Starbreak Read online

  But it was easy—surprisingly easy—to talk about the Children of Abel. I told Hannah about the meetings in that musty library, about the librarian and how he’d once passed messages among us all. I told her about the journal that had been shared between the women of my family, all those hand-marked pages about the first rebels and how they’d resisted the Council every chance they could. And I told her about the riots. The people had flooded the dome, jubilant, drunk, their chants and shouts echoing under the ceiling of glass. They took the granaries. The fields. The shuttle bays. As I spoke, Hannah held her hands between her knees, giving her head a few forceful shakes.

  “No, no,” she said softly. “They couldn’t. They couldn’t. Didn’t you get our message?”

  I remembered the grainy video I’d watched with Silvan in the command center. The air around us had seemed alive, electric as I’d listened to Hannah’s words. But mostly my attention had been on the men in the background, with their translucent skin and endless black eyes.

  “We did, but it was too late. The riots had already started.”

  Silence stretched out, the only sound the wind stirring the camp’s white walls. I leaned forward, watching Hannah intently. “What happened down here? What happened to you?”

  I touched my hand to her hairline, to the brown scab that split her forehead.

  “It was awful,” Hannah said at last. She nudged at the hard earth with the toe of her boot. “Do you know what the locals call their world? Aur Evez. ‘The crowded land.’ The cities are packed, and the wilderness is filled with monsters, Terra. There’s no room for us here, and even if there were, the Ahadizhi—”

  “Who?” asked Jachin, sitting forward on his log. Hannah pressed her lips into a wistful smile.

  “The furry ones, with all the teeth. They’re carnivores. Hunters. They see us as no different from the animals outside. When we first reached the city after landing, we were hopeful. They ignored us initially. But then something changed. They attacked us. I thought we would be torn apart.”

  “If it weren’t for the Xollu, we’d be dead. The tall ones? Travel in pairs? They’re scientists. Scholars. They saved us so that they could study us. But they still don’t understand.”

  “Understand what?” Rebbe Davison prodded. Hannah only stared at him. Finally one of the crew members, a young man with dirt-darkened curls, answered for her.

  “Animals,” he said. “They don’t understand animals. They’re not like us. It took us days to figure it out. The tall ones, the Xollu, they don’t eat at all. They seem to survive off water and sunbeams. They don’t even need to breathe. Even the Ahadizhi move like branches in the wind. They’re plants. That’s our theory, at least. The only thing that would explain it.”

  We all went silent, staring into the fire. It fit with everything I’d noticed about the planet, the way that the vines tripped through the forests, the way that the hunters had moved, lithe and flexible but not breathing a single breath. And yet it was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.

  “Plants?” said Rebbe Davison. “It can’t be. It just can’t.”

  I thought of the boy, of his smooth, tender hands. Of his body, pressed beside mine, cool and fragrant. It seemed right. But it also sounded absurd. What would Mara Stone have to say about this?

  “Good thing we brought a botanist,” Jachin said. His lips lifted wryly. It was supposed to be a joke.

  But nobody laughed. Not even me.

  • • •

  When the sun began to fade through the tent’s walls, Hannah rose from the ground and took my hand in hers.

  “Come with me!” she said. “All of you.”

  The others scrambled to their feet, dusting off their dingy clothes. But Aleksandra didn’t like to be told what to do. She stayed where she was at the edge of the fire, scowling into it.

  “Why?” she asked.

  Hannah led us across the compound to where the tents shivered in the warm wind. Her smile was thin, a little ruthless. She wasn’t like the rebels, who fell into line so easily at the sight of their fearless leader. In fact she hardly seemed to have any tolerance for Aleksandra at all.

  “Dinnertime,” was all she said.

  With that, the gate clanged open. A gang of Ahadizhi came in, hefting a garishly painted cart behind them. They hummed as they worked, throwing down slabs of green, fatty meat. Though the sound was tuneless, meandering, I still had to fight the urge to drift close again. Even Aleksandra stood, watching them, a hungry intensity in her eyes.

  But they ignored her, pushed the cart away, and left without so much as a growl.

  The crew set upon the food like a pack of wild animals. Dipping their arms into the green puddles of blood, they sorted out the meat that was too slimy, too fetid, too old. Then they began to build a fire to cook it all down.

  “When we first got here,” Hannah said, spearing a chunk of meat on a spit, “they didn’t seem to understand that we needed to eat at all. Then they started giving us food, but we had no way to cook it. We were sick, all of us, for days. I thought we’d die. Until their translator came in and suggested fire.”

  “Translator?” I asked. Hannah didn’t seem to hear the eagerness in my voice. She only gave a small nod, hefting the meat over the smoking coals.

  “He’s a Xollu, but he’s not like the rest of them. Honestly, we thought they all were nothing more than savages at first. Shouting at us and shoving us around. But then one afternoon he walked in. He held his hands up high, like this”—she lifted up her free palm to show me what she meant—“and he said, as clear as day, ‘Hel-lo.’ I think he’d been listening to us for ages.”

  “He’s the one who told you,” I said, watching the flame char our dinner, wrapping it up in blue and orange and black, “all about the Ahadizhi and all of that? And the name of the planet? Aur Evez?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She drew the spit out of the fire, tearing at the burning meat. Once I’d admired Hannah for her poise; she’d been the mannered daughter of two Council members, after all. Now so much of that had fallen way. She was only a person now, dirty, half-starved. She offered me a sliver of meat. I took it, chewed. “He’s almost nice to talk to. All of the Xollu seem curious—you’ll see, later. But he’s the only one who has a handle on Asheran. He’s friendly. Even if he’s, you know, different.”

  I didn’t know. Still chewing, I shook my head. Hannah watched me, considering.

  “They call him a lousk. The others, I mean. At first we thought it was his name.”

  “But it’s not?”

  “No.” Her lips pursed. “I’m not sure what it means. ‘Outcast,’ maybe. There’s something sad about him. Don’t take this the wrong way, but he almost reminds me of you. He seems to carry his sadness with him, like his heart has been shattered to bits.”

  My heart was in my throat, pounding out a panicked beat. I thought of the boy, and his arms around me, and his fingers cold against my burning skin. I thought of the way I felt when I was dreaming, so happy that I was afraid the forests around me would be burned away by the force of my joy.

  “What do you mean, ‘you’ll see, later’?” I asked, eager to change the subject before she heard the labored, frantic movements of my heart. Hannah shrugged her thin shoulders and tore off another strip of meat.

  “They come every morning,” she said, “drag us away in groups to study us. I hate it. It makes me feel like an animal in a cage. We need to get out of here, Terra. They’ll never see us as people, only as lab specimens.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve and looked toward Aleksandra, who still stood over the fire, staring down into it as it burned.

  “You know, I never liked her,” she said, cocking her thumb back, “but I’m glad she’s going to get us out of here.”

  I bit down on my lip so hard that I tasted blood.

  • • •

  That night Ettie, Laurel, and I all piled into Hannah’s tent. It was so much warmer there than it was in the world outside the city gates. W
e stripped off our flight suits; Hannah handed me a dirt-stiff undershirt and a pair of shorts she’d worn on the day of the crash, to cover up my bare limbs. Even that was almost too much as we laid out our sleeping rolls and tucked ourselves in for the night. It was funny, to watch Hannah put a protective arm around Ettie. I guess she’d missed being a mother, all that nurturing gone to pot as she waited for rescue on the planet. Ettie seemed to be growing used to the treatment too—the grown-ups holding her, comforting her, protecting her from the savage world beyond. Which was how it should be, I thought. If we were going to survive here, we’d have to learn to be a true community, not just a collection of families with only gossip holding us together.

  Together they tumbled toward sleep almost immediately. But not me, and not Laurel. She’d hardly spoken since the beast had struck Deklan down. Now her eyes were like two shining stones in the darkness. They gleamed like glass, polished, sharp. After a moment, both of us tucked down inside our sleep sacks, she began to cry, letting out tiny gasps of breath.

  “Laurel,” I whispered. I reached a hand out, offering it to her. She stared ahead. At last she put her clammy hand in mine.

  “I can’t believe that he’s gone, Terra. We were always friends. For as long as I can remember.”

  I remembered too. The pair of them, holding hands in school, walking together, laughing and joking, long before the rest of us had discovered what boys were for. His friends had been cruel ones, jeering, teasing. But I’d never heard him say a truly unkind word to Laurel.

  “You loved him,” I said.

  “Of course I did.” Her answer was quick—almost defensive, as if the suggestion otherwise offended her. And then the heat dripped away from her words, and she was crying again, worse this time. “Of course I did.”

  I did the only thing I could. I held her. We’d never been friends, not really. Before that day in the library, I knew almost nothing about her life outside of school. But we were the same now, the two of us. Not only because we’d been through so much together—the rebellion and the riots, the crash and our long journey south—but because we’d both lost people we’d cared about. It was like a scar that we both wore, a secret sigil that made us different from everyone else.

  As I clutched Laurel to me, rubbing her heaving shoulders, I thought of Hannah’s words about the translator. She’d said he was like me—that he carried his broken heart with him wherever he went. I wondered if he’d lost someone too.

  “Terra?” Laurel asked, her voice coming, shaky and weak, through tears. She pulled away from me, leaving a soggy gap in her wake.

  “Yeah?” I whispered back.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to do this. How I’m going to live on without him.”

  I let out a long, low sigh. As I pressed my head against the cold ground, I thought back to Abba. Since his death I’d learned a lot about survival. About living on—the very thing that he’d never been able to do. What would I have told him if I could have?

  “At first it will be hard. Almost impossible. You’ll wake up and feel like Deklan’s been pulled from you and all that’s left is his silhouette inside your body. It will be with you all the time. Every breath you take will be a reminder that he’s not here and breathing anymore. People will try to tell you things to make you feel better, but it will only make it worse. ‘It’s so sad,’ they’ll say, and you won’t be able to tell if they miss him because of him or because their grief will make them look noble. Sometimes it will feel like they’re trying to steal your grief, your story.

  “But you’ll keep breathing, and you’ll keep living. And one day you’ll be sitting down at breakfast or talking to a friend and you’ll stop. The blood will drain from your fingertips, and you’ll go so pale, because you’ll realize that it’s been hours since you last thought about him. Maybe even days. His loss will always be with you. You won’t forget. But time will move on and it’ll get easier, and easier until one day it’s just something that’s always been there. A part of you, but not all of you. Not anymore.”

  She didn’t say anything. A warm breeze stirred the cotton walls. I looked up at the dark shadows in the corners of the tent.

  “It’ll surprise you,” I said at last. “You’ll be changed by his death, sure. When something like this happens, it blows your world apart. But in a way, when you patch your world back together, it’ll be stronger than it was. You will be stronger than you were. I promise, Laurel. Really. You’ll be okay.”

  There was another hiccuped breath. At last, in a small, sad voice, she said, “Thanks, Terra.”

  She turned her back toward me, and I, too, turned away.

  I didn’t know if what I said helped her. I hoped it did, as she stumbled toward sleep that night. What I did know was that my own heart was heavy, my mind leaden with doubt as I pulled the covers over my head and retreated into the dark.

  • • •

  He waited for me in our usual place, in the leaves and vines that formed a bed in the warm black earth. Maybe I should have gone to him with questions. Maybe I should have asked him where he slept in the city that night, what sort of person he was, if he really was a plant. But, as always, my heart was impetuous. It wanted what it wanted. It didn’t want to think things through, didn’t want to ask questions or talk.

  I wanted him. His mouth, his hands. As soon as I saw him, broad in shoulder, narrow in waist, and familiar, utterly familiar, I pulled him down against me. I felt the cool caress of his skin and the relief it offered. I wanted him. I made that clear.

  His response was laughter, or something like it. He didn’t tumble away, but he did look at me. His black-eyed gaze was steady; each eye held the very same promise—deep, and even, and true.

  I’m here. I’m here, I said, hardly able to keep my excitement in. Looking in those lozenge-shaped eyes, I had the strangest sense of import. My ancestors had fled a dying planet. They’d traveled five hundred years. They’d lived and died all so I could be here with him, us tumbling our bodies in a bed of violet leaves. It made me giddy to think about it. I let loose peals of laughter too. Or something like it.

  His fingers wrapped around my wrist like a vine. He watched me for a long time, smiling at first. But then that smile faded; his wide lips pressed together, hiding his rows of tiny teeth. That’s when I felt it for the first time—the pain inside him. Worse than anything that I’d ever known. Worse, I think, than what Laurel felt that night. Worse than even the pain that had driven my father to fritter his life away. It made me want to cut myself open, to spill my guts out on the open ground. It made me feel halfway crazy. It was a desperate and ugly sensation; I found myself scrambling to get away. Not because I thought it was his fault. Of course not. Only because it hurt too much to stay there, his body aching on top of me.

  I sat up in the soggy leaves, staring at him. He made himself small, drawing his knees to his chest.

  I wanted to ask him questions. I wanted to demand answers—who did that to you, made you broken and jagged, strange? But this wasn’t a night for questions. It was a night for touching, a night for feeling. I wrapped my arms around him. And even though he was stiff against me, cold to my touch, I ran my warm fingers over his shoulders, his arms. I touched him—his long fingers in triplicate, the smooth palm that had no life line at all. I knew I couldn’t heal the fissure in him. The pain was too cutting, too ancient, too true. But I could try. I figured it could never hurt to try.

  I’m here, I said again, rocking him against my body. His posture finally softened. He touched a hand to my face, feeling my eyelashes flutter against his hand. I’m here. I’m here.

  10

  Morning was bright and muggy. I woke to sweaty limbs, a parched throat, and a strange, sad sensation deep in my belly—but I couldn’t name it, couldn’t quite pin it down. I put on my flight boots, pulled myself out of the tent, and went to the fire, where the others were already gathered. They talked in low tones, turning skittish glances left and right as if they were waiting
for something. What, I couldn’t be sure.

  Laurel sat stooped over a log, eating a fist of burned meat. Her face was still puffy from the night spent crying, but it was no longer slick with tears. She glanced up at me and gave a weak smile. I wriggled my fingers back, then went to the stack of supplies the shuttle crew had stacked up just past the fire pit, hoping to find even a small ration of fresh water.

  They’d lined the jugs up all in a row. Half were from the shuttles—the tempered polyglass that had been crafted by our ancestors and filled by a fleet of old women in preparation for our journey. The other half were of a foreign design. Their shapes reminded me of the curling flasks Mara Stone used in her research. Their bottoms were sturdy, but the necks looped and twisted. Each was corked with a plug of bright green wax. Some had been punctured, drained. But I found one still three quarters full. I jammed my thumb into the seal, breaking it—and leaving a ring of dirt around the glass lip. I didn’t even care. I held the mouth to my mouth, and drank and drank. It might have been alien water, but it was clean. Cold. Healing.

  I was standing there, my head cast back, a bottle shaped like a swollen gourd pressed to my lips and the water dripping down my chin, when the gate at the front of the camp gave a great shudder. I turned, my stringy hair catching on my still-dripping mouth. It was through the blond veil of hair that I saw a line of Ahadizhi filter in. I understood then why the others had seemed so apprehensive. The Ahadizhi grabbed on to them with three-fingered arms, prodding them with their weapons. The whole camp was filled with flashes of light, sparks. Ettie let out a cry. It seemed to rise up over the cacophony of electricity. I dropped the bottle against the hard-packed dirt and went running, grabbing her by either shoulder before one of the Ahadizhi could do the same.

  “Go hide,” I told her, pushing her toward the tents. She scrambled forward, her hair a dark streak behind her. I watched her tuck herself into one of the rear tents and zip up the flap behind her. When I turned back, it was to a new sight.