Starbreak Read online

  “No need to wonder. I have this.”

  She reached for something on her flight suit belt, a square of rusted metal with jutting antennae. Fiddling with the controls, she flipped a switch. A burst of static came back.

  “This is Wolff,” she said into the mouthpiece. “Give me an update on the ship’s status.”

  There was a long gasp of white noise—so long that I thought they’d never answer. But then I heard a garbled voice.

  “Rafferty continues to make his threats, but the coward still hasn’t moved to action.”

  “Rafferty?” I said. I thought of Mazdin, the doctor who had killed my mother. I thought of his sweat-slick face on the night the Asherah reached Zehava. I’d done that to him—poured poison in his wine. But I’d hardly thought about him since. I was too busy running, too busy working to stay alive.

  Aleksandra stared pointedly at me. She still held the radio up in one hand, letting the static stream out. “He means Silvan,” she said. “Your intended.”

  She’d wanted me to murder Silvan, to get him out of the way so that she’d be free to lead. But I’d been a bad rebel. Disobedient.

  Aleksandra shut off the device.

  “It’s funny,” she said, though her tone suggested that it wasn’t really funny at all, “how much of this could have been avoided had you followed your orders.”

  I remembered that night. Feeling the weight of the poison in my coat pocket after Mazdin had told me about killing my mother. He’d said that we were weak, helpless—no threat to him. I’d been desperate to prove him wrong.

  “Alex, we have the ship,” Rebbe Davison said. “What more do you want?”

  His voice sounded hoarse, fearful. Aleksandra clipped the radio to his belt. She studied his face—his thinning hair, the wrinkles that formed parentheses at the edges of his mouth. And then her own mouth softened.

  “Nothing, Mordecai.” Her lips spread into a wide grin. It was a politician’s smile—charming, trustworthy. “I’m as happy as a clam.”

  He hesitated—nodded. But as he turned away, her eyes caught mine. Her expression? Went as cold as ice.

  • • •

  “We’ll go east,” Aleksandra said as the fire began to fade. By then the sun had pressed deep into the mountain ridge. Two of the three moons were rising. Akku and Aire. I saw how we’d strayed from the path in our quest to find the source of the fire, drifting farther and farther into the woods. But how could I come out and tell her we were going the wrong way when all eyes were on her, shining with admiration? The words caught at the base of my throat.

  But Rebbe Davison spoke for me. “What’s east?”

  There was an intensity in his question that was new; it made me sit straighter on the log. Aleksandra sat forward too, her eyes as dark as the smoke that whispered around us. Suddenly she stood, grabbing a slender twig on a nearby branch. The twig undulated in the open air until she snapped it off and it was still. Dead. She pressed the narrow end into the crust of snow and began to draw a jagged line with it.

  “This is the coastline,” she said as the others scrambled to gather around her. I stayed where I sat, glimpsing her rough diagram from between their shoulders. “Before we departed for the planet, my mother received a transmission from the shuttle crew. It originated from here, near the largest array of lights. They said that the inhabitants are hostile. At least one crew member was injured.”

  Hannah, my brother Ronen’s wife. Council-born daughter. Cartographer. The last time I’d glimpsed her pretty features, they’d been streaked with blood. She’d sounded so afraid. I clenched my hands between my knees, wondering if the cold that bit through my flight suit gloves came from the chilly evening or from within.

  “The next closest light cluster is here,” Aleksandra said, jabbing the stick higher along the coastline. “East of our current location. I’m hoping that the inhabitants there will be amenable to negotiations if the others aren’t.”

  “Negotiations,” Rebbe Davison echoed faintly. He glanced eastward as if he could see the city straight through hundreds of kilometers of forest and mountain. “What makes you think they’ll be willing to talk to us? We’re strangers to them. We’re nothing.”

  Aleksandra stood tall. She thrust the stick into the embers. We all watched as the flames leaped up, enveloping it. “You remember what we learned in school, Mordecai,” she said, a smile curling her lips. But it was a fond smile, teasing, without malice. “The planet Earth was fractured. Many cities. Many cultures. Even on the Asherah, we’ve had factions. The Children of Abel on one hand. The Council on the other.”

  “Diversity,” Rebbe Davison said. “You’re right. It’s unlikely that we’d find a monoculture here. But even so, that doesn’t mean that we’ll even be able to speak to them—”

  “Maybe we won’t,” Aleksandra agreed, tucking a hand inside the open flap of her flight suit. On a knife’s hilt, I realized. She carried the ceremonial blade of a guardsman with her even now, so far away from the culture of our ship. But she’d carried it not only for ceremony but also for the death it could bring. “There’s a chance that any alien life forms we encounter might be hostile. But the eastward settlement is closer, and smaller. We need to be patient, and we need to be on guard. If we’re going to conquer these lands—”

  “Conquer these lands!” The words spilled out before I could stop them. I firmed my jaw, gazing into the blue-tongued flames even as Aleksandra turned her attention toward me.

  “Yes, Terra?” she said. This time her smile had teeth.

  “They’re not our enemies,” I said fiercely. I thought back to the boy, to the way his arms enveloped me like vines on a wall. I felt so safe inside them. But Aleksandra didn’t know that. She only let out a short, dry laugh.

  “You saw the transmission,” she said. “Care to tell the others what you saw?”

  “The aliens,” I said, weaker now, as she found my cracks and fixed her fingers into them. “Their bodies move like grass in the wind. Their eyes are black. A night without moons or stars.”

  “Tell them about Hannah,” Aleksandra prodded. I drew in a breath, held it. Finally I drew my gaze down to my knees.

  “She was bleeding. She asked us to come save her.”

  “They sound real friendly,” Deklan said, letting out a skeptical grunt. He turned away from me and toward Aleksandra, who was ready, even as the night deepened around us, with her plan.

  I felt my stomach sink as she spoke. We’d leave with the morning’s first light, tracking Epsilon Eridani as it rose through the sky. I remembered the way the boy’s voice sounded in my head as he urged me south. Fearful. Passionate. But none of them knew anything about that. Instead they only saw the sharp, certain movements of Aleksandra’s hands and heard the ferocity of her warning. Hostile. The aliens were hostile. Her followers all held their rifles to their chests, not just her guards but Rebbe Davison, and Deklan, and Jachin, and Laurel, too.

  Only Ettie stayed apart from the rest, sitting beside me on a log, watching as the embers died. For a long time she didn’t speak. Her hair was a dark net over her eyes. But at last she slipped her hand in next to my hand.

  “I don’t like this plan,” she said. “What if there are monsters?”

  “I’ll keep you safe from them,” I said. I’d brought Ettie here, after all. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.

  “With your gun?”

  The weapon still rested across my knees. Ettie reached out and touched the barrel gently, as if the metal might spring to life at any moment.

  “With my hands and fists and teeth if I have to,” I said. I put an arm around her and held her close. Her body shook next to mine. I realized she was weeping then, but I wasn’t surprised. It had been a long day—for all of us. I knew I should have said something, offering apologies for her grandfather’s death or comforting words. But I’d never been any good at that. Everything I could offer seemed awkward, wrong. My words withered before I could speak them


  “Now I think it’s time we get some rest,” Aleksandra said, speaking too loudly, I think, to mean only the group gathered around her. She meant the rest of us, too—Ettie and me especially. “It’ll be a long hike tomorrow before we can reach the city.”

  Ettie rose, still sniffling. To my surprise she turned to look back at me.

  “Thank you, Terra,” she said. I gave an uncertain nod. It seemed like I’d done so little—shared a hug, a few comforting words. But maybe, just maybe, my being there had been enough.

  • • •

  The rest of them worked together, driving their tent stakes into the hard, half-frozen ground. But I only watched. My eyes were wide, taking in the darkness. I needed to go to the city, where I would be safe, where the boy waited for me. I needed to stand up to Aleksandra, to prove to her that I was someone worth listening to. And if that didn’t work, I needed to strike out on my own. But I couldn’t. I watched as Rebbe Davison held a stake and Ettie swung the mallet, grinning proudly as the tears dried on her face. She was here only because of me. They all were, and I knew it. My guilt was an invisible thread tying us together. We were bound even as they all crawled inside the tent and disappeared into the darkness, leaving me alone there with Aleksandra Wolff.

  “When I said it was time for bed,” she said, standing over the fire, her shadow long and dancing against the writhing foliage, “I meant you, too.”

  I still held my gun across my knees—the metal was cold, as heavy as dead flesh. Useless. What did I know of guns?

  “We shouldn’t go east,” I said. I couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes, only stared down at that stupid gun. “There are animals in the forests. If we head south, there’s a path. We can walk to Raza Ait—”

  “Terra,” she said. She didn’t sound sneering, or vicious. Just tired, like she’d lost all patience for me. “Shut up.”

  So I did.

  “I don’t know what you thought you were doing when you took that shuttle,” she said. “A sixteen-year-old girl, head screwed on backward! You can’t even follow the simplest of orders, and you thought you could negotiate with the natives?”

  I hadn’t thought that, actually. In my mind the path ahead had been simple: I’d find the boy, fall into his arms, and the world around us would fall away. But now, with Aleksandra standing over me, I could see how naive I had been. There was a whole ship up there, crumbling into chaos. And a whole world down here, dangerous and new. I winced but didn’t answer.

  “I came down here to stop you from ruining our chances of settlement. Now you might be useful,” she said, speaking cautiously. “My mother said that Mara Stone was pleased with your progress in your vocation. But unless it’s about plants, I don’t want to hear a single word from you. You’re only a botanist—a talmid at that. You’re no diplomat. Do you hear me?”

  Her small brown eyes bored into me. She wanted an answer, so numbly I nodded.

  “I remember my mother talking about Alyana Fineberg,” she said, letting out a low sigh. “Common-born, but she always wanted to be a leader. Thought she could rise up the ranks through the Children of Abel, march us into glory. We all know how that ended.”

  I’d never wanted to be a leader. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. But Aleksandra took my silence for a protest. She spat on the ground, hard.

  “Remember who’s in charge,” she said. I wasn’t about to forget it as I watched the dark shadow of her back disappear behind the flimsy fabric walls of the tent. My throat was dry. I clutched my rifle. There was no way I was going to follow her in there, lay my head down in a sleep sack only a few meters from her plotting, murderous hands.

  I pulled the synthetic blankets out of my pack, then wadded up the bag beneath my head. Still dressed in my sweat-drenched flight suit, I squeezed my eyes shut. I was sure that I wouldn’t sleep that night, out in the open, the wind frigid and biting against my cheeks.

  But from almost the moment my eyes closed, I was plunged into the world of turbulent dreams.

  • • •

  We sat in a patch of thorny brambles only a few meters apart. But it might as well have been kilometers. I clutched my arms around my naked body, shielding myself.

  Come, he said, reaching a willowy arm out to me. I wanted to grasp his hand in mine, to furl my body around his, as tight as a fiddlehead. But I couldn’t. East. We were going east. Aleksandra had decided.

  And yet he said it again. Come! If those black eyes reflected anything, it was the heat of his desire. But I couldn’t figure out how to bridge the gap between us. The ground was frozen, hard and slick. And netted with thorns.

  Over the past two days—during our shuttle journey and our sojourn in the Zehavan wilderness—I’d kept one goal in mind: reaching him. And no wonder. Through hard month after hard month, he’d been my respite. His hands, preternaturally long, had graced my white belly. His mouth, soft and wet, had pressed against my throat. I hadn’t understood the passions that lurked beneath my flesh, but I knew that he made me happy. If there was one certainty, it had been that.

  Now I hesitated. Maybe I’d made a mistake in coming to the planet. Maybe I was only a foolish girl, as Aleksandra said, sixteen and with a head stuffed full of dreams. After all, I’d been stupid enough to think myself in love before, but I’d been wrong about that. I remembered standing in front of Koen Maxwell, whom I’d hoped I would marry, waiting for him to make a move. I’d been starved for his kisses, for the steady pressure of his hard hands against my skin. And then, when Silvan came along?

  I’d been so glad to lay my body down in the soggy leaves, to let him press his hands over my belly, my hips, my thighs. It didn’t matter what the Children of Abel wanted. It didn’t matter that there were times when I hated Silvan, despising those pretty lips and the words that tumbled from them. All that mattered was feeling: his body on top of mine, his fingers and tongue and lips and palms, the way his slender hips jutted out, and the fine fur over his belly. How was this any different? I’d endangered all of them—killed Mar Schneider too—just so that I could feel loved.

  The boy reached for me. I saw his arms stretch out, long and blue. I felt his desire, how he wanted to fold me into his body. I knew that it would be better than what I’d shared with Silvan. Safer. Purer.

  But I couldn’t. For sixteen years I’d convinced myself that everything I did was noble—right. When the truth was, I had no idea what “right” even meant. All I’d ever understood was desire. Anger. Emotions that I carried with me even now. For sixteen years I’d lived like a loaded gun.

  I can’t, I told him as he laced spindly fingers through my hair. I can’t. I can’t.

  His fingers froze at the nape of my neck. They were so cold. Sometimes I wondered if blood even ran beneath the surface of his jewel-toned skin. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he had no heart, no mind. Maybe he didn’t exist.

  He drew away from me, hugging his bandy legs to his body.

  Come? he asked. Then he pointed out toward the sky above.

  In that moment I couldn’t be sure if I were asleep or awake. The moons overhead were real, I knew that much. Akku shone down on me, the color of a just-ripe fruit. But Aire was far, far west. Who knew how long it had been since our group had last walked the path between them?

  No. I can’t. Aleksandra is leading us east—

  But the beasts! The beasts! He waved his fingers wildly, gesturing at something in the darkness, something I couldn’t quite see.

  But I heard it. Something halfway between a click and a shudder, so loud that the trees all around us recoiled, tucking their branches under, hiding themselves away. The frozen ground beneath me shivered. I turned toward the boy. His bottomless eyes gaped back at me. He snatched up my hands, gripping them tight.

  Promise me you won’t go any deeper. Promise me! I can’t lose you, too.

  Too? I asked, but he didn’t answer. In the distance the shudder grew louder, and louder still—huge clouds of snow rising up in the distance. Fea
r rattled through him like an oncoming storm.

  I promise! I promise! I said, just as the snow and ice swallowed up us both.

  7

  The sensation of falling wrenched me from my sleep. In my ears that animal racket echoed. But when I sat up, the forest around me was quiet, the sky the color of pale gold in the morning light. Strange, here, how there were no birds. It made everything seem lonely, half dead. Still shivering from the dream’s aftershock, I rose. My body felt stiff, aching at a thousand points where it had touched the ice-cold ground straight through my flight suit.

  “Good morning,” Laurel called to me from across the cold, ash-spent logs. She swiftly rolled up our tent. Ettie, at her side, seemed to be doing more to impede her progress than to help. But Laurel didn’t seem to mind much. Under Aleksandra’s command, I guessed, Laurel had found new purpose. She tied the tent straps tightly around the bundle, then slipped it into her pack.

  “Morning,” I grunted back. Who knows how long they’d all been up, milling around me, conversing, listening to me whimper in my sleep? I’d always done it. My brother, Ronen, used to tease me for the things I said. But if I’d said anything embarrassing, none of them gave any sign. They continued to drink their coffee substitute out of enamel cups as they broke down our camp.

  “You’re finally awake, then?” Aleksandra called as she came down over a nearby ridge. She was flanked on either side by a guard. The radio on her belt still spluttered static. I wondered who she’d been talking to up there. I wondered how everyone was. I felt a sudden stab in my chest, sweet and cutting. I’d left so many people up there on the Asherah: my best friend, Rachel; Koen; Van; my brother, Ronen; and his newborn daughter. Even Mara Stone.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked, my eyes lingering on the radio. She flashed her hand down over it, gripping it tight.

  “Now you care? They’d be safer if you’d disposed of certain difficulties.”

  From beneath her fingers I heard muffled words: “Silvan Rafferty has sent out a message to the Council-born: join him in the captain’s stateroom to be safe from the violence of the dome. What should we tell the people, Giveret Wolff?”