Starglass (18 page)

“Stupid cat,” I muttered, shoving the door open with both hands.

The curtains in my father’s bedroom were tightly closed, as usual. But he had left his bedside lamp on, and it bathed the room in warm light. The illumination spilled over his crisply made bed and down across the threadbare carpet. His room was the only one in our house kept clean. The sole sign of my father’s chaos was the glass that sat encrusted with wine on the floor beside his bed, a line of ants circling the rim.

I moved quickly. First I ducked my head beneath the wide double bed that he’d once shared with my mother, but all that greeted me were cobwebs, cat toys, and dust. Then I went to the dressers, opening each one. I ran my hand along the dresser bottoms, beneath the reams of folded cotton. But the drawers held no books or secrets.

Finally I stood before my father’s closet door. Down the hall my own closet vomited old toys and paper and clothing. But my father had hung up each uniform coat with care. I shoved the hangers aside, but only the wall greeted me.

Then my eyes strayed down.

There, between two pairs of leather boots, sat a wooden box. The top had a floral design carved into it. Once it held my mother’s jewelry. Now the elaborate leaves and flowers and scrollwork were edged with dust. I fell to my knees before it and lifted the lid.

I found a tangle of necklace chains, the metal dark and in desperate need of a polish. And a pressed flower—what had once been a violet but whose delicate petals were now brown and brittle and nearly destroyed. I stared at the paper-thin leaves, wondering who had picked the blossom for my mother. A silly question. It must have been my father, of course. He was always bringing home flowers for her, their stems tied up with pretty bows. I set the flower down against the box’s lid. That’s when I saw something square, wrapped up in brown paper and twine.

I sat on my heels, holding it up in both hands. Momma’s handwriting was scrawled across the paper. She’d had a sloppy, jagged script—quite a bit like mine. I ran my index finger over the long-dried ink. It read:

Arran—

Great great (etc.) grandmother’s journal. (private!!)

Please give to Terra before she leaves home, & know I always love you both.

—Alyana

He hadn’t ever opened it—that much was clear. The twine was tied in a tangle of impossible-looking knots. Holding the volume out in both hands, I carried it to the bed and sat down. I was supposed to take this book and bring it to Van. The task had sounded easy enough. But I hadn’t anticipated that the book would be Momma’s or that she had meant it to be
mine
. What did I have of my mother? A small handful of memories? A few sweaters? Suddenly my hands woke to life. I tugged the twine downward, tore the paper aside. At long last I undressed the book. It looked ancient—cracked leather cover, and gold-edged pages, and gold
letters stamped into the front. Old American.
DAY JOURNAL
, it said.

I leaned back against my father’s bed, letting my hair fan out across the smooth blankets. Then I lifted the book and began to read.

At first it was difficult for me to decipher the handwriting. The writer, one of my long-dead ancestors, the matriarch of my bloodline, had written in nearly incomprehensible cursive.
Z
s that dropped below the line.
Q
s that looked like giant numeral twos. But eventually I got used to it. I don’t know what I was looking for in those pages. No, that’s not true. I knew, but I didn’t want to admit it. I was looking for some shadow of my mother in that woman, an old woman who wrote daily letters to a daughter she had also named Terra.

I didn’t find her. This woman was hard, bitter—nothing like my mother at all. She wrote all about her daily life on the ship, about how claustrophobic the light panels that lined the dome made her feel and how she didn’t like the taste, mossy and stale, of the recycled water. These things meant nothing to me—after all, I’d drunk that water all my life. I’d never tasted what she called “the crisp tap water of New York City, the best water in the world,” and I’d never experienced the wonders of getting sunburned after “sitting out all day under a hazy Manhattan Beach sky.”

She hated the ship. She would lie down beside a man she didn’t love, and her heart twisted and thundered in her chest. But she did it anyway. Over and over again she wrote about how someday, maybe,
it would all be worth it—someday some descendant of hers, some distant great-great-great-great-grandchild, might have a chance to set her feet on a planet, a real planet, under a real, wide sky. And be free again. Spiritually. Emotionally. Physically.

Some of the things she wrote scared me.

and

I remember the day they took your brother away to be sterilized. Only thirteen years old. They told us to tell him that the “ceremony” would make him a man, that it was a mitzvah. . . . I may not be a good Jew myself, but it nauseates me, the way they’ve perverted religion.

I read, and read, and read, tasting my own frantic heartbeat in my mouth. It wasn’t until the clock bells rang out in the distance that I bolted upright. Ten chimes for ten o’clock. My hands shook as I smoothed down my hair, remembering Mara’s lab and the duties that still waited for me. Ducking into the closet, I shut Momma’s jewelry box
and slid Abba’s suits back into place. Then I gathered the crumpled paper and twine up, and held them close. Momma’s words were on them. Her soft hands had touched this paper—this ink. I couldn’t throw it away. So I tucked the book under my arm and carried it back to my room.

I folded the brown paper into a square the length and width of my palm and tucked it into my underwear drawer, buried at the back where no one ever looked. The journal went inside my bag. I dressed in a hurry, throwing my lab coat on and pushing a knit cap down over my untamed hair. Then I hustled downstairs. But as I made my way through the empty districts, I held my bag against my chest. I could almost feel the journal there, throbbing like a second heart.

•  •  •

After work I sat on a stone bench in front of the library. I watched children straggle along the path from the school toward the districts. Little girls walked along with their arms interlinked—young boys chased and jostled one another. I felt a sharp stab in my chest. Not for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to join them, to leave my bag with its heavy burden in the pricker bushes and go run and play until I felt dizzy and out of breath.

The iron doors finally swung open. Out stepped Van. He wore a smart sheepskin coat and heavy scarf. A leather satchel, weighted with books, was slung over one shoulder. In his gloved hands Van held an iron key. He locked the library doors with it.

“Hello, Terra,” he said, hardly looking at me.

I rose to my feet. “I have the book!”

Van tipped his head.

“What book? I’m the librarian, girl. There are many books.”

“The book,” I said weakly. My hand settled on the flap of my bag. I could feel the shape of the journal there—the corners were sharp under my fingers. “The one you asked for.”

“Come with me,” Van said, and hurried away from the crowded pavilion.

I matched my strides to his. Together, not speaking, we made our way along the path that ran beside the pasture fence. It wasn’t until we reached a narrow footbridge, shadowed with browning willow branches, that he turned to me.

“Stupid girl. What if someone heard you?”

“Sorry!” I said, my face warming. I lowered my voice to a whisper, though there was no one near except a few carrion crows that loitered in the branches overhead. “I got what you asked for. You know. The book.”

“That was fast.”

Van held out his hand.

I threw my bag open. But then I found myself staring down into the shadows. Amid the crumpled papers and the wrinkled pages of my sketchpad, I could see the journal’s gilded pages. I ran my finger
along them. The metal felt cool and smooth. I thought of Momma’s note.
Give to Terra
, it had said. She had meant the book for
me
.

“Will I get it back?” I asked, still staring down. At first, Van scoffed.

“It doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to all of us.”

I looked at the librarian, and my voice took on a cold edge. “It was my mother’s. And now it’s
mine
.”

Van’s mouth stayed hard a moment. But then it fell open. He sighed.

“Fine,” he said. “I can copy it, then return it to you.”

He held his hand out to me again. I looked at his open, waiting palm.

“Liberty on Earth,” I said to myself at last, hoping the words would help me to feel triumphant. I’m not sure it worked. I reached into my bag and then shoved the book at Van. I watched him throw it into his satchel with all his other books.

My eyes burning, I started down the path. But Van called out to me.

“Terra Fineberg!” he said. I stopped, but didn’t turn. I couldn’t stand to look at him. “The meeting’s at twenty-three o’clock tonight. In the library.”

Finally, finally, I’d done something right. A grin lifted the corners of my mouth. I turned to the librarian and touched two fingers to my heart in salute. He squinted in puzzlement, but touched his heart back in turn.

I hadn’t realized how small my world had always felt, until the day when the Children of Abel invited me to join them. It was as if the dome walls had opened, leading me toward a brand-new place. As I hurried down the path toward home, I felt, for the first time, like I was walking toward something. Toward my future. Toward Zehava.

N
ow that the winter and long nights had begun in earnest, there was no artificial sun to pass through the library’s stained glass windows. Instead the dusty chandeliers that hung from the rafters were on. Their feeble bulbs burned a slow, gloomy yellow, casting long shadows through the wood beams. I passed through the iron doors, nearly missing the figure in the shadows there. It was Van who slipped by me, hustling toward the door.

“They’re up there,” he said, gesturing toward the staircase as the key clanked in the lock.

Voices drifted down from the first landing, beside the ancient card catalog that stood gathering dust. Three strangers, men, who wore the brown, rough-hewn garb of fieldworkers, spoke in low tones. Green cords barely held on to the worn fabric of their coats. Among them stood Koen. My intended’s gaze met mine, and he lifted his arm at the sight of me.

“Terra!” he called, grinning. “You came!”

Somewhere in the distance, acres and acres away in the center of the atrium’s fields, bells struck the hour. The sound reached us even here. Van breezed by us and up the staircase.

“Follow me,” he called.

The three men whispered among themselves as we trudged upward. There was something that felt dangerous about the way they all looked at one another—furtive, desperate, hungry, proud. My hands felt cold inside my lab coat pockets.

We made our way up and up and up the narrow steps. On the top floor a skinny walkway bordered the book-lined walls, shouldered by a once-polished railing that had gathered a fur of dust. The rafters hung low overhead. Koen had to bend his neck to make his way beneath them. At first all I could see was his back—dark corduroy over slumped shoulders—and the dim chasm of books and shelves below. But then we followed Van around a wide shelf of books and found ourselves on a balcony that looked out over the entire library.

A small crowd waited for us there, draped over leather-stuffed chairs and leaning their weight against the precarious railing. There weren’t many citizens on the balcony that night—fifteen, perhaps twenty. Fewer than had been in my class at school. But there were a few familiar faces among them.

Sitting at a study desk, his hands folded in front of him, was Rebbe Davison. He smiled at me, then, swiftly, as if embarrassed, looked away. And there, stooped on a footstool, was Mar Schneider, our old neighbor who was always digging in his yard out front. His ancient eyes hardly seemed to notice me in the library’s feeble light. I even spotted a few of our old classmates sitting wedged together on one of the overstuffed sofas. Deklan Levitt, the gruff fieldworker. And his intended, Laurel Selberlicht, pressed beside him. She’d been the best shuttle pilot in our class and was now training to ferry us to Zehava. And she caught my eye as I looked out across the balcony, lifted her hand, and waved.

Koen and I sat down beside each other on the dingy carpet. His grin was glinting and white.

“Meet the Children of Abel,” he said.

Van pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He stood before the railing, his broad hands folded in front of him. The balcony was filled with whispers, hissed words. Koen leaned toward me again, his voice low.

“We’re only a single cell of a greater movement,” he said. “No cell knows who the other members are, except for the librarian. Van acts as a go-between, passing messages among all of us. Jacobi trained him for the job.”

The memory of the guard’s words echoed through my mind.

The names! Give them to me!

“Does the Council know he’s been trained to do Jacobi’s work?” I asked, leaning forward. Koen gave his head a sharp shake.

“Of course not. How would they?”

I thought of the way the knife’s blade looked as it drew across Jacobi’s throat. Then I glanced at Van. The skin of his own neck was very white under his ruddy stubble. He looked confident as he stood with his back against the railing, gazing out at us. I wouldn’t have been so self-assured if I had information that the Council wanted.

The sound of  Van’s voice brought my consciousness slamming back into my body.

“What news do we have since our last meeting?” he asked. A woman who stood near the stairs shouted out to him, eager to have her voice heard.

“I’ve heard word that the Council destroyed the probes!” she said. “They’re claiming they were lost, but there’s been no evidence.” There was a fevered rush of agreement. Van lifted up his hands for silence.

“Our leadership is well aware that the Council destroyed the first exploratory probes. We’re working on a contingency plan should Wolff and her cohort follow through with the destruction or suppression of a second set of probe results.”