Star's End

  “I’ll help,” I said. I don’t think that’s what he wanted.

  He grunted, turned away, and left. Just like that. The funeral for beautiful and popular Isabel had taken all of fifteen minutes.

  “He’s grieving,” Rena said. “He’s just doing it in his own way.”

  I wondered if she really believed that.

  We stood side by side, looking down at the urn tucked away in the grave. Adrienne and Daphne chased each other around the trees, their laughter bright and jarring.

  “I guess we should get started,” Rena said, watching them. “If we’re out here much longer, they’ll ruin their dresses.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  One of the gardeners had laid out a flat packing crate of potted flowers before the start of the funeral: mostly heliconia plants, with a tiny twist of glory bower and a sprig of bougainvillea. Rena regarded them for a moment, then picked up the shovel lying beside the crate and began tossing the dirt back into Isabel’s grave.

  Planting flowers on a grave was supposed to be done by loved ones. Family. Dad should have been there. He should be shoveling the dirt into place; he should be pulling the heliconias out of their canisters one at a time. But instead, he’d left it to us, a servant and a stepdaughter.

  And he didn’t even let her friends, those women who flitted around the gardens, say goodbye.

  I watched Rena fill the grave and promised myself that I’d never become like Dad. No matter which Coromina Group career path I took, I wouldn’t carve my heart out the way he did. If someone I loved died, I would plant flowers on their grave. I wouldn’t delegate the job to someone else.

  Rena finished filling the grave and looked at me. I handed her the first of the heliconias, but she shook her head. “The bougainvillea first. It was always her favorite.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t known that. I brought the bougainvillea over to the grave. Rena dug a space for it, and together we tugged it out of its canister. She let me set it into place. The soil was rich and dark and cool beneath my hands, damp from the moisture in the air.

  Adrienne and Daphne wandered over to us from the place beneath the trees. Their faces were serious. Maybe they did understand what had happened. They sat in the grass, holding hands and smearing their white dresses with bright grass stains. Rena called them over and showed them how to place the flowers in the dirt. They planted two before they started throwing clumps of dirt at each other. Rena shouted at them that they were being disrespectful. Daphne just laughed at that and threw more dirt. But Adrienne looked away, her hair hanging in her face. My heart twisted.

  Rena and I planted the rest of the flowers. I tried to think of Isabel as I worked, the way you were supposed to. I wanted to think on her in happier times, but I kept seeing her face as we rode in the armored car to the shuttle. She had already been sick, and none of us had known.

  When we finished, Rena crouched down behind the twins, her muddy hands resting on their shoulders.

  “There,” she said. “Whenever you want to visit Mommy, you can come here.”

  So, Rena had explained something to them. They didn’t say anything, though, just stared down at the flowers. Maybe they were in shock. Could kids go into shock? Of course, I was sixteen, and I hardly understood everything that was happening. I couldn’t understand why the universe thought this flu was fair, or why Dad wouldn’t give her a real funeral.

  Adrienne buried her head in Rena’s arm and Rena stroked her hair. Daphne just kept staring at the grave. Her face was streaked with dirt and her hair was tangled up with leaves. She looked like part of the forest.

  I turned back to the flowers, sparse against the dark dirt. Supposedly, Isabel’s spirit would live on in those flowers, because her remains would help them grow. But that was a story for children, and I wasn’t a child anymore.

  • • •

  After the funeral, there were no more outbreaks, and we tried to settle back into our old routines, as if the flu had been nothing more than a shared nightmare. But there was an empty space where Isabel had been. The gardens were empty. The guest wing was shut up tight. The house had a black hole at its center, and we couldn’t do anything to fill it.

  I spent those next few days thinking about the baby. I still didn’t know her name, and I imagined her looking the way the twins had when they were born, scrunchy-faced with a thatch of black hair. A tiny life trapped in an incubator. Motherless. Raised by a machine.

  I asked Rena one afternoon if I could see the baby—at least peek through a window at her. Something. Isabel was gone and I thought I could fill that gap if I at least knew what the baby looked like, if I could at least hold her image inside my head.

  “I’m afraid not, sweetie,” Rena said. We were sitting outside in the sun, watching the twins play some complicated game of freeze tag out among the pineapples. “Dr. Tristany still isn’t sure how the flu affected her. If she’s even going to pull through.” Rena squinted in the direction of the twins. Daphne shrieked and dove behind one of the larger pineapple plants while Adrienne’s back was turned.

  I pulled my knees up to my chest, feeling numb. “Does she even have a name?”

  Rena kept staring at the twins. “Not yet,” she said softly. “Mr. Coromina has—” She took a deep breath. “He’s still grieving.”

  I hadn’t seen Dad since the funeral. He spent almost all his time at the office, working. It seemed a funny way of grieving to me.

  “She needs a name,” I said.

  “I don’t disagree,” said Rena.

  The rest of the day stretched out, languid and empty. My tutoring sessions hadn’t started up again, and without Isabel, we didn’t eat meals in the dining room the way we used to. My life had been ordered before the outbreak, parceled out into blocks of time. Not anymore. There were just hours and hours of hot sunlight that burned away my balance of mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby, couldn’t stop wondering if she was going to die. It drove me mad.

  That evening, I’d had enough of it. I put on a sundress and makeup and pulled my hair back into a sleek, fashionable ponytail. I blinked at myself in the mirror. There I was. Alive.

  I didn’t worry about the soldiers shooting me as I made my way to the edge of the estate. Death had brushed past me so closely, I had felt the breeze of it on my skin; I couldn’t believe I’d ever been frightened of the soldiers’ guns.

  The sun was starting to set. Lines of color oozed across the sky. I wondered if Laila had opened her food stand again. I wanted to see her, but I didn’t think I could stand the thought of going to her house, another place kissed by death. I wanted to see her, to hug her and eat some of her fried shrimp and maybe, for just a second, feel like everything was normal. Maybe it wasn’t possible. But maybe it was.

  I walked along the main road toward the food stands, weaving through the tall sea grass. Cars whipped by. Insects chirped in the trees. The air was balmy on my skin. Soon, I was able to make out the lights from the food stands, already switched on even though we were just edging over into twilight. Laila’s seashell was lit up. My heart thumped. I darted across the road without waiting for the signal. A car could have slammed into me at three hundred miles an hour, but I didn’t care. Not tonight.

  The stands were busier than I expected, families carrying their cartons of food over to the tables set up to look out at the stretch of ocean in the distance. Laila’s didn’t have a line, though, and I walked right up to the window and rapped once on the glass, the way I always did. Laila pulled the window aside and blinked at me. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for days.

  “Esme?” She gave me a halfhearted smile. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Wanted to see you. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

  Her half-smile vanished. I wished I could vacuum up my words. Of course she wasn’t all right. Her brother had just died. I wasn’t all right, either.

  “I mean, I’m glad you’re safe,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m
glad you’re safe, too. You want to come in?”

  I moved toward the door, but she held up her hand and said, “No, you know what? I need a break. I’ll meet you outside.” Then she vanished back inside the recesses of her shell. The lights dimmed. A sign flicked on in the window: BACK IN TEN MINUTES.

  Then Laila stepped out of the side door. She activated the lock. I wandered over to her. She pushed her hair out of her face and looked down at her feet.

  “You want something to drink?” she said. “I can get usually get a few ales out of the liquor stand.” She tilted her head sideways, toward the rainbow of lights erupting out of Sandu’s Refreshing Beverages.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not thirsty.”

  Laila shrugged and walked away from her seashell toward the little pavilion on the back where stand workers could hide out from their customers. I followed her and tried to think of things to say.

  “Have you talked to Paco?” she asked, stopping abruptly.

  “For a few minutes the other day.” I crossed my arms over my chest. Laila was staring out at the ocean. The waves shimmered in the dying light. “He just wanted to tell me he was all right, that he was doing stuff for the Underground.”

  Laila choked out a laugh. “The Underground,” she said. “Like that helped us one goddamn bit when you get down to it. They act like they’re all different, but they’re under the company’s thumb too. Same as the rest of us.”

  She darted a glance at me. My cheeks burned. I thought of the screams of the villagers, the rattle of light-rifle fire.

  “How was the space station?” she said, her voice as sharp as a wasp’s sting.

  I looked away, over to the stands, to the people milling around in the lights. Coromina citizen-employees. They almost looked happy. But they couldn’t be, not after the outbreak.

  I wondered how many of them had seen death too.

  “It was terrible,” I said.

  I could feel an electric prickle on my skin, and when I glanced over, I saw that Laila was watching me with hooded, dark eyes.

  “Not as terrible as it was here,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Probably not.”

  We stared at each other. I didn’t know what Laila wanted from me. If I could have brought back her brother, I would have done it in an instant. The same with Isabel, too. But the Coromina Group hadn’t figured out the secret to resurrection. It couldn’t even keep us safe from a virus outbreak.

  Then Laila sighed and turned away from me. Her lank hair swung through the shadows. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just been so hard. I can’t believe—” Her voice cracked. I could hear the tears trying to get out. I rushed over to her and threw my arms around her shoulders. A backward hug. She wiped at her eyes.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” she said.

  I didn’t let go.

  “It came on so fast. There were these CG people coming around, scanning people’s temperatures from a truck, and they knocked on our door in the middle of the night and said Orlando had a fever and we weren’t allowed to leave the house.” Her words fell out in a rush. I pressed myself against her. She smelled like the sea, like salt and shrimp. “They put this big black X on our door. And then Orlando started coughing and choking and there was blood everywhere—”

  She pulled away from me, her hands balled into fists.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered.

  “I stayed with him,” she said softly. “We all did. What else was there to do? I thought I was already dead. And you were up in the sky.” She flicked her hand dismissively. “And Paco had run off with the fucking Underground like it would actually do anything, and I was the only one here, watching it all happen.”

  She whirled around. Her cheeks were shiny with tears. I was crying too, little gasping sobs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have gone, but Dad made me—and it didn’t matter anyway; Isabel died and it was all so stupid and pointless.” I thought about the gunshots again. Who had the soldiers killed? Whose death had been covered up by the company, passed off as a victim of the flu?

  “It’s not fair,” Laila said. She kept squeezing her fists tighter and tighter. “I know it’s not your fault, but it’s just not fair.”

  I felt hopeless. I had come out here because I wanted things to be normal again. Now I realized they couldn’t be. The flu had done more damage than I realized. Killing people wasn’t enough.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Laila shook her head. “It’s not your fault.”

  But she stood several paces away from me, and she didn’t come any closer.

  • • •

  I ran all the way home. When I made it to the woods on the edge of the estate, I leaned against one of the trees and sobbed. I was to inherit the Coromina Group: in thirty or fifty or a hundred years, I would hold all the power in the system. And yet not even the Coromina Group could save a little boy dying in his family’s arms.

  I screamed and slammed my fist into the tree trunk. The stinging in my knuckles shocked me, and I gazed down at my hand dotted with blood. I wondered how many other people had died from the flu. The official numbers hadn’t been released, of course—it was bad business. Not even the Underground had been able to get ahold of them. But it was probably a lot. More than I could have imagined.

  I slumped down in the dirt, leaning my back up against the tree. A hot wind blew in from the direction of the ocean. I could smell the salt on it and it made me think of Laila, my arms thrown around her shoulders while she stood as stiff as a corpse, like she didn’t even want me to touch her.

  All this death. All this sorrow. My internship was starting next year. Planet Maintenance. It was definitely going to be with Planet Maintenance. No other division in the company worked so closely with the system’s people. When I owned the Coromina Group, it would become whatever I wanted. It didn’t have to be Dad’s vision anymore. We didn’t have to manufacture weapons or engineer soldiers—the idea made me queasy, anyway. When the company was under my control, we would manufacture vaccines for diseases like the flu. We would find ways to end hunger. We would do good in this system. In other systems, too.

  I wiped at my eyes. My hands were still stinging but I didn’t care. I stood up, shaking. I was already starting to understand that I had lost Laila, that I might have lost Paco, too—that the older I got, the further I would be pulled away from the village. Company headquarters was going to swallow me whole. It just didn’t have to be a bad thing.

  I trudged forward, weaving through the trees, back toward the house. The lights in the windows glimmered up ahead. We were going to return to normal eventually. We would shove the memory of the flu aside. But we wouldn’t lose our memories of the dead.

  Isabel. Orlando. Two souls gone, with only one to take their places. The baby. A little sister. I hadn’t been much of a sister to the twins—I’d always just thought that they had each other, that they didn’t need me. But I realized I was wrong. The twins and the baby, they would be the first people I kept safe.

  This was what I told myself over and over as I picked my way through the cool grass toward the lights of the house. I entered through the garden door, and the cool dry air of the climate control was a relief against my skin. I stood in the atrium, my heart pounding. Somewhere in this house were the three lives I was determined to protect.

  I marched up to the twins’ suite. It was still early enough in the evening that the twins hadn’t gone to bed yet. The door hung open, lemony light spilling into the hallway. I slipped into their playroom without knocking. They were in an immersion, the ghosts of brightly colored cartoon characters swirling around their heads. Rena was reading something on her lightbox. She glanced up at me and frowned.

  “My God, Esme, what happened to you?”

  My face flushed. I ran a hand over my hair—it must have been wild from the humidity and the wind and my running away. “I’m fine,” I said. “I—I just wanted to see the twins.”
/>
  Rena tilted her head. I thought I might have seen a smile. “They’re playing right now. You can keep me company, if you’d like.”

  I slunk over and sank down into the sofa beside her. Rena switched off her lightbox and cradled it in her lap. “You look like you’ve been traipsing through the woods,” she said. “Is that what brought on this change of heart?”

  “It’s not a change of heart.” I looked over at the twins. Daphne kicked her feet in time to some song I couldn’t hear. “I just—I don’t want to lose them, too.”

  Tears brimmed in my eyes. I kept seeing Laila, standing away from me like I could taint her. All my life, I’d pretended there was nothing separating us. But there was, an entire system designed to keep us apart.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Rena said, throwing her arm over my shoulder. I wiped my eyes, embarrassed that she’d seen me. “I understand.” She stroked my hair, the way she had when I was a little girl, and I leaned against her shoulder, still watching the twins laugh at their holos. We sat like that for a moment, and I started to calm.

  “If you want,” Rena began, “you can help me. With the twins. With the baby, too, when she comes out of her incubator.”

  My heart fluttered. “Really?” I twisted my neck to peer up at her.

  She smiled. “Your father won’t like it, you doing servant’s work, but he won’t have to know about it, will he?”

  “I’d like that.” I didn’t think that taking care of my sisters was servant’s work. But I didn’t always think like my father.

  We sat in silence for a few moments. Then Rena said, “You don’t know how glad it makes me, you caring about your sisters.” She pulled away and looked down at me. “My sister survived the outbreak. I don’t think I told you.”

  I shook my head. My face was hot with embarrassment. I should have asked Rena about her sister. But I’d been so wrapped up in losing Isabel, and then Orlando, that it never even occurred to me.

  “Good,” I murmured.

  “She’s safe. For now.” Rena gazed across the room, at some unfathomable point on the far wall. “The baby, she’s doing better too. I can take you to see her once Dr. Tristany gives us word that it’s all right.”