Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  But Dad wasn’t at dinner.

  Isabel was upset about it. After the staff brought in the first course, she called Mr. Whittaker into the dining room where we were all sitting around the table with bowls of cold fish soup.

  “Will Philip be joining us this evening?” she said in a flat voice.

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. May Coromina. Something came up at the office.”

  Her face tightened, as if her emotions were trying to escape. “I see,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He scurried out of the room in his little weaselly way, and we ate the rest of our dinner in silence, the only sounds the clink of spoons against porcelain and the twins slopping their food. I didn’t tell Isabel that before they’d gotten married, he’d never eaten dinner with me, that the dining room had gone unused. No family meals, no evening dinner parties. It was her presence that had drawn him to the table. Her presence wasn’t enough anymore.

  My good mood slowly evaporated. Something heavy hung on the air.

  “It’s the flu,” Isabel murmured to herself, stirring her soup around without taking a bite. She wasn’t talking to me; I didn’t think she was talking to anyone. The twins whispered together and looked over at her, their eyes wide. Isabel dropped her spoon with a clatter and leaned back in her chair. Her belly arced in front of her. She had to be due soon. Another girl. I didn’t even know if she and Dad had thought of a name.

  That night, I lay awake and didn’t think about my mother at all. I thought about Isabel stirring her soup, muttering about the flu. I knew the symptoms. We all did, even if we didn’t talk about them. A high fever. And then, an hour later: sweat. Sweat pouring out of your skin, an ocean of your own liquid. And then blood seeped from your orifices, and then you died. It happened fast. Two or three days. If you were sick, though, I imagined that wasn’t fast enough.

  The official newsfeed had stopped talking about the flu a couple of weeks before. It had moved onto a war in the Uskroba system, some corporate showdown of the sort that happened every few decades, the kind of thing Mr. Garcia said was necessary for a healthy corporate ecosystem. Like forest fires, or predators eating their way through an overpopulated wilderness. Like a virus.

  The underground newsfeeds hadn’t gone silent on it, although they didn’t have much information, only the bits and pieces they could steal from the Coromina Group: there were reports of an outbreak on Catequil, a riot on Quilla. But no one knew for sure, and I had let myself think it was dying out, which was naive of me. I should have known that the flu wasn’t gone. It had only been covered up. Contained. Locked away even from the Connectivity Underground, the Galactic Media Standard.

  We had talked about the importance of information containment in tutoring.

  I fell into an uneasy sleep. Maybe I dreamed about my mother, but I didn’t remember it. I woke up feeling scratchy and disoriented. The sunlight in the window was too bright. I rubbed at my eyes. Maybe I’d see Dad today; maybe I’d ask him about my mother. But probably not.

  I dressed and went down for breakfast, like I always did. But this morning was different. The dining room was empty, the lights switched off. The table hadn’t even been set.

  Standing alone in that dark room, still blurry with sleep, I thought backward through my trip from my bedroom to the dining room. Hardly any staff in the hallways, even though morning was when they did most of the cleaning. In fact, the only staff I had seen were Jean and Astrid. They had been huddled together in the corner, speaking in hushed whispers. They glanced at me over their shoulders and went quiet.

  I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. But now the pieces were fitting into place. The scarce staff. The empty dining room.

  Isabel.

  She was always down here at breakfast, sitting with the twins and Rena, projecting the newsfeeds over her meal.

  Something was wrong with Isabel.

  Miscarriage. I left the dining room and rushed up to her suite on the second floor. I expected to see Dr. Tristany, the obstetrician Dad had hired, or at the very least Mr. Hankiao, the nurse. But the hallway was empty.

  I knocked gently on her door and called out her name.

  Silence.

  I knocked again, harder, and this time, the door opened. Isabel stood in the doorway, her eyes red and puffy.

  “Esme?” She blinked at me like she couldn’t remember where she knew me from.

  I stared at the curve of her belly beneath her dress. My heart pounded. It wasn’t her pregnancy.

  “Oh, Esme,” she said. She rushed forward and wrapped me in a hug, something she hadn’t done since we first met.

  “What’s going on?” I asked into the sweet-smelling silk of her hair. Even though I knew. Dad working late, the empty hallways, the empty dining room, the empty newsfeeds.

  “No one told you?” She pulled away, her hands on my shoulders. “My God, I asked Rena to wake you this morning.” She pulled away, one hand to her forehead. In the next room, one of the twins started to cry. “They can sense it. Everyone’s afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” My voice tremored.

  “The flu,” Isabel said flatly.

  For a moment, the room went white. I could hear the blood pounding in my head.

  “The flu?” I whispered.

  “In Undirra City.” Isabel disappeared into the next room, leaving me standing in her sitting room, shockwaves of horror rippling through my bloodstream. Undirra City. Forty-five minutes by car. Twenty by air shuttle.

  Isabel reappeared, a weeping Daphne clutching her hand. Adrienne followed behind, her eyes wide and solemn and fearful.

  “When?” I said.

  “Last night.” Isabel knelt beside Daphne and enveloped her and Adrienne in a desperate hug. “My baby girls,” she said softly, brushing Adrienne’s hair away from her face.

  “What’s going on, Mommy?” asked Adrienne.

  “I told you, sweetheart; it’s a grownup emergency.” Isabel kissed Adrienne on the forehead. Then she squeezed Daphne again and murmured something into her ear that I couldn’t hear. I trembled in place, my thoughts brimming with panic. I wondered how long until the flu came to the village.

  “Run back into the bedroom,” Isabel said to the twins. “I need to speak with your sister. You don’t need to worry, my dears.”

  They looked at each other. Adrienne seemed doubtful, but she took Daphne’s hand. “C’mon,” she said, and led her into the next room. Isabel watched them go for a moment, and then stood up and turned toward me. My heart pounded.

  “Word came while I was sleeping,” she said in a flat voice. “Star’s End has been put on quarantine. No one enters, no one leaves.”

  “Dad—” I choked out.

  “He’s here. He’s the one who brought word. I think this is why he hired those soldiers. He knew it would happen eventually. He denies it, but—” Her expression turned hard, like diamonds.

  Hot sunlight poured through her windows, but I was cold. Isabel turned away from me, toward the sound of the twin’s voices spilling out of the next room. Bits of dust floated in the sunbeams and swirled around her like stars.

  I stumbled out into the hallway. I felt heavy, and breathing was too hard. The staff were nowhere to be seen. No one was mopping the floors or brushing out the curtains. Star’s End was abandoned.

  Part of me wanted to go up to Dad’s office and demand to know everything, demand to know how he could look at us in the eye and claim the soldiers weren’t there because of the flu, demand to know how he would act now that the flu was creeping in on our home. Instead, I went to my suite.

  As I rushed down the hallways, everything about the estate was quiet and slow and empty, a sharp contrast to the rhythm of panic playing inside my chest.

  I burst into my room and stood in the doorway, hands braced against the frame. Rena was perched on the sofa in the sitting room, staring out the window. Her eyes were red, too.

  I stopped in the doorway. “Rena?”

  She turned to m
e. “I was supposed to wake you up, but you were already gone.” She took a deep breath. “Did you hear about the quarantine?”

  I nodded and sat down beside her. I was glad she was here, even if I kept telling myself I was too old for a nanny. She was, after all, the closest I had to a mother. I pressed closer to her, grateful I didn’t have to be alone.

  My window looked out over the pineapple garden. Right now, it was empty too. In the distance, one of the soldiers cut across the lawn. He held his light rifle in both hands. It wasn’t strapped to his back the way the rifles had been before.

  “All this time and we never heard anything,” Rena said in a hollow voice. “And then suddenly—” She snapped her fingers. “It’s at our back door.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. Then I slid off the sofa and grabbed my lightbox from the next room. Brought up the official newsfeeds. They were talking about yet another skirmish in the Uskroba system, forty-five thousand light-years and five jumps away.

  “They aren’t saying anything.” Rena knocked the tablet out of my hands and it hit the sofa cushions, the speaker still going on about the skirmish. I switched it off, too stunned by Rena’s outburst to do anything more.

  “We thought it was over, because the newsfeeds weren’t talking about it,” Rena said. “But it wasn’t.” She looked at me and her expression was angry and afraid and I remembered with a sharp jolt that her sister Ella lived in Undirra City, that they spoke once a week or so over Connectivity.

  “Your sister,” I said. “Oh God, Rena—” I picked up my lightbox. “Let me check the underground feeds. Paco showed me—”

  “They don’t know shit, either,” snapped Rena. I jumped; I wasn’t used to her lashing out at me. But then she shook her head, pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just—those underground feeds—the Coromina Group knows how to keep them out of the loop when they need to.”

  Her words stunned me, but I understood then that I should have made the connection a long time ago. I’d been learning the Coromina Group strategies, but I thought the Underground was omnipotent in a way the company wasn’t.

  Rena turned toward the window. Beyond the glass, the pineapple garden looked like a painting.

  “Ten people are dead in Undirra City already,” she went on. “Ella knew. But she didn’t say anything. And you know why?”

  I shook my head. My heart pounded.

  “The Coromina Group has that much control on this planet. They silence not only an entire city but an entire continent. They couldn’t contain the flu, so they just forced everyone to stop talking about it.” Her mouth twisted. “Thank your father for that. My sister’s probably going to die.”

  “Rena—” I put my hand on her arm. She looked at me and I expected to see rage in her expression but she only looked sad.

  “He wants you to be like him,” she said.

  I knew this wasn’t meant to be a good thing.

  “Don’t look so worried,” she went on. “He’ll make sure you’ll survive. Isabel’s carrying a girl, so you’re still the heir. The rest of us, though—” She shrugged.

  “I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure your sister will be fine.”

  Rena laughed. “Guess he hasn’t quite gotten to you. But you’re young yet. This sort of thing is inevitable.”

  I didn’t really know what she was talking about. Inevitable that I’d someday be like Dad? It frightened me that she was going on about my future when the flu was creeping over the southern part of the continent, heading toward the village, heading toward the estate.

  Rena stood up. Her eyes were flat. Dead, I thought, like the flu had already gotten her.

  “Remember this conversation,” she said, and then she left.

  • • •

  For a long time after my conversation with Rena, I sat in silence. A quarantine. Star’s End locked away. Star’s End. It hadn’t registered in my mind until now. Only Star’s End was under quarantine. The village wasn’t.

  And then I thought: Laila.

  I darted over to my couch and picked up my lightbox and switched on the projector. Dusty blue light bolted into the sunlight scattering through the windows. My heart pounded. I watched my lightbox trying to connect with hers. Please be okay, I thought.

  And then her face appeared, blurred and transparent on the holo.

  “Laila!” I cried. “Thank God. Are you okay? I was afraid—”

  “Esme! You’ve heard, haven’t you?” Her eyes were sunk deep into her skull and her hair hung lank around her face. “They cancelled school this morning. Last night, these CG guys were coming around taking everyone’s temperature.” She slumped back and the holo blurred for a moment. “I’ve been up since three.”

  “You’re okay, though, right?”

  She nodded. “Just sleepy. None of us had a fever.”

  I thought about her family, all her rambunctious brothers and her lovely brown-skinned mother and their house that always smelled of jasmine. They were safe.

  “And Paco?” I said. “Have you talked to him yet?”

  “He’s fine. He’s already met up with some of the others, to see about getting in food and medicine in case we go into quarantine—”

  Her voice wavered and her eyes flicked away from the holo and that was when I knew, that she knew about Star’s End’s own quarantine. That I was locked away and she was still out in the open.

  “I’ve been listening to the newsfeeds,” she said. “All night. I couldn’t sleep. But even Connectivity Underground has been talking about Uskroba.” She sighed, a sound like static. I thought of what Rena had told me, about how even the underground feeds were under the company’s control. I didn’t say that to Laila, though. I couldn’t.

  “There’s a rumor,” Laila said, and her voice sounded dry and strained. I frowned at her. “That Undirra City is in quarantine. They’re saying—” She hesitated. “They’re saying that Alvatech soldiers are shooting anyone who breaks quarantine.”

  The air slammed out of me.

  “It’s just talk,” Laila said quickly, moving close to the holo. “I’m sure it’s just talk.”

  I nodded. “Just talk,” I whispered, but part of me knew better. Dad controlled the planet. He gave orders to any militaries brought in to maintain order.

  “I mean, I heard that from Pepe,” Laila went on. “You know how he is. It’s probably not even true. He doesn’t exactly have a direct line to the Coromina Group offices.”

  “Right,” I said, and I tried to smile. Laila gave me a ghost of a grin. I knew neither of us felt like smiling.

  “Is anybody sick in the village?” I asked, to change the subject.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The soldiers are still here, but they’re letting people leave. I figure that means no one’s been sick.”

  I nodded.

  A shout erupted from Laila’s holo—her brother Leo, the youngest one. He climbed into her lap, his long dark hair hanging in his eyes. He squinted at the recorder. Squinting, I knew, at me.

  “Mama needs you,” he said, still talking into the recorder.

  I jolted, thinking, I don’t have a mother.

  “Yeah, I know.” Laila slid him off her lap. “Listen, I got to go help with the laundry, okay? Mom’s been washing all the sheets in the house.”

  “That’s fine.” I felt jittery. “Do you think I’ll be able to get ahold of Paco?”

  “Maybe.” Laila fussed with Leo, who had disappeared into the blurry edges of the holo. “He definitely won’t be diving today, and I’m sure he’ll want to hear from you.”

  She looked up at me, dark smudges around her eyes. I wished we weren’t talking on a holo, wished I could reach out and pull into her a hug and tell her it was going to be okay, that the Coromina Group cared for its citizens, that none of us had to die.

  “Be careful,” she said. Then she switched off her recorder, and I was alone.

  • • •

&nbs
p; For lunch, Mrs. Davesa didn’t bother with a proper meal and instead laid out cold cuts and slices of bread in the kitchen. I fixed a plate to try to distract myself. I hadn’t been able to get ahold of Paco, but if he was working with the underground, that made sense. At least, that was what I told myself.

  I ate in my room, sitting beside the window and picking at my food. The day was still as bright and clear as it had been that morning. The idea of the flu almost seemed nonsensical.

  Someone knocked on the door of my room, jarring me out of my skin. “Come in,” I said, and the door swung open. It was Isabel. She looked pale and worried, dark circles ringing around her eyes.

  “I wanted to see if you’d like to go outside,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’ll be good for the baby.” She smiled a little. “It’s such a lovely day, and she ought to soak in the sunlight through my skin.”

  “But the flu,” I said.

  “The flu doesn’t spread on the air.” She didn’t look at me. “And it does us no good to be cooped up inside.”

  I stared at her for a moment. The sunlight pouring in through my window was hot against my back. And then I nodded. “Sure.”

  It felt strange going outside. Dangerous. The staff had set out chairs for us on the lawn, and we faced the plumeria maze, a wind blowing in off the sea.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Isabel’s voice was taut, crackling with electricity. She rested her hand protectively on her stomach. “Such a wonderful day.”

  “Sure.” The maze was blooming, clusters of pink and white flowers letting off scent. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that the air seemed poison to me, choked with viruses that would kill us all.

  “Phillip says this should all be cleared up in the next month.”

  Even I could tell Isabel didn’t believe this. She sighed and dropped her head against the back of her chair. Adrienne and Daphne sat at her feet, playing with their lightboxes. They projected up into the air butterflies as big as platters that turned transparent in the sunlight. I looked away from the butterflies and up at the blinding blue sky. Coromina I was out, the storm clouds churning across the surface. Amana too, although it was as transparent as the holographic butterflies. An entire other planet, as populated as this one.