Phoebe North - Starbreak

“I wasn’t going to find anyone here. Look at me. You know it’s true.”

She did. Hannah stared and stared, her mouth firm.

“But Koen, and Silvan—”

“Just distractions,” I said, giving my head a sad shake. “We were never meant to be together. Not really.”

I gazed at my sister-in-law, standing there in her rank, dirty clothes. And then I saw the flash of a memory: Hannah on her wedding night, her slender body swathed in gold silk. Her olive skin had been clean. There were flowers in her hair. But most of all I remembered how she seemed to glow, her eyes and teeth and laughter radiating love as she bound herself to my brother.

“I was only twelve when you and Ronen got married,” I said. “Momma had just died, and Abba treated me like I was invisible. But for all my self-pity, all of my doubts, there’s one thing I never questioned. You were meant to be with Ronen. No matter how much I hate him sometimes—my stupid brother, the same one who used to pull my hair and pinch me and call me names—it was obvious when you looked at him that you had the same heart, the same soul. And I couldn’t help but think, ‘Oh, how lucky he is.’ ”

Hannah rolled her jaw. I could see that she was fighting off a smile as she glanced back to the road beyond—where her husband and her daughter waited.

“But Ronen and I grew up together. You’ve only just met the alien.”

“That’s okay,” I said, calmly at first. “We have time. Assuming Silvan doesn’t do something rash. Assuming I can get us back to that planet.”

Hannah pressed her lips together. I saw then that she didn’t want to return. She wanted to stay here, where it was familiar—even if it was no longer safe. I didn’t know what to say to change her mind, so I said nothing.

“We should go,” she said. “Ronen and Alyana are waiting for me.”

I looked at her and pressed my lips together too. Together we headed down the empty street.

The tiny front plot of my brother’s home was all trampled, and it sparkled with broken glass like a whole new sky. There was paint on the front door, red letters that seemed to have dribbled and dripped onto the stoop like blood.

TRAITOR, it said, the word jagged as the breath that I heard Hannah suck in as we stood on her front walk. And then a second hand had added, in smaller, squarer script. COUNCIL SCUM.

She was stunned, frozen in the middle of the slate pathway. I let out a sigh and pushed past her, then rapped my knuckles against the old, familiar slab of cedar wood.

I heard everything go quiet in the house—footsteps paused, hesitant, on the precipice. So I knocked again, harder this time.

“Damn it, Ronen, let us in!”

The door swung open. My brother stood there, his tiny daughter slumped and sleeping in his arms.

“Terra?” he said, his face lighting up brightly. And then he looked past me, to where his wife still stood in the middle of the walk, surrounded by her annihilated flower beds. Hannah began to cry, and the baby woke, hiccuping tears, but it didn’t matter. Ronen rushed past me and down the steps.

I would have felt odd, ill-fitting, at the sight of their perfect family reunion if I hadn’t had my own old friend waiting for me just past the open door. There was a small, furry shadow there. The cat arched his back, letting out a curious meow.

“Pepper!” I cried. I moved past the doorway, feeling almost like my body floated several feet off the ground. I swept my cat up into my arms and buried my face in the warm fur between his shoulder blades. He smelled the same as he always did, like old fish and dust bunnies and dead mice. But I didn’t care. I clutched his purring body against me, pressing kisses between his ears.

“I’m glad to see you too, Sister,” my brother said, watching me over his wife’s shoulders. But I didn’t care. I snuggled Pepper to me, laughing through tears.

Because if my cat had survived these long, strange days without me—survived the riots, survived the tumult of my whole world falling apart—it meant there was room for light in all this darkness.

It meant there was room for hope.

In the time that we’d been gone, my brother had lain low, hiding amid the cobwebs and the unwashed clothes that now littered his quarters, hoping that the violence outside would soon pass. His home had a musty, human smell, of diapers and crusty food and slept-in sheets. Even with my face pressed to Pepper’s fur as I snuggled him at the galley table, I could smell it—rank and musky.

But Hannah didn’t mind. She bounced Alyana on her knee, gurgling to the baby about how much she’d missed her. My brother watched, blushing.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said. “I just knew it. Your parents—”

And then he broke off, pressed his lips together, and leaned back in his seat. He was pensive, like his mouth held secrets inside it.

“Are they all right?” Hannah asked, her baby’s fat fingers still wrapped around her own.

“They’re fine.” He paused, waiting a beat. “They’ve left for the ship’s bow with the Council. They wanted us to join them, Alya and me. But I told them I had to wait for you, to make sure you knew where to find us when you returned.”

Hannah gazed at him, her lips gently parting.

“Oh, Ronen,” she said, and the way she said it made my heart lurch in my chest. She was so relieved to be returned to him. Her old face and voice and manners had all begun to come creeping back in his presence, like she was once more being woken to life. “I can’t believe you waited.”

“Of course I did. I kept thinking about what might happen if you were lost to us on the planet. I kept wondering what I would tell Alya about you when she was grown. How her mama just slipped away to Zehava’s surface and . . . disappeared.” My brother’s voice grew choked, as if it hurt him to say those words. “And how we just left her there, as if she were an old toy forgotten in someone else’s quarters.”

Hannah’s face shimmered in the dim light of my brother’s quarters. But she didn’t get a chance to respond to him, to tell him he was a fool for waiting—and that she was touched by his foolishness too. Because a knock sounded then at Ronen’s front door, a little jittery rattle, so quick that at first I thought it was nothing but the wind. Then again, louder this time. We all turned and stared.

“Might be those kids again,” he said. “Since the riots, they’ve been roaming the streets like hooligans, knocking things over, throwing eggs. Probably best not to ans—”

A third rattle cut him off. My brother still remained seated, and his wife, too. So I rose and put Pepper on the floor. The cat looped my legs over and over again as I made my way over.

“Be careful, Terra,” Ronen warned. And I was. I opened the door just a sliver, peeking through the crack.

A smooth face. A slender neck. Lovely dark skin the color of a chestnut shell that disappeared into the collar of her fine wool coat. Rachel !

I threw the door open, and my arms around her. She hugged me back, her face pressed against the silver fabric of my robes.

“Terra, Terra, Terra!” she cried, laughing. “I thought I’d lost you! I thought you were gone. When I heard about the shuttle, I came as fast as I could.”

I gave a fierce shake of my head. I thought of the open door of her parents’ home, and all the broken shards of china scattered inside. I remembered the fears that had risen up inside me: Rachel, dead and gone like Ettie’s parents. A fate too dark for me to even imagine. I’m sure she’d thought the same, imagining my body dashed to pieces on Zehava—she’d seen a future stretch out ahead of her where she was alone, and I was gone.