Starglass

Okay?”

Koen didn’t answer. But he blushed suddenly, furiously. I felt my throat tighten in response. I needed to go—before the tears came, before I made a fool out of myself. I headed toward the stairs.

“Terra?” Koen called, just as I started down the steps again. I glanced at him.

“Yeah?”

“I hope . . .,” he began. Then he sighed and tried again. “I hope the Children of Abel don’t hurt you. I’ll do what I can to see to it that they don’t.”

What could Koen do? He was only a boy, really, hardly more than a child. The smile that trembled on his lips was sweet and hopeful.

“Thank you, Koen,” I said. I headed down the stairs and out into the freezing night.

29

A dome hung low overhead, but it wasn’t our dome. The sky—viewed through smooth, solid glass—was a bleak, pale yellow. Moons waxed against the horizon, just visible through the afternoon light.

The vines of the forest had already enveloped us. The flowers blossomed brightly against our skin. He held me in his arms. When he spoke, his words were as hot as summer against my ear. I couldn’t tell you what language he spoke. But I could tell you his meaning.

Who are you? You weren’t supposed to be here. But I think . . . I think I would have been dead by now if it weren’t for you.

I turned to him, but my own hair veiled his face. All I could see was a shadow of black—his eyes endless, pupil-less. When I reached up to cradle his face in my palms, it was blindly. I felt skin, the impression of a mouth.

You’re my bashert, aren’t you? I asked him. In my dream my chest was tight with the promise of tears. I never believed in them before, Silvan.

He laughed. Both our bodies shook with the force of it. Who is Silvan?

Silvan. We’re to be married. And I’m supposed to—

But he cut me off before I could say it. It was as if he weren’t listening—like he was lost in his own troubled thoughts.

There are always two, he said. But after a loss? No, there’s never another.

I didn’t know what to say. I tucked my face in against his chest. His skin was ice cold. He hardly seemed to breathe.

Who are you? he said again. His voice faded. You weren’t supposed to be here. Who are you?

There was a sound like a million bones breaking—a crackling, a snap, a shudder. We looked up. The dome was dissolving into scattered darkness. When I looked down, turning to see him again, he was gone.

There was only the scuffed wall beside my bed.

Even after I startled myself awake, I heard a groan move through the ceiling rafters. There was a great shudder, the sound of metal lurching. I reached out and touched the walls, sure that I had imagined it. But I could feel the cold steel moving beneath my palms.

The thrusters. I’d almost forgotten. Somewhere on the ship Captain Wolff must have turned them on, slowing the ship to a stop. I told myself that this was normal. I told myself to stay calm. But the noise went on, and I could feel the vibration down into my bones. In the distance Alyana woke and began to bawl. This wasn’t just my nightmare.

In the spare bedroom of my brother’s home, I turned over on the narrow mattress. My eyes adjusted to the dark, but my mind couldn’t accept the sensation of my body moving beneath the sheets. Or the sight of Momma’s wedding dress hanging, wrinkled, at the far end of the room.

In the morning we’d be frozen in Zehava’s orbit. In the morning I’d be wed.

* * *

It seemed to take ages for the noise to stop. In truth, only an hour passed, maybe two. But by the time silence came again, I’d become so accustomed to the terrible sound of the thrusters that its absence startled me. Down the hall there was a hiccup of quiet, then Alyana started wailing again. When I didn’t hear Ronen’s footsteps in the hallway, I sighed and flicked on the light.

I got up and plodded down the hallway to Alyana’s room. Pepper darted after me, circling my ankles again and again in a panic. I guess he didn’t really understand stuff like “thrusters.” The baby didn’t either. When I reached the pitch black of her bedroom, she paused for only a second before she started screaming again.

I lifted her into my arms. Her wailing faded but didn’t die. I carried her down the stairs into the galley to fix her a bottle.

The three of us waited for the water to heat. Pepper sat on the table, flicking his tail. By then Alyana’s cries had steadied. Still, she windmilled her tiny fists against my body. I lowered my arms, looking at her for a long moment. Red-faced and bald, she looked more like my father than she did either of her parents.

“There, there,” I whispered. As I spoke, I bounced her gently. “There’s no need to be sad. Don’t you know what today is? Today’s the day we go home. To Zehava. Just wait until you see it. The snowcapped mountains. The frozen oceans. It’s all blue and white and beautiful, and someday, when you’re bigger, you’ll go outside and look up at the dark sky and see a million stars sparkling. And then you’ll realize that some of the stars are really snow, little pieces of the night that have broken off. And you’ll stick your tongue out and catch them in your mouth. And then your momma will call you inside, and she’ll wrap you in a blanket, and you’ll be warm and safe.”

I heard movement behind me. Ronen stood on the stairs dressed in his striped pajamas and my father’s ratty bathrobe. I wondered when he’d gone to take it from our old quarters. In a way, I felt relieved to see it as he sloped across the galley floor, yawning, and went to turn off the stove. Deep down I was happy to see bits of Abba in my brother, in the way he carried himself as he prepared the bottle.

Maybe that’s what I hadn’t realized before, in the years after Momma died. How life moves on whether you want it to or not. How we carry the dead with us. How death is an ending only for the person who died.

Ronen came over and took Alyana from me, offering her the bottle. As she suckled, I rose from the table, hefting my cat under my arm.

“Hey, Terra.”

Ronen called for me as I made my way toward the stairs. When I turned, I saw a thin, tired smile playing across his mouth.

“That was crazy, wasn’t it? The thrusters.”

“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, knuckling one of Pepper’s silken ears.

“I can’t . . .,” Ronen began. His expression was pained as he nursed his daughter. “I can’t believe Dad missed it.”

I frowned. “Yeah,” I agreed, but then added: “His loss, though, isn’t it?”

To my surprise, Ronen didn’t argue with that. He only grinned. “Yeah,” he replied. “Seriously.”

I gave my brother a weary smile and trudged up the narrow steps.

* * *

There was no one to help me dress for my wedding.

Tradition was that a girl’s mother dressed her in gold silk. Her aunt and sister-in-law would lace flowers through her hair. But my father’s sister hadn’t spoken to any of us since years before he died. And Hannah was down on the surface of the planet, gathering data. Even my brother begged off helping. He’d see me later, he said as he fixed Alyana’s sling to his back. Later, he said, at the wedding. Right now he had work to do. But I knew that in the dome, celebrations raged. Zehava was dawning overhead. No one was working. Not today.

I went to the shower and slathered myself in the ceremonial honey and salt wash I’d purchased the night before. The water was lukewarm and briny, as always. Still, I did my best to scrub myself clean. The pungent scent made me wrinkle my nose, but I had to go through all the motions of tradition. After all, today was the day I