The Star Dwellers (31 page)

“I gotta get out of here,” I mumble, to
whoever might be listening. No one.

Or Roc. “Okay, master. Let’s go for a stroll
down that one tunnel—you know the one, right?—that leads to that
other tunnel—the gray one with the brownish rocks. And then we can
walk down that other gray tunnel that splits into two other gray
tunnels. It’ll be way more fun than sitting here playing cards with
two of the coolest cats around.”

I smirk. “One—don’t call me ‘master.’ And
two—Elsey’s cool, but I’m struggling to figure out who the other
cool person is, unless you’re referring to me?”

“Ha ha, very funny. It’s me, you dolt.
Dolt—oh, I kind of like that. It definitely suits you more than
‘master.’” He uses two fingers on each hand for the quotes around
master
.

Elsey giggles. “Are you sure you aren’t
brothers? You fight like Adele and I did when we were little.”

I see Roc’s spine stiffen, so I answer
casually. “What do you mean ‘were little’? You still
are
little.”

“I most certainly am not!” Elsey scoffs.

“Are too! Would I be able to do this”—I leap
off the bed, rush over to her, and grab her, picking her up and
swinging her around—“if you weren’t little?”

“Put me down! Is that any way to treat a
lady?” she squeals, but she’s giggling hysterically and I know
she’s enjoying it, so I don’t stop for another ten seconds.

When I do set her down again, she brushes off
her tunic with her hand and says, “Hmph. The scoundrel boys in the
orphanage were more gentlemanly than you are.”

I’m about to fire back a sarcastic retort,
maybe tickle her, maybe pick her up again, when Roc says, “Elsey,
we’ve got something to tell you.”

The whole time I thought I was rescuing my
best friend from a touchy subject, he’d been thinking about it, and
I can tell he’s ready to talk about things, starting with telling
Elsey our big news. “Like a surprise?” she says, her face lighting
up.

“Sort of like that,” Roc says, staring at his
hands. He gets up and moves to sit on the side of the bed and Elsey
follows him. I remain standing nearby. Roc seems to want to do this
on his own.

“What is it?” Elsey asks innocently, staring
up at Roc with wide eyes.

“You know how you just asked whether we were
sure we weren’t brothers?”

“I just said that not two minutes ago,” Elsey
says, in that proper way that only she and people from the
seventeenth century could say it.

“Well, as it turns out, Tristan and I, well,
we actually…are…brothers. Well, sort of…I mean, we’re
half-brothers. We have the same father.”

Elsey’s eyes are bigger than the artificial
suns in the Sun Realm. “Your father is the President, too?”

Roc nods. “We both just found out. Like a
couple days ago. It’s still a bit of a shock.”

“Wow,” is all she says.

“I don’t really want anyone to know yet
though,” Roc says.

“Like a secret?”

“Exactly.”

“I swear on my friendship with my truest
friend in the whole wide world, Ranna, that I will never share what
you have told me with another soul.”

“Or you can just not tell anybody,” Roc says,
chuckling.

“That’s what I just said!”

“Except it took you three times as long to
say it,” I add.

“Oh, boys,” Elsey says, shaking her head,
like we’re the ten-year-olds.

“Who’s hungry?” I ask, as I feel my stomach
rumble. It’s late, but the nice thing about this place is that
there’s always food to be eaten.

“Me, me, me!” Roc exclaims, waving his hand
in the air like a child trying to get the attention of the
schoolteacher. He’s doing it to entertain Elsey and she
giggles.

“I would be honored to dine with you two
strapping young gentlemen. Thank you for asking,” Elsey says
grandly.

Roc and I just look at each other, laughter
in our eyes.

We make our way to the commons, which are
bustling as if it’s the middle of the day. Members of the
Resistance are streaming all over the place, carrying packs of
supplies, weapons, and body armor. Everything looks a hundred years
old but there seems to be plenty of it. It’s as if the entire
command center is readying to move out to war. The soldiers look
like ants next to the heights of the honeycomb atrium above
them.

Few of them are eating, however, so we easily
spot Ben and his sister at a lone table, their heads together,
their voices a whisper as if they’re discussing something
treacherous, like an assassination attempt on the President; maybe
they are. They lift their heads and voices when they spot us,
donning big smiles and motioning with their arms for us to join
them.

We do. “What’s all this about?” I ask as we
sit down, sweeping my hand across the buzzing cave.

Jinny answers. “You didn’t think we’d be
going into subchapter 1 without some protection, did you?”

“They’re all coming with us?” Roc asks
incredulously.

“Sure,” Ben says. “The Resistance is all
about being prepared. In the event that something happens, we want
to be ready for it.”

“Will I be coming, too, Father?” El asks.

“Most definitely. You think after all we’ve
been through that I’d let you out of my sight again?” he says,
pulling his daughter into his side. For once, Elsey is just a kid,
melting into Ben’s side, closing her eyes, her face full of love
for her dad. It’s not something I’m used to seeing.

“Umm, food?” Roc says.

“Thanks, I didn’t know you were serving
tonight,” I joke. “I’ll take some mashed potatoes and bread rolls
with gravy, if they’ve got it.”

“Fat chance,” Roc says. “Those days are long
over.”

I punch his arm and stand up. “For which I am
glad,” I say. “I’ll get the grub.”

After taking Roc’s and Elsey’s orders I go
and retrieve the food from the counter, balancing all three plates
on one arm like a waiter, while toting three mugs of water with the
other hand. “Bon appétit,” I say, dishing it out.

“You’re good at that,” Roc says, winking. “If
this whole rebellious-son-of-the-President thing doesn’t work out,
you’ve definitely got a future as a servant in the Sun Realm.”

“And you can become a comedian,” I
retort.

For a few minutes Roc and I manage to cease
our normally nonstop banter as we strive to accomplish the same
goal of stuffing our faces. As we eat, we listen to Ben and Jinny
discuss the next few days.

“After we arrive in the subchapter, we’ll
head straight to the Big House to settle in and get the lay of the
land,” Ben says.

“The Big House is the code name for the place
we’ll be staying,” Jinny explains for our benefit.

“Right. Hopefully Anna and Adele will arrive
shortly afterward and we can have a big family reunion.” At that,
Elsey’s eyes light up, but she can’t speak as even she’s forgone
manners in order to fill her belly, and her mouth is full, her
cheeks puffed out as she tries to chew.

“We’re hoping we’ll get a few minutes
together before all the VPs are ready to begin the peace summit.”
I’ll drink to that
, I think, taking a big gulp of my water.
It feels so surreal that I haven’t hung out with Adele in days
after having gone through such an emotional two days by her
side.

“Then what?” I ask, licking the last bit of
mashed potato off of my finger.

“Then we pray for the best,” Ben says.

T
he star dweller
generals listen patiently as my mom explains what happened. I
expect looks of shock: wide eyes, open mouths, dropped
jaws—something. Instead, they just stare with unreadable
expressions and pursed lips.

The only one who reacts is General Baum, the
one who’s a member of the Resistance. She’s older than my mother,
perhaps by five years, but is in fantastic shape, with strong,
sculpted arms and legs that boast years of athletic endeavors. Sort
of like my legs. Strong and capable and far from ladylike. Her
aging brown hair is peppered with gray, but it’s cut short, like a
boy’s, so it’s not that noticeable.

Her eyebrows are raised and her knuckles
white on the table. The exact opposite of the other generals who
look almost indifferent. When my mom finishes, she rests her hands
gently on the table, waiting for a response. The tension in the
room is palpable and I have the urge to reach out and try to touch
it, as if it’s something solid in the air.

Finally, one of the older generals, a
gray-haired man who looks almost fifty, leans back with his hands
behind his head. “This doesn’t change anything,” he says.

General Baum slams a fist on the table and
looks like she might jump across and throttle him. “Doesn’t change
anything? Are you cra—”

One of the other generals, a woman with long
blond hair and perfectly smooth skin, silences her with a finger on
her lips.
Shhh!
I can almost hear her say, although she
makes no sound. Instead she mouths,
They’re listening,
and
then points to the ceiling. I look up, half-expecting a huge pair
of ears to be hanging from above.

I glance at my mom and I can see her eyes are
wide and serious. The blonde starts writing frantically on a piece
of paper in front of her, as the old general continues speaking.
“Honestly, I’m not sure what you expect us to do with this
information. So there was a spy. You took care of him, so that’s
the end of it.”

The woman finishes writing and passes the
note to my mother. Tawni and I read over her shoulder.
The sun
dwellers are listening to every word. They have our families.
They’ll kill them if we don’t cooperate. I’m sorry we didn’t tell
you sooner, but if Brody had found out…

My heart beats faster as the pieces fall into
place. The unwillingness of the generals to listen to reason; the
way they used the sun dweller weapons to attack the Moon Realm;
this crazy three-day deadline: the Sun Realm—President Nailin—is
controlling it all. And on the ground was the puppet master: Brody.
Now that he’s gone it will take the Sun Realm time to put another
spy in place. We have a narrow window to act.

My mom’s head stays down and she starts
writing a note.

The other general keeps speaking as if
nothing is happening. “But it doesn’t change the fact that the Moon
Realm is not willing to cooperate with us. In less than three days
we’ll have no choice but to declare war on the moon dwellers and
use every resource at our disposal to crush them.”

I read my mom’s note before she passes it
across.
We will do our best to protect your families. God
bless.
She slides a separate note to Baum.
You stay here. Do
what you can to help them.
She nods.

“Fine,” my mom says. “I understand your
position, even if I don’t agree with it. For now, we’ll wait and
let the peace process run its course. If the Moon Realm won’t join
us, we attack.” Her words are cold, harsh, believable. My mom’s a
good liar. I never would have thought it six months ago.

A final note from the woman general.
Godspeed and good luck.

My mother nods. The old general says, “Good.
This forum is dismissed.”

Everyone rises and we leave.

* * *

When we exit the meeting, darkness has fallen
on the Star Realm. My mom has a flashlight, which cuts a triangular
arc through the gloom, but because the lighting here is so poor
even during the day, my eyes adjust quickly to the dark.

“We need to leave right away,” Mom says.

“Shouldn’t we tell Dad—”

“There isn’t time. He knows about the spy,
but the rest can wait. And some things are better told in
person.”

“I can’t believe they took their families,”
Trevor murmurs. For the first time I see compassion in his
expression. Perhaps it was always there and I just couldn’t see it.
But he’s a different person to me now. Not a spy—a star dweller.
And so he cares about the families of the star dweller generals.
He’s a good person, regardless of his faults.

“I can,” my mom says. “Nailin is a heartless,
soulless demon who will do anything for power.” Her words are
filled with fire. “The only reason they couldn’t get to me is that
I was brought in much later, as an outsider. Plus, they thought
they already had my whole family imprisoned.”

We walk in silence for a few minutes as we
follow my mother through the narrow alleys of the subchapter.
Occasionally I hear one of the homeless lying against the walls
mumble something in their sleep, or snore. We pass through the
alley where Mep and his followers tried to steal our stuff, and I
look up at the window I clambered through what feels like years
ago. Through the dark, I think I see the outline of legless Mep
sitting on the sill, his arm raised, giving me a thumbs-up. I might
be seeing things, but I return the gesture. Tawni gives me a
questioning look but I just shake my head and picture Mep being
carried back inside, where he’ll read a story to the orphans
huddled around him. The thought makes me happy and sad all at the
same time. They’re the ones we’re fighting for. The unwanted
orphans, the beggars in the streets, the wrongly convicted
prisoners, the fathers working impossible hours in the mines, the
mothers fighting like hell to turn a few potatoes and bags of beans
into enough food to fill the bellies of their children: we’re
fighting for all of them. I feel adrenaline pump through my veins
as I stride forward, following my mother, the warrior.

It’s silent for a few more minutes until we
pass by an open doorway in one of the buildings. Heavy music pumps
through the opening and I can see bodies gyrating and writhing
under crackling red and purple lights. One of them turns to watch
us pass by, a genderless form with tattoos all over its face and a
white-tipped Mohawk. Red lipstick stands out against its pale skin.
Raising a single long-nailed finger, it motions for me to enter the
building.