Tarnished Are the Stars

by Rosiee Thor

  “Look, if you don’t believe us …” Anna crossed her arms.

  Eliza looked up then, eyes locking with Anna’s. “The thing is, I think I do. There’s something not quite right about this planet, and I’m not about to dismiss any theory out of hand.”

  Nathaniel didn’t realize he’d taken a step back until he collided with the wall. The urge to leave overcame him, like he was not only unnecessary in this conversation but somehow unwelcome. He’d been given a chance to process with only Anna as his witness; why shouldn’t he give Eliza that same courtesy?

  Before he could move on the impulse, Anna turned her head, knocking him back again with a look. “My satchel, blue book.”

  It took Nathaniel a moment to understand it was a request, not a statement, and he scrambled. He didn’t have to search long. The satchel was small and the book fairly large.

  She took the book from him and tapped the cover. “I’m hoping there will be some answers in here.”

  Eliza snatched the book from Anna’s grasp. “What is it?”

  “Hey! Give that back!” Anna grabbed for the book, but Eliza held it out of reach, flipping through the pages. “Typical nobility, thinking you can just take things. Where’s your polite society now?” Anna crossed her arms and leaned against the bedframe.

  Eliza’s brow pinched. “It’s only a book.” But she handed it back to Anna, who hugged it to her chest like a shield against Eliza’s scrutiny. “So? What’s the plan?”

  Anna released her grip on the book. “We have blood samples from both of us, but we need one more.”

  For a moment, Nathaniel thought Eliza might refuse. Her gaze was venom, as if the mere thought was enough to put an early end to their partnership. But then she nodded and rolled up her sleeve.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Eliza asked.

  Anna crossed the room to swap the book for her tools. “He’s still alive, isn’t he?” She prodded Nathaniel’s shoulder with her pointer finger. “Go ahead, ask him yourself.”

  She didn’t. Instead, Eliza turned toward Anna as she approached with the sterilized needle in hand.

  Nathaniel looked away. Even though it was only a prick of a needle, a brush of a thumb between Anna and Eliza, such movements felt magnified. When it had been his arm in Anna’s grasp, everything had been clinical, no more contact than was necessary. But now, Nathaniel didn’t need to watch to know this was different.

  Glancing down at the book in his lap, Nathaniel thumbed through it. Spiderweb penmanship filled the pages, recipes for ointments and salves. But as he progressed, symbols and letters he didn’t comprehend appeared with more frequency. Sentences became equations, equations became diagrams, and diagrams became sentences once more. These were not the simple instructions of a physician as they had been in the early pages, but strings of ideas and questions, more like a diary.

  “Aha!”

  Nathaniel’s head shot up.

  Anna leaned against the window, dangling a vial of blood in the sunlight.

  “I don’t see anything.” Eliza stood to join her.

  “Exactly!” Anna’s triumph seeped through her voice. “You’re from the Tower, so you wouldn’t have whatever’s turned our blood gold. No one’s poisoned you.” She gave Eliza a pointed look before adding, “Yet.”

  “Even if there’s an anomaly in your blood, poison will be difficult to prove,” Eliza said. “It could be anything.”

  Anna glanced back at Nathaniel. “Anything of use in there?” she asked.

  Nathaniel frowned. “I’m not sure.” He pointed to the page he’d landed on. “I can’t make sense of it, but this bit here seems … I’m not sure.”

  Anna and Eliza closed in on him.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  Nathaniel held up the book for them to see, not trusting himself to put voice to words that weren’t his. Just as Anna and Eliza’s glances and touches seemed private, so did the words winding across the page:

  Too weary of digging, the treasure hunter turns to alchemy. But what good is transmuting lead when the very earth bleeds gold? Sometimes I think in the moments between night and day, so, too, do we all, stars streaming through our gilded veins.

  “Well that’s nonsense.” Anna settled back on her heels.

  “Is it poetry?” Eliza asked.

  Nathaniel had to swallow a laugh. They were both wrong, and the irony of it filled Nathaniel up. For once, he had the answer. “Come, Anna. Surely you recognize a riddle when you see one?”

  Anna snatched the book from him to read the lines again. “It’s not a riddle.”

  Eliza stood on her toes to read over Anna’s shoulder. “Maybe not, but we can treat it like one. Let’s each take a line and see what we can make of it. A close reading, if you will.”

  They knelt together, crowded around the page. Nathaniel took the first line, Eliza the second, and Anna the third.

  After several minutes of silence, Anna was the first to speak. “If we take the last line literally, that’s exactly what we experienced. It was barely dawn when we took our blood sample. Maybe the light has something to do with the poison’s visibility. It would explain why I’ve never noticed before.”

  Eliza nodded. “Do you still have the blood samples? It’s fully morning now. Let’s see if there’s been a change.”

  Anna fished in her satchel for the vials, but when she held all three up to the window, Nathaniel couldn’t tell the difference between theirs and Eliza’s, all three a deep red.

  “I think the second line refers to the same phenomenon, only in the flora and fauna of the planet. I noticed it, too, with a flower this morning.” Eliza indicated a wilted rose on her vanity. “Perhaps it’s naturally occurring, an effect of the planet.”

  “It isn’t natural,” Anna growled.

  “You don’t know that,” Eliza shot back.

  Anna’s eyes sharpened to points. “Don’t you dare tell me my entire village is dying because of some kind of luck, some survival of the fittest rubbish. It isn’t chance that my people are sick and none of yours are.”

  Nathaniel cleared his throat.

  “Sorry. One of yours is.”

  “No, that’s not it.” Nathaniel ran a hand through his hair. “It’s just— My line, the first line. It’s about alchemy.”

  Alchemy, the impossible science, his mother’s killer. Nathaniel’s stomach dropped as the word left his lips, emptiness replacing it inside him. Alchemy had always been forbidden to him, and the rest of the Settlement, for that matter. Perhaps Nathaniel was the only person on all of Earth Adjacent who knew the Commissioner’s true rationale.

  “What of it?” Anna asked, as if daring him to say anything of worth.

  Nathaniel swallowed, unsure how to best express himself. If he told her the truth, she’d have one more piece of him. And if he kept it to himself, it would just be another thing he couldn’t share. “It’s illegal,” Nathaniel said at last. “If it’s too dangerous for my father’s government to control, then—”

  “Control,” Anna scoffed. “That’s all the Commissioner cares about, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what government is for,” Eliza said.

  “Funny. I thought it was supposed to make people safer.”

  “Perhaps safer from their own idiocy.”

  Anna took a step away from Eliza. “Not you, too,” she grumbled. “I know you’re an Orbital, but I thought you’d understand.”

  “And why is that?” Eliza’s eyes bored into Anna’s.

  Anna opened her mouth and closed it several times before finally saying, “I don’t know. I thought you were different. Clearly I was mistaken.”

  Nathaniel watched them fling words back and forth, acutely aware that he understood only the surface of what they said. Their eyes told a different story—Eliza’s harsh and unrelenting, Anna’s uncharacteristically jumpy. Even when Eliza had held Anna at knifepoint in the garden, the two had seemed less at odds. Something had changed.

  No o
ne had ever looked at Nathaniel that way—and he was glad of it. Still, it left him on the outside looking in on something he wasn’t sure he was supposed to see.

  “I’d imagine you’re mistaken about a great many things, Red.”

  Nathaniel couldn’t listen to them bicker any longer, and the truth bubbled up inside him like a kettle left too long on the fire. “My mother died in an alchemy accident.”

  Silence fell in the wake of his words, and Anna and Eliza exchanged a look he couldn’t read.

  “That’s terrible,” Eliza said softly.

  “It is terrible,” Nathaniel said. “It happened when I was very young. I don’t remember it—I don’t remember her.” He’d already lost her. He couldn’t lose them, too.

  “I’m so sorry, Nathaniel.” Eliza’s hand drifted toward his shoulder, but he shifted away.

  “We never talk about it. My father treats it like a family secret, a family shame. Like if we never mention it, it’s almost as if it never happened. But it did happen. My mother died, and my heart failed, and forgetting doesn’t make it any less real.”

  Anna leaned forward. “But don’t you understand? This could help us learn the truth about our hearts.”

  Nathaniel sighed. “I want to know the truth—I do—but not if it means risking our lives.”

  “We’ve already risked our lives, Nathaniel,” Eliza said. “If the Commissioner finds out about any of this, do you really think he’ll let us go unpunished?”

  Anna nodded her agreement. “I’ve been risking my life for three years as the Technician. This isn’t anything new.”

  Nathaniel’s throat went dry. The closest he’d ever come to risking his life was when he’d left the Settlement the first time, but even then, it was an abstract danger of the unknown world, not the wrath of an angry ruler that threatened them now. Anna and Eliza were practiced at risk, cohorts of danger. But Nathaniel couldn’t let them do this. He couldn’t let them die.

  “I don’t want to put either of you in harm’s way,” he said quietly.

  Anna threw the book down on the vanity. “That isn’t your decision to make.” Her eyes gripped his with a fierce stare. “You owe me, remember? You don’t get to change your mind.”

  Though Nathaniel feared Anna’s rage, it was nothing to the threat of alchemy. “I thought you said you didn’t want me to help you simply because I felt beholden.”

  Anna’s eyes bulged with restrained emotion. “Your father is already dangerous. Alchemy doesn’t increase the risk.”

  Nathaniel couldn’t see past the imagined scene in his head: a woman, his mother, lying dead on the floor, a trickle of colorful liquid on her chin. He knew it wasn’t real—he’d not been old enough when she died to remember her body, or even her face. He knew she had dark hair, a small chin, and maybe long limbs. She was an equation, a sum of the parts of himself Nathaniel couldn’t place in his father’s reflection.

  He couldn’t save her, but Nathaniel could still keep Anna and Eliza safe—he should keep them safe. It was all he had left.

  “I hate to agree with Red here, but she’s right.” Eliza’s voice was gentle, as if she knew he was a gaping wound, raw and exposed. “If we have any chance at all of discovering the truth, it won’t be without risk. And if we have any chance at all, we should do it now.”

  “Do what?” Anna and Nathaniel said in unison.

  “Do what all rebellions must.”

  “Attack?” Anna asked, a hopeful glint in her eye.

  Nathaniel rather thought fail was the more apt word, though he refrained from saying so.

  “Certainly not! We have no weapons.” Eliza rested her hand atop Anna’s as though stopping a motion she’d not yet made. “Not blades—information. All good rebellions rely on good intelligence, and we have none at all.”

  “I don’t need intelligence to ram a knife through the Commissioner’s throat,” Anna grumbled.

  “In good time,” Eliza said. “But first, I propose we infiltrate the Commissioner’s office and see what we can find. If you’re correct and the Commissioner is poisoning your village, there will be evidence somewhere, and his office is as good a place as any to start.”

  Anna frowned. “I had no trouble getting out. Shouldn’t be too difficult to get in, right, Nathaniel?”

  Nathaniel’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. Anna’s escape, though perhaps for the best, still hung shamefully around his shoulders. “My father wasn’t home then. It won’t be so easy now he’s back.” Nathaniel met her determined blue eyes. There would be no dissuading either of them. He would simply have to wait and watch, hope and help. “He spends almost all his time in his study, so we’ll need a good distraction to lure him out.”

  “So it’s settled?” Eliza asked. “You’re all right with this, Nathaniel?”

  “I suppose I have to be.” Nathaniel bit his lip. “I want to be.”

  Eliza nodded. “I’m not choosy about how we bring him down, as long as it’s legal.”

  Anna opened her mouth as if to argue, but Eliza cut her off.

  “If that doesn’t work, you can try it your way. Does that appease our little revolutionary?”

  Though little was hardly the right word for Anna, neither of them argued.

  Eliza clapped her hands and exclaimed, “Good!”

  “What about the distraction? How are we going to lure my father away from his work?”

  “Oh, I’ve got just the thing.” Eliza smiled, a glint in her eye. “I don’t suppose either of you knows how to dance?”

  “A dance? You want to waste time on a silly party?” Anna asked.

  “Not just any party—our engagement party.” Eliza closed the alchemy book, sending a plume of dust into the air.

  Anna had forgotten about their supposed engagement. It had seemed such a triviality, before. A political marriage, Nathaniel had called it. A party to celebrate would solidify it as real. Not that it mattered. Anna had no vested interest in the marital status of her coconspirators.

  “The Commissioner and I already arranged it. As Nathaniel’s father, he’ll have to participate as the host. He can’t hide in his office, and most of the manor staff will be tied up welcoming me to Earth Adjacent. Everyone will be too busy congratulating me on my impending nuptials to pay any attention to you two.” Eliza ran her thumb across Nathaniel’s forehead, brushing aside his dark curls. “It’s a perfect distraction.”

  Anna’s chest tightened as she watched Eliza’s fingers. Before when she’d taken Eliza’s blood, they’d seen only each other. Anna had held Eliza’s arm in her grasp, skin on skin, their pulses thundering as if racing one another toward some unknown finish line. Something about the noble girl intoxicated Anna, more noxious than any poison. It was her aura, her aroma, her audacity to look into Anna, not just at her.

  “What about Nathaniel?” Anna asked, her words coming out a fraction higher than usual. “Won’t people miss him if he disappears from his own engagement party?”

  Eliza dropped her hand from Nathaniel’s face and frowned. “Please,” she scoffed. “No one will be paying him any attention once I arrive. Mark my words, every eye in that ballroom will be mine.”

  “You sure think a lot of yourself.”

  Eliza shrugged. “Nobles are shallow, and I’m stunning. I don’t need to be a scientist to understand that equation. Besides, you haven’t seen the dress I plan to wear.” Her eyes narrowed as her gaze swept over Anna. “Now, what to do with you?”

  Anna pushed away her first thought, that Eliza could do anything she wanted with her, and instead asked, “What do you mean?”

  “The Commissioner can’t find you lurking about dressed like that.”

  Anna glanced down at her clothes, borrowed from Nathaniel. The fit was poor, but at least they were clean. “What’s wrong with how I’m dressed?”

  Eliza raised her eyebrows. “Well, the implications are rather salacious—when you wear someone else’s clothes, there’s a certain assumption of intimacy.” She
eyed Anna’s collar, tapping her finger against her own bare skin, miming unbuttoning an invisible shirt.

  Anna’s heart thundered in her ears. “What would you suggest? I can’t very well wear my own. They’re covered in blood, if you recall.”

  “Never mind what you’re wearing,” Nathaniel said. “The Commissioner can’t find you at all. We’ll need a believable disguise for you.”

  “The Commissioner doesn’t know what I look like, does he?” She eyed Nathaniel. “Unless you’ve told him who I am, I don’t see why he’d be suspicious.”

  Eliza pursed her lips. “One does not need to know you’re an infamous outlaw to know you don’t belong here.” She ran a finger through her own hair, staring pointedly at Anna’s, braid tangled and matted.

  “We’ll need to hide you more effectively,” Nathaniel said.

  “If I might make a suggestion?” Eliza crossed the room and circled Anna like a vulture. “Aristocrats have excellent eyes for abnormalities, but they are unlikely to look too closely at their scenery. You might blend in if we were to dress you like one of the servants.” She tugged at Anna’s collar.

  “I’m not a servant,” Anna shot back, brushing Eliza’s hand away, absorbing the shock of contact as best she could.

  “Eliza isn’t wrong. Even I don’t notice the staff.” Nathaniel shook his head.

  “The Commissioner, if my read on him is correct, won’t be so aware. Once dressed in uniform, I wager you’ll become practically invisible to him.” Eliza swept a hand in front of Anna’s face, as if erasing her completely. “Now we must decide where to hide you.”

  “I won’t be your lady’s maid, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Anna fumed.

  “I doubt you’d know the first thing about ladies.” Eliza turned up her nose. It was as much an accusation as a challenge.