Starglass

cross Koen’s cheeks. But he didn’t look embarrassed. He looked proud.

“Are you sure?” Van asked. There was some deeper question hiding beneath his words, but I couldn’t quite suss it out.

“Positive. Now come on, intended,” Koen said, his voice a little too loud for the empty library. “Let’s go.”

We moved down the spiral staircase together. But tucked under his arm, I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t walking at all. Instead I flew over the creaky steps, my body suspended several feet above the floor. It wasn’t until we stepped through the iron door and into the cold night of the evening that I touched ground again.

“Thank you!” I said to Koen, reaching out for his hands. It felt like the most natural gesture in the world, to hold his hands in mine. But his cold fingers stayed slack, like dead flesh against mine.

“Sure,” he said. He pulled his hands away and shoved them down inside his pockets. They were balled into fists.

“I didn’t expect you to speak up against Van like that.”

“Oh.” I watched Koen chew the peeling skin from his lower lip. At last he said, “Well, if I’ve learned anything from your father, it’s that it’s my duty now. You deserve to have someone looking out for you.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I stood there, blushing. “Sure,” I said. “But still—standing up to the Children of Abel.”

Koen only shrugged.

We stood there for a moment under a glass sky splattered with stars. At last Koen stepped away.

“I should go. Work tomorrow. And all.”

He didn’t kiss me good-bye. He didn’t even wait for my answer. Koen turned and hustled off, leaving me alone in the shadow of the huge, dark library.

16

I no longer dreamed about the atrium. Now, as the ship drew closer to Zehava, my dreams had changed, become stranger.

I’d be walking through a forest, but the shapes of the trees were all wrong. The bark seemed smooth, fleshy—and branches fanned out gently from the trunks. Indigo leaves stirred and moved overhead in what I assumed was wind. The Asherah’s air circulated in only one direction, from starboard to port, over and over again. This wind was different—lively, capricious—and sometimes, for whole moments, it was still, too.

I was never alone.

At first I was sure that the boy who walked beside me was Koen. I wanted him to be. His strides matched my strides perfectly; sometimes he even laced his fingers in mine. I only ever saw him out of the corner of my eye, a shadow. But night after night I cobbled together a fuzzy image from those stolen side glances. Whoever he was, he was taller than Koen, much taller. And darker, too. Even in my dreams I could tell that he smelled different. Sweet, like flowers. And somehow green. His body beside mine had none of the animal musk of Koen’s body.

Sometimes we stopped on the path. Around us the ground was soggy and dotted with white stuff. Snow. But there were still flowers on the branches. They turned toward us, watching. And I would hear a voice in my mind: Who are you? I don’t know you. You’re not who I thought you would be.

And then I would answer: Bashert. I am your bashert. Your destiny. I know it. You must too.

He fell silent at that.

In my dreams our bodies moved together in a way that felt completely natural, like it was what my body was made for. Like every moment I’d ever felt awkward or out of place or wrong didn’t exist and never had. Sometimes the snow would be so cold against my skin that it nearly burned it. But then he would touch those pinpoints where my flesh had started to pink, and every sensation that wasn’t right and good and wonderful would melt away. Soon the vines that masked the trees crawled down to cover us. They tangled round our limbs, binding us together. Our bodies were covered with flowers. Everything was a flurry of color and feeling and light.

In my dreams I was very, very happy.

I’d wake up with a lump in my throat, like I’d just been crying, or wanted to. Sometimes I turned to my pillow and did cry, hugging Pepper to my chest. I lost something in waking. I always did.

I just didn’t know what.

* * *

One night Koen and I sat on a stone bridge that loomed above a river on the second deck of the dome. Our legs dangled above the burbling water. From above, it looked silver over the rocks. You almost couldn’t see the artificial bottom that waited below, or the jets that pushed the stream fore to aft, circulating the water toward the districts in an infinite loop. I shouldn’t have felt unsettled by the sight of it. This was what creeks looked like on the Asherah. But for some reason my belly clenched as I watched the salmon move through the stream. I wondered if rivers were different someplace else.

“Koen?” I asked. “Do you ever dream about Zehava?”

“Sure,” he said, his hair whipped by the wind. “All the time. I can’t wait to see what life will be like once we live there. You know, once we get rid of the Council.” He turned his gaze down the river, watching as a pair of kids untangled their fishing line at the shore. It seemed cold to me for fishing—their bare ears were pink, their hands all wrapped up in their heavy mittens. But, determined, they spiked their bait on their hooks and cast the lines out into the water.

“No,” I said. “I don’t mean ‘Do you think about Zehava?’ Of course you do. We all do. I mean, do you dream about it?”

Koen stared at me, thinning his lips. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I have these dreams,” I said, looking down at my dangling boots, at the untied laces that reached toward the current. “They’re kind of weird. I’m always on Zehava in them. Every single night. It’s always Zehava.”

“What’s it like there?”

I gave a shrug. “Wild. Weird. Hot.”

Koen let out a snort. He fixed his hands against the railing, pulling himself to his feet. Then he stuck his hands into his pockets. “I’ve had dreams like that.”

“You have?” I asked. The wind tangled our hair.

“Yeah. But I’ve never told anyone. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

I let out a sigh, relieved to share the burden. “I know.”

“Terra,” Koen began. A frown creased his eyebrows. “You know it doesn’t mean anything, right? Whatever it is you dream about—it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good citizen, a good wife.”

“Of course not, Koen,” I said, frowning too. “Why would it?”

He smiled faintly. Then he offered me his hand. I took it gratefully, pulling myself to my feet. But as we walked beside each other, we both stared out ahead, our expressions as dark as the shadowed branches that twisted above.

* * *

We’d reached a comfortable stalemate, Koen and I. On some nights we’d lounge around my bedroom and whisper about the rebellion. I loved those nights, when his hands would make passionate gestures through the air. Sometimes I teased him, and he blushed, and we laughed together. Sweet, hopeful laughter, laughter that rippled like river water over stones. I felt real and whole and present, like a better version of myself. I wondered if this was what love might feel like.

Other nights didn’t go so smoothly. We walked side by side in the dome, neither of us sure what to say to