Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “I still don’t think they’d listen to me.”

  “They’ll listen to you before they’d listen to me. And an investigator could only find them. He couldn’t bring them home.”

  “I don’t know why you think I could.”

  Her father looked away, toward the fireplace. Neither of them spoke for a long time. But eventually he said, “You were closer to them than I was.” His gaze snapped back over to her. “You’ll of course have access to as much money as required to track them down, as well as any diplomatic contacts that may prove necessary if they left the system.”

  “I didn’t say I’d do it.” But even as Esme spoke, she knew she couldn’t say no. She was reeling from the idea that she and her sisters had been close—because they had, hadn’t they, all those years ago? Sitting in the gardens at Star’s End, eating formal dinners in the grand dining hall.

  But more than that, she couldn’t say no, because it was her father who asked her. He wasn’t just her father; he was her boss. She was the one sister who stayed behind, because at the core of it, she’d spent her entire life trying to please him in a way the others hadn’t. She’d done everything he’d ever told her to do. This request wasn’t any different.

  He knew it too. Maybe the promise of dying made him vulnerable, but it didn’t make him stupid.

  Esme toyed with her hair. It was already coming loose from of its bun. “How secret does this need to be?”

  “Treat it like a Ninety-Nine-level project.”

  Of course. She sighed. “Can I at least get help from Will? We’ve worked together on sensitive projects before, and he might be useful . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t want to talk about her sisters like they were clients.

  “Yes,” her father said. “I agree that Will might be a help in all this. With his connections.”

  They sat for a moment, and Esme considered her options. She could contact Daphne, no doubt still windfarming on Catequil. Daphne’d be the easiest to convince to come home. She was always the most easygoing, the most peaceable. And Esme needed to go to Catequil anyway as she followed the trail of security breaches across the Four Sisters.

  “I’d like you to keep me informed of your progress,” her father went on, although he was unfolding himself from the chair, a signal that the conversation—the meeting, because Esme knew damn well that’s what this was—was coming to a close. “Weekly reports, let’s say? And feel free to let me know if you uncover anything significant.”

  Esme murmured a note of acquiescence. Rubbed again at her aching head. Her father stood up.

  “Thank you, Esme,” he said, and he was staring down at her, and he meant it, he actually fucking meant it.

  “Why don’t you keep me informed,” she said, “of your progress, too.”

  His mouth tightened into a slash of disapproval. “Very well.”

  They stared at each other for a moment longer, and then her father left the parlor. Esme dropped her head against the chair and listened to his footsteps echo against the tile in the foyer, listened to the chime of the apartment as it called the elevator for him.

  After five minutes or so had passed, she asked, “Is he gone?”

  “Yes, Ms. Coromina,” the apartment answered.

  Esme stood up and stumbled out of the parlor into the big empty space she called the living room. Night had fallen and the room was lit with the pale electric lights she’d had installed last spring. But even they seemed too bright, and the air in the apartment was stifling and hot. She went out onto her balcony. The wind whipping off the ocean was damp and unseasonably cool, which was exactly what Esme wanted.

  She leaned against the railing, breathing in the scent of the sea. Lights twinkled down below, from the Coromina Group housing complex, from the village ringing around it. A few boats out on the water, bobbing like lanterns.

  It was cloudy, too cloudy for stars. But all three moons were visible. Catequil, cleaved in half. Amana, a sideways smile. Quilla, a sideways frown. Esme had visited all three. They were company moons. The Coromina Group, under the direction of Esme’s father, had terraformed them all, as well as Ekkeko, long before Esme was born, when her father was a young man through natural means and not artificial ones.

  And her father was where Coromina I got its name, of course, the big gas giant the color of fire. There wasn’t much of it tonight, only a sickle of burnished gold. Four satellites, four colonies. The Four Sisters, people called them. A name they’d been given before Phillip Coromina had four daughters.

  Esme had never thought that was a coincidence.

  TWENTY-SIX YEARS EARLIER

  When I was sixteen, my father called a family meeting. This was unprecedented; even after he’d married my stepmother, the first Isabel, I hadn’t thought he cared enough to do such a thing.

  It was raining that day, sheets of water pouring over the garden, and the curtains were pulled away from the windows so that gray light seeped in. I slunk into my father’s office with a sweater draped over my shoulders. Isabel was already there, Daphne sitting in her lap, Adrienne on a blanket at her feet. For the longest time, I could only tell the twins apart because Isabel always dressed Daphne in reds and oranges and Adrienne in blues and greens, but in the last few months, I realized I didn’t need the color-coding anymore. Daphne was the one always playing make-believe out in the yard. Adrienne was the serious one, always asking Why. The one destined for company work, the one that even at three years old made me nervous. It occurred to me that I had become used to the idea of having sisters, a fact I thought I’d always resent.

  It was a good thing, too, because Isabel was pregnant again. You could already see her belly curving beneath her clothing.

  I sat down in one of the big leather chairs and waited.

  Dad wasn’t there. Mr. Whittaker, his personal assistant, had materialized during my tutoring session to ask me to come to the office, and so I did. I wasn’t surprised that he was making us wait.

  Isabel giggled. When I glanced at her, she was smiling down at Daphne’s face, toying with the ends of Daphne’s black hair. She looked up at me. “Hello, Esme.”

  “Hi.”

  “How are your lessons going?”

  “Fine.”

  Our conversations were always like this: short and polite, the bare minimum of what was expected of us. Isabel was only ten years older than me. She was graceful and elegant, like an actress from an Amanan drama. She was nothing like me, and nothing like my real mother.

  “Phillip says he wants to see about getting you an internship in the fall.” As she spoke to me, she brushed her hand over the curve of Daphne’s head, a maternal gesture that always twinged the jealousy in me. “Has he told you that yet?”

  I nodded. “He said something about setting me up in accounting, since I like math, but I’m most interested in planet maintenance.”

  “PM!” Her eyes widened in surprise. “That’s an intriguing choice.”

  I shrugged. Planet Maintenance was the division of the Coromina Group that focused on the welfare of its citizen-employees—making sure that utilities were working, that cities and towns weren’t falling apart. To me it seemed the best way to help my friends Laila and Paco in the village from my place in the citadel that was the CG main campus. I didn’t want to tell Isabel all that, though.

  Daphne squealed and tugged on a lock of Isabel’s hair. Isabel laughed and tickled Daphne’s stomach, and I looked away, over at the rainwater sluicing over the glass. Lightning flickered shadows across the room. Thunder rumbled off in the distance. Isabel sighed like she was happy.

  An entire happy family, and me.

  The office door banged open and Dad bustled in, his hair damp and the tops of his shoulder glistening with raindrops. “God,” he muttered, dropping into his chair behind his desk. “I hate the rainy season.”

  Neither Isabel nor I said anything. A few seconds passed before Dad looked up at us, like he was just remembering we were in the room.

&
nbsp; “Oh good, you’re here,” he said.

  “We’ve never had a family meeting before,” Isabel said, gazing at him with her usual sweet expression. “What’s the occasion?”

  “A family meeting, I like that.” He laughed. He never laughed with me. “Although I’m afraid the occasion’s not too joyous.”

  “Is it about the flu?”

  Dad and Isabel both turned to me. I suppressed a smile, glad that I had ruined their banter.

  “That isn’t a flu,” Dad said.

  “Yeah, it’s worse.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Laila told me her friend’s third cousin caught it in Soxal, up north.”

  Dad didn’t answer.

  “She’s dead now,” I said, an unnecessary statement. If you caught the flu, you died. Thank God most people didn’t catch it. “It’s also popped up on Quilla.”

  Dad narrowed his eyes. “Where did you hear that?”

  I shrugged. Isabel shifted in her chair and gave a nervous little sigh, one hand stroking distractedly at Daphne’s hair. “Is that true, Philip?”

  Dad was still glaring at me. “Where did you hear that, Esme?”

  “Newsfeed.”

  “The Coromina Newsfeed has reported no such thing.”

  “Didn’t hear it there.”

  “Enough!” Isabel hugged Daphne to her chest a little more closely than she had before. “Is this why you called us here? To talk about the flu?” She fixed Dad with a surprisingly steely gaze. “You don’t have to listen to the illegal newsfeeds to know that there still isn’t a cure. Everyone’s been talking about it.”

  Dad glowered. “We’ve contracted out with Dobbin and Shook to help find a vaccine. You know that. The whole damn system knows that. But these things take time.”

  I sank back in my chair, arms crossed over my chest. Isabel fussed with Daphne, her expression dark. I’d spent enough time preparing for an internship with PM to know that the Coromina Group was responsible for the wellbeing of all the inhabitants of the Four Sisters. Every single citizen-employee, from the lowest to the highest. This was a responsibility, I’d learned over the last few years, that Dad frequently sent out to contractors.

  “Well, I hope they develop something soon,” Isabel said.

  Dad cleared his throat and tapped his fingers against the desk. “There’s no point in talking about the outbreak,” he said. “It’s a minor thing and it’ll clear up eventually.”

  My stomach knotted up. Liar. I had been listening to Galactic Media Standard, to Amana Free, all the illegal newsfeeds. They were saying that once the flu got a stronghold, it could wipe out an entire town. People weren’t even sure how it spread—not aerially, they knew that much, which meant it had to come from contact, from the exchange of human matter. Right now, the Ekkekon outbreaks were all far from here, up in the north, although they appeared in strange patterns. A cluster of deaths here, an isolated case five miles away in an old man who hadn’t traveled and didn’t receive visitors. And then there were the reports from Quilla—

  This was not a minor thing.

  Dad was staring at us, his fingers still rapping against the desk. Rain pinged against the windows, and the air had that steamed-up quality of the rainy season. We were all waiting for something. I knew what Isabel and I were waiting for, but I didn’t know about Dad.

  “If you’re not here to give us word about the flu,” Isabel said, one hand in Daphne’s hair, the other wound around Adrienne’s shoulder, “why did you call us into your office?”

  “I had something unrelated to tell you.” Dad leaned back in his chair. “I hired a military squad to stay with us for a while.”

  A stunned silence. The rain was like a metronome.

  “What?” said Isabel. “Why? My God, Phillip, this is about the flu. Don’t you dare lie to me.”

  “I told you, it’s not a flu.” Dad’s voice was sharp with anger. “And this isn’t about it either way. There are some security concerns—”

  “Security concerns?” Isabel grabbed hold of Adrienne’s hand, squeezing it tight.

  “Mommy!” cried Adrienne.

  “What sort of security concerns? I was thinking of inviting Marianne to stay sometime next month—will that be a problem?” Isabel’s eyes were wide with fear, her skin pale against the dark curve of her hair. She looked even more beautiful when she was scared. Some sort of evolutionary tactic, I supposed, so that you’d want to take care of her. I certainly hadn’t evolved that particular trait.

  “No, not at all. The concerns are nothing major. We had a bit of trouble with protestors in the last year.” He looked over at me. “You can thank those illegal newsfeeds for that. But really, dear, this is nothing. I’m just paranoid.” He smiled, and that was how I knew he was lying. Whatever this was, it wasn’t nothing.

  Isabel stared at him. Adrienne squirmed against her grip.

  “Which military?” I asked.

  Dad glanced at me. “Alvatech,” he said, before turning back to Isabel. “I just have our family’s safety in mind. I would be distraught if anything happened to the kids or to you.”

  His attempts at consolation washed over me. Alvatech. Not the military my mother worked for. When Dad had said military squad, my thought had gone immediately to her, and I’d felt a tiny flicker of hope that I knew was fruitless. And I was right.

  “They’ll arrive in three days,” Dad said, still speaking to Isabel. “You won’t even notice they’re here. They’ll be casing the perimeter of the estate, monitoring the roads. We aren’t concerned so much about the house itself.”

  “Then what are we concerned about?”

  It struck me as strange that he hadn’t told her. The way he’d gaze so adoringly at her when they were together, the fact that he came home for dinners more often than not these last four years, since they married, eloping in secret—I figured he told her everything. But right now, she was glaring at him, her shoulders trembling, spots of red decorating her pale cheeks.

  He sighed. “It’s a work matter, darling. I told you—”

  “It is the flu, isn’t it?” She smoothed down Daphne’s hair, her hands shaking. “Esme was right. It is the flu.”

  Dad shot me a furious look, which I met with the impassive gaze I’d learned from him.

  “It’s worse than the Coromina Newsfeed is saying, isn’t it? Has it spread offworld? You told me it was dying out in the north—”

  “And I wasn’t lying,” Dad snapped. “It is dying out. The squad has nothing to do with the outbreak—and I keep telling you, it’s not a flu.”

  “Everyone calls it a flu.”

  Dad scowled. “What does it matter? It’s almost eradicated. It nearly kills itself out after every outbreak. The squad has nothing to do with the outbreak—I’m bringing in the military because there’s been some minor concern about a security threat. Anti-corpocracy radicals. I doubt they would hurt you or the babies, but I want to make sure.”

  I noticed I wasn’t included in the safe list.

  Isabel’s hands stopped shaking. “Radicals,” she said.

  “Oh, you know, they pop in from the Murtro system from time to time, whenever they can get a ship captain to take them on the jump, and set up Connectivity centers and spread lies around—it’s nothing you need to worry about, dear.”

  “You keep saying that.” Isabel closed her eyes and pressed her mouth against the top of Adrienne’s head. “But if it were nothing to worry about, you wouldn’t have hired soldiers to come to our home.”

  She stood up. Dad didn’t say anything. I always took that as a sign that he truly loved her, the way he let her have the last word. He never did that with anyone else. Certainly not with me.

  She murmured down to Daphne, “Come along, sweetness, let’s go.” Daphne tottered up, then called out to Dad, “Bye, Daddy!” before following Isabel and Adrienne out of the room.

  The air sighed when she closed the door. Dad stared after her, fingers tapping against the desk. Tap tap tap. The sound of
his fingers blended in with the sound of the rain, and I started to slide out of my chair.

  “I suppose you have some questions too,” he said. I stopped, looked at him, slid back into place.

  “Not really.”

  He turned to me. He was made of stone now. His vulnerability, what little of it there was, only bubbled to the surface when he was with Isabel.

  “If anything happens to me,” he said, “you’ll be given a place on the board of directors. Mr. Ortega will serve as temporary CEO until you’re old enough to take control.”

  “Is something going to happen to you?”

  “Don’t be a smartass.” Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. I didn’t bother telling him I was genuinely curious. Genuinely concerned.

  “I finally got Isabel to have a gender test done. On the baby.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She kept insisting she wanted to be surprised. Ridiculous.” He shook his head. “Another daughter.”

  He exhaled when he said daughter, like the word had some unbearable weight to it. I looked down at my lap. I could have assumed that, this new baby being a girl. He wouldn’t have told me I’d take over if anything happened to him otherwise.

  We sat in silence. I was waiting for him to say something else, but he eventually just flicked his hand at me, gesturing toward the door. I left without saying goodbye.

  • • •

  After the meeting, I went up to my suite instead of back to tutoring. Mr. Garcia would come looking for me soon enough, but I wanted a few minutes alone. The rain fell harder now, pounding against my windows, so loud I could hardly think. I went into my closet and pulled down the little metal box I kept next to my shoes. I carried it over to my bed and sat down with it in my lap, and then I pressed my thumb against the lock. A tiny prickle passed through my skin as the lock tested my DNA, and then the box sprang open.

  My mother.

  The box was half-filled, mostly by the big, old-fashioned holocube my mother had given Dad when she left me at Star’s End. There was also a handful of datachips, all of which contained the transmissions she sent me, once every five or six months, about her adventures across the system. Adventures was my word, not hers—she was professional military, and she just called all of it her job.