Star's End

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  No, she corrected herself. Not my garden. But she thought of it that way nonetheless, a mental tic that she couldn’t shake. It had embedded itself in her brain and so there it was: her garden. Her house.

  The doorbell rang.

  Her doorbell rang.

  She jumped in surprise and almost dropped her coffee cup. Serena? No, their appointment was this afternoon, at the Immersion offices.

  Maybe it was her father, tired of waiting for him to return his messages. Or maybe it was someone here to tell her, in person, that her father had died.

  She drained the last of the coffee and set the cup face down in the sink. Then she smoothed down her uniform and strode through the house into the foyer. A shadow moved on the other side of the front door, distorted through the glass.

  Esme pulled the door open.

  It was Adrienne.

  She didn’t say anything, just blinked like she was surprised to find Esme on the other side. She was dressed up in faux fur and white gloves, a woman about town. A shiny silver personal car waited in the driveway. No driver. Of course. Adrienne wouldn’t have the taste for genetically engineered drivers, would she? Not anymore.

  “Adrienne,” Esme said, stunned. “What are you doing here?”

  “You’re not the only one who can show up unannounced at people’s houses.”

  Esme nodded. She deserved that. “Would you like to come in?” Esme asked. She stepped out of the doorway and Adrienne glided in, glancing around the living room with a dispassionate expression. She slipped off her fur and draped it on the sofa.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Esme asked.

  Adrienne sat down on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap. Her eyes flicked over the images on the walls. “This is more decorated than your suite at Star’s End.”

  “It’s more decorated than my condominium back on Ekkeko, too.” Esme sat down on the sofa beside Adrienne. “The offer still stands for coffee.”

  “I don’t want any.” Adrienne squeezed her hands together. Esme didn’t say anything; she would let Adrienne speak when she wanted. A technique she had learned in business, but it worked for sisters, too.

  Adrienne glanced at Esme out of the corner of her eye. “Do you understand why I left?”

  Esme blinked, taken aback. “I thought I did,” she said. “But then, I stayed.”

  Adrienne shook her head. “I had my life planned out; did you know that? An internship in Terraforming—at the time, I thought it could catapult me up to Psych or PM. Immersion production. I wanted to show the people of the Four Sisters how wonderful it was to live here.”

  Esme looked down at her hands, remembering her own idealism. It felt as old as starlight.

  “I assumed I would marry a company man, and we’d live on the estate until we had a high-enough ranking to get one of the bigger houses in the enclave—” She laughed bitterly. “I used to get John to drive me past them; did you know that? The big ones on the beach. Flirted with him, too. It drove Daphne mad.” Adrienne covered her face with her gloved hands. “And then I saw what the company was really about.”

  Esme said nothing.

  Adrienne fixed her with a cold, dark stare. “I wanted to be the bigger person. I wanted to show Dad that I was bigger than him. It wasn’t a matter of proving it to myself, because I knew that, knew it as well as I’d known that one day I’d live in an enclave just like this one.” She turned away. “And I wound up with something better than an enclave.”

  The house buzzed from the climate control. Adrienne stood up. Esme tried to figure out where this conversation was headed. She couldn’t, and that made her feel lost. Unmoored.

  Adrienne looked at Esme. For a moment, nothing but silence passed between them.

  “I didn’t want to accept your apology,” she said. “But I remember the way you used to be. Before—” She glanced at one of the windows. It looked out at the empty street outside. “Before Isabel. I think your plan is—corpocratic, at its heart. But your heart is in the right place.”

  Esme stood up and walked over to Adrienne. She wanted to throw her arms around her and hug her, like when they were younger. But she stopped herself. Adrienne walked over to the window and put her hand on the glass. Her expression was far away.

  “I’ll come back to Ekkeko and watch Dad die,” Adrienne said.

  “What?” Esme sputtered. This was the last thing she’d expected; she’d accepted her failure in bring Adrienne home. She’d thought it didn’t matter anymore. But now, hearing Adrienne say it—she realized it did.

  “I was the bigger person all those years ago,” Adrienne said. “Now I want to be the smaller one. I want to sit by his bed and make sure that he’ll never hurt anyone again.”

  That was when Esme grasped what Adrienne had really said—she wanted to watch their father die. She didn’t want to say goodbye at all.

  “Oh,” Esme said. “Thank you. I can make the travel arrangements for you—”

  Adrienne flicked her wrist. “Don’t bother. I’ll have Faust do it.”

  Esme expected her to leave, to stride out the front door. But she only turned around, her gazed fixed on a stand of electronic flowers buzzing in the corner.

  “I know where Isabel is,” she said, in a flat voice.

  Esme’s throat felt dry. Her head spun. “Is she all right?”

  Adrienne sighed. “No.”

  Esme opened her mouth, trying to find the words for the questions she wanted to ask.

  “How do you expect her to be,” Adrienne said, “when her own family used her body the way they did?”

  Esme looked away.

  “I’m not going to tell you how to find her,” Adrienne said.

  “We have our records,” Esme bluffed.

  “You don’t have hers.” Adrienne smiled again. “I have work to do, so I’m afraid I can’t stay much longer. But I’ll be back on Ekkeko soon. Tell Daddy I’m so looking forward to it.”

  She turned and walked away. The door slammed behind her, echoing into silence.

  Esme wept.

  THIRTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  I lay in bed, listening to the rain pound against the windows. I’d managed to fall asleep for a few hours earlier, which was more sleep than I’d managed these last few weeks.

  The Coromina Group was going to war.

  It wasn’t official yet, but I was high-ranked enough to know anyway. A man from OCI had been caught with Coromina Group secrets. An act of corporate espionage. The company had waged wars for less.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and pressed my head into my pillow. My blood pounded in my ears, my heart thudded in my chest. It was like I’d gone jogging, not like I’d been stretched out unmoving, thinking that if I could fool my body into thinking I was asleep, I’d actually fall asleep for real.

  Over in the corner, my lightbox lit up, a square of pale white telling me I had a message waiting—a message that had been sent through Coromina Group Connectivity. My chest tightened and I wondered if this was it, the message, the one that would tell us we were going to war.

  I kicked my blankets off. Sat up. I wasn’t going to let a message like that go, not while I was awake. Not knowing would eat me.

  I took a deep breath. “Play message,” I said, my voice unnaturally loud in the quiet stillness of the nighttime. I closed my eyes, all my muscles tense. If it was war, the lightbox would want a DNA sample, confirmation that I was who I said I was.

  Hey, Esme, it’s me, Miguel. Just wanted to let you know that I looked into that project—the roads in Tirem, on Quilla? It shouldn’t be too much to shift some funds around to get them fixed, if that’s really what you want.

  He hadn’t bothered with a visual recording. Just his voice, wavery through the Connectivity. He would still be on Quilla—it was morning there. Late morning.

  I slumped down on my bed. War delayed for another minute, hour, day, week—I didn’t know. At least Tirem, that little village in the desert, would get its new roads before every
thing went to hell.

  It was risky, continuing my secret PM projects without permission from Dad. The closer war got, the higher he pushed my ranking—I was a Ninety now, which was high even for Genetics. High enough that it meant I learned things I didn’t want to know. But high enough, also, to order repairs on little villages, to try and make the Four Sisters a better place for its inhabitants. I tried to focus on that. I was doing what I’d set out to do when I first started at the company.

  It wasn’t enough of a consolation, though. Not with war coming.

  I shoved myself out of my bed. My heart was still pounding. It pounded a lot these days. Mr. Hankiao said it was anxiety due to work stress and gave me medicines manufactured by the Coromina Group. They didn’t help.

  It wasn’t work stress.

  I shuffled over to my window and gazed out at the rain-drenched garden. Shards of planetlight broke through the storm clouds, turning everything an eerie tarnished color, like the world had gone bad. I pressed my forehead to the glass. I’d only fallen asleep this evening out of pure exhaustion; when I woke, it had been because of a nightmare. I dreamt of Starspray City. It was flooding, the ocean waves rising higher and higher, and Isabel was there. She was locked away in one of the buildings, and there was nothing I could do to save her.

  Something had happened on Catequil. I still didn’t know what, only that Dad’s story, about Lasely fever, about a new medical surgery, didn’t sit right with me. Isabel had come home almost six months ago. She was the one part of Dad’s story that didn’t fit. She acted strange now. Withdrawn. Quiet. I couldn’t get anything out of her. Neither could the twins.

  Trying to find out what had really happened to her was impossible. I’d tried. I’d made the calls; I’d visited the right offices. I’d done everything but ask Dad, which was the one thing I didn’t want to do. After that strange outburst, when she accused me of knowing something—I still didn’t know what—Isabel started brushing off my attempts to find out more. Said it was just surgery, it was nothing. But she’d come back a different Isabel. I knew damn well it couldn’t just be nothing.

  The sun would be up in a couple of hours, and at that point, I’d have to get dressed and go back to the office and pick up where I left off yesterday. The Alvatech general was still waiting to hear from me, to confirm deployment of the soldiers we’d paid for two weeks ago. Our Andromeda Corps troops had already been deployed—it had been weird and scary and a little thrilling to make that call. As Level Ninety, I’d made sure the Andromeda Corps was on our side. Made sure the right squadrons would be engaged.

  For the first time in my life, my mom was making her way to the Coromina System. I’d finally been able to draw her there.

  • • •

  The next morning, the house had a pallor to it, the way it usually did those days. I was up early, sick of lying in my bed, waiting for sleep. The hallways were empty and still. Not even the staff was moving around, tending to their chores.

  A door swung open, nearly slamming into me. I jumped away, startled. No one else should be up.

  Isabel stepped into the hallway, her face pale, her eyes dark. We stared at each other across the empty space.

  “Hi,” I said, and I gave her a smile. She didn’t return it. “You’re up early.”

  She watched me, guarded. “I wanted to go outside before the rain started again.”

  “Isabel,” I said, and her name stung my tongue. “Isabel, I—” I floundered for something to say. Anything. “I want us to be friends—” No. Wrong relationship. “Sisters. I want us to be sisters again.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She snorted. “You’re not my sister.”

  I jerked back as if she’d slapped me. She had never said anything like that to me before.

  She turned away and loped down the hallway and then vanished down the stairs. I listened to her footsteps echo against the wall and her words echo in my head. You’re not my sister.

  I thought about the first time I’d ever seen her lying in that incubator, a miracle wrapped in blankets. I’d sworn to take care of her that day. Some job I’d done of it.

  I trudged downstairs. Isabel’s outbursts were burning away at me. What the hell had Dad done to her? I’d tried all the avenues I had to find out. Asked all the people I knew. I’d even taken Flor out to dinner in Undirra City, at one of those trendy floating restaurants that drift languorously over the city lights. But she wouldn’t say a thing.

  I wandered into the kitchen, my thoughts hazy and sad. No one was in there; it was still too early for even Mrs. Davesa. I started up the coffeemaker and then sat down at the staff’s table, feeling vaguely like I was a little kid again, tucked away for one of Dad’s parties. I pulled out my lightbox. The message light was blinking, a cold white square fading in and out like a patch of sunlight.

  My chest clenched up, and for a moment, Isabel flew out of my thoughts and I wondered if this was it, if this was the message, the one that would tell me were going to war.

  I was alone down there, so I went ahead and pressed my hand against the message alert. There was a pause; the holo illuminated but it didn’t show me anything.

  “Come on, come on,” I murmured. And then a face materialized on the holo. It was the last face I expected to see, but after what Isabel had told me, it was the face I needed to see right now.

  It was my mother’s.

  All the breath went out of me. She was talking but I couldn’t make sense of any of the words; her voice sounded like static, like air. She was clearly older than she’d been in the last holo, and she had a new scar, an angry red slash above her right eye. But her hair was still cropped short, and she was still wearing the black and red uniform of the Andromeda Corps.

  “Replay,” I whispered, but my lightbox didn’t do anything. I raised my voice. “Replay, dammit. You stupid thing.”

  The holo froze. It flickered. And then my mother was talking to me, and this time, I heard her.

  “Hey, baby girl.” My mother smiled, rubbed distractedly at her ear. “I guess you’re not such a baby anymore, huh? Well, I know it’s been a while, but Andromeda Corps’s been deployed—looks like we’re fighting on your side. You probably knew that already.” A crooked, sideways grin. “I’ll be pulling into Ekkeko tomorrow. Why I was able to send this through CG Connectivity. Anyway, I got special permission from my CO to meet up with you, if you’d be into it.” She’d looked away from the holo recorder then, and run her hand over her shorn hair. “I know I ain’t been much of a mother, but—I do hope Philip’s been treating you right. You want to meet up, just let Andromeda Corps know. Sure do hope I get to see you.”

  Her image flickered out. I sat there in the kitchen, the coffeemaker gurgling behind me, staring at the empty holo light. She had contacted me. She wanted to see me. Part of me had been afraid she wouldn’t. I hadn’t heard from her in so long. I still had all her old holos, though, tucked away in my suite. I was overcome with an urge to watch them again, to listen to those strange patterns in the static one more time. I’d been so convinced she was trying to tell me something. Now I knew it was just interference.

  I told the holo to play my mother’s message again. Her voice washed over me.

  • • •

  The starport was a seething mass of travelers. The lines to get on the jump-ships were longer than I’d ever seen, stuffed with families dragging their weight-restricted trunks behind themselves. The air was smoky with anxiety and the threat of impending war.

  Everyone was trying to get offworld, to Coromina ally planets like Esteller or Occamy, before the fighting started and the travel restrictions came down.

  I waited at the disembarkation lobby, tapping my fingers against the side of my thigh. I’d almost come down there in my gray uniform, but Grace pulled me aside just as I was about to dash out the door. “You shouldn’t,” she whispered. “Not right now.”

  “What?” I glared at her. “I have to! It’s one of my only chances to see—”

 
; “No, that’s not what I meant.” Grace closed her eyes. She looked so much older. Even though she took Rena’s place, she’d always been my employee, not my nanny. Now I wondered if she hadn’t seen our relationship the way I had. “You shouldn’t go dressed like that. Be yourself.”

  I’d looked down at the suit fabric shining in the house lights, and I knew she was right.

  So, there I stood, in the bustle of the starport, wearing dressy civilian clothes for the first time in weeks. I was always in my suit or the old lounging outfits I wore when I worked from home.

  Her shuttle had landed. I could see it through the windows, a smear of white light against the sunny backdrop. I replayed her message in my head as the shuttle emptied its passengers into the starport. All of them were military. Entrance into the Four Sisters had gone into martial mode, even though we weren’t at war yet. Citizens and soldiers only.

  This was a woman-born squadron, none of them engineered. The Coromina Group was trying to rent as many of the militaries as we could out from under OCI—even with our troops of CG-branded engineered soldiers, we still employed the old-fashioned soldiers, the ones who worked their way through the system. I got a kind of weight in my stomach, thinking about it, that my mother was being flown out there to make a statement more than anything else.

  Even though they weren’t engineered, the soldiers had a tendency to look the same, like they wanted to fool you into thinking they were the top of the line. They all had my mother’s short haircut, and they all carried narrow collapsible trunks with the Andromeda Corps logo emblazoned on the side. The kids waiting to get off the planet stared at them with big round eyes. I felt like one of those kids myself.

  And then I saw her.

  I’d been afraid I wouldn’t recognize her, that the holo would have distorted her image so much that when she stepped out onto the starport, I’d just see another soldier. But no. I caught the glint of her platinum hair, the swell of muscle in her arms. It was her. My mother.

  I felt something heavy inside my chest, like my lungs were trying to collapse.