Kai. It bubbled to her lips, and she closed her mouth around it, felt it echo against her jaw and teeth and tongue. It wasn’t his name any longer, and what was more, this man was no longer Kai. Not the Kai she’d known all her life. Not the Kai she’d held in her mind these past four years, the one she’d invented in the dark of the night, when she dared to imagine that things might be different. That Kai was clearly a fantasy. The man he’d become would probably deem it a nightmare.
Once her breath returned to normal, she straightened, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a key. She crossed to the lock and inserted it, but paused to shutter the lamp before she opened the door. She couldn’t risk anyone seeing the light through the window. Not tonight. Not Kai.
Inside, the darkness rustled around her. She moved through the space from memory. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet, and slips of paper whispered upon her face and her hands. Her fingers reached her desk and then the window with its heavy shade. Beyond, the moon would be rising.
She lifted the shade and bathed the room in silver. Moonlight glinted off the glass and metal instruments on her desk and vanished into the eaves. Moonlight skimmed over the floorboards and made Nero’s eyes a shimmering green. It wasn’t enough to work by. It wasn’t enough to read by. But who needed to read? She knew them by heart.
All around her, strung from the ceiling and wafting softly in the draft, Kai’s paper gliders glowed in the moonlight like pale spring shoots bursting from the soil.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Dear Elliot,
Thank you for the textbooks. I put them right back where you told me. I can’t believe my da doesn’t know anything about the wars. Especially if they did all that stuff like your textbooks say. Can you imagine always knowing exactly where you are in the world, just with a machine? I can’t help but be really mad at the people who screwed that up for us.
By the way, I’m putting all this in the letter because I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about it in front of my da. He got very upset when I told him about the Reduced infantry in the Second War of the Reduction. I suppose that’s why they only teach that stuff to Luddites.
Your friend,
Kai
Dear Kai,
I know! I find it amazing, some of the things they could do before the Reduction. (Just don’t tell anyone I said that.) My grandfather has one of those old compasses on the wall in his house. The wheel just goes round and round now. One day I’ll sneak you in to see it.
What I learned in school is that the Lost were so desperate, knowing that all their offspring would be Reduced and in a generation their entire society would be gone, that it didn’t matter to them what happened. They wanted to make sure that no one stole what they thought was theirs, even if all their descendants wound up Reduced and couldn’t use it. They thought that if they couldn’t have their technology, their land, their things, no one could. My Luddite ancestors survived, but there were whole countries that at the time were too poor to have the ERV procedure. The Lost bombed them into oblivion rather than let them inherit the Earth. The same thing would have happened to us if we hadn’t hid away in the caverns.
I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, to live before the Reduction. Can you imagine knowing what way you’re going without using the stars? I read these stories in the books about England or Greece or Egypt or China and I wonder if they are still out there. Do you?
I’m sorry if I upset Mal, even inadvertently.
Your friend,
Elliot
Dear Elliot,
I know they are still out there. The wars couldn’t have destroyed everything. They just can’t find us, same as we can’t find them. (Don’t tell anyone I said that.)
And don’t worry about my da. He’s been cranky recently. He keeps saying stuff like he’s run out of things to teach me. But about this I guess I understand. He can’t help but picture his parents or his brothers and sisters being used as Reduced infantry to draw away the seeker bombs. That’s really upsetting.
I’m glad we don’t have wars anymore. The Reduced have it bad enough without being used as living targets.
Your friend,
Kai
Dear Kai,
I still don’t understand. Obviously, no one in your ancestry was ever in the Wars, or you wouldn’t have been born. Your family was protected by their Luddite lords. They would have been under the care of the Norths, not someone who was Lost. So I don’t see why it bothers Mal.
Your friend,
Elliot
Dear Kai,
Where were you today? You didn’t write me a letter and you weren’t in the barn.
Your friend,
Elliot
Dear Kai,
It’s now been a week. I spoke to Mal today and he said he didn’t know where you were. I know that’s not true, and I know you got my last letter. If you’re mad at me, I wish you’d tell me why.
Your friend (I hope!),
Elliot
Seven
ELLIOT SET OUT EARLY the next morning to see Ro. She should be told if Kai was back. After all, she’d probably been more outwardly upset than Elliot when he’d left the first time.
That morning, Ro’s group was working in the easternmost field, and when Elliot arrived, the foreman, Gill, gave her a wry look. “Come to see what all the commotion is about?”
“What do you mean?” Elliot asked.
Gill nodded his head in the direction of the laborers. “It’s not for me to say she shouldn’t have it, Miss Elliot, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be a fight before the day’s out. Favoritism and all that. My own common-law doesn’t have anything half so pretty.”
Elliot peered into the field, searching for Ro’s bright hair, but saw no sign of it. Instead, she saw something else. “Ro!” she called, and waved the girl over.
Ro ran up to the boundary fence, her face split in two by a smile, her hair mostly hidden beneath a silky scarf the color of shaded summer leaves. It made her skin glow. It made her green eyes stand out from her face. Kai had not forgotten Ro. He even remembered the precise shade of her eyes.
Ro giggled and twirled, pointing to the scarf.
“It’s beautiful, Ro,” Elliot said, trying to keep the unexpected stiffness out of her voice. He’d brought Ro a present.
“I’d have already taken it off her,” Gill added helpfully. “But I know you have a special fondness for this one.”
She should take the scarf from Ro, Elliot thought, for all the reasons Gill had mentioned, and more besides. Ro was a very pretty girl, and not a child any longer, either. The vile sorts of things that happened on other estates were forbidden on the North estate—her father had his faults, but he was scrupulous when it came to the behavior of the people who lived on his lands. Her cousin Benedict had been sent away years ago for taking advantage of a Reduced girl. Still, there were dangers out there, as well as changes that she wasn’t sure Ro herself was ready to make. Other Reduced her age were already mothers, but Ro had never shown much interest in children or the birthing house. All she cared about were her flowers.
Elliot beckoned Ro closer, then touched the edge of the scarf. It felt cool and silky beneath her fingertips and she wondered what it could be made of. Bamboo, perhaps? Not real silk, certainly. A silk scarf was worth a sizable percentage of the yearly income of the estate. Not even Malakai Wentforth could have that much to spend on a scarf. How many sun-carts could he have possibly found?
“Kai!” Ro said with glee, tugging it off and handing it to Elliot.
She hadn’t spoken his name since a few months after he’d gone. Sometimes Elliot wondered if Ro even remembered her old friend. But clearly, she hadn’t forgotten him any more than he had her. This was such a very Ro gift—green and pretty and utterly decorative. It wouldn’t keep her warm. It was far too slippery to hold back her hair. But Kai understood Ro as well as Elliot did. She loved beauty. And so that’s what he’d brought he
r.
Elliot handed the scarf back. She wouldn’t be the one to deprive Ro of that. “Be careful with it. It’s very fine.”
Ro nodded seriously, then pushed it back onto her head with muddy fingers.
As she returned to Gill, he clucked his tongue. “You spoil her.”
“Do you have a complaint about the quality of her work?”
“Point taken.” He gazed out over the fields. “Miss Elliot, I don’t mean to pry, but there’s talk . . .”
“Yes, Gill?”
“The Posts living up at the Boatwright house. The Cloud Fleet, they call themselves. There’s someone we know up there, isn’t there?”
“Yes.” She toed the dust at the fence line before lifting her gaze back to the older man’s. “Mal’s son is back.”
ELLIOT HAD DOUBTED THAT Tatiana’s offer to show the Fleet the star-cavern sanctuary was a serious one, so she was surprised when her sister organized a tour the following day. Tatiana intercepted her as soon as Elliot returned to the house from the dairy.
“Take off those clothes and run a comb through your hair,” her sister ordered. “We’re taking our guests to the sanctuary.”
Elliot’s eyes widened. “Do you think Father would approve of that?”
“Do you think Father would approve of you appearing in front of our tenants looking like a Reduced servant girl?” Tatiana replied. “You might see them any moment.”
Elliot wondered if Tatiana would be so concerned with Elliot’s attire had the Fleet Posts not looked so very fashionable. But there was no arguing with her sister, so she went to her room and spent a good five minutes standing before her wardrobe in search of a suitable outfit.
Very little would do. Her nice clothes were old and ill-fitting. She had several of Tatiana’s hand-me-downs, but no amount of seam letting-out and hem-dropping would disguise the fact that they had been made for someone smaller all around. And even the nicest of them featured the pale, drab Luddite colors. She finally settled on her darkest dress—the faded black mourning gown she’d worn four years ago at her mother’s funeral. It didn’t fit quite right, since she’d filled out a lot since she was fourteen, but it would have to do. She brushed her long black hair and pinned it up so it fell loose down her back, realizing even as she did that it hadn’t been cut in four years, either. Her mother used to trim it for her. Lately, she just braided it to get it out of the way.
It was an all-too-common occurrence around here. Hasty repairs, because Elliot hadn’t the means to really fix problems, stopgap deals struck with debtors who deserved repayment, pleas to the North Posts to be patient a little longer while Elliot tried to hold the estate together and bring in another harvest. Who had time to mess with clothes and hair?
By the time she met her sister at the front door, their neighbors Horatio and Olivia Grove had joined her. The Groves were another old Luddite family, though their estate was a fraction of the size of the Norths’. Horatio had inherited the estate three years ago as a young teen, and together with the help of his Posts, had managed to make their orchards and vineyards quite profitable by the time he was twenty. Elliot often wondered if she would have been capable of the same, had she been more talented at battling her father.
“A dress, Elliot?” Horatio asked wryly as she greeted him. “Not to be outdone by these fashionable Posts?”
“Oh, so you know what they wear?” she asked.
He chuckled and nodded at his little sister. Olivia Grove was clad in a scarlet gown Elliot had never seen before, and she was pretty sure the sour expression on her own sister’s face was due to wondering if her icy blue dress looked tired and dingy beside it.
“Got it for her in Channel City this summer,” Horatio said. “There are Posts all over there now, all of them dressed in the gaudiest outfits you’ve ever seen—” He cut himself off as a sun-cart pulled up outside the door, carrying Felicia Innovation and Donovan Phoenix. “A bit like that, actually.”
“I think you’ll like them, Horatio, turquoise overcoats or not,” she said.
“I know I will.” He grinned. “They have sun-carts. They’re my new best friends.”
Elliot flashed her friend a quick smile, but it evaporated quickly as another sun-cart crested the drive. She felt more than saw Kai in the second cart, the way you can tell when the sun hits a patchy spot of cloud on an overcast day. The chill reached her before she even caught sight of his cold expression, of the way he was still steadfastly refusing to look in her direction. But she refused to give in to the temptation to smooth her skirt or her hair as the cart pulled up with Andromeda behind the wheel. She wondered if Kai thought she’d changed as much as she thought he had. If so, it could hardly be for the better.
Elliot’s features, which had been harsh and solemn even when she was younger, hadn’t softened with age. Her dark brows were thick slashes over the deep-set, almond-shaped eyes she’d inherited from the Boatwright side of the family. The round snub nose came courtesy of her grandfather as well, and the skin that turned brown in the sun, then sallow in the dark winter months. She’d also gotten his full lips, though, and her black hair took on ruddy highlights every summer. But Elliot was no beauty, and she knew it.
Her mind’s eye was filled with the shade of Ro’s new scarf, the deep verdant green that had suited her more than any of the tans and browns she’d worn her whole life. Elliot had never envied Ro—not her fair face nor her bright hair, nor the easy happiness with which she greeted every day. And she wouldn’t start now. Nothing, not even presents from Kai, made up for the fact that Ro was Reduced.
“Hello!” Horatio called, waving at the Posts. “Pleasure to meet you! My name is Horatio Grove—I live on the estate next door. That one’s my sister, Olivia.”
“Good morning,” said Andromeda, nodding. “I assume you are the Groves we have to thank for the bushels of apples sent to the Boatwright house.” Andromeda’s every word seemed to be carefully weighed before it was allowed to pass her lips, and even as she spoke, Elliot noticed her unusual eyes surveying the entire scene before her. She had little doubt that, were the light to suddenly vanish, Andromeda could re-create every particular of that morning, from the open, friendly expression on Horatio’s face as he approached with Elliot to the way Kai had barely nodded at the introduction to the number of particles in the gravel drive at their feet. No wonder she was such an excellent explorer—nothing escaped her observation.
Elliot shuddered to think what the Post girl was noticing about her.
Olivia met them by the steps. “I’m Olivia Grove,” she burst out. “I love your sun-carts. That’s what these are, right? I’ve never seen one before. May I go for a ride in one? Are they very hard to operate?”
Now Kai did respond. “Yes; I’m not surprised; of course; and I can teach you if you’d like.”
Olivia worked out which answer matched which of her questions and Elliot became very concerned with the state of the dust beneath her feet. Perhaps he had not changed as much as she’d thought. His knack of remembering everything, of organizing it in his brain and acting as if everyone else did, too—it had grown only more pronounced over the years.
“My brother always teases me because I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was nine,” Olivia said. “He says I’m marvelously uncoordinated. I bet you can teach me, though.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Kai, and offered the girl his arm.
Elliot had always liked Olivia Grove. She was a sweet, unaffected girl who never had anything bad to say of anyone. She was kind to the workers on her estate, liked to sing and to walk in her orchards, and seemed equally comfortable discussing fruit with Elliot as she was ribbons with Tatiana. Had she been asked, Elliot would have denied the possibility of ever having a reason to hate the fourteen-year-old girl.
Had she been asked, she would deny a lot of things. That she ever doubted the Luddite ways she’d been taught to follow all her life. That she had broken a sacred trust in the locked room on the second
floor of her family’s barn. And most of all, that listening to Olivia pepper Kai with questions, hearing him explain the workings of the sun-carts to her in the same open, excited tones she’d once known so intimately—a voice very different than the stiff, stilted syllables he’d spared for her in the barn the previous evening—Elliot would go to her grave before she admitted that it made her heart hurt so much she could scarcely breathe.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Dear Kai,
I was sorry to learn what happened to your father today. These pills are the medicine they gave to my grandfather after he had his strokes. If you give two a day to Mal, it might help. I know you’re still mad over our argument about the Wars of the Lost, but I hope you know I’m thinking of you. Please tell me if there’s anything else I can do.
Your friend,
Elliot
Dear Elliot,
Thank you for the medicine. I hope it can help my da. They’ve taken him away to the healing house—I hate that name. They never do any healing there. People just go there to die. It’s hard to see him. This is the man who taught me to read and write and fix engines, and now he just stares at me like one of the Reduced.
He must hate that. He used to tell me how hard it was for him growing up. It wasn’t like now. He was one of the only Posts on the whole estate. They didn’t even have a name for what he was growing up—they hadn’t started calling us CORs yet. He loved his family—his parents, his brothers and sisters who were Reduced, but he wasn’t one of them. He spent his whole life proving that. And now he’s trapped, he’s mute, he’s just like them.
And that made me think of the wars. If there was a war tomorrow, would your father send the Reduced out like they did in the old days? Would you send out my uncles and cousins? Would you send out my da, now that he can no longer speak or work for you?
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