Star-Crossed

by Pintip Dunn

  “Let’s see. The crust of a raspberry pie.” I slip my hand into hers and think back to all the times I’ve eaten the dessert. “Imagine grains of sand as light as dandelion fluff, rolled in the breeze and bursting with sunshine. Threads of brown cut through the flavor, and right when you least expect it, a good strong shot of red…”

  I keep talking nonsense until I hear her slow, even breathing. Until her hand goes limp and falls out of mine.

  She looks too peaceful, too much like a corpse. Too much like my mother the last time I saw her.

  I root in my knapsack and pull out a flat plastic box. Eight round tablets, the color of a juicy peach, rattle inside.

  I wrap my friend’s hand around the case. That’s better. She looks more alive holding the brightly colored pills. As if no harm can come to her, so long as she has this store of nutrients.

  If only it were that easy.

  “Nice description,” a voice says behind me.

  I turn. Astana’s brother leans against the entry to the living unit, his head a few inches from the doorjamb. Straight hair falls over his forehead, and his caviar-black eyes sink into me.

  My cheeks warm. How long has he been standing there? Did he hear me gushing about my mysterious rescuer?

  It shouldn’t matter what Carr overhears. I’ve known him since we were kids, and he’s not the type to tease. He used to hang around with my cousin, Denver, and sometimes the four of us would play a game of tag. Most of the time, though, Astana and I would stomp around Protector’s Pond, catching and releasing dragonflies with fishing nets, while Carr would dig up worms and sell them as bait to the fishermen. He never made much—just one or two of those peach-colored pills—but looking at the dried mud under his fingernails always made me feel like one of his fat-bellied slugs. Spoiled and more than a little lazy.

  I’m not that girl anymore, I want to tell Carr. Any day now, I’ll be named Top Aegis of my class, and within a few months, the council might appoint me as the King’s Successor.

  But Blanca’s words echo in my ears. Nobody thinks you’ve got a chance. The council’s just indulging Father in one of his whims. Is she right? Maybe the council members aren’t considering me after all. Maybe it’s been Blanca all along, and they’re just going through the motions.

  So I end up not saying anything and simply stare as Carr walks into the room.

  “Nice shirt, too.” His eyes pause, for a fraction of a second, on my bare arms. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in anything like that.”

  The heat in my cheeks spreads, wrapping around my ribs and stroking its tendrils along my spine. Which is ridiculous. He doesn’t mean anything by the compliment. He works way too hard to ever take much notice of me.

  And yet, I’ve always had this reaction to him. He could give me the smallest look, or place the tiniest emphasis on a single word, and my nerves dart around like they’re the flame to his flint.

  “I, um, took off the caftan because it’s hot,” I say and then flush. I might as well have told him pills have no taste. But what else could I have said? That I took my caftan off so his sister could suck on it?

  Carr yanks on a loop to pull a sink out of the back wall. “What are you doing here?” He passes his hands under a red beam, which zaps the germs off his skin.

  “I had some extra pills I wanted to give Astana.”

  He glances over his shoulder, at his sister’s sleeping form, and his eyes fasten on the peach tablets.

  My breath gets stuck in my lungs. Colonists don’t eat, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel hunger. “Carr,” I say carefully. “What happens to the pills I leave for Astana?”

  He snaps his gaze back to me. “What do you think happens to them?”

  “I… I don’t know. She never seems to put on any weight. And I’ve left countless pills.”

  “I’ve worked in glasshouses and fish farms all my life,” he says, his voice low and controlled. “Day in and day out, I’m surrounded by food. The smell gets into my clothes, the fruit smears onto my skin. Every second of every day, I’m tempted to take a bite. Just one single bite, to see how it tastes. To experience how it feels. And you think I’m stealing from my sister?”

  I spring to my feet, heart pounding. This isn’t how our meeting was supposed to go. I lay awake for hours last night, imagining what he would say, how he would look. In my head, I made witty comments about the latest news feeds, and he crinkled up his forehead and laughed.

  Nowhere in my imagined conversation did I call him a thief.

  I grab my knapsack and inch toward the door. “Sorry I asked.”

  “Wait. Don’t go.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m not mad. I…” He slumps onto the bed across from Astana, his voice a whisper only used in the deepest night. “She’s been throwing up. Every day for the last week. And I’ve been waking up to her whimpers, because her stomach hurts so much. She’s getting worse by the day, and I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t, either.” I lift my shoulders, as helpless in my best friend’s condition as I am in my response to her brother. I didn’t know about the vomiting, about her cramps. Astana’s been keeping her symptoms from me. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of stealing. I’m just worried. About both of you.”

  “Me?” He laughs. “Why are you worried about me?”

  “You’ve got circles under your eyes.” I sit down next to him, eighteen inches away. He doesn’t appear weak, like Astana. Instead, his body is lean and hard, the kind of physique you get from too much labor and not enough pills. “You look like you haven’t nutritioned in a week.”

  “Why do you care?”

  His eyes find mine, with an expression so raw and searing I look away. Our hands lie on the mattress, a finger-width apart. All I’d have to do is stretch my pinky, and we’d be touching. Any moment now, he’ll move away. Turn so that his hand moves to his knee, a safe foot away. I forget to breathe as I wait for him to shift. But the seconds pass.

  I look up to find him watching me. Noticing our hands. And he doesn’t move.

  “Of course I care. You’re my best friend’s brother,” I say, light-headed from the lack of oxygen.

  “I’m certainly not some mysterious prince who will swoop down and save you.”

  Oh. So he did hear me.

  I lift my chin. “That was a joke. I’m as likely to rescue him as the other way around.”

  “I know. That’s what I’ve always liked about you.”

  Everything freezes. My heart, my lungs. Even the red clock projected on the ceiling seems to stop in mid-blink. Oh. Oh. Did he say he likes me? As in his-little-sister’s-best-friend-whom-he’s-known-forever kind of like? Or something more?

  “And you’re right,” he says. “I haven’t taken any pills in the last week. Astana has an appointment at the medic, and I’m saving up to pay for it.”

  Time wakes up again. My three-dimensional heart squeezes as if it’s been stuffed into a flat-surface world. “Oh, Carr. Why didn’t you ask me for some?”

  “I can pay to take my sister to the medic.”

  “It’s not about whether you can. It’s about whether you should skip meals in order to do it.”

  What about your mother? I want to yell. Where is she?

  But I don’t ask, because I know exactly where she is and what she’s doing. Ever since she lost her job as a royal cook, Carr’s mother has been strung out on drug pellets—and not the brightly colored ones, either. Many colonists will occasionally indulge in blue pills, which fizz on the tongue and create a temporary, light-headed sensation.

  But his mother’s pellets are not quite so innocuous. No, the color of these pellets is so dreary they don’t have a name, and they do things to your body I’ve only heard about. Spinning rooms, vivid hallucinations, thinner oxygen. I’m not sure what the draw is, but these pellets can keep her away from the living unit—and her children—for weeks at a time.

  “Maybe the medic won’t be necessary after all,” Carr
says, looking at his sister. Her chest moves up and down easily, and her skin has resumed its warm natural tone. “She hasn’t looked this good all week.”

  His lips curve for the first time this visit. “It must be your company that does her good. Nothing else has changed.”

  I smile back, even as my insides churn. Something’s changed, all right, and it’s not just my company. It’s the raspberry stains lining the inside of my pocket. The tart she was never supposed to taste.

  The food she’s not allowed to eat.

  Chapter

  Two

  I step into Protector’s Courtyard, so named because it’s located at the apex between the two adjoining space shuttles. The area, however, is used by everyone. It’s the only open space in our densely populated bubbles, so all large gatherings take place here, whether it involves a hundred people or ten thousand. The neatly trimmed grass is a healthy, vibrant green, and the space shuttles form both backdrop and border, tall, imposing, and majestic. As always, the view takes my breath away. Not bad for a colony who’s only been around for seven decades.

  People bustle along the row of shops that borders the bottom of the courtyard, and overhead, the sun lamps inch along a metal arc that spans our entire system of interlocking bubbles. A group of colonists, identifiable by their non-uniform clothes, bunch around a metal platform at the top of the courtyard.

  I walk nonchalantly along a path cutting across the open space, my dusty white caftan the same color as the slabs of concrete. Immediately, people begin to call out greetings to me.

  One look at my loose-fitting caftan, with plenty of room to accommodate an expanding belly, and the people know exactly what I am. Aegis. Gen mod. Servant of society and revered hero of the colony.

  Add the princess insignia pinned to my shoulder, a rose dipped in gold, and they know to press their hands to their hearts. If it were my father, they would tap three times.

  As usual, their reverence makes me feel like I’ve eaten a bad oyster. Sure, I’m sacrificing two-thirds of my own life so they can live the full extent of their ninety years. But it’s just one more thing that makes me different from them. One more way that I don’t belong. Many of them would love to trade places with me, to be the King’s daughter who might one day become Successor. They don’t know that being a princess is characterized by one trait: loneliness.

  “Princess Vela, I’ve got a new recipe to show you!” A round woman strolls up to me. She’s tied a bright blue sash around her forehead, and a cube containing holograms of her late son hangs around her neck. All around us, people look enviously at her robust body. “Caramel cricket crunch! I think it’ll be a big hit among the Aegis, don’t you?”

  “Sounds delicious to me.”

  “Come by my room tonight? I want you to be the first to try it.” Her voice turns little-girl pleading. It’s been almost ten years since her only child died, and as the anniversary approaches, she’s been getting more and more melancholy.

  “Of course, Miss Sydney.” I squeeze her arm, my fingers sinking into her soft flesh. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Satisfied, she disappears into the crowd. An instant later, Blanca appears at my elbow. Her hair is a glossy black ribbon under the sun lamp, but the light does nothing to soften her sneer. “How on orb do you know her name?”

  I stare. I visit all the Fittest families at least once a week. Is it possible Blanca’s never paid them this same courtesy? “How can you not? Miss Sydney’s only lived on the shuttle for the last ten years. Her son gave his life so our father could live.”

  She shrugs and checks her watch, as though she’s sorry she started this conversation with me. “They all look the same to me.”

  “You just wish you had her figure,” I sputter. “They don’t look the same. They just have extra curves because they eat real food and their nutrients haven’t been sucked out.”

  But she’s no longer listening. I was right. She must’ve only approached me because she was bored. Conversation over, she drifts away, her eyes trained on a 3-D logo projected by the news feed onto the metal platform.

  After a moment, I forget about being hurt. Because my sister’s always saying outrageous things in order to get attention, and another outlandish statement she once made, years ago, floats to my mind. Colonists can’t taste, she had jeered at Astana and me from across the pond, because then their pills won’t work.

  I’d thought she was jealous I had a new friend. But what if she was telling the truth? What if eating actual food is somehow interfering with Astana’s ability to absorb the nutrition from her pills?

  A hush falls over the courtyard as the news feed begins, and I notice that the crowd around the metal platform has tripled.

  I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten. Stress over Astana must be affecting me more than I realized. Thank goodness my feet brought me here of their own volition. Everyone’s gathered today to watch the last rites of Kenneth Kendall, the scientist who invented the genetic modification that saved our colony.

  “What’s so special about them, anyhow?” a woman near me mutters. Her skin is rosy and glowing. I’d take a moment to admire the sheen if it weren’t for the venom in her words. “Their excrement might stink less, but they still crap, just like the rest of us!”

  My head jerks, even though what she’s saying is true. There’s food crap—and then there’s pill crap. None of it is pleasant, but unfortunately, the nutrient-dense supplements produce even smellier feces.

  But the woman’s not talking to Blanca or me. She’s addressing the news feed at the top of the courtyard.

  I study the 3-D image. Master Kendall sits on a bed that spans the entire width of the platform, his long white beard tucked into his button-down shirt, digging into a tray of food on his lap. The holographic image is so crisp I can make out the gold stitching on the pillowcase. The vents around the courtyard blow out aromas, and all around me, people begin sniffing the air.

  “What is it?” a girl in an emerald green tunic asks.

  “Is he eating cicada? Shrimp paella?”

  “I think I smell lemongrass!”

  “Maybe they invented a new dish just for him!”

  I could’ve told my fellow spectators they were smelling kimchi-jjigae and scallion pancakes, but what would be the point? They’ll never taste either in their lives. The names of food roll off their tongues like the fashion found in old Earth films. Trendy to know, but with no real relevance to their lives.

  “We’ve come to the end of an era,” the smooth voice of a female news feeder projects over the loudspeaker. “Brilliant scientist and original colony member, Kenneth Kendall, has reached the last days of his life. His final wish? To eat the food he’s devoted his life to amplifying.”

  As if to illustrate her point, Master Kendall fumbles a spoon to his mouth and audibly slurps the stew.

  “Sixty years ago, when the space shuttles first landed on Dion, the people made a catastrophic discovery,” the feeder says. “Of the ten thousand pods that were sent to terraform our new planet, only a hundred pods had survived. Instead of a habitable, fully-terraformed planet, the people found only a patch of land on which to live.

  “They had two options. Wait for the terraforming to spread to the rest of the planet, which could take a dozen lifetimes. Or hold on until the new pods arrived in the next shuttle, which was hundreds of light-years away—and only if Earth received the emergency message that they sent. Both options meant the original colony would be decimated, as there was simply not enough land to grow the food necessary to sustain the population. The people were cut off from all communications with Earth, so they were on their own. To live…or to die.”

  A guy with full facial hair gasps, although we all learned this in our first history lesson at school. His affected drama is the result, I suppose, of taking a group of people and flinging them into the deep reaches of space. Without any other colony to distract us, we’re singularly obsessed with our own past.

  “And
then Master Kendall proposed a third option. Turn the human body into an incubator, so it becomes more efficient at extracting nutrition from food. Suction the nutrition from these incubators and distribute it to the rest of the colony. With this genetic modification, a person can eat a single portion of food and extract several times as many nutrients. It’s not a perfect solution. We know this. But it was the best option we had at the time. And so, Master Kendall moved forward in recreating a miracle that’s been talked about since the early days of Earth: he took five barley loaves and two small fish and fed the masses.”

  The crowd bursts into whoops and cheers. I clap along with everyone else, even though the feeder failed to mention the side effects. But why should she? This is about commemorating Master Kendall, not me. Not the other Aegis. So what if the transfer itself is exceedingly uncomfortable? What if the genetic modification damages our cells, so we perish six decades sooner than the normal lifespan?

  Everyone knows about these side effects, of course. That’s why the colonists showed me so much deference. We are a society built on sacrifice. Layer upon layer of sacrifice. It is not only the honorable thing to do. It is normal and expected. This colony wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the sacrifices of our original colonists. That is why we are called the Aegis. The protectors. The personification of the shield that Zeus carried in Greek mythology.

  And so, everyone who tests positive for the Aegis gene, the one that shows if a person will respond to the genetic modification, is expected to forego their selfish interest for the overall good of the people.

  “Waste not,” the feeder says. “The First Maxim of our colony. Many have petitioned the King, Adam Kunchai, to make exceptions to this Maxim, for holidays, for anniversaries, for the milestones in every person’s life. He has always declined. And for good reason. What little food we have cannot be squandered. It must be reserved to those who can utilize it best.”

  “Please!” The rosy-skinned woman next to me shifts, bumping into my shoulder. “Like a single bite would make a difference. The King wants to hoard the food for himself.”