Among the Nameless Stars

27

Six
    Seven days. Seven days since Kai had started sleeping on the streets.
    Five days since he had run out of things to sell … or buyers willing to cross Pen.
    Three days since his last meal.
    One day since Pen had come to him again.
    “You needn’t make this difficult, boy,” the man had said when he caught Kai looking through rubbish bins for food. Kai wondered if Pen had set people to watching him. He couldn’t imagine their meeting was an accident. “I don’t know what folks told you, but I’m not that bad.
    Not to people with skills like yours.”
    Kai didn’t need to talk to anyone. He’d read Bess’s letter and, what’s more, he’d seen the truth with his own eyes. The day after he’d been turned away from Bartholomew’s shop, he’d gone down to the docks to see Pen’s people himself.
    Pen was an appropriate name for the man, Kai had decided, since he kept his workers as if they were animals in a zoo. Kai had walked through the filthy, rusting metal boxes the people who labored for Pen called home. It didn’t take long. Even the huts on the Miner Estate were nicer than these. He’d seen things that looked like these in books, long ago. Before the Reduction, they were used as shipping containers, back when humankind had lived all over the world and had crossed the ocean in boats the size of cities. He was shocked any had lasted this long.
    But now, as Kai wandered down a strange street in an unfamiliar part of the enclave, he realized that, even in those shipping containers, the people had food. An empty belly counted for quite a lot, a fact he was sure Pen was counting on.

    Among the Nameless Stars by Diana Peterfreund
    | 28
    Kai had been born a Post-Reductionist. He thought he knew hunger well. All his life he’d hungered. Hungered for more than growing old on the estate he’d been born to. Hungered for more knowledge than he could find in the books Elliot had given him. Hungered for the things humankind had possessed before the Reduction, for the places beyond the islands that now only existed on old maps or in forbidden books. More recently, he’d hungered for Elliot herself. For years, he’d felt these hungers like physical needs, gnawing away from a place deep inside.
    Now he knew—that was nothing. True hunger tears you up, bends you double with cramps, gives you headaches, clouds your mind, makes you weak. True hunger was a weapon stronger than any of his abstract desires. It’s what toppled countries and made men desperate. It’s what gave Pen power.
    Ahead of him on the path, a boy several years younger than Kai played in the dirt. As Kai drew closer, he saw that the boy was messing with a string box. Kai smiled in spite of himself.
    He had some experience with those. Back on the North Estate, he and Elliot had started a campaign to make enough string boxes for every Post on the farm. They’d created quite the little orchestra before he’d left.
    The boy on the ground was trying to string his, but whatever cord he was using looked flimsy and fraying. Every time he tried to wrap a string around a turning peg, it snapped. As Kai approached, another string broke and the boy let out a shout of frustration and slammed the box against the ground.
    “Having trouble?” he asked.
    The boy looked up at him, blinking furiously the way you do when you’re trying not to cry.
    “I can’t get the strings back on this stupid thing.”

    Among the Nameless Stars by Diana Peterfreund
    | 29
    Kai crouched beside him, wincing a bit at the pressure on his wounded leg. “These are bad strings. Are they all you have?”
    “Yeah.” The kid shrugged.
    Kai could understand that. He looked at the leftover strings, and then put one in his mouth, moistening it with his tongue, and then winding it over on itself so it was doubly thick. The string tasted oddly sweet, and he had to resist the urge to swallow it. It was nothing but a hallucination, brought on by his hunger.
    Kai picked up the box and started stringing it with the new, stronger cord.
    “Hey!” came a shout from above. “You leave him alone! He’s not for sale.”
    Kai looked up to see a young woman bearing down on them both. She had the same blue-green eyes as the boy, though her hair was lighter. She was dressed in a shirt nearly open to her waist and a skirt that skimmed her thighs. But it was her expression that caught Kai’s attention.
    There was murder written all over her heavily made-up face.
    Kai straightened and