Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  But Isabel stepped away from me, sliding out from under my touch. She blinked up at Flor. Sizing her up, the way she always did with new people. Even with us, sometimes.

  Flor gave her a big, shining smile. “And you must be Isabel,” she gushed. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I wondered from where. Dad? It seemed doubtful. But it was the right thing to say to Isabel, because her shoulders loosened a little.

  “Yes,” Isabel said softly.

  “Only good things.” Flor looked up at me. Her eyes were sharp and intelligent. She looked at me like I was a rival—most people didn’t, since most everyone in the company knew I would be CEO someday. “We’ll take good care of her over here at Psych; don’t worry.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I returned her gaze. I didn’t want to leave Isabel there. I felt like I was setting her up as a pawn in some kind of convoluted Coromina Group power struggle. But then Isabel turned toward me and said, “Don’t worry, Esme. I’ll be fine.”

  I started; she did that sometimes, say something like she knew what I was thinking. I nodded. “You know you can contact me through the campus Connectivity if you need anything.”

  Isabel nodded, just as Flor said, “Oh, we’ll be just fine. You’ll have lots of fun interning with us, I promise.” She circled her arm around Isabel’s shoulders and guided her toward the elevators. “You know we work with Amana to produce the dramas, right?” she said to Isabel. Isabel nodded silently. “Do you watch them? I’ve only been able to keep up with The Intensity of Days myself—”

  I stood in the lobby until they had stepped into the elevator. Flor kept chattering away, and Isabel gave me a little reassuring wave. I told myself I didn’t need to worry. That both of the twins had internships, and they were fine. No one played games with them. It was just because Isabel was the youngest. I’d always been overprotective of her, ever since she vanished for a day back when she was younger.

  I left Psych and followed the walking paths back to Genetics. The storms churned across Coromina I’s surface. No one was out; it was too hot to be outside, really. But I needed the time to calm myself.

  • • •

  That first day of Isabel’s internship, I waited for her to contact me over Connectivity. My eyes kept flicking over to the signal light on my lightbox, and if it was blinking, my heart leapt high in my chest—but it was never Isabel.

  I went home early that evening. Isabel was already there, sitting out in the pineapple garden watching The Intensity of Days on Adrienne’s lightbox. The actors’ faces danced in ghostly patterns above the lawn, all the colors leached out from the bright sunlight. Coromina I had set; the light was ordinary again, lemony and clear.

  “How was it?” I said, kneeling down in the grass beside Isabel.

  “Boring,” she said. “They made me sign a bunch of waivers, and then I had to organize some files.”

  Adrienne reached over and paused the display. “So, you didn’t get to hang out with any actors?”

  Isabel rolled her eyes. “It was exactly what you said it was.”

  That made me feel better. Boring was good. I stood up, dusting the grass from my skirt. The girls turned back to the projector. They were more involved in whatever the love affair of the week was than anything I had to say.

  A week or so went by. Isabel went back to the company one more time—more filing, she reported over dinner that evening. My worry finally started to subside. It didn’t help that a huge order came in from the Spiro Xu military, and I spent all day in a holo-meeting, having long, encrypted conversations with the Spiro Xu representative as she argued with my scientists about the specific features the military wanted in their new soldiers.

  Things carried on. We fell back into our usual patterns. I spent longer and longer days at the office, something I hated doing, but the military requests kept pouring in, one after another, and it felt like every single one got diverted to me personally. I barely had time to catch up with my sisters. Mostly I’d just see them at breakfast, when they were bleary-eyed and sleepy, and I had an entire day to deal with at the office.

  But then one afternoon, I came into my office after a particularly exhausting lunch with some reps from the science division, and a message was waiting for me on my lightbox. I figured it was yet another military with some complaint or another about production taking too long, but when I played it, Adrienne’s face materialized above my desk, her eyes wide and her face pale.

  “Esme,” she said. “I hope you get this soon. You need to come home, okay?”

  My whole body went very still. I gripped the edge of my desk to keep myself from toppling over.

  “Daphne and I—” Her voice wavered and it was like a stab through my heart. “We’re really worried, okay? Please come home. I know you’re busy but you need to come home.”

  The message flicked off, and for a moment, I just stared at the empty light radiating above my desk. Then everything became a blur. I locked down my lightbox and grabbed my things and rushed out of the office, shouting at my admin to take any messages for me. My thoughts were a riot. Isabel. I knew it was Isabel. She had disappeared again.

  I cursed at myself as I rode the elevator to the first floor, as I waited for my car to come around and pick me up. All those projects—had they been piled up on top of each other on purpose to distract me? But no, Flor didn’t have that kind of power.

  Did she?

  “Hurry,” I told John, sliding into the backseat of the car. He glanced back at me, brow knitted in concern.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just—just hurry.” My heart was pounding so hard, I couldn’t catch my breath. John jerked the car out of the drive and sped down the freeway. I pulled up my portable lightbox and put in a call for Adrienne. She didn’t answer. Neither did Daphne. I took a deep breath and whispered Isabel’s code. The holo shimmered above my wrist. Isabel never appeared.

  “Fuck,” I said, and shut the whole thing off. I couldn’t tell where we were on the freeway; everything was a blur, green forest and blue sky. I sighed and slumped back against my seat.

  “Almost there, Ms. Coromina,” John said. “I told the car it was an emergency. Should have shaved off about ten minutes of our drive.”

  “Thank you.” Staring out the window left me queasy, so I stared up at the ceiling of the car. A thought came creeping in, cold and unsettling: I had been so tied up with work that I had ignored my sisters. And that was something our father would do.

  The car slowed; John pulled up to the front of Star’s End. It looked closed off, all the doors and windows shut tight against the dry-season heat. I flung myself out of the car and raced up the walkway and slammed in through the front door. “Adrienne!” I shouted. “Daphne! Isabel!” My voice rebounded off the walls. I kept flashing back to that day Isabel vanished as a child. It had been the rainy season, I remembered. Everything damp and cool.

  “Ms. Coromina!” Alicia bustled around the corner. “Oh, I’m glad you’re here. I keep trying to get ahold of Mr. Coromina, but he’s not answering, and Daphne is so upset—”

  “What’s happening?” I said, stopping her. “I got a message from Adrienne but she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.”

  Alicia sighed, her shoulders hitching. “Isabel,” she said. “She’s disappeared again.”

  I had expected her to say this, but hearing it just made me feel dizzy and light-headed. At least she wasn’t six years old this time. “Have you sent anyone to look for her in the village?” I said. “I used to sneak down there when I was her age.”

  “Not yet. We’ve been sweeping the woods. But I can send one of the maids to go down there. Maybe Lily? They’ve always gotten along.”

  I nodded, then told her I was going to talk to Adrienne. I remembered when this happened before, I’d been swept up in a panic. But this time, I just felt numb.

  The door to Adrienne’s room was hanging open, and I could hear her and Daphne murmuring softly
to each other inside. I knocked and went in. They were both draped on the couch, and Daphne’s eyes were red from crying.

  “Esme, you’re here!” Adrienne jumped up from the sofa and threw her arms around me.

  “Alicia told me what happened,” I murmured into the soft flower-scented sweetness of her hair. “Why didn’t you answer your holo?”

  “We wanted to talk to you about it in person,” Daphne said.

  I looked over at her. She rubbed furiously at her eyes.

  “Daphne—we—we think this has to do with Isabel’s internship,” Adrienne said.

  The room seemed to lurch, throwing us all sideways. So, I wasn’t the only one with paranoid suspicions. But I didn’t want the girls to know that. I needed to soothe them over, calm them down. Then I could find out what was happening.

  “Why do you think that?” I asked carefully, walking Adrienne back over to the sofa. Daphne watched us with hard eyes. “Did Isabel say anything to you?”

  “No,” Adrienne said.

  “The whole thing just feels suspicious,” Daphne said as I sank into the sofa beside her. “She wasn’t supposed to have an internship this young! And now she’s gone.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Start at the beginning. We need to be methodical.” I didn’t feel methodical. I wanted to jump up and storm up to my father’s suite and rip his expensive light paintings from the walls until he gave me answers. But I was the eldest. I was the adult. I couldn’t act like a child to get what I wanted. “When did you notice she was missing?”

  “This afternoon,” Daphne said. “That’s when we decided to send you the holo, and we told Alicia so she and the soldiers could start looking in the woods.”

  “Like last time,” Adrienne said.

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “I remember then, she had said something to you about meeting friends?” A wild shot in the dark, but Daphne just rolled her eyes.

  “She doesn’t have imaginary friends anymore,” Daphne said furiously. My face burned; of course not. Isabel had outgrown that a long time ago. She’d outgrown that made-up language, too. “She didn’t come to breakfast, which she usually does.”

  “She sometimes does,” Adrienne said gently.

  Breakfast. I hadn’t seen them at breakfast that morning. I hadn’t seen them at breakfast for the past week, because I’d been so busy, leaving the house early enough in the morning that the sun hadn’t even risen, and it was just the soft glow of the half-illuminated worlds watching me wind through the streets to the office.

  My stomach knotted in on itself.

  “When did you see her last, then?” I asked.

  “Same as you,” Daphne said. “When we were all sitting in the parlor last night, after dinner.”

  I hadn’t been sitting in the parlor. I’d rushed through, on my way up to my room to finish some last-minute work. But all three of them had been there. Isabel had been sitting next to the window, a holo balanced on one knee. She’d been playing music, colors swirling in time to the beat.

  She hadn’t seen scared or upset. She had seemed like herself.

  “And this morning, she was gone,” Daphne said.

  “Why do you think this is related to her internship?” I asked. Panic was building up inside me but I managed to keep my voice calm.

  “Daphne says she said something about it last night,” Adrienne said. “But I was there and I don’t remember anything—”

  “She said something about Flor,” Daphne said. “Her supervisor?”

  My chest constricted. “What exactly did she say?”

  “Just something about Flor picking her up tomorrow. And I was like, why would she pick you up? But then she got real quiet and turned her music up and wouldn’t answer me.” Daphne’s voice was wobbly with tears. “She’s not in the woods, okay? She tells us when she’s going out into the woods, and she’s never gone that long—”

  “It could be OCI,” Adrienne said quietly. “Which is about a million times worse, so I think that’s where we need to focus our attention.”

  “It’s not OCI,” I said, because Adrienne sounded like she was on the verge of tears, and because I didn’t want to think about the possibility of a rival company snatching my sister out from under my nose. But Flor DeCrie, that was another matter.

  “Alicia told me the soldiers are looking for her,” I said, standing up, taking charge. “I want you two to go down to their house and keep track of what they find. Can you do that for me?”

  A pause. They looked at each other. Then Adrienne nodded, solemnly.

  “Good.” I took a deep breath. “I’m going to try and get ahold of Flor. See if we can settle this.”

  Adrienne and Daphne both looked stunned, but they stood up, moving by rote toward the door. I looked out the window at the plumeria maze, the blossoms glossy in the heat. One of the soldiers strolled past, a lightbox held out in front of him, scanning. And I thought suddenly of those odd questions Isabel’d had, about the CG man scanning the forest. They had slipped my mind in the rush of work. But I felt a clenching in my chest—what if someone had come into our forest to snatch away Isabel? Not OCI necessarily, but anti-corpocracy rebels maybe, someone who’d gotten hold of a CG uniform.

  Or the company itself, working above my security level.

  I left Adrienne’s room, my heart thudding, and went to my own suite. I pinged Flor first thing, but she didn’t answer and so I left a message with her admin. But I also didn’t want to wait around for her to contact me back. Alicia had said they weren’t able to get ahold of my father, but I had a private channel on Connectivity that I could use to contact him during emergencies. I activated the holo, white light fanning out above my desk. Keyed in my father’s private code. No answer, but I didn’t expect one: this system didn’t work in real time.

  “Dad,” I said, speaking to the camera. “Isabel’s missing. I’ve got the soldiers looking for her but I want to know—” I hesitated. The holo light burned my eyes. “I want to know if you know anything about this. If it’s related to her internship. We need to rule that out before investigating other options.”

  Blood pounded in my ears. I switched off the holo and slumped back in my chair. My room felt too quiet. I hoped Lily would find Isabel in the village and this whole thing was some stupid misunderstanding.

  I paced around my room, my palms slick with sweat, and thought about the day Isabel returned the first time, how she had seemed to step out of the shadows. I’d always dismissed it as a trick of my eye, or of an exhausted mind. I peered out the window at the shadows and hoped I’d see her this time.

  I didn’t.

  My holo chimed. I whirled around and there was my father, his image faded by the holo light. “Esme?” he said. “You there?”

  He was contacting me on the ordinary Connectivity, and so it was a live feed. He peered around, looking for me. I stepped into the camera.

  “Where’s Isabel?” I said.

  “That private Connectivity channel is for emergencies only,” my father said.

  Anger flared inside of me; I smothered it down. “And your daughter vanishing isn’t an emergency?”

  “She hasn’t vanished,” Dad said. It was hard to make out his features on the holo. I wondered where he was—not on Ekkeko, surely; his Connectivity was too weak. One of the other Sisters, then. “She’s perfectly fine. She’s with me.”

  This did not calm me at all. “And where the hell is that?”

  “Above your ranking.”

  My anger swelled into a tide of fury, but on the outside I stayed very still so he wouldn’t see.

  “So, what,” I said, “you couldn’t tell me? Or Adrienne and Daphne? They were freaking out—they contacted me at work—” And they were right, too. It was related to Isabel’s internship. But I kept that knowledge to myself.

  Dad flipped one hand dismissively. “DeCrie and Banski are working on a high-level project—”

  “Banski!” I shouted. “What the hell does he have to do with Psych?
” Dr. Banski was one of the scientists at Starspray City.

  “It’s a cross-departmental project. They needed an intern with them to do some filing.”

  “Since when do we use interns for high-level cross-departmental projects?”

  “When the interns are my daughter,” Dad snapped. “You think you had the typical intern experience? That work you did in PM was Level Thirty at the very least.”

  I trembled with anger. “This is higher than Level Thirty.”

  “Isabel is fine. You don’t need to worry about her.”

  Dad switched off his holo before I could say anything more. I stood in front of the empty holo light, curling my hands into fists. I had known something was wrong with this internship since the beginning, and I had done nothing to stop it. I had ignored my instincts.

  Now Isabel was gone.

  • • •

  The next morning, I went to Psych first thing. I was still fuming from the conversation with my father, and it had worsened when I came down to breakfast and Adrienne was slouched in her seat, poking at the rice cakes Mrs. Davesa had made for her special. Daphne was still in bed. Last night, I had told both of them what Dad had told me, but I was sure I had just made them worry even more.

  The Psych building glittered in the sun. All that glass, all those sharp edges—it hurt my eyes to look at. I slipped in, walking briskly, heels clicking against the tiles. I tried not to think about dropping Isabel off on her first day. I should never have let her intern there. I should have fought it, brought her over to Genetics. Followed my instincts.

  The secretary glanced up from behind the desk, her eyes widening when she saw me. “Ms. Coromina!” she cried. “What can I do for you?”

  A secretary like this wouldn’t have a clearance level above twenty-five or so, but I didn’t need her to answer all my questions. Just one. “I need to speak with Flor DeCrie.” I met the secretary’s eye and spoke clearly, cleanly. “In person.”

  “Oh!” The secretary’s hand fluttered near her chest. “Oh, oh dear, I’m afraid she’s offworld right now.”

  My stomach twisted, and my mind went back to the Connectivity connection last night. Dad was offworld, too.