Starglass (25 page)

Or at least I assume that’s what happened. I didn’t see it.

Instead I lay on the cedar planks on the floor of the clock tower, staring up into the rafters as Koen rang the bells. The sound sank deep into my body, reverberating in my rib cage, making my molars vibrate. It almost hurt. But at least I felt something.

Gone
, was all I thought.
My father is gone. I will never see my father again.

But the air here smelled fragrant with the memory of him. I could remember sick days spent in the tower when he showed me the gears and cogs, when I sat in his lap, burying my face in the heavy corduroy of his uniform. Back then, when our faces were lit up amber from the dials, we were happy. I wasn’t afraid of him yet. I never rolled my eyes or bit the inside of my cheeks to stop myself from complaining. No. Back then I thought my father was the smartest man on the whole ship.

But now he was gone. Gone, gone, gone.

Koen stopped ringing the bells. From the floor I watched as he plucked splinters of rope from his work-reddened palms. He was wearing his uniform.
Abba’s clothes
, I thought, the lump in my throat thickening. But they fit him all wrong. The coat was both too loose and too short. The cuffs hardly covered his long arms.

He walked to the face of the big clock and bent at the waist. I watched as he peered out of the translucent amber glass.

“They’re setting him in the ground now,” he said, and then he
turned his gaze to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to go say good-bye?”

I didn’t answer. I was sprawled there on the floor, my hands up near my head. When Koen put his palms on his knees, focusing his gaze on me, pressing for an answer, I only looked away.

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

I don’t know how long we stayed there, Koen leaning against the control panel, silent, and me on the floor. The words kept ringing through my mind, as sure as any bell.

Gone. Gone. My father is gone.

Finally I put my hands against the boards, felt the cold of the dusty wood beneath my fingers, and pushed myself up. When I stood, it was on uncertain feet. I staggered for a moment, put a hand to my head. My hair was a tangled mess beneath my hand, but I patted it down.

“Terra,” Koen said. He was watching me, afraid I was going to fall. “You can come to my house if you want. You know . . .” He hesitated. Something in his expression told me that he doubted himself. And when he spoke, I knew that he was right to. “I’d still have you as my wife. It’s . . . it’s what
he
wanted, isn’t it? To make sure you have someone to take care of you. I’ll take care of you.”

I stared at him. Once, I would have wanted nothing more than to hear those words, to know that Koen still wanted me to be a part of his life. But something had changed for me in the forest.

“Why?” I said at last. “Why are you so hung up on this marriage thing? You don’t even
want
me.”

He looked down at his trimmed nails, at the broad fingers that clutched at one another in front of his stomach. In a low tone he said, “I just want to be normal.”

My gut gave a lurch. It was too much for me then—the tears that racked the new clock keeper’s voice, the ones that seemed to tighten my own throat but still wouldn’t come. With a slow shake of my head, I staggered down the stairs. I took them one at a time, the rhythm plodding inside me.

Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

Koen followed. He kept his distance, but I could hear his feet on the steps behind me.

Gone. Gone.

We reached the open air. I sucked it in, letting the cold burn my lungs, letting the constant wind that cycled through the dome from fore to aft strike my face. I didn’t even bother to button my coat against it.

As we stepped into the pasture, I felt what must have been a thousand eyes turn to me. All those Asherati in their funerary whites. We were the only ones dressed in color. I was still in my work clothes. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to change. I wore my brown trousers, the hems torn around my heels, and one of Momma’s old unraveling
sweaters, which was a deep pine green. Koen was in his clock keeper’s clothes. Abba’s clothes.
Gone. Gone.
I guess we attracted attention. We stepped out across the field.

As I moved through the crowd, I kept my head high. People murmured their consolations, but I didn’t look at anyone long enough to know who spoke to me or what they said. I didn’t stop when they began to reach out, touching their hands to my shoulders. I walked right through them.

“Terra!”

Koen’s voice reached out to me from somewhere in the thick of the crowd. He must have gotten lost in it. He must have lost me. I didn’t stop. People put their hands on my shoulders, my arms.

It was Captain Wolff who halted my progress across the field.

One moment I was marching forward. The next, the woman was in front of me, her silver hair sparkling in the artificial moonlight.

“Terra,” she said, gripping my hands in her hands. Inside I recoiled. I wanted to pull away, to snatch my hands back. But instead they just lay limply in her grasp. “The Council would like to extend to you their deepest apologies at the losses you’ve faced. Please feel free to come to me if you need anything.”

I tried to imagine it—pounding on Captain Wolff’s door in the middle of the night, crying on her shoulder as if she were my mother. Giving her every opportunity to plunge a knife into my
back. I managed only a coarse syllable in answer—“Yeh”—and drew my hands away. Balling them into fists, as if the warm touch of my own palms would obliterate the sensation of Captain Wolff’s fingers, I stumbled away, looking only once over my shoulder to the crowd that watched me.

That’s when I spotted Silvan. He was standing off to the side, alone again, unguarded. With his arms crossed over his broad, white-clad chest, he gazed out into the foggy evening. Then he turned and looked over his shoulder at me. He squinted at me like he was trying to figure me out.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets again and hustled away.

My brother and Hannah managed to find me before I reached the pasture gate. Hannah clutched the baby to her chest. Even Alyana was dressed in white—a long gown of eyelet lace that looked clean against her peachy skin. Ronen grabbed me by the shoulder. I was surprised by the lines that deepened his features. Though he was barely twenty, he looked so old. And very much like my father.

Who is gone. Gone.

“You’re coming to our quarters, aren’t you?” His lips were pursed, worried. He still couldn’t bring himself to tell me what to do. Which meant that I didn’t have to agree to it, right? So I didn’t. I walked off through the field, my boots sinking into the mud.

O
ur quarters looked the same. The same doorjamb where Momma had marked our heights with a pencil. The same familiar galley counters, where she’d kneaded dough while Abba cooked. The table where Ronen and I had fought—where he’d brandished a fork at me and I’d stuck out my tongue—until Abba had slammed his hands down and bellowed, “Enough!” In those days it hadn’t been scary. Not with Momma there. When she rolled her eyes, we all just giggled. Abba gave her a withering
look. Until his expression lost its icy edge and he smiled too.

It wasn’t the same place, not anymore. It no longer had the same heart. The people I loved were gone, and they’d taken my home with them.

I went to my room. There was a basket under my bed where I kept my old school papers, notes from Rachel, a certificate I’d gotten when I was seven, for the highest marks in math, the only school honor I’d ever received. I dumped them all onto my blankets and then, working in silence, began to fill the woven container again.

I took my pencils, of course. And my sketchbook. My work uniforms. The few sweaters that still fit me. Momma’s dress. And then I peeled the case from one of my pillows and got down on my hands and knees. Pepper was hunched up beneath the bed, his shoulders big and craggy, tensed in anticipation of my grasp.

“Come on,” I said. The sound of my voice against the empty walls seemed to startle him. Pepper flinched, his tail arching up, and scrambled along the wall. I let out a sigh. Fetching Pepper would have to wait. Instead I slipped my hand between the mattress and rusted bed frame and pulled out the journal.

My father had been looking for it just this morning. When he was alive. Now he was gone, and all that was left was the stupid book and the lie I’d told about not taking it.

Black thoughts. My mind was flooded with black thoughts. They
blotted out everything else like clouds of ink spreading across damp paper. I don’t remember falling to the ground, setting my head on the cold floor, and crying into my hair. But it must have happened. Because later, much later, I picked myself up, my face a snot-slick mess, dirty-blond tendrils sticking to my cheeks and my lips.

I put the book in my basket. And I reached under the bed and grabbed my cat, ignoring the way his claws flexed as I stuffed him down into the pillowcase. I tied it closed behind him. Then I gathered my things and left the only home I’d ever known.

•  •  •

It was nearly dawn. The streets were dark and cold but not quite empty. Mar Schneider, dressed as he always was in a woolen tunic and a dusty tweed cap, sat on his front steps.

He must have seen me, how my tears shone in the streetlights, how my hair was a tangled knot. Because I saw him. I braced myself, waiting for his apology. “So sorry about your father,” that sort of thing. But none came. He only touched two of his wrinkled fingers to his heart, saluting me. Then he turned away.

I walked briskly. Not forward, to where Rachel and her parents lived in a bright home full of fashionable wall hangings and warm conversation. Not to the starboard district, where Koen and his parents fought over their galley table. Or aft, where Ronen and Hannah were probably pacing while Alyana screamed and screamed. No, instead I
walked down the straight, narrow roads of my own district, the port district, the place where the specialists and teachers and librarians and lab workers lived. My feet found the path easily, though I hadn’t ever visited the quarters of this particular specialist before.

I’d forgotten my gloves. When I pounded the heel of my hand against the door, the cold metal bit at my skin. Pepper let out a meow through the fabric of his pillowcase. But no one answered us. I knocked again, and this time I didn’t stop at three. I pounded and pounded and pounded, until at last the door swung open.

In the dim light from the streetlamp, dressed in her pajamas and a too-big robe that had to be her husband’s, Mara Stone’s face seemed to be carved out of concrete. Her skin was gray and pebbled from lack of sleep. She just stood there, blinking at me.

I opened my mouth, drew in a breath, and readied myself for my own sob story: I was alone now. I had nowhere else to go, not really, not anywhere with anyone who understood.

“I need—” was all I managed. Mara held up a hand. She spared me that, simply motioning for me to come inside.

Then she closed the door behind me.

Autumn, 464 YTL

Dearest Terra,

We weren’t alone in our nostalgia, your father and me. By the time you were a child, I noticed how the ship’s passengers had begun to pepper their speech with snippets of Yiddish and Hebrew—the language of our parents and their parents before them. It was a comfort to recall our baby names and the songs our grandmothers had sung to us. Our nostalgia tied us more firmly to Earth than any decree ever could. Even I found myself guilty of this, singing as I combed the snarls from your hair: “Shaina, shaina maideleh.”

The Council would tell you that this was natural and right—the perfect execution of the contract we had signed. We were preserving our culture, saving these ancient tongues from certain death.

But I wonder if we shouldn’t have been more vigilant, if we shouldn’t have kept our minds on the future and our words circumspect. The past is a distraction—the Earth we left behind, kaput. All we have now is the present and the bleak, endless journey ahead.

Early winter, 462 YTL

My Terra,

Perhaps the world within these walls won’t kill you like it does me.

On Earth, even before we knew of the asteroid’s approach, there were several closed biomes. The TeraDome. The Arcosphere. BIOS-6. Experiments, populated with earnest students who were certain that their contributions would someday have a tremendous impact on the world at large.

Little did they know that the world at large would soon no longer exist.

I was asked to join one of these communities when I was in college. The ArcLab II. They needed psychologists—the first ArcLab project dissolved because of discord among its inhabitants—and offered me a scholarship in exchange for my services. I accepted, but then a few weeks later I met Annie. I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the idea of being apart from her for eight months. I thought that I had abandoned life under a dome forever.

Will you laugh when, grown, you read of that? Clearly, we both know better now.

Perhaps if I had lived in the ArcLab II, I would have never boarded our ship. I would have known the claustrophobia that presses
down on me whenever I let my gaze drift up above the treetops, the way that I have to swallow the water quickly here before I can think of how many times it’s been recycled, the way that even the air smells overused—stale. But I knew none of these things until we launched, and by then it was too late.

I’ll be honest: There were times when I wanted nothing more than to hijack a shuttle, to trade this small space for another even smaller space. Times when I wanted to throw myself out of an air lock and go swimming in the airless stars.

But I had you to worry about—my child. And your brother, too. Perhaps that’s why the Council demanded that we all be parents. Perhaps they knew how our children would tether us to this place.