Star's End

  Private Water slid up alongside me. “Maybe some kind of hoverboard.” He sounded like he was talking about a criminal. “The kids in the city use ’em to get around. Probably lets her coast down.”

  Did Isabel even have a hoverboard? I’d never seen her with one. But there was so much about Isabel I had been blind to.

  Private Water scanned the windowsill with a DNA sensor. I gazed around the room. It didn’t seem likely that OCI would commit a war crime of this magnitude. Even I, with only a little wartime experience, understood that much about the rules of engagement.

  But Dad could have taken her. He’d taken her before.

  “Private Sky is on her way to the cemetery,” Private Water said suddenly. “And Privates Sky-2 and Wind are checking the holorecordings.” He turned back to his scans, a light beeping in his ear. The soundpiece.

  I needed to contact Dad. Let him know about a possible security breach. Assuming he hadn’t kidnapped her himself again.

  I heard soft voices out in hallway, and then Grace stepped back into the room. Daphne and Adrienne trailed in after her.

  “Did you know about a hoverboard?” I asked them.

  Daphne and Adrienne frowned at each other. Daphne shook her head. “But you know Isabel; I haven’t seen much of her lately—” Her voice trailed off and her eyes went to the windows. “God, why does this keep happening with her?”

  Silence. Private Water finished his scans and folded the scanner back up and slid it into his belt. “No residue,” he said. “At least none that I would ex—” He paused, his ear blinking. “She’s not at the cemetery.”

  “Shit,” I said softly. Then, louder: “Well, keep looking for her.” I turned to Adrienne and Daphne. “You two, stay at the house in case she comes back. Do you understand?”

  They nodded, their expressions serious and scared.

  “I’m going to help look,” I said.

  “Ms. Coromina, you know the soldiers are better equipped for that.” Grace stepped toward me. “You should stay here too.”

  “No!” My voice echoed around Isabel’s empty room. I took a deep breath. “No. I want to help. The last time this happened, I was the one to find her. Grace, send word to Mr. Coromina that Isabel is missing. Tell him he needs to contact me immediately about this. Remind him I’m a Ninety-Nine now. Use Mr. Whittaker’s encrypted channel.”

  All of them, Grace and the twins and Private Sky, were staring at me like they expected me to have all the answers. But I didn’t have any answers. Only a blank place where Isabel had been.

  • • •

  I scoured the garden and the woods for nearly two hours, calling out Isabel’s name until my voice went hoarse. Dad didn’t have her. The message had come through almost immediately: No, we don’t have her. I’m sending a liaison to find out if OCI broke the rules of engagement. If she’s on the estate, you need to find her. The night was hot and damp, and everywhere I walked I could smell the rot-sweet scent of the pineapples. Coromina I shed that awful light over everything, confusing my search. All my thoughts were stained red: Isabel’s empty bedroom and her open window. The hollow look in her eyes the day she came from Catequil. The way she lurched through the house, trying not to look at me.

  The soldier’s holocameras zoomed by periodically, sweeping the area, looking for life signs. Whenever I ran into one of the soldiers, I demanded to know what they’d found. “Nothing, Ms. Coromina,” they always answered, mostly business but with a faint layer of empathy.

  By the time I’d worked my way around the house, I was soaked in sweat from the humid air. I trudged up to the porch and slumped down in one of the garden chairs there. I knew I should go back inside and contact the company to see what my next action should be. I’d gotten the confirmation, halfway through my search, that OCI wasn’t officially claiming her disappearance, but the sense of assurance from that claim had evaporated in the night heat. She wasn’t just Philip Coromina’s daughter. She was Philip Coromina’s secret weapon, and OCI might very well risk the treaties to snatch her up into the black for their own cruel experiments.

  The woods loomed in the distance, bloody from the planetlight, and I was sick with worry. “Isabel!” I screamed. My voice echoed over the garden and was answered with silence.

  I was too antsy to sit there, despite the heat. OCI could be lying. I knew that; Dad knew that. I knew he was already putting the machinations in place to recover Isabel and save face. OCI stealing his greatest intellectual property in the form of a daughter would be humiliating to him—they’d breached the estate’s security; they’d pulled her out of the safety of her bedroom. Dad wasn’t going to let that stand. But I wanted desperately to find her tucked away in the woods, like she had been as a child. I wanted this to be nothing. Bad enough the war might take my mother. I didn’t want it taking my sister, too.

  I stood up, knocking my chair away. If she was still out there—hurt, scared—I was going to find her. I bounded back into the yard, fists clenched in determination. I would go deeper into the woods this time. The soldiers’ holorecorders couldn’t see everything, not at night, not with Coromina I burning so brightly, you could almost imagine yourself trapped inside its storms. Red rain, red lightning, red winds. All of them toxic. Just as Ekkeko had been before the terraforming.

  And yet something had lived here anyway.

  I cut across the lawn until I came to the start of the woods. The trees rustled in the hot wind. The air coated my skin with moisture.

  And then something moved in the planetlight.

  I froze. Sucked in my breath. I willed my heart to stop beating, afraid the sound of it would give me away.

  A figure darted across the lawn, clear of the trees.

  I didn’t quite grasp what I was seeing. The figure, a shadow in the red light. Too tall, too thin to be human. Isabel, her face a pale oval in those eerie, liquid shadows. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t see me.

  She stepped into a bright shaft of planetlight, and then she was gone.

  “What?” I whispered. I needed to call Private Water, have the soldiers bring their heat sensors out here, look for her that way. But instead, I kept staring at that beam of planetlight like it would give me an explanation. I had seen Isabel, and then I hadn’t seen her.

  I took a hesitant step forward, moving by some force beyond myself. I crept out in the open yard. My clothes stuck to my skin. The wind had gone still. In the red light, everything felt dead.

  I had seen this before. Years ago. I’d mostly forgotten it. When Isabel was a little girl, she had stepped out of nothing in the middle of a rainstorm.

  I felt a flood of relief. Maybe this was like the first time she’d vanished, after all.

  “Isabel?” I called out. “Are you hurt?”

  Something snapped in the woods. A branch breaking, a foot crossing an old path. I didn’t even stop to think, just ran, tearing off in the direction of that snap. I heard another one, and another, a kind of symphony of panicked flailing.

  “Isabel!” I shouted. I was at the wood’s edge and I grabbed on to one of the trees while I steadied my breath. “Isabel, I saw you! I promise I won’t tell Dad—”

  More sounds of broken branches, off to my left. I looked and saw leaves shining through the forest like raindrops, emerald and thick, and for a moment I thought I saw a figure, a shimmer of Isabel’s outline.

  I didn’t call out her name this time. I just followed. My feet pounded against the damp ground of the forest, and the falling leaves stuck to my hair and to my skin. The trees rustled and I gasped for breath and I could hear someone else gasping for breath—Isabel. The harder I ran, the more clearly I was able to see her. She became a silhouette, became a shadow. She was outlined by the leaves.

  “Isabel!” I screamed, one last time. I was almost to her. I reached out my hand and my chest burned and Isabel’s silhouette turned and all I saw were her eyes, two eyes floating without a face, staring wide and frightened.

  All I saw were t
hose eyes. No woods, no shadows, no moonlight, no Isabel.

  Those eyes. Her eyes.

  And then I realized I wasn’t in the forest anymore.

  I skidded to a stop, stumbling over my own feet. I didn’t know how to explain it, because my brain itself couldn’t grasp the concept. I wasn’t in the forest. I was in a room, a big, cavernous room lined with cubes of white light. And yet I kept thinking I saw the trees, ghosts of them, off in the distant, shivering and shedding leaves—

  “Get out!” Isabel’s voice was shrill and sharp and frightened. “Get out before you cause any damage!”

  Someone grabbed my wrist. I screamed and jerked away and then Isabel flickered into focus. Her hair was windblown and tangled up with leaves, but she was dressed in the dark red-black that soldiers wore when they went out under cover of night.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed. She pulled on my arm, hard enough that pain rippled down my shoulder

  “Where are we?” I was too dazed to demand any other answers. “Where did the forest go?”

  “Out!” she shrieked. She pushed at me but I braced my feet against the ground—the hard, level, reflective ground, like the surface of a mirror. This wasn’t right; the ground was supposed to be lumpy in the woods, uneven, natural.

  “How did you find this place?” I whispered, tilting my gaze up. It wasn’t like any room I’d ever been in, not even the museum in Undirra City, with its high, vaulted ceilings and echoing space. This reminded me of that museum, but I felt an unease from being inside it as well, a sense that I didn’t belong, that the room didn’t want me.

  “It’s not one of the old terraforming stations, is it?” I whispered. “Those are toxic, you know. We shouldn’t—”

  “It’s not a terraforming station.” Isabel’s voice hitched. She was crying. Her eyes smeared with tears that sparkled in the eerie, flat light. I moved toward her immediately, struck by my sisterly duties, but Isabel moved away from my embrace.

  “It’s dangerous!” she shouted. “I’m trying to protect you! They’ll kill you like they did Rena!”

  “What!” I stumbled away from her. Rena’s death. We’d never solved it, never found an answer for why she had been slaughtered in our back yard. “What are you talking about?”

  Her eyes glowed with tears. She shook her head. “Rena was an accident,” she murmured. “But I’m afraid—”

  She was interrupted by sounds I knew I’d heard before, although I couldn’t say where. Hissing sounds, low and steamy like old pipes.

  Isabel whirled around and said something in the same hissing voice, and that’s when the recognition registered: her language. Her stupid made-up language she used to speak with Daphne and Adrienne.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. “Oh God, they really are here.”

  The hissings welled again. Isabel wasn’t the one speaking. She was staring at empty space, her head tilted. Listening.

  I couldn’t move. Her face grew paler and paler and she trembled in her dark clothes.

  “Isabel,” I said softly, timorously. “You won’t get in trouble. I just want to—”

  “Shhhhhhhh!” She glared at me. The hissing fell silent and Isabel’s eyes went wide. She called out something herself. It sounded more like a human language when she spoke it.

  My whole body felt cold.

  There was a long pause, and even in the darkness I could make out the rise and fall of Isabel’s chest. She was breathing hard. The hissing started again, low and insidious. In that moment I was a child again, hiding under my blankets because I thought a monster was lurking out in the garden, convinced that if I moved even a centimeter it would leap through the window and devour me.

  I had stopped believing in monsters a long time ago. Maybe that had been wrong of me.

  “You have to leave now!” Isabel said. She shoved me and I went stumbling through the underbrush. “Get out of the woods. I can explain everything, but—God, just get out of here, okay?”

  Her voice shook, vibrating with urgency and anger.

  “I know about them,” I said in a rush. “I know about you. Isabel, please, if you’re in danger—”

  “I’m not in fucking danger!”

  The profanity was a shock, the word rattling between us, but it wasn’t enough to propel me into motion. My fear kept me latched into place.

  “You are!” she screamed. “You’re the one in danger!”

  A shape rose up behind her, a shadow dappled by the leaves of the trees. Isabel turned around and said something in that language, and the thing flickered once, just as Isabel had, and for a split second, I saw it.

  A monster.

  Tall, thin, covered in shining, scaly feathers.

  Sharp teeth.

  Curving claws.

  A face long and pointed like a snout. A face that wasn’t human. But it was intelligent.

  And then it disappeared.

  I cried out, my voice strangled and sparse. Isabel looked back to me and her face was unreadable. The leaves had mostly fallen away from her, a few still stuck in her hair, and in that moment she seemed so inhuman that she had more in common with that shadow flickering on the edges of my memory than she ever did with me.

  “Go,” she whispered.

  And finally, I listened.

  I was hardly aware of myself as I raced through the woods. Branches lashed out at me and my shins ached from the impact and my chest was tight and constricted but I didn’t notice any of that until I cleared the tree line and collapsed in the damp grass. It was like I’d been underwater. I gasped for air and thought about what I’d just seen in the woods. Isabel’s pale face, flickering in front of me. Darkness. Darkness darker than shadows. Light that refracted at the wrong angle.

  A monster whose eyes glittered with intelligence.

  The ground swirled around me. I couldn’t catch my breath.

  Dad and Flor had both told me the Radiance were still here, lurking in the shadows, but I hadn’t really believed them. Part of me had thought they were toying with me, in good corpocratic style. Instead, they’d just been telling the truth, and I’d been too stupid to be terrified.

  “Esme! Are you all right!”

  My eyes flew open. My thoughts scattered like the stars.

  Isabel knelt beside me, her hair falling around her shoulders. She wasn’t out of breath. Although my face burned from where branches had struck me, her skin was smooth and unbroken. She hadn’t run out of the woods. She hadn’t been afraid.

  I sat up and my head spun and I braced myself against the ground.

  “You saw, didn’t you?”

  I curled my knees up to my chest. The air was thick with humidity and it settled over us both. For a moment, I thought I smelled rain on the distance, and it was such a normal, familiar scent that I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Just tell me.” Isabel peered at me. “I know what you saw. But I don’t know if you’re going to admit to it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You haven’t yet.”

  I took a deep breath. My lungs burned. Isabel settled back in the grass. She kept staring at me.

  “The Radiance,” I finally said, my voice raspy. “I didn’t really believe they were still here.”

  Isabel shook her head. “That’s Dad’s name for them. They call themselves the Divested. That’s translated from their own language.” And then she hissed from someplace deep in the back of her throat. “It’s hard to say properly. But I used my lightbox to find the right word in Corominan. Divested.”

  My dizziness came back to me. “They were kicked out,” I whispered. “Divested of their home. By us. By—by Dad.”

  Isabel stared at me. Her eyes were big and dark, just like her mother’s had been. She was going to look like her mother when she grew up.

  “Not kicked out,” Isabel said. “Just—displaced. In theory.”

  “In theory?”

  The wind gusted, knocking the trees around. I jumped and looked over my shoulder, e
xpecting to see that creature come barreling toward us. But the woods were empty.

  “That was what—” Isabel hesitated. “What the Coromina Group expected to happen to them, yes.”

  I kept staring at the woods. My head filled with a fierce, insistent buzzing. What the Coromina Group expected to happen.

  And like that, my mother’s hidden message became clear. She had seen them, the Divested. She might have even helped remove them—displace them. All these years, and she had known that I was living on an inhabited planet, that my whole life existed at the expense of someone else.

  Except I’d always known that. To live at the expense of someone else—that was what it meant to be the daughter of a corpocratic CEO. I slumped backward in the grass.

  “You told me to run,” I said to the sky. “I thought you were angry with me.”

  “I am angry with you,” Isabel said. Her voice was small, strained. I looked over at where she sat in the grass. “But that doesn’t mean I want you to die.”

  Horror struck me hard in the chest. “You said they killed Rena.” Bile rose in my throat. “And you—you didn’t tell us? Didn’t tell me?”

  Isabel looked away, her hair like a dark curtain. I resisted the urge to crawl away from her, to scream for the soldiers. She was my sister. And she wasn’t afraid of those things in the woods.

  “They killed Rena accidentally,” she said softly. “When one of them emerged out of the place where they live—it’s like another dimension, side by side with ours. It was a horrible mistake. But they want their home back. I went to them tonight—to stop them. To tell them not to hurt anyone at the house.”

  Blood pounded in my head. “They’re going to kill us,” I said flatly.

  “No.” Isabel looked at me then, and shook her head furiously. “No, I convinced them not to. We’ll find some other way.”

  “How do you know?”

  Her expression hardened. “They are my family. They listen to me.”

  My throat dried out. I couldn’t speak. I’m your family, I thought. But I only stared at her, trying to make sense of what she’d just said.

  Isabel stood up and brushed the dew from her clothes. “Are you going to tell Dad what you saw?”