Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

“Oh! Esme! Of course, yes, I’ve been expecting you. Come on back.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke, as if he were straining to be polite. He held the door for me and I stepped into a big room filled with row after row of industrial lightboxes. I’d never seen so many in one place, all of them glowing faintly at their core. They were powerful enough that they let off a soft, mellifluous humming. It almost sounded like a song.

  Mr. Indisch didn’t even look at them as he led me to an office in the back corner. The office had a big, clear window, but when he closed the door, the sound of the lightboxes cut out, and there was only silence and a faint glow through the glass.

  He sat behind his desk and pulled out a portable retinal scanner.

  “Per Mr. Coromina’s instructions,” he said.

  I nodded and leaned forward. The laser ran over each of my eyes and chirped that I was the right person.

  “Now let me find it.” Mr. Indisch dropped the scanner back in his desk drawer. I crossed my arms over my chest and peered around the office as he dug through a metal chest of drawers in the corner. It was cramped but also very sparse. No pictures on the wall or on his desk. No plants growing in the corner. He had one window that looked outside, but its only view was of the skyscraper next door.

  “It’s in here somewhere,” Mr. Indisch said. “I’ve got drawers and drawers of physical files—that’s why Mr. Coromina asked me to hold this one for him, I think.” He didn’t sound happy about this. Nervous, maybe. Scared. My heartbeat fluttered. “I really ought to work out some sort of system—ah! Here it is!” He stepped away from the cabinet. The file was a glass square. Mr. Indisch handed it to me, leaning over his desk. I gripped it by its edges, the same way he had, and held it up to the light. But of course I couldn’t see anything. It was completely transparent. I hadn’t seen a file like this in ages.

  “I’ve got a case for it. Hold on.” He rummaged around his drawer and pulled out a thin plastic sheath. I slid the file into place and then dropped it into my purse.

  “Thank you, Mr. Indisch.” I stood up and tossed my purse over my shoulder and moved toward the door.

  “Wait.”

  I looked over at him. He was pale, his skin gleaming in the residue of the lightboxes.

  “You’re his daughter, aren’t you? You’ve got the same last name.”

  I hesitated. “I thought everyone in the company knew that.”

  “It’s a big company, Ms. Coromina. I wanted to make sure.”

  “Yes, I’m his daughter.”

  Mr. Indisch shifted in his seat. The chair creaked. The wind howled between this building and the next.

  “You be careful with that,” he said. “Just ’cause you’re blood relatives—” He shrugged. “It’s scary stuff, isn’t it? What he’s planning.”

  “I don’t know what he’s planning,” I said flatly.

  “Neither do I,” Mr. Indisch said. He grinned. “I was asking you. I’d just heard some rumors. About—” His voice lowered. “Aliens.”

  At headquarters in Ekkeko, this sort of thing—sniffing around for information above his clearance level, spreading rumors—could get him fired. But he didn’t seem concerned, and I didn’t care enough to report him. I’d heard the alien rumors too. Wishful thinking, the way alien rumors always were.

  “Have a good day, Mr. Indisch,” I said, and I walked out the door, back into the hum of information.

  • • •

  I arrived back at Ekkeko in the middle of the afternoon, two days later. I was exhausted. After my initial tour, Flor showed me the genetics lab as well as one of the learning barracks, which had been half-full with young men and women who straightened their spines when I walked in. They watched me, eyes distant, expression blank. Dad’s stupid file was a weight in my purse the entire time.

  The shuttle brought me to the Coromina Group landing pad, walking distance from the main building. I went straight to Dad’s office. He was available—a break, it seemed, between meetings. His assistant smiled at me and said, “Good timing, Ms. Coromina,” before returning to her lightbox.

  Dad was jogging on his treadmill when I walked in, looking out his picture window at the glittering ocean. He didn’t acknowledge me. Not a surprise. I slouched down in one of the guest chairs and waited for him to finish.

  “Esme,” he said a few minutes later. He was still running, still looking at the ocean. “Did you do what I ask?”

  “Yep. Never let it out of my sight.”

  He stopped the treadmill and rode it backward until he could jump off. He turned to me. “Well, let’s see it.”

  I pulled the file out of my purse and handed it to him. He slid it out of the case and held it up to the sunlight. It sparked like a match going off.

  “This will be our victory,” he said.

  “Our victory?”

  He glanced at me like he’d forgotten I was there, and swallowed the file up in his hand. “Nothing you need to worry about, dear. At least not yet. All in good time.”

  I hated the way he said dear, as if it were a joke. He walked over to his desk and set the file down. I waited for him to tell me I could leave.

  “Have you been home yet?” he asked.

  “What? No. I just arrived on-planet.”

  He nodded. “You need to go home. There’s an emergency. I told them not to contact you—I didn’t want you distracted.”

  “An emergency?” I stared at him. “What kind of an emergency?”

  He didn’t look at me. “A family one. Rena can explain it better.”

  “A family emergency? Then why aren’t you home?”

  He went still and I knew I’d said something I wasn’t supposed to.

  “Because I have duties here.” He turned to me again, and his eyes were cold. “You can sort it out in my place.”

  I stood up, pushing the chair away from me. “Fine,” I said, and stalked out of the office. Part of me was angry with him, but a bigger part of me was worried. The last time we’d had a family emergency, the flu had come to Star’s End.

  I asked his assistant to call for a car and went down to the lobby to wait for it. I’d had my luggage sent home, but I had my lightbox, of course, and I tried to connect with the staff line. But no one was on the other end to pick up.

  I set the lightbox in my lap, my throat dry.

  The car pulled up to the doors and I climbed in, my heart pounding. The trip seemed to take a hundred years. When the manor finally loomed up on the horizon, I had a sudden sinking feeling of foreboding. I tried to push it aside—if this were a serious emergency, a life-and-death emergency, Dad would come home. He’d done that much for the first Isabel, all those years ago.

  We pulled into the drive and I thanked the driver and climbed out. The rain had stopped for the time being, and the air was warm and unsettlingly still compared to the air of Catequil. It felt like everything was dying. But at least it smelled of jasmine instead of brine and dead fish. I went in through the front door.

  “Hello!” I called out. “Anyone here?” One of the staff should be nearby. I made my way toward the kitchen. The house seemed empty. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  It was suddenly hard to breathe. This wasn’t some small thing. The house’s emptiness crackled with dread. The molecules themselves were disordered and out of place.

  I picked up into a run. “Hello!” I shouted. “Rena! What’s going on?”

  By the time I slammed into the kitchen, I had whipped myself into a panic. There was only Alicia, the cook’s assistant, sitting at the table in the corner. She jumped up when she saw me and smoothed down her gray uniform.

  “Ms. Coromina!” she cried. “You’re home.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. “I heard there was an emergency. Where is everyone?”

  “They’re out looking,” she said, cowering a little. I took a deep breath, reining myself in.

  “Looking for what?”

  She hesitated. Her hand curled around the edge of her skirt.<
br />
  “For little Isabel,” she said. “She went missing this morning.”

  The kitchen froze over. I stared at Alicia, convinced I’d heard wrong.

  “She went missing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Alicia’s voice trembled. “Gerard saw her last.” Gerard was one of the gardeners. “She was walking to the cemetery. She does that sometimes, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “He didn’t think anything of it, because it’s not the first time she’s walked out there. But he didn’t see her walk back, and an hour or so had gone by, and when he went to check—” She took a deep breath. “She wasn’t there.”

  I slumped down in the chair. Drops of rain pinged against the windows in a slow, drizzly shower. Isabel had gone missing and Dad was still in the office. And he knew. He had fucking told me about it.

  I thought I might throw up. Instead, I took a deep breath and looked up at Alicia. “And everyone’s out looking for her?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “What about Rena? Daphne and Adrienne? Are they okay?”

  “Rena’s with the others, yes. Grace is watching over the twins. They’re safe.”

  I stood up. Alicia blinked at me. I left the kitchen and walked out to the back patio, not caring about the drizzle dampening my suit. The pineapple gardens were empty, the colors of the plants bright against the gray light. But distantly I heard voices calling out Isabel’s name.

  I slid off my heels and stockings and tossed them inside the house. Then I ran into the garden, dizzy with anxiety. I ran barefoot across the grass, through the lawn and past the plumeria maze, winding around the property until I came to the cemetery. Some of the staff were there, huddled beneath an umbrella. And one of the soldiers too. It startled me, seeing him so soon after the visit to Catequil. I imagined him floating in the murky liquid of a vat, nothing but a designation number. They didn’t get names until after they were born, and even then, those names were based on whichever lab had produced them.

  “Private Sun,” I said, and he looked up at me. Sun meant he came from the small lab on the hot part of Quilla, the one I’d visited as a child. These names were really designations too, assigned to them when they left the labs. “Have you found anything? What’s going on?”

  “You heard what happened,” Mrs. Davesa said, rushing out from under the umbrella to pull me into an embrace. “It’s terrible, terrible.” She wiped at her eyes, although I didn’t know if she wiped away tears or rain.

  Private Sun watched us with a calm expression. “We didn’t see anything, Ms. Coromina. I reviewed the security feeds myself. The girl goes into the cemetery and never comes out.”

  My thoughts pounded with my heartbeat. I’d sworn to myself that I would keep my sisters safe, that I wouldn’t lose them the way I had my village friends or the first Isabel or my mother.

  And now Isabel was gone.

  I curled my hands into fists. “I want to see,” I said. “There may be something you missed.”

  I knew how stupid that sounded. Private Sun was engineered so that he never missed anything. But he didn’t question me, only nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  We left the cemetery. The drizzle had soaked me through completely, but I didn’t care. Dad would have cared, and I didn’t want to be like him. Not right now.

  The soldiers’ house was locked up tight. No one was there. “All out looking,” Private Sun said, and I nodded, not expecting anything less. He led me into the security room, where the monitoring equipment was set up on a piece of plywood that had been laid across the bed. He flipped one switch and suddenly the room flooded with a three-dimensional holomap of the estate. It took up the entire room. I stood in the middle of the house—the woods were over in the corner, crawling with tiny figures.

  “Private Wind-3 has a feed of the woods going into his eyepiece,” Private Sun said. “Scanning for her that way. He was originally monitoring from the room, but after an hour of not finding anything, he thought the old-fashioned way might be a better choice.”

  I nodded, numb. Where the hell could she be, if they couldn’t see her on the map?

  Fear turned my whole body to stone.

  “Can I watch the video of her entering the cemetery?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

  “Of course.” Private Sun tapped out a pattern on the control panel and the map spun around the room. The cemetery grew larger and larger and the rest of the estate shrank down to insignificance. Another pattern, and the cemetery jumped and transformed: Mrs. Davesa and the rest of the staff disappeared, and the light changed from the gray drizzle of the present to an eerie golden glow.

  Everything began to move.

  At first it was just the leaves in the trees, rustling back and forth. Then Isabel appeared, wearing a party dress, the one with the frilly petticoat and the big blue bow in the back. I frowned. She carried a bouquet of flowers from the garden, which she set on her mother’s grave. For a moment she stood in place, staring down at the soil, and I thought about how she was only six years old, and when I was six, I didn’t understand death at all. I thought death was my mother living two galaxies away, sending holos whenever she could.

  The wind picked up, and Isabel lifted her head, looking into the woods.

  Her lips moved.

  “There!” I said, pointing. “She said something.”

  Private Sun nodded. “Yes, but it’s just gibberish, as far as we could tell. The recording quality is not very good that far out from the house—”

  “Gibberish.” I shook my head. “No, no, you don’t understand—let me listen.” My heartbeat quickened.

  Private Sun didn’t make any indication of what he thought about my request. He followed orders without question and traced a pattern on the control panel. The recording reset.

  The room filled with a crackling and the low whine of electronic feedback. Isabel turned toward the woods. Opened her mouth. The sound didn’t quite line up with her mouth’s movement, and it was almost drowned out by the feedback, but I could still hear it, that hissing, garbled speech she and the twins shared.

  “It’s not gibberish,” I said. Private Sun stopped the recording and looked at me.

  “It’s not? We ran it through our language analyzers and didn’t come up with anything—”

  “Because she made it up. Or the twins did. They all speak it together sometimes.”

  “Oh.” Private Sun looked crestfallen. “We didn’t know. I’m glad you watched the recording.”

  I waved my hand, dismissing his concerns. It was good to scour the woods anyway. “Let me see the rest of it.”

  The recording started back up. She seemed to be speaking with someone—she would speak, and then there would be silence, and then she’d nod and speak again.

  And then she skipped off into the trees.

  “That’s all there is,” Private Sun said. He froze the image. “Would you like to watch it again?”

  I shook my head, staring at that empty, hazy cemetery. She vanished into the woods. The recording should have followed her into the trees.

  “Is there any way to strip out just the sound?” I asked. “I want to play it to the twins.”

  “Of course.” Private Sun went back to the control panel. I dug my nails into my palms. She had to be on the estate somewhere—maybe the girls were playing some game.

  I watched Private Sun and thought again about Dad running on his treadmill like it was an ordinary day. Like this was an ordinary emergency. And for a moment, I was paralyzed with rage.

  But then the holo flickered, and there was Isabel again, looking down at her mother’s grave. I stopped thinking about Dad. He didn’t matter now. Only Isabel did.

  I’d find her. I had to. It was just like my mother said on the first holo she ever sent me: Oxbow women didn’t break promises. So, I didn’t. Not even the ones I made to myself.

  • • •

  Music drifted through the door of the twins’ suite, the lilting hypn
otic jingle of one of the shows they liked to watch. I knocked. Grace answered, her face lined with worry. She gave me a hopeful smile.

  “Did they find her?”

  I shook my head. Her smile vanished. Behind her, the twins were stretched out on the floor, staring at their media screen, where a cat rolled around in a grassy field. Daphne laughed in delight.

  “I need to talk to them,” I said in a low voice. “I don’t want to upset them, but—it may be important.”

  Grace twisted her mouth. “I don’t think you’ll upset them,” she said carefully.

  Daphne laughed again. Adrienne stared at the screen with a bright, curious intensity. I shivered. They didn’t seem to care that their sister was missing.

  Grace stepped aside, holding the door for me. The twins’ room was bright, painted with pictures of Earth animals long extinct, tigers and eagles and zebras. Neither one of them turned toward me. They were too engrossed in their show.

  “Adrienne. Daphne.” The show drowned out my voice, and they ignored me.

  “Girls,” Grace said sharply. “Esme needs to ask you some questions.”

  Adrienne sighed and twisted around to face me, although she didn’t look happy about it. Daphne kept staring at the screen, and Grace reached over and turned it off.

  “It’s about Isabel,” I said quietly.

  “Oh,” said Daphne. “You don’t need to worry about her.”

  I frowned. The chill from earlier rippled down my spine. I looked over at Grace for an explanation, but she looked as baffled as I felt.

  “And why’s that?” I sat down cross-legged on the floor. The twins leaned against each other, looking bored.

  “Because she’s fine,” Adrienne answered. “Everyone’s upset over nothing.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Nah.” Daphne shook her head, her long dark hair splaying around her shoulders. “We weren’t invited.”

  Adrienne nodded in agreement.

  The chill turned to a sick weight of dread in my stomach. “Someone invited Isabel away?”

  They both nodded.

  “Who?”

  Adrienne rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you go talk to Rena? We told her all this already.”