Phoebe North - Starbreak

They’d set up their camp on the edge of a bubbling stream, where their shuttle sat, bobbing and bright, in the water. It looked like it had been a smooth landing. Aleksandra was unscathed, and not a scratch could be seen on either of her two guards, who were dressed, head to toe, in flight gear. They’d built a fire, a wide tower of freshly chopped logs that smoldered as they burned, unlike the fists of brittle detritus we’d gathered for our own fire the night before. I winced to think of it—one of those still-living trees struck down like it was nothing. But I suppose to the guard who had felled it, it was nothing. What did he care that the trees stretched and reached as if their branches were human arms? It was all the same to him. Now the guards’ motions were efficient, robotic as they doled out dinnertime rations.

I stood at the mouth of the camp, unable to make my feet move. There was Aleksandra, knelt down beside the fire. Her helmet sat on the log beside her; her long, black braid snaked out to one side. She didn’t hold a knife, not anymore. Now she wore a gun in her belt, and while I had one too, I felt sure that she’d be better at using it than I was.

She hadn’t noticed me, not yet. Maybe, I thought, if I just stay real still, she won’t.

“I can’t believe she’s here.”

I turned toward the familiar voice. Rebbe Davison leaned in close, holding his bowl of rehydrated stew against his chest.

“We were in the same clutch, you know,” he said. “In school we passed notes back and forth, like you and Rachel Federman used to. After we found out about the Children of Abel, it was like a fire lit inside her. She wrote so passionately about our cause.”

“Our notes were always about boys,” I said dully. I was hardly listening to him. My eyes were fixed firmly on Aleksandra as she flicked her braid back over her shoulder to keep it away from the fire.

“Ours were about rebellion,” Rebbe Davison said. “She decided she didn’t just want to fight for our liberty. She wanted to lead the cavalry. That was always our plan. I’d be the brains behind the outfit, and Aleksandra—she’d be the brawn. After all those years of wrestling with her mother for control, she should be up there on that ship. Not here . I was drunk when I left, but Aleksandra . . . I don’t know why she came.”

For me, I thought. She came for me.

At long last she lifted her brown eyes up. They shone like a pair of moons. When she saw me, she smiled hungrily. I felt the blood drain from my hands. I dropped my rifle; the metal clattered over the frozen ground. Rebbe Davison looked sharply at me. They all did, pausing over their meals to watch me tremble where I stood. She’d been there when they’d struck down Ben Jacobi. Then she’d been the one to draw the knife across her mother’s neck. I was surely next. When Aleksandra rose from the log, I thought I might wilt right there in the middle of the forest.

I waited for her to take up her own rifle, cocking the safety back and pressing its barrel to my head. But she didn’t. Instead she only bent over, taking my gun in her free hand and passing it back to me.

“Terra Fineberg,” she said, a smile cold on her lips. “I think you dropped this.”

Then she turned to Rebbe Davison. Her finely plucked eyebrows were arched, as if he’d just told her the funniest joke in the world.

“Mordecai,” she said. “My old friend. Come, break bread with me. We have a lot to talk about.”

I sat as far away from Aleksandra as I could, pressed on a log between her pair of guards. The others ate and ate—without any care for the supplies that might one day dwindle down to nothing. But I’d lost my appetite. Sitting beside Rebbe Davison, she looked so clean, so composed. Her hands made swift motions through the air as she spoke. The others were all enraptured. Laurel gazed up at her as Aleksandra described the rebel victory. Deklan wore a proud smirk. Even Ettie listened, one ear tilted up as Aleksandra told her story.

“Once it was clear I had unseated the Council,” Aleksandra was saying, “I knew we could no longer hesitate. We had listened to their lies about the probe results for too long. It was time to see the planet for myself, to assess the situation for my people.”

Her smile didn’t falter one bit as she wove her words into a bright fabric. So urgent was their journey, she said, that they’d taken off that very night. She didn’t mention chasing me down through the fields and pastures, or riding the lift in hot pursuit of me. She didn’t mention that she’d been the one to kill her mother—even as Captain Wolff begged her for mercy—or that she’d followed me here to make sure I died too.

“But, Alex,” Rebbe Davison said, massaging his fingers over his worried brow, “what about the Asherati? They need you—need a leader. Without your mother to lead them—”

Her words came, too fast, too fierce. By the firelight I could see the emotion that flamed beneath her cool visage. “My mother was a traitor to all of us. Though I mourn the loss of her in the riots, you will never speak of her to me again. Do you understand, Mordecai?”

I sucked in a breath. In our musty library meetings it had been common for the rebels to speak ill of Captain Wolff. They called her a cow, pinning all the ship’s woes on her. But I knew better. She’d done her best for our people, even when her best wasn’t good enough—sending out probe after probe to Zehava in the hopes that the planet would support us and be our home. Each probe had been lost, but it hadn’t been her fault. She’d been shocked when she’d discovered the truth of the missing probes; she hadn’t been hiding them from us at all. I remembered her face, gnarled and scarred, and the story Rebbe Davison used to tell about her. How she saved a boy from a thresher when she was young, the first of many noble acts she’d undertaken for us.

Rebbe Davison swallowed hard. “Of course, Alex,” he said, still clinging to her childhood name. I wondered what it would take for Alex to die for him—for her to become Aleksandra. “I just can’t help but wonder what’s going on up there on the ship.”

“No need to wonder. I have this.”

She reached for something on her flight suit belt, a square of rusted metal with jutting antennae. Fiddling with the controls, she flipped a switch. A burst of static came back.

“This is Wolff,” she said into the mouthpiece. “Give me an update on the ship’s status.”

There was a long gasp of white noise—so long that I thought they’d never answer. But then I heard a garbled voice.

“Rafferty continues to make his threats, but the coward still hasn’t moved to action.”

“Rafferty?” I said. I thought of Mazdin, the doctor who had killed my mother. I thought of his sweat-slick face on the night the Asherah reached Zehava. I’d done that to him—poured poison in his wine. But I’d hardly thought about him since. I was too busy running, too busy working to stay alive.

Aleksandra stared pointedly at me. She still held the radio up in one hand, letting the static stream out. “He means Silvan,” she said. “Your intended.”

She’d wanted me to murder Silvan, to get him out of the way so that she’d be free to lead. But I’d been a bad rebel. Disobedient.

Aleksandra shut off the device.

“It’s funny,” she said, though her tone suggested that it wasn’t really funny at all, “how much of this could have been avoided had you followed your orders.”

I remembered that night. Feeling the weight of the poison in my coat pocket after Mazdin had told me about killing my mother. He’d said that we were weak, helpless—no threat to him. I’d been desperate to prove him wrong.