The Star Dwellers

by David Estes

  At first Tawni and I walk side by side in Trevor’s wake, but are soon forced into single file as we pass beggars camped out with their backs to the buildings. They raise their jars and try to grab the bottoms of our tunics while muttering incoherently. I feel sick as I step over and around their legs, scraping past their outstretched fingers. They are gaunt, pale, dying. Things are bad in the Moon Realm, but nothing like this. I never realized.

  I never realized.

  Now I see that the gap between the moon and star dwellers is as big as the gaping crevice between the sun and moon dwellers. If the gap between the Sun and Moon Realms is a mile, then the gap between the Moon and Star Realms is more like two miles. Life seems to be hard enough as a star dweller without having to conduct a full-scale rebellion against the Moon Realm. I mean, if they barely have resources to keep their people alive, how can they afford to fight a war? Where are they getting the money for bombs and weapons and supplies? Based on the poverty around me, it seems impossible. Even the medicine required to cure us of our Bat Flu would’ve cost a fortune. A fortune that these people don’t have. Trevor must know the answers to these questions and more. Instead, I ask something else.

  “Why is the General here and not fighting in the Moon Realm?” I blurt out.

  Trevor stops and turns around slowly, his lips curling slightly as he looks me in the eyes. “Feeling chatty all of a sudden?” he says.

  “Look—cut the crap. We appreciate your help and all, but we need answers. Something bigger than all of us is happening here.”

  “You think?” Trevor says.

  He turns around and keeps walking and we’re forced to follow. I don’t think he’s going to answer my question until he says, “Not that it’s any of your business, but the General has just returned from a successful campaign in two moon dweller subchapters.”

  “Which ones?” I ask, pushing my luck.

  “Fourteen and twenty-six.”

  My breath catches and I glance back at Tawni. Her wide, blue eyes tell me that she realizes, too. The General happened to be in the same subchapters that we were during the bombings. A coincidence? I don’t believe in them.

  I nearly trip on another beggar who’s squirmed his way into the center of the thin laneway. “A Nailin for the poor,” he croaks. Feeling bad as I do it, I tiptoe around him. We still have money left from Tawni’s little prison trust fund set up by her parents, but we can’t afford to use any of it frivolously.

  “Did you say fourteen and twenty-six?” I ask.

  “Yeah, so what?” Trevor says without looking at me. “Ah, we’re here,” he adds as the alley empties out into another circular courtyard. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the layout of the subchapter. Another perfectly manicured statue of President Nailin rises majestically in the center. He has his leg raised and set on a stone block, like he’s looking out upon his kingdom. I don’t understand why these people would have so many monuments to the dictator that rules them.

  Before I have a chance to calculate the odds of being in the same two subchapters as the general we’re about to meet, especially because they’re separated by hundreds of miles, Trevor ducks into a stone entryway, motioning with one hand to follow him.

  I glance up at the building before I enter. It’s a monstrosity—not beautiful by any reckoning, but sturdy, fortress-like, with heavy stone columns supporting a cement overhang. The walls are huge, undecorated stone blocks, straightforward in their utility.

  Like everywhere in this town, it’s dimly lit inside. We pass through a thin passageway and then follow Trevor up a flight of stairs. An empty foyer welcomes us with more of the same stark stone solidity. From the foyer, Trevor moves without hesitation to the far side of the room. A heavy stone door bars our way.

  “You’re expected,” Trevor says with a wink, like we should be impressed.

  I roll my eyes at Tawni while Trevor drags open the door. We enter and I crane my neck to see past the chestnut waves on Trevor’s scalp.

  The General is sitting behind a desk.

  My heart flutters and a shiver rolls down my spine as pure elation fills my soul.

  The General is her. The General is my mom.

  Chapter Eight

  Tristan

  “Uhhh!” I groan as my back slams into the rock wall.

  “Let go of him!” Roc yells, rushing at Ram. With a lazy swipe of his big left hand, Ram backhands Roc in the face, knocking him back a dozen feet while holding me in the air with his right. He’s even stronger than I expected.

  His face is red again, seething with fury. His words are laced with venom and spit as he says, “You may have fooled the rest of them, but not me. I’ll be watching your every move, while you eat, while you sleep, while you piss—”

  “That’s gross,” I say, choosing the wrong time for sarcasm.

  Ram punches me in the stomach and I feel all the air go out of my lungs. “Shut it!” he roars as I suck at the air, wheezing through my throat. “One false move and you’ll wish you had never been born.” He throws me to the ground and stomps away.

  I feel like throwing up. Why couldn’t he have hit me before we ate? Now the potatoes that I scarfed down not ten minutes ago threaten to reemerge from the wrong end. I crawl to my hands and knees and pant, trying to calm my nervous stomach as perspiration pours from my brow. Roc groans and through my sweat-clouded vision I see him roll over.

  “You okay, man?” I manage to grunt.

  “I feel dizzy,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t leave a mark. Then I won’t be able to get anywhere with the Resistance ladies.”

  I laugh and then cough, which makes my stomach roll again. “No jokes,” I choke out.

  “That wasn’t a joke,” Roc says, which naturally makes me laugh and choke again.

  Using the wall, I pull myself to my feet, somehow managing to keep the potatoes down. Roc is up too, although he’s stumbling crookedly toward me. He probably has a concussion.

  I look at him and see the beginnings of a black eye darkening his cheek to the right of his nose. And that’s on top of the injuries he previously sustained at the hands of my brother’s goons.

  “There’s no mark,” I lie.

  “Really? Because I don’t feel anything so much here”—he points to the left side of his face—“but it hurts like hell right here,” he says. “You sure there’s no mark?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, good,” he says, laughing. “Next time we become mortal enemies with someone, can we make sure it’s not someone six-five, two hundred and fifty pounds?”

  “Good call. Are you gonna be okay?”

  “I’ll survive—you?”

  “I’m good, I think. Let’s find Ben.”

  We head in the direction Ram left, seeking a neon sign or flashing lights, or something else that points to “the Isolation Room,” where Ben said he would meet us, where Ram was supposed to escort us. We come to a crossroads and I look left, and then right. Both tunnels appear identical, gray stone at the bottom and black at the top, as if it’s been scorched by fire. “Which way?” I think aloud.

  “Right,” Roc says. “If we always go right, we can’t go wrong.”

  I smirk. “That makes no sense.”

  “Okay. Then go right because it smells worse to the left, which means Ram probably went that way.”

  I shrug. It’s as good a reason as any. We turn right and make it two-thirds of the way down the hall before passing an open door. Flickering orange flares spill into the dimly lit tunnel. “Come on in, guys,” Ben says from within, although we can’t see him through the gloom.

  Roc looks at me, grinning. “It was a lucky guess,” I say.

  “Slice it however you want, but the truth is, my logic worked.”

  We enter the room, which immediately brightens as Ben uses the single torch lighting the room to light another torch, and then a third. He’s lying on a stone bench, his leg propped on a flat boulder. His thigh is heavily bandaged.
/>   When we approach, his eyes widen. “What happened to you?” he asks, staring at Roc.

  “You see, the thing is—” Roc starts to say.

  “He walked into a wall,” I interrupt, glaring at him.

  “But…”

  “He can be so clumsy sometimes.”

  Roc looks at me, blinks. Pouts out his lips in frustration and then concedes. “Right—a wall. How clumsy of me.” I get why he wants to rat on Ramseys, Lord knows I want to, but I also want to prove myself to Ram—that I’m not a rat. I don’t know why I care what he thinks, but I do. Despite his fierce temper, he is technically one of the good guys.

  Ben looks at us strangely, his gaze bouncing back and forth between us. He knows we’re lying but doesn’t push it. “Have a seat,” he says with a wave.

  We lower ourselves onto a bench perpendicular to Ben.

  I wait for him to speak, but he’s silent, staring at one of the crackling torches. I stare at it, too, my mind wandering. What is this all about? What secrets does this man hold? Secrets buried so deep he would keep them from his own daughters? Secrets that my father would keep from me?

  “Who the hell are you?” I blurt out.

  Ben’s head twitches as he’s pulled from his thoughts. “Just a guy,” he says.

  I laugh. “You sound like me.”

  He nods. “I think we’re more alike than you might think,” he says.

  “Look, my father told me all about the Resistance. How it rose up in 475 PM, before I was born; how you tried to control the freight train system, thus controlling the flow of resources; how he sent his armies pouring out of the Sun Realm; how he killed every last one of the traitors. And yet here you are—and I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Not your father,” Ben says.

  “Maybe he just thought you were all destroyed.” I’m not trying to defend my father. I’m just trying to understand why he didn’t tell me. Because I’m surprised. My father may be a terrible person, but he never tried to hide his evil ways from me, although sometimes I wished he would.

  “No. He knows. He lied to you.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know—pride maybe. Or because in his arrogant mind he truly believes that the Resistance is still weak, of no concern to his dominion.”

  “And how do you fit in?”

  Ben sighs. “I never wanted to be the leader, which I’m sure you understand, Tristan.” I do. I am also reluctant to be at the forefront of the Resistance. Not because I don’t believe in the cause—because I do—rather, because I’d prefer to just be another soldier, nothing special. Just a guy. I’m sick of being singled out because of who my father is.

  “So you’re the leader of the whole Resistance?” Roc asks for me.

  Ben chuckles. “Yeah. All two thousand of us.”

  “But that’s not even half the size of one of the sun dweller platoons,” I comment.

  “We have a lot of heart, though,” Ben says wryly. “But that’s where you come in. We are nothing while there is dissension between the Moon and Star Realms. We need someone to unite them. Someone who knows the truth about the inner workings of the Sun Realm. Someone like you.”

  I shake my head. “Why should they listen to me? Ram was right about one thing. No one has any reason to trust me.”

  “I’m not saying it’ll be easy, Tristan. Just that it’s necessary. You and my daughter—you both have important missions.”

  “Adele,” I murmur. Just speaking her name sends flutters of excitement through my chest.

  “Yes. She has to find my wife. Anna will know what to do from her end. If we do our job from this end, we just might be able to pull this off.”

  I stare at him blankly. I comprehend his words, but they don’t make sense to me. Adele. Her mission. Important. If she’s fighting against the odds then I can too. I have to.

  “Do you know the population of each of the Realms?” Ben asks.

  “I have a good guess, but Roc would—”

  “One point five million star dwellers, one point five million moon dwellers, two million sun dwellers,” Roc rattles off. “Give or take a hundred thousand.” With higher life expectancies and enough wealth to support more children, the Sun Realm has the highest population of the three Realms.

  “Right,” Ben says. “Do the math.”

  Easy—three against two. So we’d have the advantage in sheer numbers, but—

  “They have heaps more resources,” I point out. “Weapons, equipment, armor. Plus the people up there—I point to the rocky ceiling—are in much better shape: well fed, well-trained, prepared.”

  “So we shouldn’t try?” Ben says, throwing up his hands. “This sounds like a different Tristan than just a few days ago.”

  “We have to try,” Roc says.

  I look at him. His eyes are a deep, steady brown, no hint of his usual comedy in them. Ever since leaving the Sun Realm, he’s been the one pushing me toward my destiny—whatever it is. “I know,” I say.

  “I want to show you something,” Ben says. Raising his back slightly, he slides a book from beneath him. Its cover is leathery, marred by scrapes and black marks and time, but in relatively good condition. He hands it to me and I see that a strap curls around from the back and clasps in the front.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Open it.”

  I gently unfasten the leather strap, afraid I will break the brittle material, and turn to the first page. The pages are yellowed with age, but not torn. On the inside of the cover is written “A girl’s first diary, by Anna Lucinda Smith.”

  Roc leans in to see. “Anna—you said that’s your wife’s name, right?”

  We look up and Ben’s eyes smile, but not his lips. “Just a coincidence,” he says. “But it’s one of the many reasons I like it.”

  “So whose diary is this?” I say, implying I want to know more than the name written on the inside.

  “Turn the page,” Ben says.

  Obediently, I carefully separate the page and slide it over. It’s the first page of the diary and it’s dated—

  “Year Zero!” Roc exclaims. “You mean—”

  “Yes. It’s the diary of one of the survivors of Year Zero. A little girl, only twelve years old. Her mother gave her the diary so she could remember all the experiences she had, pass them down to her children. Later in the diary she tells all about her and her family. But I want you to start reading from page one.”

  I’m interested now. I’ve never heard of there being any eyewitness accounts left over from Year Zero. Conveniently, many of the diaries and journalistic accounts were destroyed over the years, in anything from fires to cave-ins. All very convenient for a secretive government.

  I start reading in my head, but Ben stops me right away. “Out loud,” he says. His eyes are closed and he’s waiting for me to begin. I read:

  “They are calling it Year Zero. The start of a new life. But not for everyone. The Lottery was yesterday and I got picked. A one in a hundred chance, they said. The President of the United States himself congratulated me on being selected. Not in person, though, because all the government people are already underground. That’s where I will be soon. Safe and sound and away from the earth’s surface, where the meteor will crash.

  “I got a video from him, and through the fuzzy picture Mr. President said I am one of the lucky ones, but I don’t feel very lucky. My mom didn’t get picked. Or my dad. Or my grandmother, Aunt Gina, Uncle Tony, or Uncle Jerry. They even left behind my older sister, Tina. Only one of my friends got picked. I guess she was lucky, like me.

  “My mom was crying yesterday. I asked her if she was sad, but she said they were tears of joy, because I got picked. My dad didn’t cry, but he got really quiet. I’m only twelve but first thing tomorrow I’ll have no family.

  “In a day I’ll be in the Caves, far under the earth, where it’s safe. The government people say I’ll be given a new family, even though I don’t want one. They say
life will be better; that it’ll be a fresh start for humans, for Americans. I try not to think about things, but when I do, my palms get sweaty and I get really cold, like I’m sick. I don’t cry, because I don’t want to upset my mom again.

  “They’re coming to take me away tomorrow.”

  I finish the first entry and look up. “My father told me the Lottery was bad, but I didn’t realize they split families up,” I say.

  Ben nods, his eyes still closed, and says, “Keep reading.”

  I flip to the next entry and read:

  “Tomorrow has come faster than I thought possible. The streets are full of shouting people. Some of them have sticks, some shake their fists, all wear angry faces. The armored truck is here and the crowd presses around them until the soldiers start shooting their guns in the air. When the bullets start flying the people quiet down and back away. The serious men who get out of the truck are wearing heavy armor and carrying big, black guns. I don’t want them to take me away, but I put on a brave face and hold all the tears inside of me.

  “My mom’s hug is so tight I can’t breathe, but I don’t complain, I just hug back harder. ‘Everything will be okay, sweetheart,’ she says, but I know she’s lying.

  “Finally my dad is crying, which scares me the most. He’s a man, big and strong and proud. I’ve never seen him cry, not even when Grandpop and Grandma died in the same year. I blink away the tears and stick my chin out. ‘I’ll be okay, Dad,’ I say. Now I’m the one lying. He nods and pulls me close and then pushes me toward the men.

  “I don’t struggle, because I’ve already seen the men use the Tasers strapped to their belts on other people on my street. They always get you in the end.

  “My eyes are wide as the men lead me through the crowd, but I stare straight ahead and pretend I’m all alone. Before the big soldiers help me into the truck, I look back at my house and notice things I’ve never noticed before. The bright yellow paint that always felt so cheerful after a long day at school looks brown and flakey. The white shutters on the windows are gray with smog. The bright red door is the mouth of a beast, and my stark-faced parents are its teeth, cold and uncaring. Why don’t they do something? Why don’t they save me?