Starglass (2 page)

But I always thought it made her look creepy.

As she turned toward us I focused on her eyes—drops of pitch-black ink. Her gaze willed me to do what I had to do. I pressed my fingers to my heart.

“Honored citizens. I come to you on behalf of the High Council to lead you in your mourning duties,” she began. I noted how she spoke
of
our
mourning duties, not her own. Her words always excluded her from the rest of us. “Today you bid farewell to your cherished sister, Alyana Fineberg, spouse of Arran Fineberg, mother of Ronen and little Terra.”

My jaw tightened. I was twelve, but I no longer thought of myself as a child.

“Alyana was a baker, but her loving smile warmed your spirits just as much as her work warmed your bellies. She was, indeed, a true Asherati.”

Captain Wolff paused as she surveyed the people spread out across the field before her. It looked like she expected someone to disagree. My eyes darted out to the citizens gathered in the pasture.

Most of the mourners were solemn as they waited for Captain Wolff to go on. But to my surprise a few men and women wore faces as pale as their clothing. Their eyes were wide. Their lips trembled. They were afraid of Captain Wolff.

At least I wasn’t the only one.

No one spoke. Satisfied with our silence, Captain Wolff lifted her hands through the air. “Now let us sing the kaddish,” she said, and began to croon. Her old voice warbled.

Numb, I sang along, moving through the verses by rote. “On our hallowed ship or on Zehava,” I sang, hardly feeling the words. “May there come abundant peace, grace, loving kindness, compassion. . . .”

A few verses later it was all done. Captain Wolff was the first to step forward. She bent low and took a fistful of black dirt in her delicate hand. Against the spotless cloth that waited, she cast it down. Then, wiping her palm on a rag that one of her guard members provided, she turned and was gone.

We all watched her disappear. At the far edges of the field, sheep bleated. Finally, at last, Rachel came forward, her family trailing after—her curvy, beautiful mother; her handsome father; her younger brother tottering behind. Rachel pressed her lips into a thin smile. Then she bent down and tossed another fistful of dirt into the grave. Three more handfuls followed. Then dozens more.

Every family stepped forward together to throw their own dirt down over my mother’s body. Each family had a mother, a father, a daughter, a son. When it was at last our turn, I couldn’t help but notice how only three clumps of dirt were cast down. For the first time I realized how we were different. Broken. I stood there for a long time, waiting for the fourth handful of dirt to fall, until Ronen touched my shoulder and told me it was time to go.

•  •  •

That night they invaded our quarters. I’d never seen our home so full of people before. Busy and crowded, it felt completely alien. Pepper seemed to agree with me. He ducked behind the bath basin, crouched down beneath the tangle of pipes, and refused to come out.

I couldn’t hide. It was my job to take the kugels and pies and tuck them away into our icebox. But I decided that I didn’t have to be nice about it. I pushed out my lower lip, sulked and stomped. I knew my father’s eyes were on me as I snatched a tray of salted meats from Giveret Schneider’s hands. But Abba wasn’t the one who had to rearrange all the shelves in the icebox to make room.

I wanted them all to leave us alone, but they wouldn’t. They mingled and joked and then grew silent again, as if they suddenly remembered why they were there. I glared at them from my place in the corner. I watched as Abba’s family crowded around him, ignoring me. It had been years since we’d seen them last, not since Grandpa Fineberg had twisted Ronen’s arm as a punishment for feeding their dog table scraps. Momma had refused to visit them after that, but now that she was gone, they had no reason to stay away.

Ronen sat on the stairwell, making out with Hannah Meyer. Since they’d turned sixteen, she’d been hanging around more and more. Her parents had come too, and though they weren’t wearing their gold-threaded cords, you could tell that they were Council members. It was the way her father held himself, posture stiff and proud. Abba saw it too. When they came in, he practically fell over himself trying to shake the man’s hand. Momma would have laughed at that. I could almost hear her voice in my ears.

Arran, you’re such a suck-up.

But there was one visitor he ignored. Mar Jacobi, the librarian. He was a small, copper-skinned man, serious-looking, and he wandered in through the front door holding a tin in his hand and looking lost.

“I’ll take that,” I said, scrambling up from my chair when I realized no one else would. The corners of his eyes went all crinkly. He bowed his head.

“Thank you, Terra,” he said. I tensed at his words. Before that day, we’d only ever spoken at the library’s checkout counter. And even then our words had been polite—perfunctory. “Hello,” and “This is when they’re due,” and all of that. But now he held out the tin for me. “I brought you macaroons. Chocolate. Alyana told me they were your favorite.”

“I didn’t realize you knew Momma,” I said, taking the tin from him. The metal box had been recycled many times, rust ringing the edges. The glue seemed hardly strong enough to hold the label down. I tugged on one of the loose ends of the paper, lifting wary eyes to the librarian. His smile was small, strained.

“I certainly did.”

But it didn’t make sense. He didn’t fit into our tiny galley, packed with familiar mourners. He floated around alone while Momma’s bakery coworkers drank all the wine they’d brought for Abba, and while Rachel came in and sat with me, holding my hand and gossiping about the other girls from school. Mar Jacobi stood there with a
plate in his hands, stirring the food around and not eating anything. And then, when people began to leave, yawning their apologies once again, the librarian stayed, sitting across from us at our galley table.

“I don’t know why they keep saying they’re sorry,” I said to him at last, eager to plug up the silence that had begun to fill our home. “It’s not like it’s their fault Momma died.”

The librarian lifted the corners of his mouth, quietly amused. But Abba didn’t find it funny.

“Terra,” he said. “It’s time for you to go up to bed.”

“Ronen gets to stay up!”

My brother had slipped out with Hannah, his arm draped over her shoulders. But Abba wasn’t hearing any of it. He only shook his head. “Your brother is sixteen, a man. He can stay up as late as he wants. You’re still a child.”

Mar Jacobi’s eyebrows were knitted up, but he didn’t argue with Abba. I pushed my chair away from the table, huffing.

“Momma would let me . . .,” I started. Hearing my father’s silence answer me, I winced.

“Sorry,” I muttered. My father’s hard gaze softened. Still, he urged me toward the stairwell with a tilt of his chin.

“Bed, Terra,” he said.

I pulled myself up the stairs. When I reached the dark second story, I stopped, my hand curled around the banister. It felt like I had broken
some sort of sacred rule, reminding Abba that Momma was gone.

Gone
, I said to myself.
Gone.
And then I began to wonder whether she felt anything now that she was dead. Maybe she just stared into the empty darkness of the atrium, a darkness not so different from the one that waited for me in my windowless bedroom.

I shuddered at the thought of it—an endless black so dark that sometimes you couldn’t even tell if your eyes were open or closed. Meanwhile the warm light of our galley flooded the metal wall along the stairwell. I couldn’t bring myself to face the darkness. I sat down at the top of the stairs, holding my head in my hands. Pepper crept out of the bathroom to curl up at my side. I tucked my hand against his soft belly, listening to the men talk.

“She’s a good girl,” Mar Jacobi said. I sat forward at the words, desperate to hear what they were saying about me. “There’s much of her mother in her.”

My dad let out a snort of disagreement. “Alyana wasn’t so good.”

“No?”

“No, not good. Kind. But you knew that.” Another pause. When my father’s voice came again, it was garbled. He wasn’t crying. But he was closer than I’d ever heard him. “She was mine.”

“I’m so sorry, Arran.”

My father kept talking as if the librarian hadn’t said a word. “All these years of mitzvot, all these years of working up in that clock
tower alone, doing my duty. I’m a good man, Benjamin. But what has it brought me?”

“You’ll reach Zehava. Only four more years. Then we’ll be rid of this ship.”

“I’ll be alone.” My father’s tone wasn’t wistful or sad. He said it like it was a simple fact, like there would be no arguing with him. I knew that tone all too well, even at twelve. “Alone, Benjamin. Alone.”

“You have your children. Your daughter. Your son.”

Another snort. “Ronen’s all but ready to declare his intentions to the cartographer girl. He won’t be living with me for more than a season. If it weren’t for Terra, I’d . . .”

“Arran.” There was a warning in Mar Jacobi’s voice. “You’ll take care of your daughter until she’s grown. You’ll do your duty so that she can join you on Zehava. It’s what our forefathers wanted. What
Alyana
wanted. It’s why you’re here.”

Chair legs squealed against the scuffed metal floor. I tensed, afraid that my father was coming close. But his voice went to the far end of the galley instead.

“A burden,” my father said. “That’s what she is. Trouble. Like her mother.”

My stomach lurched. I bent forward, pressing my face to my knees, and squeezed my eyes shut. I could see stars against my eyelids, but they didn’t distract me from the pain that I felt.

I heard the slosh of liquid then as my father spilled wine into a cup. There was a long pause, then a crash as he slammed his tumbler back down on the countertop. He filled it again.

When he spoke at last, his voice had hardened. “Leave me, librarian,” he said. “Leave me to my grief.”

I didn’t wait to hear Mar Jacobi’s reply. I knew that my father would soon come stomping up the stairs. He was going to slam his bedroom door, blocking out the world. And I didn’t intend to get in his way. I knew what would happen if he found me here, still awake. There would be yelling, and lots of it.

So I picked up Pepper, clutched him to my chest, and retreated to my room. When I stepped inside, I pressed the door closed behind me. I stood there for a moment, still as stone, waiting to hear my heart beat out its rhythm in the dark, a reminder, however small, that on the night my mother died, I still lived.

I
leaned my weight against a maple bough and watched as the ceiling panels overhead went dark.

I was on the second deck. Up on the main deck, beneath the dome’s glass ceiling, I would have been able to see the stars as the artificial lights dimmed. But here, between the forests and the grain storage, there were no stars. The squares of sky were turning purple and would soon go utterly black. I’d have to stumble blindly through the forests to make my way to the lift and then home. That was all
right with me, though. I’d never been afraid of the dark.

I sat with one leg on either side of a knotty branch, balancing my sketchbook between my knees. I had to make quick work with my pencils to capture what stretched out before me, the shape of the branches that crowded the second-deck walkways and the vines that shadowed the path. Below, people hurried along on their way home from the labs. They wore white coats that glowed in the twilight. They were scientists—specialists like my father, wearing blue cords on their shoulders and grim expressions. I knew I had little time to spare.

Momma had given me the pencils years ago. I hadn’t cared much for them at first, but lately they’d become a comfort. On nights that were too dark and too awful, I’d draw, letting my mind go blank and my hands do the thinking for me. Usually it soothed me. But not on this night.

I penciled in another tree, crosshatching the shadows that now grew short in the twilight. As I cocked my head to the side, considering the way the branches bent in the wind, I tried not to think about what was waiting for me in the morning. My job assignment. My real life. The end of school and free time to spend whittling down my evenings in the forest. I was nearly sixteen, and it was time to be serious, as my father always reminded me. At the thought of his deep voice, I clutched my pencil harder, overlaying violet in dark strokes across the top of the page.

Perhaps I’d gripped the pencil a little
too
hard. It snapped in two in my fist, and I watched as the pointed end fell through the branches. With a sigh I tucked the other half behind my ear and then began the long climb down. I gripped the boughs in my hand, swinging my weight. It felt awkward, but then I always felt awkward lately, all knees and elbows since I’d had my last growth spurt. Abba hadn’t been happy about that. Such a waste of gelt to buy me clothes I’d surely outgrow
again
.

The pencil was nestled in a crook in a lower branch. I crouched low, steadying my back against the trunk. That’s when something in the gnarled bark caught my eye.

Words. Words carved in deep and then healed over. That alone wasn’t unusual—what tree in the atrium
didn’t
bear the initials of some young couple who had declared their love hundreds of years before? But these words were different. There wasn’t any heart looping around them. No arrow sliced through either. They were a little hard to make out in the fading daylight, but I ran my fingers over the rough bark, reading them with my fingertips.

Liberty on Earth. Liberty on Zehava.

I frowned. We were only months away from reaching the winter planet. The Council had been preparing us in their usual, regimented way. This year they’d said there would be more specialists among the graduating class. More biologists to wake burden beasts from cold
storage. More cartographers, like my sister-in-law, Hannah, who would draw maps and find us a suitable place to live. More shuttle pilots too, to rouse the rusty vehicles that waited in the shuttle bay. The other girls whispered that it didn’t matter what the results were on our aptitude exams. It didn’t matter if we studied, or flirted with the counselors. The Council would make good use of us in preparation for landing, whether we liked it or not.