Starglass

parents’ quarters at night, he joked and cuddled with me like he had no worries at all. Since the blowup with his dad, the only thing he fretted over was our wedding. He was very concerned that the day go off without a hitch.

“You’ll ask Mara for flowers from the greenhouses,” he said. “I like lilies. White lilies. Ask her for those.”

“Silvan,” I said, turning over in his bed. “She’s not a florist. The greenhouses are for research.”

“But we can’t get good flowers from the florists anymore. It’s too cold. Besides, you want flowers on our wedding day, don’t you?”

I arched an eyebrow. His smile was sweet, showing only the smallest line of his white teeth. I almost couldn’t stand it. I pressed my face into his neck, disguising beneath a giggle the guilt that twisted my stomach.

“Oh, all right,” I said. I felt his fingers work their way through the cowlicked locks of my hair.

“Good. I was thinking about something else, too. Thinking maybe we should both wear white.”

My body went stiff beside him. I sat up, struggling to keep my frown from warping my expression. “What? No. I’m not wearing the color of death at my wedding. Besides, wedding dresses are supposed to be gold.”

Silvan scowled. “Says who? Just because it’s tradition doesn’t mean you have to. It’s not like it’s in the marriage contract.”

“No!” I spoke the word decisively, clearly. Silvan gave a small shrug.

“All right,” he said.

I fell down onto the bed beside him. “I don’t see why you’re so hung up on the white thing, anyway,” I said, a note of sulkiness seeping through my voice. Since Silvan had become Captain Wolff’s talmid, the only color he ever wore was his purple and gold rank cord. Even now, his silk underclothes were as white as new paper.

“What, you don’t think I look good in white?”

I bit the inside of my cheeks. I couldn’t deny that he did. Silvan grinned.

“I wear white because I like it and because I have the gelt for it. You know why most people save white for funerals? It’s because it gets dirty so easily. Most clothes can be worn again and again and again for generations, and no one can tell the difference. People think they’re doing a mitzvah by saving their whites for funerals. I think it’s a waste.”

I’d never heard Silvan talk about mizvot before. My stomach clenched again. It was like he was taking the memory of my father and stomping on it. And his smile never faltered for even a second.

“A waste,” I said.

“The dead don’t care that you save your best clothes for them!” I could tell that Silvan had spent a lot of time thinking about this. The way he said it sounded almost rehearsed. “The dead are dead!”

I felt anger flare up inside me. Red-faced, I muttered, “Fine. But don’t expect me to wear white to your funeral.”

Silvan thought I was joking. He locked his arms around me in a bear hug, rocking my body as he mimicked my words. “Fine! Then don’t expect me to wear white to yours!”

* * *

Those days, work was a necessary release for me, the only place where I wasn’t “Terra, Silvan’s intended” or “Terra, the secret assassin of the Children of Abel” but simply Terra—a girl, a botanist, a person who did good work when she could and who lived and changed and grew. I’d already shown Mara my drawings. She laughed and told me it was a wonderfully backward way to design plants—function to follow form—but then she let me sit down beside her at her computer and watch as she put one of my designs into practice, rendering its gene structure on the dusty, fingerprint-streaked monitor.

We didn’t talk about rebellion. We didn’t talk about Silvan Rafferty. In the lab we could pretend like the world outside didn’t exist—that Zehava didn’t loom overhead, an ever-expanding circle beyond the dome glass.

But I couldn’t just keep my head down and pretend like nothing was happening. One morning I arrived at the labs to find Mara perched on the edge of her desk.

“Good morning,” I said as I went to hang my coat on its hook. But Mara held up a hand, stopping me.

“Not so fast. Someone came looking for you this morning.”

“Was it Ronen?”

I’d been up all night with Alyana, rocking her, feeding her. It was supposed to be his turn to care for her now. Leave it to Ronen to come bother me at work, I thought bitterly. But Mara only lifted her eyebrows.

“Hmm? No. It was that redheaded man. You know the one—the librarian.”

“Van Hofstadter?” I hated saying his name.

“Yes, that’s the one. He wanted to speak to you. I suppose this has something to do with the Children of Abel.”

“I suppose it does,” I agreed. I reached for my coat again, slinging it over my shoulders. But as I turned to leave, Mara called out to me one more time.

“Terra!”

When I turned, I saw that Mara grimaced.

“You’re still involved with the Children of Abel, aren’t you?” she asked. “This didn’t end with the common foxglove.”

I hung my head. The bottle in my lab coat pocket felt suddenly very heavy, as if the glass had been blown out of ancient lead. I suppose my silence answered for me.

“Are you comfortable with your role in this?” Mara demanded, rising from the desk and walking close to me. I bit my lip, hard. Tasted blood.

“I don’t see any other way,” I said. “If I don’t kill Silvan—”

“Silvan? Everyone knows that boy is a milk-fed fool. He’s only a pawn for the Council. Is this what your engagement is about?”

Of course, that wasn’t all it was about. It was about kisses, too, shared under a canopy of empty branches and stars. It was about hands and heat.

But none of that mattered, not really. What mattered was the poison weighing down my pocket.

“Yes,” I said bleakly. “I’m marrying him so I can kill him.”

Mara sighed, turning away from me. When at last she spoke, it was over her shoulder. “It’s hard, on this ship. So few choices. Such claustrophobic air we must breathe.”

“You’ve made your own choices,” I protested. Somewhere deep in my heart I’d become convinced that I’d been doing the same—forging ahead on a whole new path, exacting revenge for my mother’s death. Now I didn’t feel so sure.

Mara gave a snort. I could see how her lip curled even in profile. “I fought for every choice I made. And I’m a better mother at sixty than I ever would have been at twenty, like the other sweet young things from my clutch. I never wanted to be married. Never wanted to be a mother. But the Council saw to it that I married and had children, whether I liked it or not.”

“You could have joined the Children of Abel. Momma asked you—”

“And trade the Council’s goals for the goals of the unwashed masses? That’s the problem with picking sides, Terra. You end up fighting for someone else. But who is to say that someone else has ever been fighting for you?”

I pressed my lips together, unsure what to say or do to make Mara understand. She was right—I didn’t have any choices, not really. So long as I was trapped under the glass of the dome, I’d be living the life that either the Council or the Children of Abel chose for me. But I was doing my best, wasn’t I?

“You should go,” she said at last. “The librarian’s waiting.”

I gave a small, sad nod and hustled out through the laboratory door.

* * *