Starbreak (3 page)

It was the same as always, and yet the sight of it never failed to make me lose my breath. The lush landscape here wasn’t the muddled brown and green of the dome. It was purple: deep blue flowers, craning their blossoms up through the black soil; violet vines, curling toward the sun. And stranger still, it all moved, as though the plants weren’t just alive but knowing—sentient. One moment the trees would all glance up, staring into the white-gold sky. The next, they’d swivel their leaves to face me like I was a long-anticipated guest they couldn’t wait to welcome home.

At first he was nothing more than a shadow, shifting listlessly in the wind and waiting for me. I saw only his shape, his narrow waist and broad shoulders. But then he started to come closer. His movements across the soft black ground were effortless. He didn’t so much stroll as
glide
. Soon he stood in front of me, his body smelling sweet as summer.

I’m coming
, I thought, though it was as if the words traveled through a veil of molasses. For some reason I felt unsure that they would reach him, that he would understand. Most nights we spoke with our bodies, not bothering with mouths or even thoughts. He stared up into the yellow sky.

Coming?

Yes, coming. I’ll be there soon.

But his response wasn’t the one I’d hoped for. Instead of enveloping me with his arms, drawing me close so I could feel safe from the intrusions of the world beyond, he hung his head. His words came swiftly, easily, like he was used to speaking this way.

No, no. You are not real. Cannot be . . .

He might as well have punched me, sinking his fist into my solar plexus and snatching away all my breath.

What do you mean? Of course I’m real.
I’m right here! Just as real as you are.

No—
he began, but before he could finish that thought, I reached
out, grabbing his hand in mine. I pressed it to my chest, let him feel the heart that beat frantically inside.

Do you feel it?
I asked.
Do you? I’m here! I’m real!

He snatched his hand away, cradling it against his body like it was a wounded bird. I wanted to reach for him again, to make everything between us right and safe. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.

Behind us the forest was waiting for me, its branches cast back like a pair of open arms. I couldn’t make things better with the boy, not now, not when we still had so far to go. So I turned around and walked into the forest, into her vines, her purple light. She enveloped me, wrapping branches around my limbs, tangling her flowers through my hair. I let her. I thought I heard his voice, soft and strangled. But I paid it no mind. What was the point? He didn’t want me, not yet. But soon I would be there, standing in front of him, and he wouldn’t be able to deny me.

I let myself get lost in the wild landscape of the Zehavan jungles.

•  •  •

I was jerked from the warm, smothering dark by turbulence.

The planet filled the entirety of the glass ahead. In the morning light, clear waters sparkled. Sprawling forests were swirled with a thousand different shades of violet, crimson red, and the bluest ultramarine you could imagine. But something was wrong. The continents seemed to jiggle beneath us like old fingers, prone to tremors.
I watched as Laurel wrestled with the controls, gripping the control stick, pulling hard.

“No, no, no!” she was saying through gritted teeth. I turned to the little girl.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, but of course she didn’t know. Though her legs still swam in her too big flight suit, she’d pulled them up onto the seat. She held her arms high, shielding herself from whatever was to come next. Her grandfather had slung an arm over her to protect her. I turned the other way. Rebbe Davison sat in white-knuckled silence beside Jachin.

He was my teacher, one of the smartest men on the ship. Surely
he
would tell me.

His forehead was wrinkled. But his expression wasn’t like it had been during school when I tried his patience, stumbling in late day after day. Back then there had been a weary humor beneath his frown. Now there was only fear.

“She entered the wrong coordinates,” he said softly, so soft at first that I almost couldn’t hear it above the engine’s roar. But Laurel did.

“I’m only a
talmid
!” she shouted. “I was never supposed to do this alone!”

In the seat beside her I saw Deklan reach out. He put his hand against the nape of her neck.

“Not now!” She swiped at him, smacking his hand. He shrank
back. I did too, my shoulders sinking into the bucket seat. After our long flight my armpits ached, sweaty from the straps. My legs felt somehow both numb and swollen in the flight suit’s boots. But none of that mattered now. What mattered was my heart and its hard, hysterical rhythm, and the dry, shallow wheeze of my breath.

“The shuttles are meant to make a water landing.” Rebbe Davison’s words were murmured low. This time Laurel didn’t hear them. But I don’t think she was meant to. When I slid my gaze over, I saw that his gaze was firmly fixed on me. “We’re supposed to land on water.”

I peered through the glass in front. We were coming in over the northern continent where drifts of winter snow dappled the purple landscape white. The wide gulf of water was to the south of us and shrinking fast from view. I saw the craggy landscape change—saw gray dunes and the deep shadows beneath them.

Mountains. We were headed for the mountains. And from the way that the shuttle quavered as the peaks filled more and more of the glass, I knew we were about to crash.

I
didn’t black out. In fact, everything seemed to slow down, as if the universe was trying to give me enough time to think, react, respond. I pressed my head back against the seat, clutching the armrests so hard that I thought they might break off in my fists. It felt as if all my blood were leaving my body, propelled out by the force of the fall to my extremities. The rest of me was left so cold that my teeth chattered. Or maybe they chattered from the vibrations. The whole shuttle shook as we ripped through the atmosphere. The men were talking, softly at first,
a constant, urgent murmur. Then the shuttle banked sideways, and they were screaming, and the girl was screaming, and I was screaming too. Even Rebbe Davison screamed. I didn’t know he had it in him, but he did—a great bellow of a bass, low and rumbling.

It’s funny; I’d spent years feeling disconnected from everybody around me, alone and sad. There were nights when I stared up into the sparkling blackness of my room and wondered why I was so
wrong
. And on some nights, the worst nights, especially after Abba died, I wondered if I wouldn’t be better off if I went away too. I didn’t know where I would go. I just thought it would be better if I were somewhere, anywhere but in my bedroom on that ship—and there was only one way out that I had ever seen.

Now, as the metal walls of the shuttle screamed around me, as the other passengers screamed too, I realized how foolish it all was. I was too young to die. I wanted to see Zehava, and not just from behind jittering glass. I wanted to see Ronen’s baby grow up. I wanted to finally fall in love. But now that was all slipping away from me, just as surely as our shuttle slipped down and down through the atmosphere, hurtling toward the frozen ground.

I didn’t black out. I didn’t even close my eyes. They were wide open as the window was swallowed up by white, as our limbs were lifted up, as weightless as balloons, for just a moment, a narrow moment before the shuttle slammed into Zehava.

•  •  •

I woke up without even remembering having fallen asleep. There was no forest, no vines, no boy. Just my aching body. I pried my eyelids painfully open, taking in the light. For a moment I wasn’t sure where I was. My arms were wrapped tight around me; my chest felt squeezed. When I turned my head, my neck protested—a bolt of pain traveled down it and into my spine. I let out a small gasp, wincing.

“Terra? Are you okay?”

Rebbe Davison knelt before me. Half his face was smeared with blood, but he was whole, hopeful. I turned my head back and forth. The pain flared brightly again, then faded back.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice shaking. “Yeah, I think I am.”

“I’m going to unbuckle you, okay?”

He smiled again, a gentle, familiar smile. I’d been so surprised when I’d found out that he was a rebel, though I guess I shouldn’t have been. Even Abba had said that Mordecai Davison was a real mensch. He seemed to be in it for the good of the people, because he truly thought it was right. Now he took his soft, kind hands and used them to unlatch my safety harness. I fell forward—when had the ground gotten so slanted?—but Rebbe Davison caught me, letting out a small laugh. I felt myself blush. I wasn’t a girl anymore, one who needed her teacher to hold her up. I tried to stand straight, though my knees still shook.

“The girl,” I said, scanning the interior of the crumpled shuttle. One half of it had been sliced open during the impact. Snow spilled in, and there was broken glass, and blood. “Is she all right?”

He hesitated, wavering on his feet.

“We have her outside.”

I followed him, stumbling over the jagged, broken edge of the shuttle door. But almost as soon as I stepped out beneath the open sky, I staggered back. It was huge above us, golden white and endless. It stretched from one end of the world—where a tangle of black, naked branches clung to the mountainside—all the way to the other. There it disappeared beneath a sparkling field of ice. It seemed too low, too close—then I realized why. There was no glass to keep it back. Only space, wide open and free.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

I jumped. It was Jachin—the rebel who had sat beside Rebbe Davison on the shuttle. His dark hair was curly. Now he ran broad fingers through it again and again.

I stepped forward over the icy ground. Deklan was standing over Laurel, his gaze fiercely protective. Beside her sat the little girl. Their posture was the same—fetal, deflated. The girl held her hands over her face, her body shivering with tears. But they were both alive. That’s what mattered.

“Where’s Mar Schneider?” I asked, turning back. Rebbe Davison
still stood in the mouth of the shuttle, one boot up against the broken steel. His mouth fell open. He glanced behind him to the capsule, torn open behind us like a throat. That’s when I heard it—the girl let out a cry.

“Zayde!” she said.

I don’t know why, but my legs snapped to action, as if they were under the command of someone else. I scrambled past Rebbe Davison, ducking inside the shuttle. I peered left, toward the cockpit, where the window glass had shattered into a thousand glinting shards. And I turned right, where the storage container had fallen open, exploding its contents across the snow-slick floor. Then I saw it, the shock of red that seeped out beneath a curved overhang of metal. I shouldn’t have, but I knelt down and looked.

He was still strapped to his seat, his limbs dangling down. I saw hair. Silver wisps of hair. Then the white skull beneath them. And something else. His insides.

I’d seen bodies before—too many bodies. Momma’s, waxy and still in her hospital bed. Abba’s, dangling from the bedroom rafters. Benjamin Jacobi, and Captain Wolff, too. But even when I’d seen blood spill out from open throats, those deaths had been quick ones, and relatively clean. Not this. I turned and was sick in the corner. I puked until there was nothing left, until my stomach was just an empty hole.

When I was finished, I pulled myself out of the shuttle again. The light struck me dizzy after all those years spent in the dark of the dome. I collapsed in the snow beside Laurel and the girl. The child cried and cried, her face slick with tears. At first I was frozen, stunned. I’d made it to the planet, thoughtlessly pursuing my dreams, and now, because of me, an old man had died.

I looked down at the girl. She was narrow-shouldered. Young. Younger than I’d been when Momma died.

“Esther, are you okay?” I asked, at last pulling her name from my memory. Her eyes still fixed forward, she wiped her nose on the back of her flight suit sleeve.

“Ettie,” she said finally. Then she honked out a cry.

“Ettie,” I said, and then added, in case she’d forgotten: “I’m Terra. And I’ll keep you safe.”

I didn’t even consider the meaning of my words before I spoke. I’d never kept
anyone
safe before. I’d always been a loner—messy Terra Fineberg, looking out for herself and no one else. But I wanted to believe that it was possible. This girl, her hair all a tangle, was alone in this strange world—helpless.

But maybe not anymore. She drew in a shuddering breath. I drew her to me, and she tucked her face in against my shoulder, letting me hold her as if we were more than strangers.

•  •  •

I’m not sure how long we sat there in the snow, the winter sun bright and small overhead. Without the clock bells to toll the hour, it was impossible to tell. Might have been twenty minutes—might have been two hours. We hunkered down in silence, shivering. I guess we were all shocked from the crash. I know I couldn’t make words move past my mouth.

At last Deklan pulled himself to his feet. He stared down the mountain. Between a pair of boulders was a deep cleft, wide enough for a man to pass.

“Helllooooooo!” he called. His voice came echoing back a dozen times, folded over itself. When at last it died, he turned to us. “Nobody’s home.”

“It’s a big planet,” Rebbe Davison said.

It was. Stretching thousands of kilometers out in all directions. This wasn’t the ship, where there was no place to go, and anywhere you went was safe. This was Zehava, the wider world. The air was cool and biting, and there were no warm quarters waiting for us. I finally let go of Ettie’s hand and stumbled to my feet.

“We need a plan,” I said. “For the night at least. Otherwise we’ll freeze. I know I didn’t come all the way to this planet just to—” I broke off, thinking of the body smashed inside the shuttle, and how it had once been a man.

“There are supplies,” Laurel said, not noticing how I tripped over my words. “We’ve been stocking up the shuttles for months. Shelf-stable food. Water. A tent, and sleeping sacks.” She paused, as if she were afraid to go on.