Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “Sounds good to me.” They walked down to the conference room. This time, it wasn’t a lab assistant who was waiting for them but Dr. Goetze himself. He straightened up as they approached, smoothing one hand over the bald spot on the top of his head. “Ms. Coromina,” he said. “Mr. Woods.”

  Esme smiled to put him at ease—this wasn’t about a problem with his labs. It was a problem with the Radiance. “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure, Doctor.”

  Dr. Goetze’s features flickered, as if he couldn’t decide if he should smile or not. “Your message concerned me, Ms. Coromina. After the first interview, you said there was no sign of a containment breach.”

  Will stepped forward, gave his easy golden-boy grin. “And there wasn’t. We’re just here so I can link up with Sergeant Woods. A company matter.”

  “We explained this on the request,” Esme said sweetly. Both of them, she and Will, acted as if this were routine, as if they had Dr. Goetze’s best interests in mind. Lying was what business was all about.

  Dr. Goetze frowned. “I read the request, yes. I’m just here to protect my own neck.”

  Esme did not let her smile falter. “I completely understand.”

  The three of them walked into the conference room. Dr. Goetze was ranked highly enough that he was allowed to listen in, even though Esme wished he wouldn’t. The fewer people who knew, the easier it was to keep information within the right circles. But as a Level Ninety-Three, he had the right.

  One soldier waited for them this time; one was all they needed for this. He was not a new recruit—he was, in fact, part of the original batch of R-Troops. He and Will had been brothers-in-arms, along with ten other soldiers. Half of those soldiers had been lost at Star’s End. Esme could see his history reflected in the way his face, with all its standard features, seemed worn down. He watched them with a steely glint in his eye, his mouth a thin line. Unlike the recruits from the other day, he was not afraid.

  “Sergeant Woods,” Will said, giving him a nod. “It’s been a long time.”

  Will and Esme sat down at the head of the table; Dr. Goetze stayed standing, hovering just behind Esme’s shoulders. Sergeant Woods glanced up at him, scowling, looked back at Esme and Will.

  “There’s no breach,” he said. “I monitor all the soldiers under my watch, and I know the other sergeants do too. If we see anything—any dreams, any voices, any of that shit—we cut off the infected soldier and close up their mind. The Radiance are not getting through here.”

  “We know that,” Esme said. “We spoke to some of your soldiers the other day. This is about a potential breach on Catequil.”

  “Catequil?” Sergeant Woods frowned. “Why aren’t you harassing the labs out there, then?”

  Esme sighed. Will shifted in his seat—he might be uncomfortable; he might find this amusing. Sometimes it was hard to tell, with him and the R-Troops. Especially the last of the original squadron.

  “The breach is tied to a weapons manufacturing factory,” Esme said. “The workers there are not enhanced, but they are producing enhanced weaponry—specifically, the guns your fellow R-Troops can link up to in battle.”

  Sergeant Woods smirked a little, rolled his eyes. It caught Esme off guard, but she knew how to recover. “I asked Will to come and link minds with you to see if you can find anything. The worry is that the Radiance may be creeping in through the production process.”

  Sergeant Woods sat very still, watching her as if she were prey. He leaned back in his chair. “So, this is one of those espionage jobs?”

  “Is that what they’re calling them now?” Will asked.

  Sergeant Woods gave a hard bark of a laugh. “You need to get out of the goddamn corporate system. You were always one of the best. You’re too good a soldier to waste on this shit.” He gestured at Esme, and she felt her cheeks warm. “But yeah, that’s what we’re calling it now. Ain’t that what it is? Peeping in on them where they live? Sniffing around to see what they’re up to?”

  Will’s shoulders hitched a little. “I suppose you could look at it that way.”

  Sergeant Woods looked at Esme. “You ought to go in and talk to them yourself sometime. Bet you’d be surprised by what you found.”

  “Sergeant,” Dr. Goetze said sharply. “You’re being insolent.”

  “It’s fine,” Esme said, looking at Sergeant Woods and not Dr. Goetze. She didn’t want the sergeant to know that his words had gotten to her. First Dasini, now Sergeant Woods—she thought she was used to these sorts of things. To the idea that some people had to be unhappy in order for a corpocratic system to function. But she realized now that she had only managed it because Isabel was gone. Because she had allowed herself to forget the extent of what the company had done to her sister. Of what they had done to the Radiance, too.

  Esme sat unmoving as Will walked over to Sergeant Wood’s side of the table. He sat down and they looked at each other. The R-Troop’s mind-link didn’t look like anything to an outsider. If Isabel were here, she’d know what they saw as they delved into each other’s minds.

  These soldiers, genetically engineered, infused with Radiance DNA, only existed because of Isabel. Because of what had happened to her. Esme thought she had come to terms with her own part to play in all of that a long time ago. She had come to terms with the fact that she had chosen to be like her father and not like her sisters.

  But sitting in this stuffy conference, watching Will and Sergeant Woods speak with their eyes closed and their mouths shut, she knew she had been lying to herself.

  • • •

  Adrienne’s records were waiting on Esme’s lightbox when she came home after the meeting at the laboratory. She felt drained, indistinct. Will and Sergeant Woods hadn’t found anything unusual when they dipped into the space where the Radiance lived. No sign of a breach. Dasini was going to have to go on lockdown until they got this sorted out.

  When Will had left the lab, he seemed shaken. His skin was like ash. She didn’t ask him what he’d seen, other than to confirm that there was no breach. She knew it could be difficult for him, connecting with his old squadron. Hardly any of them were left. Of the ones who had survived Star’s End, a few had gone on to be killed in other wars, and the rest of the survivors were scattered throughout the galaxy.

  Esme didn’t open the file right away. The sight of it made her chest hurt, and so she left it, the lightscreen still up, beaming images into the clean air of her apartment. She ate a CG nutritional packet and her hunger slowly faded, along with the faint anxious churning in her stomach. The packets always did that; they were designed to calm in cases of emergency.

  Esme sat down in front of her lightscreen and tapped on the file. It shimmered into existence on the air above her bed.

  Adrienne Adele Coromina, the report said, current whereabouts unknown.

  No surprise there.

  The report listed Adrienne’s past in chronological increments: Year 2902 to 2920: Star’s End in the village of Undirra, the continent of Izal, Ekkeko. Year 2920 to 2923: Marzal College in the city of Etzin, the continent of Starr, Quilla. Year 2923 to 2927: Jaconet College of Design in the city of Cordova, the continent of Starr, Quilla.

  Esme already knew all of this, and she knew about it in more depth: Adrienne had always wanted to work for the Coromina Group. She had studied for it under Mr. Garcia’s tutelage for years, and she had trained for it with her internships as a teenager. But not long after Isabel left, so did she. Off to study art and then terraform design on Quilla. She messaged home sometimes. It was before Daphne had left. She had rarely spoken to Esme.

  Esme deactivated her lightscreen. The report blinked out, and it took Esme’s eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness.

  Adrienne had stopped messaging when she graduated from Jaconet. She didn’t come back to Ekkeko for holidays. Slowly, without Esme even realizing it, she vanished completely. Then Daphne left and there was no one. Star’s End had been gone for nearly two years by then.

&nbs
p; When Esme went to bed that night, she thought about the war as she waited to fall asleep. She thought about the R-Troops, the miracle that won the war. The weapons that were now the pride of the Coromina Group. Products, not employees. Certainly not citizens.

  Slaves, Esme thought, staring blankly at the empty wall of her bedroom. Adrienne had said that, right before she left for college. “They want freedom too. People shouldn’t be weapons.” And then she was gone.

  • • •

  The next morning, Esme asked her driver to take her by the tourist shacks along the Undirra expressway before work. She wanted a cup of coffee from Seaside Coffee, which grew their own beans on a farm down on the other side of the village and which had, in Esme’s opinion, the best coffee in the village. She felt better this morning, after a night of deep and dreamless sleep.

  “Wait here,” she told the driver when he pulled up to Seaside Coffee. She didn’t know why she said it; he would have waited anyway. But it was a politeness she wanted back. When they had unenhanced drivers, when she was younger, she had always thanked them.

  The driver, for his part, just nodded and looked back at her, his eyes glowing blue from the Connection.

  She climbed out of the car and crossed the lot and bought her coffee. The Seaside Coffee building stood in the same place that Laila’s shrimp hut had, all those years ago. But the old seashell facade had fallen into disrepair and Laila had disappeared from Esme’s life long before that. Esme ought to put in a request to find her. Probably have better luck than finding Adrienne.

  She carried her coffee down to the overlook. The driver was still plugged into the car. She could see the blue of his eyes from there.

  The overlook was always empty that early in the morning, and that time of year, there weren’t many tourists, anyway. It faced the ocean glittering off in the distance. The water was red from the light of Coromina I, which was full and heavy-looking today. It hung low in the sky, and Esme sat down on top of a picnic table and watched the storms creep across its surface. Isabel used to read her fortune in those storms, although she never saw what eventually happened to her. Esme wished it were that easy, to look up at the clouds of Coromina I and find the answer to your questions.

  The wind stirred the sea grass, bringing in the scent of fried plantains from the cluster of tourist shacks. If you ignored the whine of cars on the road, it was almost peaceful out there.

  Her lightbox chimed.

  “Wonderful,” Esme muttered. She dug it out of her purse and activated it. The holo appeared, pale in the early morning sunlight.

  It was her father.

  “Just checking up on your progress on Adrienne,” he said.

  “There wasn’t anything in her records I didn’t already know.” She balanced the lightbox on her knees, and her father’s skeletal face hovered next to hers. He looked worse than she’d ever seen him, like a ghost. She resisted the urge to swipe her hand through the holo. “The last entry talks about her attending college on Jaconet.”

  “What?” Her father closed his eyes, defeated. “Are you sure there’s nothing after that?”

  Esme nodded.

  “That’s impossible. We keep pristine records; you know that. Even if she left the system, we’d still have a record of it.”

  Esme sipped her coffee and shrugged. “I guess the records have been blocked. Ever since she left college, there’s no record of her at all.”

  Her father’s holo stared at her. Seeing him this way, built out of light, just made him look all the more transparent, all the more weak.

  “That’s not possible.” He frowned. “You put it through the official channels? You did—”

  “I know how the system works,” Esme said. “There must be some kind of block. Or the information got erased.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said. “You’ve got Ninety-Ninth clearance; there shouldn’t be any blocks. And you know damn well no information is ever really erased. Not for a Ninety-Nine.”

  Esme didn’t say anything. The wind stirred at her hair. There was a vein of coolness to it.

  “Have you looked up—” He stopped. “Anyone else?”

  A curious pain throbbed in her chest. He couldn’t even say Isabel’s name. “Not yet.” She paused, trying to read his expression through the holo. She couldn’t. “I’ll keep looking into Adrienne, though. All I have to do is go down to the Records Office and scan in. Once they’ve got my clearance level established in person, it should be fine.” She looked past her father’s holo, out to the hazy crimson ocean in the distance. “I’ll go there now.”

  “Let me know what you find out.” And he switched off abruptly, the way he did when they were discussing business.

  Esme sighed. She drained the last of her coffee and slipped her lightbox back in her purse. She wondered if she was right about the block, or if Adrienne had managed to vanish out of the system entirely. Maybe she’d learned the trick from Isabel. Esme knew there was no trace of her in the Coromina Group records, either.

  • • •

  The Records Office building was one of the newer Coromina Group buildings, more industrial than organic—lots of flat panes of reflective glass and white stucco walls. The car dropped Esme off in front of the entranceway and then zipped away, back to the enclave to pick up some other Coromina Group employee. Esme stared at her reflection in the glass door. People moved on the other side, as transparent as ghosts.

  She took a deep breath and went in.

  The lobby was crowded, but Esme rarely noticed crowds anymore, because they didn’t affect her, not at the Ninety-Ninth level. She strode through the milling clumps of people, passing up the public elevators in favor of the high-ranking elevator tucked away behind a locked door. She pressed her thumb against the sensor and stepped into the hallway. The elevator was sleek and silver. “Citizen-Employee Records,” she said. The elevator dinged to acknowledge her request.

  “Fifteen seconds,” the elevator said in its charming woman’s voice. Esme crossed her arms. It was quiet there in the foyer, especially after the din of the lobby.

  The elevator arrived and slid open. It was empty. Esme was the future CEO. She had a Ninety-Ninth-level security clearance. She never rode in an elevator with another person unless she wanted to.

  The elevator took her to the twelfth floor. Citizen-Employee Records hummed like a beehive. Coromina Group employees scurried between the open office doors. The receptionist at the front desk was speaking to someone over the computer, but he waved at Esme as she walked past. She’d never seen him before, but he had certainly recognized her.

  She threaded over to Gerald Conto’s office and knocked.

  “Come in!”

  Esme plastered on a smile and pushed the door open. Gerald had his holo up, his fingers dancing through the illuminated air. “Esme!” he called out. “Did you get the records you requested? Was there anything missing?”

  “Yes, most of them.” Esme sat down in his guest chair. Gerald looked at her through the hazy glow of the holo.

  “Most of them?” He frowned. With a swipe of his hand, the holo disappeared. He leaned forward on his deck. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Esme sighed. “My God, did you even look at that file?”

  Gerald laughed and held up his hands. “You caught me. It’s been crazy around here, so I just signed off on it, sent it on its way.” He paused, watching her closely. Gerald never acted less than amiable, but if you looked him straight in the eye, you could see a streak of corporate savagery. He sized you up; he looked for weakness. And he always made you laugh as he did it.

  “I understand. It’s not anyone’s fault.” Esme laid her lightbox on the desk and activated the holo. Adrienne’s whereabouts, ten years out of date, materialized on the air. “I suspect she’s blocked her records.”

  “Strange.” Gerald squinted at the holo and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “She must have connections, if she was able to pull that off. Legal or—illegal. I hear
the anti-corpocracy hackers have been advertising for ways—”

  “I’m sure it was legal,” Esme said, even though she wasn’t. She didn’t know what to think, not about Adrienne, not anymore. “At any rate, I need the block removed.”

  “Well, then you better hope it’s legal.” Gerald chuckled. “Hard to remove a block that’s not meant to be there.”

  Esme nodded, keeping her expression chilly if civil. She wished he wouldn’t chatter on so much and instead would just find out what was wrong. She wanted to know where Adrienne was, she realized, and not because her father asked for it—but because she wanted to know. Maybe finding Adrienne would be a chance for her to apologize. She doubted very much their father cared about redemption. But Esme was starting to realize that she did.

  “Good thing you came in.” Gerald drew up his monitor again. “A lot of the Nineties end up thinking they can put in a digital request and we’ll get it taken care of, and I’ve got to tell them every time: Nope, need your DNA.”

  Esme gave him a polite smile. “How quickly will it take to lift the block?”

  “Depends on who called for it. If it was your daddy, just a few seconds. Otherwise—” Gerald shrugged. “We’ll have to take it from there, won’t we?”

  Her father hadn’t put the block on the records; Esme knew that much. She sighed as Gerald reached into his desk and pulled out a portable sensor and set it down in front of Esme. She laid her forefinger on it, where she was greeted with tiny zip and a sharp, minute burst of pain. Gerald nodded in satisfaction at something only he could see on the sensor’s screen.

  “Looks like you are who you say you are.” He grinned. “Seriously, though, it won’t even work without your blood.”

  “I know,” Esme said.

  Gerald brought up his holo again. He was well trained enough to keep his face dispassionate. He had to know Adrienne was a relative, if not her sister—the name, the old address at Star’s End. Gerald was old enough to remember Star’s End.