For Darkness Shows the Stars Part 4

"Oh, so you know what they wear?" she asked.

He chuckled and nodded at his little sister. Olivia Grove was clad in a scarlet gown Elliot had never seen before, and she was pretty sure the sour expression on her own sister's face was due to wondering if her icy blue dress looked tired and dingy beside it.

"Got it for her in Channel City this summer," Horatio said. "There are Posts all over there now, all of them dressed in the gaudiest outfits you've ever seen-" He cut himself off as a sun-cart pulled up outside the door, carrying Felicia Innovation and Donovan Phoenix. "A bit like that, actually."

"I think you'll like them, Horatio, turquoise overcoats or not," she said.

"I know I will." He grinned. "They have sun-carts. They're my new best friends."

Elliot flashed her friend a quick smile, but it evaporated quickly as another sun-cart crested the drive. She felt more than saw Kai in the second cart, the way you can tell when the sun hits a patchy spot of cloud on an overcast day. The chill reached her before she even caught sight of his cold expression, of the way he was still steadfastly refusing to look in her direction. But she refused to give in to the temptation to smooth her skirt or her hair as the cart pulled up with Andromeda behind the wheel. She wondered if Kai thought she'd changed as much as she thought he had. If so, it could hardly be for the better.

Elliot's features, which had been harsh and solemn even when she was younger, hadn't softened with age. Her dark brows were thick slashes over the deep-set, almond-shaped eyes she'd inherited from the Boatwright side of the family. The round snub nose came courtesy of her grandfather as well, and the skin that turned brown in the sun, then sallow in the dark winter months. She'd also gotten his full lips, though, and her black hair took on ruddy highlights every summer. But Elliot was no beauty, and she knew it.

Her mind's eye was filled with the shade of Ro's new scarf, the deep verdant green that had suited her more than any of the tans and browns she'd worn her whole life. Elliot had never envied Ro-not her fair face nor her bright hair, nor the easy happiness with which she greeted every day. And she wouldn't start now. Nothing, not even presents from Kai, made up for the fact that Ro was Reduced.

"h.e.l.lo!" Horatio called, waving at the Posts. "Pleasure to meet you! My name is Horatio Grove-I live on the estate next door. That one's my sister, Olivia."

"Good morning," said Andromeda, nodding. "I a.s.sume you are the Groves we have to thank for the bushels of apples sent to the Boatwright house." Andromeda's every word seemed to be carefully weighed before it was allowed to pa.s.s her lips, and even as she spoke, Elliot noticed her unusual eyes surveying the entire scene before her. She had little doubt that, were the light to suddenly vanish, Andromeda could re-create every particular of that morning, from the open, friendly expression on Horatio's face as he approached with Elliot to the way Kai had barely nodded at the introduction to the number of particles in the gravel drive at their feet. No wonder she was such an excellent explorer-nothing escaped her observation.

Elliot shuddered to think what the Post girl was noticing about her.

Olivia met them by the steps. "I'm Olivia Grove," she burst out. "I love your sun-carts. That's what these are, right? I've never seen one before. May I go for a ride in one? Are they very hard to operate?"

Now Kai did respond. "Yes; I'm not surprised; of course; and I can teach you if you'd like."

Olivia worked out which answer matched which of her questions and Elliot became very concerned with the state of the dust beneath her feet. Perhaps he had not changed as much as she'd thought. His knack of remembering everything, of organizing it in his brain and acting as if everyone else did, too-it had grown only more p.r.o.nounced over the years.

"My brother always teases me because I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was nine," Olivia said. "He says I'm marvelously uncoordinated. I bet you can teach me, though."

"I'll do my best," said Kai, and offered the girl his arm.

Elliot had always liked Olivia Grove. She was a sweet, unaffected girl who never had anything bad to say of anyone. She was kind to the workers on her estate, liked to sing and to walk in her orchards, and seemed equally comfortable discussing fruit with Elliot as she was ribbons with Tatiana. Had she been asked, Elliot would have denied the possibility of ever having a reason to hate the fourteen-year-old girl.

Had she been asked, she would deny a lot of things. That she ever doubted the Luddite ways she'd been taught to follow all her life. That she had broken a sacred trust in the locked room on the second floor of her family's barn. And most of all, that listening to Olivia pepper Kai with questions, hearing him explain the workings of the sun-carts to her in the same open, excited tones she'd once known so intimately-a voice very different than the stiff, stilted syllables he'd spared for her in the barn the previous evening-Elliot would go to her grave before she admitted that it made her heart hurt so much she could scarcely breathe.

FIVE YEARS AGO.

Dear Kai, I was sorry to learn what happened to your father today. These pills are the medicine they gave to my grandfather after he had his strokes. If you give two a day to Mal, it might help. I know you're still mad over our argument about the Wars of the Lost, but I hope you know I'm thinking of you. Please tell me if there's anything else I can do.

Your friend, Elliot Dear Elliot, Thank you for the medicine. I hope it can help my da. They've taken him away to the healing house-I hate that name. They never do any healing there. People just go there to die. It's hard to see him. This is the man who taught me to read and write and fix engines, and now he just stares at me like one of the Reduced.

He must hate that. He used to tell me how hard it was for him growing up. It wasn't like now. He was one of the only Posts on the whole estate. They didn't even have a name for what he was growing up-they hadn't started calling us CORs yet. He loved his family-his parents, his brothers and sisters who were Reduced, but he wasn't one of them. He spent his whole life proving that. And now he's trapped, he's mute, he's just like them.

And that made me think of the wars. If there was a war tomorrow, would your father send the Reduced out like they did in the old days? Would you send out my uncles and cousins? Would you send out my da, now that he can no longer speak or work for you?

I will tell you the truth. The truth is I was angry at you. The truth is that you're my closest friend, and I still felt like there was no way I could possibly make you understand what it's like to be me, what it's like to be my da. The truth is that my da is dying, and because he's a COR, he's shoved away to be forgotten in the healing house, while your grandfather gets medicine and nurses who wait on him hand and foot. The truth is, if there was a war tomorrow, everyone I know would be forced to do exactly what your father wants, just like they forced my father to go into the healing house, just like they will force me to go work as a foreman in the fields, because I'm not old enough or educated enough to keep being a mechanic if my da's not there to teach me.

The truth is that I'm scared to even write these things down and send them to a Luddite to read. Even if that Luddite is you.

Your friend, Kai Dear Kai, You are my closest friend too. And I promise I will do everything I can to help you and Mal. I will talk to my mother. I will talk to my father if I have to. You may not know everything you must to be our mechanic, but you know enough to apprentice at it, and my father will have to admit it would be a waste to track you into a foreman job. My mother knows who you are, and she knows what we owe you and Ro since your mothers died on the day we were all born. I know she'll help us.

I wish the shipyard were still open. I think you'd have liked it there, even if I'd've missed you. And my grandfather is a good man. They say he even had a Post as his first mate, back when he still traveled up and down the coast.

Is the medicine helping at all? I'm going to go sit with Mal in the healing house, since I know you have to work.

Your friend, Elliot.

Eight.

THE STAR-CAVERN SANCTUARIES COULD be reached only through a tunnel in the North cellars, which helped the family restrict access to those they deemed worthy. A few Reduced housemaids were allowed down for cleaning purposes, but generally the s.p.a.ce was reserved as a monument to the Luddites' great accomplishment: perseverance.

Elliot had always been in awe of her ancestors. They'd possessed the strength of mind to fight against the tide of their society. When everyone else was putting their faith in scientists like Gavin and Carlotta and getting the ERV procedure, the Luddites had their doubts, as they did about corporate foods whose very genetic codes killed competing vegetation, about computer chips designed to make your brain run faster, about living among people who'd filled the air and water with toxins. They'd saved the world by rejecting it all.

How could she abandon what they'd fought so hard to achieve?

The s.p.a.ce was softly lit by sconces as they entered the sanctuary, and the predominant sound was Felicia's gasp of wonder. "It's even more spectacular than I'd thought."

The cavern's earthen walls sloped upward into vague shadows, and where the walls weren't marked by murals depicting the skylines of ruined cities and monuments that Elliot had only seen in antique books, they were blackened by the smoke from ancient fires. Here and there stood other artifacts from the Luddites' time underground. Elliot tried to imagine what it had been like for her ancestors, living their entire lives underground, kept from the turning of the seasons, from the feel of the sun on their faces or the smell of the fields.

Perhaps this was what she'd been missing. Perhaps her father was right, that she should spend more time in the sanctuary to reflect on the true weight of her heritage. Her forebears had spent untold years living in this darkness, subsisting on fish from underground streams, mushrooms, and stockpiled food, because of the horrors that genetic manipulation had visited upon their world. And now, because of a few lean years, she had chosen to tread down that same, dangerous path. Of course, her wheat grafts weren't ERV, but the idea was the same. Gavin and Carlotta had introduced Endogenous RetroViruses into the Lost in order to trick their G.o.d-given DNA into turning on only the best and most powerful expressions of their genes and delivering those same traits to their offspring. Elliot's grafting methods hadn't been nearly so intricate, but the result was the same: horizontal gene transfer and a transgenic wheat that produced thicker, heavier seed heads far sooner in the season.

She'd told herself it wasn't the same. She hadn't been mucking around with microscopes and DNA strands. It was safe, hardly any worse than the type of cross-pollination that occurred naturally when one plant sat too near another in the field. Of course, that was G.o.d's plan, same as when he'd cursed those with ERV and caused the virus to mutate within their genes and Reduce all their progeny. Elliot had manipulated this wheat herself. And she doubted her Luddite ancestors, who'd experienced much leaner times than this in their years spent huddled in the caverns, would accept her excuse that she'd been desperate to find a way to feed the people on her lands. She felt her cheeks burning in humiliation, and was glad for the dim lights that hid her shame.

Elliot braved a glance at Kai, wondering what he thought now that he saw the North star cavern for himself. He was staring straight up at the darkness in the ceiling, just like the Phoenixes, with an amused expression painted across his features. "So this is all of it."

"Fascinating," Andromeda said softly. "Well, at least I can say I have honestly never seen anything like it."

"You haven't seen anything yet," said Olivia Grove. "Shall we turn out the lights, Tatiana?" She leaned over and extinguished a nearby sconce when Tatiana nodded.

Elliot and the other Luddites began putting out the lights. As the cavern dipped into twilight, she looked back at Kai, waiting for the moment when the miracle overtook him, but his expression did not change.

"Our ancestors," Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into utter darkness, "were forced to take refuge during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they'd done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction. They destroyed technologically backward countries that didn't have the money for the enhancements. They attacked each other, too, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world." She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.

"For years-some say more than a generation-the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . ." Tatiana's voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.

It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.

Olivia began to sing, a soft Luddite hymn they'd all known since childhood. And as her voice grew, the stars glowed brighter, twinkling down on them with promise. As a child, Elliot had been amazed by this-that the stars in the cavern responded to human voices, when the ones in the sky did not. Now, even when she knew the truth, the effect was still quite beautiful.

"In the old stories," said Tatiana, "a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, G.o.d showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, G.o.d showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world."

It was more complicated than that, though. When Elliot's ancestors emerged, it was into an unrecognizable world. A world where even some of the machines the Luddites were willing to use no longer worked. A world where there was no sign of life beyond the islands, where the needles of compa.s.ses spun uselessly, where there was no direction at all save the stars. All the Luddites knew was that they were alone, and that they alone bore responsibility for gathering up the shards of humanity.

"Amazing," whispered Felicia.

"Interesting," said Andromeda, her tone pedestrian.

"Ann," Donovan warned under his breath.

Elliot, standing close to the Phoenixes, heard the girl shift in the darkness. "Miss Grove," Andromeda said. "That's a very pretty song. You should hear my brother sing. It would no doubt blow you away."

"I would like that," Olivia replied. "He could sing now. The stars glow brighter with song."

"I wonder why that is," Kai said. "Do you think they suppose their food is closer and they hope to attract it into their webs?"

Tatiana made a choking sound. "How . . . do you know?"

Kai sounded bored. "That they're bugs? I thought it was common knowledge."

It wasn't. Elliot had told Kai herself, years ago, when she'd learned the truth about the glowworm "stars" her family venerated in the sanctuary. They were bugs-tiny, bioluminescent insects that crept into crevices in the rocks and attracted prey through their glowing lights.

"Really?" asked Olivia sadly. "I was so disappointed when I learned the truth. I was ten years old."

"I can imagine," Kai replied. But he didn't need to. Elliot had been disappointed back then as well, and so had Kai, though he'd never seen the stars for himself. Still, the knowledge of the truth behind the miracle didn't take away from the wonder of the sight, nor from the importance-even more so because it was natural and not manmade-that the appearance of the "stars" had held for Elliot's ancestors.

"I don't mean to belittle it," said Kai. "It's stunning. Not like the real thing, of course-nothing can compare to when you're out at sea, nothing around you but stars, shining above, reflected below." The Phoenixes murmured their agreement. Elliot gazed up at the sanctuary firmament and tried to imagine what it would look like. "These . . . well, they look like bugs."

"They look like stars!" Tatiana exclaimed.

"Not to my eyes," said Kai.

"Nor mine," Andromeda added. "Nor yours, right, Donovan?"

"I must admit they do not," Donovan said, his tone reluctant.

"I'm sorry for that," Felicia broke in. "If you cannot see the wonder in this sanctuary, then your superior eyesight has done you no favors."

For a moment the three captains were silent, as if Felicia had scolded them like children. Finally, Andromeda spoke. "To be fair, the real stars don't even fascinate me as much as when I was . . . younger."

"I am sorry for that, as well." Felicia's voice was sad.

What did Felicia Innovation have to apologize for? It was hardly her fault that her young friends were unimpressed with the Norths' most sacred possession. Indeed, she suspected Kai's response was on purpose.

"It's especially disappointing," Felicia went on, "when you consider those who will never see this miracle with any eyes . . ."

Elliot heard Donovan's harsh intake of breath. Beside him, Andromeda mumbled an apology.

"It's quite all right," said Felicia, but her tone was so flat, Elliot felt sure that it was anything but. "Miss Norths, you must forgive these young captains. They have seen so many wonders beyond the sh.o.r.es of these islands, they forget the beauty of the wonders here at home."

"I would love to hear more of what you've seen," said Olivia. "I've long wondered what else is out there."

"Have you?" asked Kai. "That's an unusual desire for a Luddite. Even when I've heard them express it, they've never been sincere."

Elliot bit her lip and stared up at the stars until they blurred before her eyes.

Nine.

"PERHAPS YOU'LL BE MORE keen on this," Olivia said, as if attempting to steer the conversation in a brighter direction. "Over here, there's a spot where if you whisper, you can hear it all over. Where is it . . . ?" Elliot could hear her stumbling about in the darkness.

"Let me help you," said Kai. "Give me your arm. There, that's better. This way?"

Their voices drifted away from the main group, and a moment later, Olivia's disembodied whisper echoed through the cavern. "Here it is," came her hushed syllables. "If you talk here, you can be heard everywhere. But over here-" Her voice cut out.

"Now that is interesting," said Donovan.

"There are directional whisper zones, too," Horatio said. "You can whisper in one place and be heard only in a very specific other. There are some markers that show how-whisper by the yellow rock, be heard by the other yellow rock, and vice versa. Let me put on a light so I can show you."

He relit a sconce so there was at least enough light that they wouldn't trip onto their faces, and within moments the group had dispersed over the interior of the cavern, each trying out a separate whisper zone. Tatiana alone remained aloof, and Elliot took a seat beside her sister.

"This is what I get, I suppose, for allowing a bunch of Posts into the sanctuary," Tatiana said with a long-suffering sigh.

"Now, Tatiana," Elliot said. "Don't pretend you never played with the whisper zones yourself. You used to make Benedict and me come down here and play Gavin and Carlotta with you."

"I was ten," Tatiana sniffed, but then her tone turned teasing. "How we scared you with that game! Is that why you hate coming down here? Are you still afraid of the dark?"

"No," Elliot insisted. It wasn't the ghosts of Gavin and Carlotta who scared her in these caverns. It was the ones of her ancestors and their Luddite expectations.

"You sure?" Tatiana leaned in and began to whisper the sing-songey rhyme. "Gavin and Carlotta come, When their names three times are sung. Stand before a mirror clear, Let them whisper in your ear."

"Stop it!" Elliot shot out of her seat.

Tatiana laughed. "So you are still scared."

"No," Elliot said, and hoped it was true. "It's like you said. It's a children's game. And not a very nice one to play in front of the Posts."

Tatiana laughed again. "Why, because they come from Reduced stock? That's silly, Elliot. You're either born Reduced or you're not. These people know what they are." She dropped her voice again. "If your image doesn't give you fright, Then you are a true Luddite. But if the gla.s.s shows you a haze, Reduced you'll be for all your days-"

"I said stop," Elliot hissed, and she swept off the bench and away from her sister, shivering a bit in the chill of the cavern. This dress wasn't warm enough for the sanctuary. She'd worn a sweater over it at her mother's memorial service four years ago, but that sweater had been long since relegated to the rag bin.

There was hardly enough light to see her way as she walked deeper into the star cavern. Horatio stood with one lantern and whispered near a stone painted yellow, while at a corresponding yellow stone across the way, Felicia and Donovan listened intently. The whisper zones were ancient, too. Her ancestors had to have something to entertain themselves with other than scary nursery rhymes during their years spent in the dark.