Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “What?” I shook my head. “Why did you touch me like that? What do you think I knew?”

  Her chest rose and fell, tears burned in her lashes.

  “About the surgery?” I reached out to her and she pulled away. “I found out about it when I went to Catequil. Isabel, why did you touch me like that? What’s—”

  “You knew,” she said again, louder, her voice edging into a shriek. “You knew he was going to do something to me! You knew everything was wrong!”

  I felt cold. I had known, hadn’t I? Or at least suspected. And I hadn’t done anything to stop it.

  But how could Isabel know that?

  “Isabel.” I moved toward her but she turned and raced out of my room, slamming into the hallway. I darted after her and watched as her nightgown fluttered behind her just as she dove into her own bedroom. I heard the lock activate.

  Maybe I should have gone after her, pounded on her door and demanded answers. But instead, I slumped against my doorway. The nighttime silence fell around me, and I could hardly breathe.

  NOW

  Amana at night was like a fever dream of the inside of the human body. It was a circulatory system of light. Esme watched those veins of illumination from the window of the shuttle as it descended over Santos. She hadn’t been there in years. There wasn’t much Genetics work in Amana. It was almost all propaganda. Psychology. Actual Psych work, not the cover her father had used when he was doing his work on Isabel.

  The shuttle touched down at the Coromina landing pad, just outside the city limits. Esme was the only person aboard aside from the flight staff, and they smiled at her as she disembarked, wishing her good business and congratulations on her promotion. They wouldn’t know about her shutting down weapons manufacture. That announcement hadn’t yet been made public.

  A company car waited for her at the end of the landing pad, the driver standing beside it with his hands tucked behind his back. He greeted her with a bland, polite “Good morning, Ms. Coromina.” She had to do the calculations to see that he was right: it was three o’clock in the morning, Amanan time.

  “Would you like to go straight to the enclave?” he asked, opening the door for her. “Your house has been prepared for you.”

  Esme hesitated. As much as she wanted to get this whole awful business over with, she doubted it would do much for her cause if she showed up at Adrienne’s house so late—no, so early, here.

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  She climbed into the car and they sped off into the brilliant darkness of Santos. Esme pressed her forehead against the window, the glass cold against her skin. Santos was farther north than the main Coromina Group campus, more temperate than tropical, and the night was cool and breezy.

  The car moved so fast through the abandoned streets that all Esme could see of Amana was a blur of light. It made her motion sick. She closed her eyes and imagined tomorrow’s scene.

  I chime the bell. Adrienne answers. She slams the door in my face.

  I chime the bell. Adrienne answers. She reminds me that I betrayed our sister, and then she slams the door in my face.

  Esme sighed. She couldn’t imagine any situation in which this would work.

  The enclave loomed out of the darkness, the streets as twisted and confusing as the enclave on Ekkeko. The car had slowed enough that Esme could make out the houses in the pools of bone-colored streetlights. Squat and nondescript, just like the houses in her enclave at home, although these were built of brick and not teak and sea stone.

  Her temporary house was just as squat and nondescript as all the others, low-slung and sunken into the ground. The driver led Esme up to the front door, dragging her suitcase behind him. He produced a key and handed it to her with a quick bow. “So you may come and go as you please, Ms. Coromina. A shuttle runs every fifteen minutes during the day to take you to the campus or into the shopping district, if you need anything. You can also call for a car, if you prefer.” He spoke with bright, even clarity and didn’t sound tired at all, as if he too was on Ekkekon time.

  Esme thanked him and went inside.

  The house was eerie, filled with the same pale prefab furniture that came standard in all the enclave houses. That furniture hung like ghosts in the shadows. Esme switched on the lights and everything suddenly was too garish, the prefab furniture trying too hard to be tasteful. But it was better than being haunted. She dragged her suitcase down the hall until she came to the first bedroom, switching on lights all the way. She stood in the doorway and looked at the white sheets on the bed, at the white curtains hanging from the window. One of the windows was cracked open and the curtains fluttered and Esme was reminded, suddenly, of Star’s End. She dropped her suitcase to the floor and marched across the room and tried to draw the window shut. It wouldn’t move. She sighed, stepped back. A flaw in this perfect enclave house. If there was anything that better summed up her father’s entire existence, it was that.

  Esme twisted the curtain away from the window so it wouldn’t move.

  She knew she ought to sleep, but she also knew she’d be space-lagged tomorrow either way. That was what happened when you booked the earliest possible flight: you got stuck with poor landing times.

  No matter.

  Esme went back into the living room and sat down with her lightbox. The message light blinked; she knew it was her father, that he had heard from someone about her announcement at the board meeting. She didn’t want to deal with him yet, though, so she brought up the map to Adrienne’s house and readied it to download into the driver tomorrow morning. She toyed with the map out of boredom, calculating distance based on her current location and drawing out potential itineraries past restaurants and coffee shops. Adrienne lived on the opposite side of the city from the enclave. A car driving at full speed could get there in fifteen minutes. But they probably wouldn’t be able to drive at full speed.

  Esme tossed the lightbox aside and stretched out on the sofa. The ceiling was painted a dull, nondescript white. It felt like it could swallow her whole.

  • • •

  At first, all Esme could see of Adrienne’s house were flashes of sunlight flickering through the curtain of pine trees that lined the road. But then the car turned down the drive and the house materialized, a great modern white box lined with windows. It didn’t seem like a place where Adrienne would live. But Esme didn’t know Adrienne anymore, not really.

  “Shall I wait for you?” the driver asked when they came to the end of the drive.

  Esme didn’t even hesitate. “Yes, I would appreciate that.” A pause. “If you don’t mind.”

  He nodded. The drivers never minded—the implants subdued those parts of their brains. The technology for the drivers had grown out of the technology used by the engineered soldiers. The method of linking to a machine, the cultivation of the right kind of personality. For one scintillating moment, Esme wondered what she had done, ending the weapons manufacture program. It had been the entire foundation of the company for the last two hundred years. No wonder her father kept pinging her.

  She took a deep breath. She would worry about that later, after speaking with Adrienne. She had an appointment with the director of the weapons program there on Amana—she would start the company changes there, on this planet of propaganda. The immersion department could help. Even though she had been planning for this shift for the last five years, she hadn’t expected to become CEO so quickly. Everything was moving so fast.

  Esme stepped out of the car. The air was still cool out despite the sun being up, and she hugged her arms in close, wishing she’d brought a warmer coat. The house loomed up ahead. She focused her attention on this matter. On bringing Adrienne home.

  I chime the bell. Adrienne answers. She slams the door in my face.

  Esme walked up to the porch. Sunlight bounced off the windows and scattered across the yard. There wasn’t a doorbell. Adrienne had a sensor installed, the same that their father had at his house. It read the identity of the pe
rson touching it and fed the information into the house’s Connectivity.

  Esme reevaluated the scene in her head:

  I activate the sensor, no one answers.

  She took a deep breath. The air nipped at her skin. She laid her thumb against the sensor. It didn’t make any sound, but warmth singed against the pad of her thumb. She dropped her hand and waited.

  Waited.

  Waited.

  She hadn’t realized until this moment that she would stand on this porch until Adrienne spoke to her. It was madness, but it was a madness she had brought upon herself all those years before, when she kept producing the R-Troops even though she knew where the genetic material had come from.

  Shutting down weapons manufacture, coming to find Adrienne: they were the same thing, really.

  Esme pressed her thumb against the sensor again, then she sat down on the edge of the porch to wait. The car was still parked in the driveway, the driver sitting behind the wheel, his head bent low over a lightbox. He had disconnected from the car. Esme hugged her knees. The Amanan sky was clear and bright blue, a blue you didn’t often see on the equatorial line of Ekkeko. The cold wind last night must have swept all the clouds away.

  The door opened.

  Esme jolted; she hadn’t expected an answer so quickly. She jumped to her feet and turned around, holding her breath as if that would force her to speak when faced with Adrienne. But Adrienne didn’t stand in the doorway. A stranger did, a woman dressed in slim black trousers and a white shirt.

  “May I help you?” She spoke with a Tarczan accent and wore a streak of blue in her hair, a Tarczan custom. Esme couldn’t remember what it signified.

  “I’m looking for Adrienne Lanka.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  Esme shook her head.

  “May I ask why you need to speak with her?”

  Esme’s head buzzed. She ought to lie. Maybe the woman hadn’t seen the sensor readouts; maybe she hadn’t recognized Esme’s name. And so, this was Esme’s chance to get inside the house, to at least see Adrienne face to face, to maybe have a chance to explain—

  “I’m her sister,” Esme said. “Esme Coromina.”

  The time for lying was over.

  The woman gave no suggestion that this was a surprise or a problem. She only nodded and said, “You can wait in the foyer if you like.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman held the door open and Esme stepped in. After the cool air outside, the house felt too warm.

  “I’ll be just a moment,” the woman said, and then she disappeared down the hallway on whispering, slippered feet. Esme tucked her hands into her coat pockets. The foyer was filled with sunlight from the windows carved into the ceiling. Some unidentifiable plant, tall and wild with growth, lurked in the corner. It was not a species native to any of the worlds of the Four Sisters.

  Footsteps. Esme’s heart leapt in her throat. But it was only the woman again.

  “Mrs. Lanka says that she will give you five minutes,” the woman said. Her face was expressionless. “If you violate her hospitality, she’ll call the Tarcza consulate.”

  So, Adrienne didn’t even trust the local police. Esme wondered if she trusted anything about the Coromina System anymore.

  “I understand,” Esme said, in the same voice she used for the boardroom.

  The woman seemed immune. She nodded and said, “This way,” and walked off in the direction that she had come. Esme followed. Her heart fluttered fast against her sternum. Daphne felt easy in comparison. Daphne still called home. But Adrienne had worn her hurt and betrayal out in the open. She had trusted the most in the company when they were children. Her disillusionment made her bitter.

  They walked into a big open room even more flooded with sunlight than the foyer. A glass chandelier hung from the ceiling and threw rainbows against the walls. Esme recognized it immediately: it was the same chandelier that had hung in the foyer of the estate in The Intensity of Days, that drama Adrienne and Isabel had loved so much. Seeing it twisted something in her chest, and for a moment she was young again, and Star’s End still stood, and her sisters were lying out in the garden, watching a holo with that chandelier glittering in the sun.

  But then the moment passed. Esme was back in this unfamiliar room. And at the center of the room was a table and at the head of the table was an elegant woman in a silk dressing gown.

  “Adrienne?” Esme said.

  The woman lifted her head from her plate of fruit. It was Adrienne, only older, her face sculpted by surgeons in small ways—sharper cheekbones, a narrower jawline. It was a trendy face. Her hair was pinned back. She wore no makeup.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, and her voice was more like Adrienne than anything else about her.

  “Adrienne, I—” Esme started toward the table, moving to pull out one of the chairs. But Adrienne held up one hand.

  “Don’t bother sitting. I’m not letting you stay long.” She leaned back in her own chair and crossed her arms over her chest. The sleeves of her dressing gown pooled in her lap. She was as imperious as a queen, and Esme felt like nothing in her presence.

  “It’s about Dad,” Esme blurted out. “He’s dying.”

  Adrienne didn’t move. The climate control must have turned on because the rainbows began to dance around the room. One of them slid back and forth across Adrienne’s face.

  “I thought you were here to apologize,” she said. “But I see now I was thinking more highly of you than you deserve. Get out.”

  Esme’s cheeks burned as if Adrienne had physically slapped her. “That wasn’t my fault,” she said softly, her refrain from thirteen years earlier.

  It was a mistake to say that. Adrienne plucked her napkin off her lap and hurled it at the table. “We’re not having this conversation again, Esme.” Adrienne looked up at her. “You forgot the rest of it, what you used to say. That it was Dad’s fault.”

  Esme looked away.

  “It was Dad’s fault, and now you’re coming to tell me that he’s dying? I don’t care.”

  “He’s your father,” Esme said.

  “And she was your sister!”

  Silence filled up the room. The rainbows kept dancing over the walls.

  Adrienne gave a cold, bitter laugh. “I can’t believe this. How did you even find me? No—I don’t fucking want to hear it.”

  Esme let herself bear the weight of Adrienne’s anger.

  “That company is poison,” Adrienne said. “And so are you. Now get out of my house before I call the consulate. I’m a Tarczan citizen now, and no one from the Coromina Group has any say over what I do. Not you, not Philip, not anyone.” Her cheeks were flushed. She gripped the edge of the table and Esme was almost afraid of her. Almost. But she’d dealt with worse threats than this in her time at the company.

  “Now get out,” Adrienne said.

  “You can make me leave your house,” Esme said. “But you can’t make me leave Amana. And I’ll stay here until you let me explain.”

  She whirled around and stalked toward the exit, even though she knew Adrienne would have the last word.

  “There’s nothing to explain!” Adrienne shouted, her voice echoing down the hall. “Because you’ve already explained just how horr—”

  Esme slammed out the front door. The silence on the porch was overwhelming.

  For a moment, she thought she was going to cry. But she didn’t.

  • • •

  Esme woke early the next morning, still groggy with space lag. The sun had not yet come up, and she lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. The climate control hummed through the house, a hollow sound that reminded her she was alone. Lights rippled across her bedroom: surveillance drones keeping watch over the enclave. Those made her feel alone too.

  Her lightbox chimed an hour later. It was around seven in the morning, Amana time. Her alarm. She’d avoided looking at the lightbox as she lay not sleeping, but she had to grab it now in order to turn th
e alarm off. A new message from her father.

  She stared at it for a few seconds, her hands trembling. She kept thinking about Adrienne in her room of light and rainbows, sitting beneath a chandelier from a drama she had loved so much. Adrienne, who had believed so deeply in the company. She had taken her rage out on Esme because she had believed Esme should have been better than their father.

  And she was right.

  Esme rolled over onto her side and played the message. Her father’s holo’d face appeared over her bed, distorted from the transmission across space.

  “I need to speak with you about this nonsense at the board meeting,” he said. “I know you’re meeting with Adrienne, but we need to talk about this immed—” Esme switched off the holo. Later.

  The sun was finally starting to come up, and that made it all right for her to get out of bed. She sat up and her eyes were bleary and she was already tired from the day’s trials. Her meeting with the Amanan branch of the weapons division was scheduled for that afternoon, and she had already done all the preparations on the shuttle over. But she didn’t want to try Adrienne again. Not without devising a plan of action.

  Esme realized now that she couldn’t treat Adrienne the way she had Daphne; she had to treat Adrienne like an employee from a rival company, someone the headhunters had brought in for her to woo. And what did Esme do when she was trying to bring over talent from OCI or Glowka & Oldster or any of the others? She certainly didn’t go banging on their doors unannounced.

  “Stupid,” Esme murmured to herself. The house answered with silence. She stood up, stretched, dressed in comfortable day clothes. Whenever she spoke to a potential transfer citizen, she researched them. She looked for their weaknesses; she looked for their strengths. She had made the mistake of thinking that the Adrienne in the white house was the same Adrienne who had lived at Star’s End. But she wasn’t. That Adrienne had disappeared when Isabel did.

  The house’s kitchen was fully stocked with food and supplies. Esme had never really learned to cook in her time at the penthouse suite, but she could at least scramble some eggs in a frying pan. She sat down with her eggs at the breakfast table. Activated her lightbox. Since she was in the enclave, she had access to the company’s Connectivity, which meant she should be able to tap into the civics information the Amanan offices had about Adrienne Lanka.