Starbreak (32 page)

Terra, don’t,
Vadix said at last. But he didn’t have to. My mouth was open, and I was already speaking.

“Your father was a great man,” was what I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rachel let out a breath of relief. On the night before we landed, I’d told her bits and pieces of the truth—that I’d hurt Mazdin, that my hands had wrought shameful things—and she must have figured out the rest in the days since Mazdin’s death. And yet she hadn’t told Silvan, not one single word. My heart swelled at the sight of her. Rachel, my loyal friend. Holding my secrets in.

“Of course he was a great man,” Silvan said peevishly. He gave the controls one last flick, on and off, before standing straight. “No matter what the rebels say.”

That’s when I knew for certain that Silvan would never absolve me of my guilt. Not that he really could anyway. The only person who could ever forgive me was Mazdin, and he was gone, lost to the foxglove. Just like Momma.

“They don’t understand,” I said, swallowing hard. It hurt to even breathe, much less speak, as I heaped praise upon Silvan’s father. “Your father sacrificed so much for them, and they don’t understand at all. And they never will. We’re too different. Too much has happened for us to ever live in peace.”

His lips fell open. When he looked at me again, it was with sadness. “I wanted you to join us. I don’t mean the rebels. I mean you, Terra. I thought we could be friends. Even if—”

“I know.” Stepping closer, I reached out, taking his hand in mine. I needed to still it, to keep it away from the controls. “You were always good to me. But you have to let us go. We’re no good to you. You have Council men and women, and loyal commoners willing to follow you too. We’ll just get in the way of your father’s dreams. You can see them to fruition better without us. Take the ship and leave us here, and let us make our own mistakes on the planet.”

He hesitated, running his thumb over my knuckles. Such a familiar gesture. But then, as if he’d just remembered Rachel standing beside us, he snatched his hand away.

“The natives will have you?”

It was my own turn to hesitate. I sucked in a breath. “Not yet. But soon I hope.”

When Silvan turned toward the viewer, his black curls shone—as if the stars were trapped inside them. His gaze went dark as he
watched the planet. The world spun silently, and he was thoughtful.

“Might go faster if I helped you. It’s what Abba would have wanted. Near the end he kept asking where you were, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. At last Silvan filled the silence for me.

“He said it was cancer, just like the one that killed your mother. Isn’t that strange?”

My stomach clenched. Rebbe Davison had once told me that Aleksandra’s mistake was in not dealing with the consequences of her actions. I guess these were my consequences—the heavy burden of my guilt, and Silvan and Rachel, lost to me forever.

“Yes, strange,” I said, but my voice came out as nothing more than a whisper.

•  •  •

I streamed out of the lift and straight into the darkness. Someone had broken the pasture fence; a flock of sheep had strayed down to the main path, and they bleated at my arrival. I pushed past their heavy bodies. I’d lose this soggy field soon—the silent clock tower where my father had once worked, and the ground where he rotted now. Would lose it all, the glass overhead, honeycombed, full of Zehava’s beautiful continents. Would lose my beautiful best friend, too. No, wouldn’t lose them. That wasn’t quite right. I’d given them all away, ignoring the fact that there was nothing left for us, nothing assured.

“Terra!” At last I stopped, turned. Mordecai ran toward me; my brother trailed behind. They both looked hopeful as they approached, their mouths stretched with stupid smiles. They’d waited for me—waited in the stuttering dark. “How did it go?”

“It was fine,” I croaked out painfully. “But we’re not. The ship. I gave him the ship.”

Without waiting for their response, I turned and hustled through the field again. It was Ronen who called out, amid a nest of laughter. I stopped again, frowning, to listen.

“What do we need a ship for?” he asked. “We have a whole damned planet!”

I looked back over my shoulder at my brother, my naive, sweet brother. He’d cast both arms upward, gesturing to the world above. I wondered at the shape of her as she slept in the darkness. I thought of all of our troubles ahead—the senate and their mandate, the beasts, the Ahadizhi in the south. But for the first time I gazed not to the sparkling continent up north but to her southern land, steeped in darkness. And I wondered if maybe, just maybe, Ronen might be right.

H
umans as Guardians? It is an unlikely proposal.

Vadix sat on his doorstep in Raza Ait. He took in the sight of the dark grove. He watched the silhouettes of trees wavering before him. They reached and stretched, up and up and up toward the cupola above. But the stars were out that night, the glass shadowed by snow-heavy clouds. In a way I sat beside him in the doorway, my knee knocking his. But only in my mind. In flesh I was sprawled out in Ronen’s pitch-black guest room, Pepper stretched across my belly.

Unlikely,
I said. I heard the baby bawling in the distance, the cat yawning on top of me. In Raza Ait I heard the wind blow. I couldn’t hear my own heart.
Many things are unlikely. You are unlikely. I am unlikely. We—

I don’t speak from a lack of faith, zeze!
In the dark of the night, Vadix laughed at me, but there was fear behind his laughter.
You would face so many dangers. The beasts! You met one, did you not?

I did.
I remembered Deklan’s body, gored straight through, the yellow horn dripping blood. I remembered mouths packed full of teeth. Savage, wild eyes.

Then you know the impossibility of this.

I ran my hand over Pepper’s knobby back. The cat had teeth, and claws that he loved to sharpen against the leg of my brother’s galley table. He was sweet, but sometimes dangerous, too, like when he slipped out an open door and returned dragging a squirrel by the scruff of its neck—its little belly already open and licked clean. I remembered the Ahadizhi vehicle that had swept up through the forest, a stream of color: red and gold, purple and green. And their intoxicating music lacing its refrain around my heart.

Tell me what happens in the winter,
I said.
When the Guardians are awake and you walk in the dreamforests.

Vadix stretched his long legs out, putting his slippered feet against the cold ground. He looked up, as if he could see the storm looming
beyond the glass. But he couldn’t—the cupola was clouded with condensation, opaque as polished steel.

I have never seen it,
he began.
Of course, I have only ever slept through the long season. But I have read the accounts kept by our Guardians. They leave their work in the winter to defend our city—forming parties that hunt twice daily. The old and the young. The feeble and the strong. With their prods and knives and songs, they fell the beasts. So that we may be restored to life in spring and repair the damage done to our cities, so that we may all live in peace.

And what happens if they don’t?

Vadix closed his eyes. In his memory I could see the shadowed spaces where he retreated during the winter. The dank smell of cave was all around. But the mouth of that dim space was open, filled with light.

We are vulnerable. Without them we die. Our partnership dies. Our city dies. We have no industry. No ingenuity. We are just slender vines at the whim of tearing claws. We are impoverished. Defenseless. This is why the Xollu are afraid. We all know it, down to the root. Our essential weakness.

It was true. If I dug deep inside him, uncovering the parts of him he’d worked so hard to hide, I could see his fear. Taste it too. He was little more than a quivering child, flinching at every wind that passed. I shifted in bed, unseating Pepper. He stretched, then sank down again, tucking his black nose between his paws.

Could humans be taught to hunt?

I do not know. You are clever. But you are also prey. The Ahadizhi art raises desires in you. It is hypnotizing to you—tempting. I know. I have felt it in you. That day in the city, when you were almost lost to me.

I cast my head to the side. On my desk sat my sketchbook, scattered with pencils.
I’m an artist too. Maybe I can learn to resist it
—
to be like them. There might even be others on the ship. People who can dance and sing, or play instruments. There hasn’t been much room in our lives for art, but maybe once we settle on the planet, there will be.

Vadix sounded hopeful—cautious but hopeful.
Perhaps.

You need to ask them for me. You need to make this happen. Please, Vadix?

He didn’t answer, not right away. Instead he only sat back on his steps, turned his gaze up, and watched the snow begin to blanket the cupola.

•  •  •

That night I dreamed alone.

When was the last time that had happened? It must have been ages and ages ago, while the ship was still drifting through open space. Lately I’d become accustomed to meeting him at night. Even if we spoke without speaking, even if our minds were together more and more as the days went on, there were always moments of tumult, of darkness—moments that could only be healed by his touch. When
we walked through the dreamforests together, I knew that I wasn’t alone, wrong and strange. I knew that I was understood. Strong. Beautiful. Solid. Real. His lips were a reminder that I was someone worth kissing; his arms an assurance that I was worth holding, too. I looked forward to our nights together. I craved them, like a hungry ghost, insatiable.

So on that night, when I stumbled through the dark corners of my own mind, I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Where
was
he? He was supposed to be here, my support, my scaffolding. Cradling my hand in his hand and saying my name. Reminding me that I was still a living creature, not just some small scrap of memory left behind when my father died.

Abba. He was here in my dream, his voice echoing down the long hallway of the house where I grew up. I took ponderous steps down it; the hall seemed to stretch longer and longer. When I opened his bedroom door, I found him sitting on the bed. It was wrong, all wrong. He was dead, and nothing would ever change that. But then he smiled, and it didn’t matter. My Abba’s true smile, wide and gummy. It had been years since I’d seen him smile like that.

“I’ve been packing,” he said, turning to a basket full of clothes beside him. I glanced down. There they were, those corduroy uniforms, each shoulder marked by a blue rank cord.

“For what?” I asked. I braced myself for bad news, that Abba, my
strange, temperamental father, would take off with Silvan for the Earth again. But he only shook his head, letting out a chuckle that went on just a beat too long.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it?”

My father nodded his bald head. He lifted his index fingers, glancing between them. “It seems to me that there are two options. Zehava or death.”

That’s when I realized that he didn’t
know
. He didn’t remember dying up in those rafters—hung from the frayed piece of rope that was still knotted through ancient wood. I studied his features—the feather of hair surrounding his bald head, the single silver eyebrow hair that gnarled up out of the black ones, the pores along the side of his face, all ruddy from shaving. All these details that I had forgotten, the tiny markers that had once proved that he was a living, breathing man.

His eyelashes shivered. I wondered what would happen if I told him the truth, that he was dead, gone already. Would he be upset? Would he vanish, like smoke? In my dream my father had packed for a trip—seven pairs of identical trousers, identically folded, small scraps of paper, a pressed flower that had once been Momma’s. He didn’t want to die. Tonight he wanted to come with me, to finally achieve
tikkun olam.

“I guess it’s Zehava, then,” I said, and pressed a kiss into his forehead. My father leaned into my lips’ touch. I got a strong whiff of him. Wine and cedar boards. Dust.

•  •  •

I woke with my body sopped with sweat, the sheets tangled around my torso.

“Vadix!” I called, out loud, until I heard my voice echo against the blackness and clamped a hand over my mouth. Afraid of waking the baby, I spoke silently instead.

Vadix, where are you?
A pause, too long, so I added in a panic:
Are you all right?

I waited a long time for him to answer. I pulled myself upright, feeling my heart pound right through my nightshirt. Touching a hand to my throat, I listened to myself breathe. What if he was gone? I thought of the inviting darkness of the funerary fields, the desire that urged him to join Velsa. But I shook that thought away. He was alive somewhere down there in the city. His compulsion to join Velsa wasn’t just a memory but a real, present wish, that indelible part of himself that never would be washed away.

Vadix!
I chided, more firmly this time, and I felt his awareness slam into mine, hard. I closed my eyes against the dark, saw the gray fingers of light come dawning in the glass over Raza Ait. The whole city was like a bud, gently unfurling in the spring.

He stood on the senate steps, his shadow dim and long out in front of him. He was tired, so very tired; he hadn’t slept a single wink that night. That’s why we hadn’t roamed together through the forests. He’d never even gone to bed, much less succumbed to dreams.

And yet somehow, inexplicably, he was happy. I felt his mouth stretch from earslit to earslit, the air cold against the dozens of tiny blades that were his teeth. The emotion that filled his chest wasn’t heaviness or dread, or even his old, familiar friend solitude. It was something else, some small, giddy sliver of hope.

I have a gift for you,
he said. He watched Xarki peek out over the shadows of the tallest buildings at the city’s edge. In the morning the skyline looked jagged and full. Even though it was still dark in Ronen’s guest bedroom, I found myself squinting, resisting the sun’s beams.