat. How many years had she waited for that moment? How had she found that strength, that patience? It seemed to be eluding her now, as she snarled and hissed accusations. But it wasn’t as if my own heart were steady. It beat wildly, a series of staccato bursts. I drew in a breath and held it there. I needed to be calm, sane, if I was going to get the translator on my side.

The door slid open. There was Vadix. His mouth formed a silent line. Beneath the bright light, his skin was as translucent as a jewel. His lips, slightly wet, parted. But he didn’t speak.

“Vadix,” I said, testing his name against my tongue again. He flinched; it was a surprisingly human reaction.

“How do you know this name?” he asked. His voice was high and clear—it made it that much easier to hear his offense.

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly, lifting up my hands and dropping them against the paper. “You tell me—”

“Terra.”

He said my name.
My
name, two syllables so ripe they dripped juice down onto the metal ground below. It was almost enough to shake my resolve away, to make my hands dart out, lace his fingers in mine, and draw him close to me. But not quite. My hands were still in my lap, and he stayed frozen near the door of the little room. Not breathing at all.

“This cannot be,” he said at last. “You are an animal. You are made out of
meat
.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, I wanted to laugh at that. The absurdity pulled at my stomach, drawing all the air from it. But he seemed so
serious
. To him it was no laughing matter. His narrow earslits widened as he waited for my response.

“They say you’re a
plant
,” I said. “Do you know how strange that is? A talking plant?”

He shook his head. It was a very human thing to do. Maybe it was something he’d picked up from watching the shuttle crew over these last few weeks. From watching us.

“There are no thinking animals here. When the Guardians found your people, they did not believe it. They thought them dinner.”

“But not you?”

“The Xollu do not partake of flesh.”

My cheeks began to heat. It wasn’t until I pushed a tangle of hair back behind my burning ear that I realized he was talking about
diet
and not sex. In the wake of my embarrassment, I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Why have you brought us here?” I demanded at last. The words tumbled out, as sharp as an accusation. I winced at the sound of my own voice, but Vadix didn’t.

“To study you. There is a Xollu pair, scientists. Ardex and Aile. They wish to see if there are any chemical differences between the human sexes, as there are among Xollu. The other females will have their bodies scanned today. Aile believes that despite your beastly nature, some females may have ethylene receptors—”

“We’re not lab rats,” I said, but my words sounded dull—passionless. I knew that we would do the same if we were in their position. Shove them into cells, study them. Slice their skin down to slivers and hold them under a microscope, as I’d done to so many other plants, so many times before. Maybe we were more alike than I cared to admit.