A Universe of Wishes

by A Universe of Wishes (epub)

  Respect, in some small measure.

  She inclined her head toward the glow of the ball.

  “My daughter”—she gestured a delicate hand toward a girl in an ice-white gown—“she would make a fine princess, don’t you agree?”

  The girl had the willfully bored look of so many noble daughters. She was sighing and glancing around, as though waiting for some signal that would allow her to leave.

  “And how would this help her?” I asked. “Even if I’m gone, I’m sure there are dozens of other girls waiting.”

  “A little heartbreak at just the right moment can be good for a man,” the woman said. “It can bring on an instinct to settle down. And if I know the moment that instinct is to come, how much better for me and my daughter? While so many other girls who would love to be princesses are standing around being sour about you, my daughter will be patient, and ready.”

  A small protest bucked within me. Not so much the thought of being used by la nobleza; la corrección was proof that the nobility of my kingdom used its own just as thoughtlessly.

  It came more from the idea of leaving this cut on the prince’s heart. Not because I owed him anything. But because he seemed the kind of prince who would never let la corrección stand in his own kingdom.

  My hesitation sank beneath all I would gain. Safety for my family, without ever having to approach the king and queen. Because who knew if that would come to anything anyway? I could so easily err in my speech and ruin the only chance my family had.

  No. This was the way of the world, how things came to be. Not by kneeling before sovereigns, but by small bargains made, with those who wanted what little I had to give.

  “And what assurance do I have that you’ll keep your word?” I asked.

  “A very simple one,” the noblewoman said. She did not seem insulted. “I need you to remain vanished forever. Never approach the palace or the prince again. If I should fail my side of the bargain, you wield the threat of reappearing. And should you reappear…” She inclined her head.

  I caught the edge of the threat, like knocking my hip on the corner of a table.

  On her way back toward the doors, the woman eyed the glittering glass on my feet. “Lovely shoes.”

  Later, when the prince approached me again, my guilt was weighing down las zapatillas de cristal. But I let my skirts sweep over it as he drew me into his arms.

  And I trod it down when, at the clock’s twelve chimes of midnight, I slipped from our dance and dashed from the ball.

  I sprinted for the garden doors, the thought of my family humming in my chest. Yes, we would live as strangers in this kingdom, but we would live, together, free from la corrección. I would bring the news home, and it would burn bright enough to keep the shame of my own cowardice off my skin.

  It blazed enough to lessen the sound of the prince calling after me.

  I made my heart as solid as the glass on my feet, so I would not hear him.

  It would be better this way, whether the prince knew it or not. He needed to glance less at girls like me. How much better would the noblewoman’s pale daughter, in her pristine gown, look on a prince’s arm?

  All I had to do was get far enough into the garden that I wouldn’t be seen. I couldn’t risk anyone watching me stand in las zapatillas de cristal, a swirling mist enveloping me. They might pull me from it before the magic could carry me off. Where I came from, we revered las brujas, but so many lands considered witch a condemning word, and I did not know if this was one of them.

  The outside lamps gilded my skin and turned my dress to deep amber. They lit the bursts of roses and neat lines of bulb flowers.

  But they did little to show the way out of the maze of hedges. Each tunnel of green looked the same as the one before.

  My next step caught on a root, and I felt a sharp giving-out beneath me. It came with the sound of splintering glass. I fell forward to my knees, fine dirt paling the red of my skirt.

  I twisted to inspect las zapatillas de cristal.

  One of the heels had broken off, leaving a clear, jagged knife behind. The other had a deep crack through the arch that might break the slipper in two if I put more weight on it.

  I slid out of las zapatillas de cristal. I chose a path and kept on in my stockings, the broken slippers in my hands.

  The leaves flew by. Branches brushed my shoulder and scratched my arms.

  I took the dark bend of a corner, and the sight of tulle and satin halted me.

  At first, the scene before me gave the effect of a lovely and enormous dessert, an adorned cream puff. A frosted cake set in a nest of fairy floss. It was as though the confections from the ball had come to life and gone out to roam the gardens.

  My eyes adjusted to the faint light.

  A white gown.

  A skirt the color and texture of a storm cloud.

  A head of blond.

  A braid of brown.

  The noblewoman’s daughter, the one she wanted to throw into the prince’s arms.

  She was in the cool darkness of the hedges, kissing a dark-haired girl in a dove-gray gown.

  I stilled my breath so they wouldn’t hear me.

  The way they kissed was so gentle and so fierce that I lifted my fingers to my own lips.

  As I stood in the tulip-scented air, I thought of my mothers at this age, the age of these girls, the age I was now. How my mothers, too, had once hidden in the shadows of leaves. Yes, those leaves had trembled from ahuehuete trees and not from hedgerows, but in this light, they were closer to these girls than I ever would have noticed in daylight.

  The thought opened into another, of all those who could meet only at night.

  Of all the families la corrección rended like worn fabric.

  Of the villages where families like ours resisted, their homes burned down to ashes.

  I couldn’t usher my own family into the safety of this kingdom’s borders and think nothing for those left after us.

  The deepening of the girls’ kiss thickened the guilt in me, until it grew into a current and became something else.

  Resolve.

  Nerve.

  Will.

  Las zapatillas de cristal knew my heart better than I did. They had stopped me from fleeing back into their mist.

  They had brought me to the palace gardens, and now they would make me carry myself the rest of the way.

  I left the enchanted glass beneath one of the hedges.

  In my dirt-dusted stockings, I wound back through the hedge tunnels, back past the bulb beds, into the flow of light from the ballroom.

  I lifted my skirt so I could dash up the stairs.

  I burst through the garden doors.

  The ball quieted.

  The prince stared at me, looking as breathless as I felt. His gaze pinned me where I stood.

  Seeing that kiss in the garden made my lips hot with wanting to be against his, to know what it might feel like. But I folded that thought into the bodice of my dress.

  I walked to Their Majesties’ thrones, the crowd’s surprise opening a path for me. The king and queen were on their feet, talking to guards, who, for all I knew, were moments from being dispatched to look for me.

  I curtsied as though they were seated to receive an audience. I dropped into a bow so low it set my knees against the marble floor. My skirt billowed around me like the cap of a milk mushroom.

  “Your Majesties.” I lowered my head, both in respect, and so, whatever their expressions, they would not unnerve me. “I come here from a land that is being torn apart by what men in power think we should and should not be.” My heart beat in my neck like a moth in a jar. “My mothers live in fear of me being taken from them, and them being taken from each other. Our friends face the choice of losing their lovers or their lives.”

  M
y skirt settled to the floor.

  “We beg your help,” I said.

  We. The word came out of me, slipping in place of any I.

  “We beg you to open your kingdom to us.” I took a few breaths to get the air I would usually get from one. “We are hard workers. We keep at our crafts and our fields as though tending to our own bodies. Everyone like us, we will bring more to your kingdom than we will take from it.”

  I meant it as truly as my own name. I would have staked my life on the trueness of those I came from, people la nobleza saw to be nothing more than nuisance.

  I could feel the noblewoman’s glare, and the glare of so many others, on my back. They mixed with the puzzled interest of the rest.

  Enough silence passed that my own curiosity lifted my chin.

  The king and queen were looking not at me but at each other. The consideration on their faces seemed like a silent conversation between them.

  I held my breath until the queen moved her attention to me.

  “There will come a day when all such decisions will fall to our son.” She cast her eyes to the prince. “And it’s never too early to see how well he takes them in hand.”

  The stares of the ballroom met at the young man in the gold waistcoat.

  Panic took hold of his expression for only a second before he regained the composure of a prince.

  “I think we must ask the opinion of everyone here,” he said.

  Confusion crossed his parents’ faces.

  Rage-tinted frustration bubbled up in me. Was this the way of this kingdom? Kings and queens passed the burden to princes, and princes passed it on to la nobleza?

  “If it were your own mothers,” the prince said to everyone in the ballroom, “your own fathers, your own siblings, your own children, if you would have a kingdom bar their doors to your own in their hour of need”—he seemed to eye each of them at once—“then please”—he gestured as though to offer the floor—“let us hear your objections.”

  My breath caught.

  His words were as neatly forged as the gold of a crown.

  The guests, with their damask and wine, stood silent.

  The pride on the king and queen’s faces brightened the glow in the hall.

  The prince looked to me.

  Go, he mouthed without sound.

  Thank you, I said just as silently.

  Relief and sadness crowded my heart. I had done what I thought myself too small to dare. But to this young man I had danced with, this young man who had stirred in me the slightest measure of how my mother Alicia looked at my mother Lydia, I would never again be seen as anything but la campesina. I was nothing more than the simple country girl who had snuck into the palace for an audience with his mother and father.

  He would never know me, and I would never know him, beyond tonight.

  I shored up the crack in my heart. I let myself sink into the knowledge that I would forever be grateful to the prince, from this moment and into the years after he was crowned in his father’s place.

  Guards led me to the stable. Grooms lent me boots for riding. They showed me to a mare who let me approach her in a way that spoke of her tameness, but who breathed in a way that signaled how ready she was to run.

  A pair of heavily gloved hands helped me up into the embossed saddle.

  I looked to the groom to say my thanks.

  A familiar face caught me, along with the green smell of campanilla vines.

  He wore the plain trousers and tunic of a rider, his chest bound underneath.

  The prince set a hand on the mare’s haunch. She turned her head as though greeting him.

  His eyes shone in the dark.

  “If you’ll let me go with you…,” he said.

  The glint to him was different than by the ballroom’s candlelight. Here, in the blue dark, it was more pain than mischief.

  “I know it’s your home.” He cleared his throat, as though the words came hard. “But they’re my family too. All those like us, we belong to each other.”

  My own throat clenched.

  I lifted his hand to my mouth, pressing my lips to his fingers, the closest to a yes I could manage.

  He understood, giving me a slight nod as he pulled himself onto a gray stallion.

  And we rode out into the dark, toward everyone we called our own.

  If I could do one thing over—if I had one opportunity to correct a mistake or right a wrong or fix a problem—I would ask Nana Gbemi if fufu should be pinched off or twisted off. She’d taught me the recipe on my seventeenth birthday. The best going-away/birthday gift I’d ever received, since she holds on to recipes like she used to hold on to my ears when I got in trouble.

  “Kweku?” A gentle clap on the shoulder accompanied the question. “You all right?”

  I shook myself out of my memories. The ship’s ancient lift groaned to a halt at the Science and Research module. This was my stop. I smiled wearily at the older boy staring at me with concern.

  “Tired, Tomas. Tired. Reran those numbers for the colony food budget. Took way too long.” A yawn split my words as if to punctuate my point. “Need to check on the babies before I crash—if I can get in my office. The door’s been acting up.”

  Tomas flashed his trademark grin—all gold teeth and dimples framed by a smooth brown face. He gestured at the lift. “Good luck, bro. This whole ship’s been acting up. I’d help, but Hustlin’ Harry wants another run-through on the drop-ship landing.”

  Harold Bolaji, our leader and mentor, and the ship’s captain, earned his nickname when he famously worked three straight shifts trying to retrofit the ship’s filtration system with “improved adsorption purifiers.” Rumor has it he hated the lingering odors after the cafeteria’s Fish Frydays.

  “Again?” I asked.

  Tomas nodded. “He wants to be absolutely certain the ‘process proceeds propitiously,’ or whatever he says.”

  “I guess. Don’t pull an all-nighter—we need you for loading tomorrow.”

  “If Harry doesn’t want to do another inventory count, sure. Otherwise—” He shrugged, the universal sign for Harry’s going to be Harry, then changed topics. “How’s Nana?”

  I tensed. At first, I thought he meant my grandmother, but then my shoulders relaxed. No one knew how the unofficial name for my project first came about. One day it slipped into a conversation, it felt right, and so it stayed.

  “Fine. Should be ready once we touch down.”

  “Glad to hear it. I—”

  “Tomas, Harry.” The hail came through fuzzy and distorted on the general line. Tomas sighed and fiddled with the old comm system clipped to his belt. I snorted, and the older boy glared at me as he played with the dials. Eventually he got the system working and cleared his throat.

  “Tomas here.”

  “Run-through’s in ten. You see Kweku?”

  Tomas glanced up at me. “Not since this morning.”

  I mouthed Thank you, and he rolled his eyes.

  “Well, if you do, tell him I need those numbers run again—they’re too high. And tell him to come to the run-through once he’s done.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “Roger. Tomas out.” A frown crossed his face as he disconnected. Tomas patted his pocket, then reached in and pulled out a thin, twisted piece of metal. “Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Your door isn’t the only one acting up. Francis and I had to break into our room a few days ago. Papi taught me how to make these when I was little. ‘Papi’s Last Resort,’ he called them.”

  I took the lockpick and grinned. Tomas’s grandfather was nothing if not a scourge on the elderly community he stayed in. The thought of the tiny old man clothed in nothing but a too-short bathrobe playing cat burglar pulled a chuckle from me. Tomas grinned.
No doubt the same image played in his mind, but too quickly my grin faded and I sighed.

  “He would’ve loved the colony. My nana too. The real Nana,” I added for clarification. I fiddled with the lockpick. “Do you ever—”

  “Wish we could’ve brought them along?” he finished for me. “All the time. Every single day. But their bodies couldn’t handle the strain. Neither could our parents’. Ours barely can. You know that. And they knew that even while they helped us build and grow the things the colony needs.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my thoughts a thousand light-years behind us. “Yeah, I know.”

  The thought of those we’d left behind put a somber mood on the conversation, and so it ended. I got off the lift, each of us departing to handle our respective tasks. Overwhelming tasks to be sure, but these days if it wasn’t overwhelming it wasn’t important.

  “Authorize,” I said as I entered the outer room of my laboratory. The dry automated voice of the ship’s virtual assistant filled the room as I quickly stripped out of my uniform and into a clean pair of scrubs.

  “Kweku Aboah, age seventeen, ship’s acting research officer, Liberia, Black Star Line. Authorization complete. Welcome back, Kweku.”

  Liberia.

  The first and greatest colony ship, the sweet chariot that swung low and carried us home, the mule that pulled us to our proverbial forty acres.

  Liberia.

  It was still surreal, even now, seventy-five years after the first wave of settlers arrived in the Colonies. Yet this would be the last voyage this ship would make before being retired, carrying the youngest generation possible, the teenagers who would grow to be the scientists, the doctors, the engineers, to push the Colonies into the future.

  Liberia.

  I smiled. The name was fitting.

  The outer door shut, and the sterilization process began. Several minutes later the inner door hissed open, and I stepped into a different world.

  Sweet, rich, earthy scents pulled me deeper into the laboratory, past hanging vines of kudzu creeping up the walls, around the obstacle course of floating herb pots humming waist-high off the floor, and through fingerlike tendrils of bean plants dangling from the ceiling. But it was the bed of earth stretching across the floor that called to me.