Beneath the Guarding Stars

by Everly Frost

  “My home has been empty for far too long, and you’re under my care while you’re here. It makes sense for you to stay with me.”

  She spoke as if it was a practical decision, but I caught the yearning in her eyes and I remembered she’d mentioned a daughter.

  “I’m not trying to replace her,” she said quickly, as though she’d read my mind again. “I’m not trying to replace my daughter with you. I want to make sure you’re safe and happy here.” She squeezed my hand. “What do you think?”

  Would I ever truly be safe? I couldn’t answer that question, so I nodded in agreement and she surprised me again by giving me a brief hug.

  “I live in Tower Seventeen.” She caught my eye and nodded. “Yes, the same tower Michael works in. I didn’t want to tell you before because I didn’t want it to influence your decision.”

  It would have. I would’ve said yes to living with her for the chance to see him, but then I remembered where he worked—with the scientific community—and my joy turned to trepidation. I’d be living in the same tower as their headquarters and suddenly that didn’t seem as safe as I’d thought.

  Half an hour later, when we got off the train, I tapped my finger on the security panel and followed Ruth along the platform, through another glass tunnel and burst of wind. Ruth was right—I didn’t notice the air print so much this time. She was also right about it being more open inland. We exited the train station and came upon an open park at the base of the tower, populated with spreading trees, flowers blooming despite the cold. In the middle, a proud cherry tree sported pale pink buds, showering the surrounding grass with dropped petals.

  Ruth leaned in close, a delicate smile touching her lips. “The cold produces flowers here, even in deep winter. In fact, I love the cold-weather blooms even more than I love these summer ones. I can’t wait for you to see them.”

  She gestured me to the atrium at the bottom of the tower, where I walked through another soft shower of air, warm this time, and soothing despite its purpose. When I glanced back I could see the last tower we’d passed on our way. Further out into the blue and white of the sky, Evereach wasn’t visible anymore. We’d come too far inland, and a small part of me felt a pang for my former homeland, for its cars and skyscrapers, low-lying houses and scattered cafes, even the neighborhood-watch drones on their pre-set routes around my home. The air in Starsgard was so clear by comparison, no constant throbbing hum signaling the imminent arrival of a drone.

  “I live on level 177.” Ruth gestured me to the gleaming steel and glass elevators. She smiled again. “It’s at the very top. I think you would call it a penthouse in Evereach, yes?”

  “I thought you said you lived next door to a farmer and a designer?”

  “Yes, well, vertically next door.” She smiled. “As in, I live above them. I have a quarter of the floor to myself.”

  My eyes widened but I shouldn’t have been surprised. She was obviously some kind of leader in their community. “Who lives in the other three-quarters?”

  “Surveillance. Like the top of every tower.”

  Surveillance next door and medical beneath. I shook off the cold creeping into my chest. “Okay. So … how many people live in this tower anyway?”

  “Around twenty thousand.”

  “Twenty—? Whoa, I know it’s a massive tower but that’s a lot of people.”

  “Which makes me even luckier to get as much floor space as I do.” Ruth smiled, a genuine smile. “Some things should never be taken for granted.”

  “When we were on top of Tower One, Michael’s mom mentioned a Council. I’m assuming you’re one of them.” I stepped into the opulent elevator. Inside, the bioluminescent plants were not strings of light this time but blooms in the shapes of roses, positioned behind smooth glass, casting glossy shadows across the polished floor.

  “We have a Council of Seven and rule by majority. You’ve met Jonah already—he governs Region Two, which is the region to the southeast, bordering Seversand like this region borders Evereach. You’ll meet the other Councilors in due course.” As the elevator ascended, she changed the topic. “You must be starving. The first thing you need is a bath and some food. And then sleep.”

  The wrinkle in her nose made me smile. “I hope I don’t smell that horrible.”

  “Not at all.”

  When we arrived at level 177, the elevator doors remained closed until another air panel flickered into life. Ruth tapped it and the doors opened into a square hallway. I looked for other doors, leading to the surveillance areas but there was only the one opposite. As Ruth thumb-printed on the air screen next to it, I saw that it led directly into her home.

  “I’ll make sure you’re keyed into the system as soon as possible,” she said. “So you can access this level without me.”

  I realized that as much as I struggled to trust her, she was also taking huge leaps of trust by giving me full access to her home. But then I wondered whether it was leaps of trust or steps of control. I shook my head, trying to shed the questions, to take a moment and breathe in the warm scents in the room, sweet and welcoming, as though she’d baked cookies.

  I stepped into a place that I could never have imagined. The floor was glass, and beneath it were the same soft visible blooms—giant roses and tulips and poppies—except there also appeared to be a stream flowing through them, creating a visible division in the room at an angle from one corner to another.

  Plants grew along one wall to the left—not behind glass this time—but as though they formed part of the wall. There was a galley kitchen near the wall of plants, and directly ahead was a lounge with a dining table at the far end. The dining area faced wide doors leading to a balcony that opened out into pure sky. To my right were a myriad of rooms and I suspected a number of hallways, making the floor space as big as a large house.

  I gravitated in the direction of the balcony, drawn to the clear blue. The plants across the ceiling were dim, but as I moved forward they lit up, glowing softly brighter, as did the blooms beneath the floor, until I could have been in an exotic garden. The faint wash of the stream beneath the glass under my feet reached my ears, soothing and lulling in the quiet.

  “Food first,” Ruth said, busying herself in the kitchen. “Then a bath and sleep. You won’t be needed anywhere until tomorrow afternoon, so you may as well make the most of it.”

  All three sounded wonderful to me.

  Ruth began plucking things from the wall of greenery and I wandered over to assess the accessible leaves on the wall, only to find that they weren’t decorative after all. There were fronds of lettuce, rocket, and even cherry tomatoes. Further down near floor level, there appeared to be the tops of what I was sure were carrots and radishes growing in cleverly positioned tubs of soil.

  “We grow a lot of our own food inside,” she said, finishing up the salad sandwich. “Watch.” She went to a tray attached to the wall next to the greens and riffled through tiny packets about the size of charge cards. She picked one with a smile. “Do you like pizza?”

  I eyed her. “Don’t tell me you have a pizza plant.”

  “Not quite.” She pulled a packet of seeds from the envelope, carefully separated one of them, and bent to an empty pot at the bottom of the wall, gesturing me closer to see. “We’ve engineered them to grow fast. Just a little water…” Out of the pot she pulled a metal utensil with a spoon on one end and what looked like a thimble on the other. She used the spoon to dig a small hole and bury the seed in the earth, and then filled the thimble with water and poured it over the spot. “Watch…”

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, to my surprise, a small green spot appeared, quickly becoming a single leaf.

  “It slows down as it reaches maturity. We can’t have the plants taking over.” She smiled. “When it’s fully grown, it will be like this one.” She pointed to a nearby plant that I’d thought was a tomato vine, but as I looked closer I realized its leaves were different shades and shapes.

  Ruth
plucked two of them and waved them under my nose so I could smell them.

  “Basil,” I said, surprised. “And … the other one is oregano. Both on a tomato vine.”

  “We don’t waste space.” She popped the leaves on the bench and brushed her hands off. “We haven’t figured out how to combine wheat with another plant, so we still have to mill flour separately. It’s a favorite project of mine. Imagine being able to make dough from a pizza plant. Oh well.” She shrugged, and as my stomach growled audibly in the silence, she hurried to the bench and brought over the sandwich.

  I sat at the table, staring into the blue sky outside as she placed it in front of me, along with a tall, clear glass.

  “Electrolytes,” Ruth explained, gesturing to the glass. “To make sure you aren’t dehydrated.”

  The view was calming and I almost didn’t want to tear my eyes from it. I knew I’d have to eat slowly because it had been a while since I’d had a full meal, and while my stomach yearned for food, it also turned and constricted.

  “The scientific unit wanted to send someone to check you over, to make sure you’re okay, but I told them not to. You don’t need any more medical tests. But if that cut on your cheek doesn’t improve, you’ll need to go downstairs and get it checked.” She paused, her lips pressed together. “There’s something else we need to do…” Standing behind me, she dropped her hands onto my shoulders. “I need to cut your hair.”

  The first mouthful stuck as I tried to gulp it down.

  My hair was much longer than my age allowed.

  She disappeared behind me into the next room, and when she returned she held a pair of scissors and a hairbrush. I wasn’t sure how easy it would be for her to cut my hair while I ate, but she seemed determined to do it right away, so I swallowed another bite and nodded, and it was all the agreement she needed.

  She returned to stand behind me, drawing the brush through my hair. “You’ll find that we live very different lives to people in Evereach, but this rule is universal: your hair must match your age. You’re sixteen and it’s better if you don’t look older than you are. Otherwise, Seth won’t be the only man confused by the length of your hair. You need to remind people you’re only a child.”

  In Evereach, we weren’t allowed to grow our hair past our shoulders until we’d passed Implosion, the day we became adults by law. Starsgard was the only country on the planet that didn’t undertake Implosion, since it never entered the war. It belonged only to itself. That was the reason it was the only place Michael and I could possibly be safe.

  Ruth finished brushing as I managed to swallow another half of the sandwich. She was so gentle that I didn’t feel the first cut of the scissors. No tug as my hair floated to the floor.

  “In the eyes of Starsgard, children are treated differently.” She brushed stray hair from my shoulders. “There are harsher penalties for adults who break the law. By seventeen, you’re considered an adult.”

  Michael was seventeen. Which meant he was an adult in their eyes, just like he was an adult back in Evereach. But being an adult in Evereach meant being able to move out of home, get a car, go to college. It had nothing to do with facing harsher penalties.

  Her voice was tight. “Adults can get married and have children.”

  There was a warning in her voice and I must have stilled, because she said, “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Ava. Michael is one of a kind. Despite what he thinks, he will be sought after, and he will be able to choose whomever he wants. It doesn’t matter that his mother is shunned.”

  I was suddenly cold. When she’d talked about me being sixteen, not yet an adult, she’d talked about breaking the law, as though she thought I was destined for trouble and she wanted to protect me from it. But when she spoke of Michael, she spoke about marriage and children as though he was destined to be someone’s prize catch.

  He was immortal. Truly immortal. Of course they would see him differently, like the girls at school in Evereach. With everything that had happened, with Josh, with Michael’s dad, everything we’d gone through at the Terminal, I’d forgotten what our real lives had been like.

  Whomever he wants.

  That wouldn’t include me because I was sixteen, and Ruth was cutting my hair to prove it. Not to protect me from the law or from Seth, but because she wanted to cut my connection with Michael, as though she could separate us with the snip of sharp scissors.

  I wanted to stop her. I could shake myself out of her hold, but she’d already started. If she stopped now, my hair would be left in two lengths.

  Then my hair would be just like me, cut in two: the real me and the one trying to belong where I didn’t.

  “How did your hair even get this long?”

  I tried not to let my voice quaver as she resumed the gentle snipping. With each cut, my heart was crushed, pulverized into liquid.

  Without thinking, I said, “At the Terminal. There was this stuff they called ‘nectar.’ They kept my brother alive for years by implanting an ampule of it under his skin. It made him heal as fast as Michael. It helped me regenerate too, and that’s when my hair grew.” Like Michael each time he died—his dark hair growing longer with each regeneration.

  The scissors stopped. “Nectar?”

  My hair tugged for the first time, and I half turned to see her hands shaking.

  “Was it black? A black liquid?”

  “Yes.” My senses sharpened, the ache in my chest suddenly overtaken by a sense of danger. I searched her face and the frightened expression on it.

  I’d told her too much. I didn’t know why but I had.

  Chapter Five

  “WHEN THEY gave it to you, did you hurt anyone?”

  I pulled away from her. “How do you even know to ask that?”

  She drew back, seeming to only half realize she hadn’t finished my hair. “I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry, Ava, it’s the only thing I can’t talk about.” She took a deep breath, her expression begging me to understand, but I didn’t.

  I wouldn’t.

  So I answered her first question with as much force as I could. “I threw a man across the room and set him on fire just by breathing on him. Yes, I hurt someone, but don’t worry, he got his revenge.” Officer Reid was one of the covert operatives who’d been working for Michael’s dad. Reid had taken Michael and me prisoner. He’d hurt Michael and tried to hurt me, and in the end I’d rammed the mortality ampule into his heart and killed him, killed him for real, but I didn’t tell Ruth that. I stopped talking and pushed down the memory of Officer Reid’s dying face.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this.” She rounded me and took my chin in her hands, forcing me to meet her eyes. “Nobody can know. Do you understand? I’m not asking you to forget what happened or what they did to you. It was wrong. All of it. But there are things that the people of Starsgard can’t find out about. If you tell them—anyone—about this, then you’ll never be able to have a life here.”

  I wondered at the terror in her eyes, whether it was me she feared or what I’d told her, or something else altogether.

  She ran a hand through her hair. “Treble has a lot to answer for, but sadly they probably never will.”

  The scissors snipped again and she finished my hair in silence, brushing my shoulders when she was done. “Please, finish your sandwich, then I’ll show you where the bathroom is. And your new room.”

  She turned away at that point and busied herself in the kitchen again, not seeming to worry about the hair all over the floor, marring the beautiful blooms with dark brown streaks.

  When I finished my sandwich, she directed me down the first hallway to the left, down another hallway, and gestured to an open door, calling it my new bedroom. She pointed me to the bathroom next to it, directly ahead at the end of the hall, placing a clean set of clothes on the towel rail, and told me to go straight to bed afterward.

  I couldn’t believe how much I looked forward to a shower and sleep.

  With the water beating o
ver me, the drones and Bashers and even Michael’s family drained away with the water. I focused on the yellow sand behind the glass shower walls, interspersed with starfish-shaped flowers that looked so much like real starfishes I almost expected them to come alive. I fixed the image of one of them in my mind, using it to block out all my worries about nectar and about Michael.

  When I emerged, I checked the cut on my cheek in the mirror. It was still red and sore. Maybe I’d have to front-up to the medical unit sooner rather than later. I didn’t want to, but at least I might see Michael while I was there.

  My eyes drooped. Michael and I had been plunging through the forest to get to the Starsgardian border just the night before. It was nearing thirty-six hours since I’d had any sleep. Not that I’d call what I’d got in the last few weeks real sleep.

  Dressed in what I guessed were Ruth’s own clothes, I shuffled across the hallway to my new bedroom, taking in the large window opposite, facing the same direction as the balcony and the breathtaking view into the clear blue. If I opened it I was sure I’d touch clouds.

  The floor was pale marble, gleaming and smooth. A large yellow rose, encased in glass, bloomed on the wall above the bed, casting soft creamy light across the room all the way to the desk and the closet opposite the bed. I wondered if the rose would eventually die like the flowers in Evereach.

  I closed the door behind me and crawled beneath the covers, not knowing how I was supposed to turn the light off. Then it dimmed all by itself, and I didn’t even bother to think about it before I closed my eyes.

  I woke to silence. Someone had drawn the blinds over the window, but the crack beneath them revealed sunlight. Bleary-eyed, I headed to the bathroom to splash water on my face. The cut stung and I winced at it in the bathroom mirror. It looked red and angry.

  I found Ruth sitting at the table, her head resting on her hand, staring out into the sky as though she was trying to read it. She’d cleaned up the dropped hair so the floor was pristine again.

  “What time is it?”