Starglass

interested in such things, but you know how gossip travels through these halls.”

I nodded.

“I always tell them that Mara Stone’s never been much of a joiner. Movements are for people who can’t move themselves, that’s what I’ve always said.”

She cocked her head to one side, looking at me for a long moment. It was the sort of scrutiny that would have normally made me blush—but I was too spent for that. “Really, I’d expect no different from you. You are my talmid, after all. P. pungens?”

I squinted at her. She held her palm out. “The Picea pungens sample, Terra. You know, some of us still have work to do.”

I turned to one of the long boxes of finished slides that waited on my desk. As I ran my finger along the glass edge, I heard Mara make a strange noise—a rumble low in her throat, like she was trying to get it clear but couldn’t.

“Funny thing,” she said. It seemed she spoke more to herself than she did to me. “I can’t remember the name of the woman who first asked me to join the Children of Abel. I do remember the smell of her, all yeasty. And there was flour on her shirt. I believe she was a baker. Yes, that’s right. A baker. Now, what was her name? You know, it’s been years since I last saw her. I wonder whatever became of her.”

I swallowed hard, but it didn’t do anything for the lump in my throat as I handed Mara her slide.

“Oh, well,” she said, taking it from me. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. Does it, Terra?” Though the words seemed casual, her gaze was piercing, pointed. Like she was sharing a secret with me.

That’s when the pieces fell into place. The journal. Mar Jacobi. The bakery. Mara’s words.

Momma was a Child of Abel. A rebel. Like me.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” I said quickly, and though my lips lifted in a giddy, exhausted smile, we both ignored it. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

14

A few nights later I came home to an empty house. I couldn’t be sure where Abba had gone—out drinking or wandering the streets. But I was relieved to find our quarters silent and peaceful. I’d just begun fixing Pepper his dinner when a knock came at the door.

It was Koen. When I saw him standing in the doorway, his smile broad, I felt my heart swell in my chest.

“I have something for you,” he said, and held the journal out to me. I snatched it from him, and hugged it to myself. Then I laughed a little. I must have looked foolish, clutching the leather book to me like it contained the spirit of my mother in its pages.

“Thank you,” I said sheepishly. “Would you like to come in?”

My pulse raced as I said it. Now that we shared the rebellion between us, I wondered if Koen would finally take me in his arms, touching his lips to mine. He glanced into the dark galley behind me.

“Sure,” he said.

We went up into my room together. Pepper soon appeared, wrapping himself around Koen’s ankles. I waited in the doorway to see where Koen would sit. Maybe he would settle into the nest of tangled sheets on my bed. If he did, I would sit down beside him and press my leg against his. But, to my disappointment, he sat in my desk chair instead. I tried not to sigh as I sat on the end of my bed alone, drawing my knees up against my chest.

“So what is that?” he asked, pointing to the journal that he’d carried for me across the dome. My fingers caressed the smooth leather cover.

“Van didn’t tell you?”

At this, Koen flushed lightly, scratching at the back of his neck. “Um, no. I didn’t ask him.”

“It belonged to one of my ancestors. She was one of the first passengers, but she wasn’t like the signers we learned about in school. She was an agitator.”

“Like us!” Koen exclaimed, his grin broadening. I couldn’t help but smile back at him. I had liked the way it felt to chant along with the fieldworkers in the library, to touch my hands to my heart in salute and have it mean something for once.

“Yeah,” I said. “She wouldn’t have been happy to know that five hundred years down the line we still live under the Council’s thumb.”

“Can I see it?”

I passed it to him. He began to fan the pages, but then a scrap of paper that had been pressed between the cover and the first page fell out. It fluttered to the floor. Koen bent to pick it up.

“That’s Van’s handwriting,” he said, frowning. He handed it back to me.

“?‘Terra,’?” I read aloud, holding the scrap of paper between my middle finger and thumb, “?‘we need extract of common foxglove. Stone will have in herbarium. Bring to next meeting. Van.’?”

I, too, frowned. “Did you know he was going to ask me for this?”

“No!” Koen said, and from the way that his eyes went wide enough to show the whites, I believed it. “What would they want with some plant?”

“I don’t know,” I said, biting my lip, “but I don’t think I can help them. It’s not like I’ve even seen the herbarium. Mara’s the only one who goes in there.” I’d seen the door at the rear of the lab but never even stepped past the threshold. And Mara wasn’t eager to help the rebels. She’d made that much clear. So I crumpled the sheet into a ball and tossed it down to the floor. Pepper pounced after it, batting it as if it were one of his catnip mice. I smiled at the way the cat’s tail furled and unfurled in slow waves. But then I saw that Koen wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What?”

“You should do what they ask,” he said. I was surprised to hear a note of fear in his voice, bright and clear. “From what Van tells me, they’re not . . . they’re not the kind of people you want to make mad.”

On the floor Pepper took a running dive toward the paper and chased it underneath the bed.

“I’ve proved my worth to them. So why should I be afraid of people I can’t even see?” I glanced at my intended. “Why should you?”

“You’re not the only one who’s had to do stuff for them.” Koen raked his hand through his hair. “They asked me to watch your father, Terra. And report his activities back to them.”

“My father? Really?” It was hard for me to imagine what sort of threat my drunken father might pose to the Children of Abel.

“I don’t even know why. He never does anything. He mostly seems . . . kind of sad.”

“My father is no friend of Abel,” I said, an echo of Van’s voice in my melancholy words.

“I guess he isn’t. But he doesn’t seem dangerous, either.”

Silence stretched between us. Desperate to fill it, I slid down onto the floor and gathered Pepper in my hands. The cat leaned his body into mine, drawn to its warmth.

“I don’t really understand how you got involved with them, Koen,” I said softly. To my surprise, Koen set the journal on top of my desk. He came to sit beside me, his knee knocking mine. Pepper stretched slowly, then tiptoed over onto Koen’s legs. I watched my intended run his fingers along the bony ridges of the cat’s back.

“I used to always hang out in the library. Reading about the way the dome works. The changes of the seasons, all of that. Van started talking to me one day. We hit it off. He’s just so passionate about everything. This was last year. I was worried that the Council would stick me with some job I didn’t want. I don’t know. Once I had my vocation, I thought things would change. That I’d lose interest in the whole thing. But I didn’t, not after Van dragged me to a meeting. The way people talk there . . . it was so easy to get swept up in it.”

I thought of the jumble of voices that had filled the library rafters, rattling the dust and the cobwebs from the corners. I thought of how I’d moved my fingers to my chest in salute without even a second thought. I’d felt proud to be part of something for once. Like it wasn’t so bad that I was different—because there were other