For Darkness Shows the Stars

do exactly what your father wants, just like they forced my father to go into the healing house, just like they will force me to go work as a foreman in the fields, because I’m not old enough or educated enough to keep being a mechanic if my da’s not there to teach me.
    The truth is that I’m scared to even write these things down and send them to a Luddite to read. Even if that Luddite is you.
    Your friend,
    Kai
        
     
    Dear Kai,
    You are my closest friend too. And I promise I will do everything I can to help you and Mal. I will talk to my mother. I will talk to my father if I have to. You may not know everything you must to be our mechanic, but you know enough to apprentice at it, and my father will have to admit it would be a waste to track you into a foreman job. My mother knows who you are, and she knows what we owe you and Ro since your mothers died on the day we were all born. I know she’ll help us.
    I wish the shipyard were still open. I think you’d have liked it there, even if I’d’ve missed you. And my grandfather is a good man. They say he even had a Post as his first mate, back when he still traveled up and down the coast.
    Is the medicine helping at all? I’m going to go sit with Mal in the healing house, since I know you have to work.
    Your friend,
    Elliot

Eight
     
    THE STAR-CAVERN SANCTUARIES COULD be reached only through a tunnel in the North cellars, which helped the family restrict access to those they deemed worthy. A few Reduced housemaids were allowed down for cleaning purposes, but generally the space was reserved as a monument to the Luddites’ great accomplishment: perseverance.
    Elliot had always been in awe of her ancestors. They’d possessed the strength of mind to fight against the tide of their society. When everyone else was putting their faith in scientists like Gavin and Carlotta and getting the ERV procedure, the Luddites had their doubts, as they did about corporate foods whose very genetic codes killed competing vegetation, about computer chips designed to make your brain run faster, about living among people who’d filled the air and water with toxins. They’d saved the world by rejecting it all.
    How could she abandon what they’d fought so hard to achieve?
    The space was softly lit by sconces as they entered the sanctuary, and the predominant sound was Felicia’s gasp of wonder. “It’s even more spectacular than I’d thought.”
    The cavern’s earthen walls sloped upward into vague shadows, and where the walls weren’t marked by murals depicting the skylines of ruined cities and monuments that Elliot had only seen in antique books, they were blackened by the smoke from ancient fires. Here and there stood other artifacts from the Luddites’ time underground. Elliot tried to imagine what it had been like for her ancestors, living their entire lives underground, kept from the turning of the seasons, from the feel of the sun on their faces or the smell of the fields.
    Perhaps this was what she’d been missing. Perhaps her father was right, that she should spend more time in the sanctuary to reflect on the true weight of her heritage. Her forebears had spent untold years living in this darkness, subsisting on fish from underground streams, mushrooms, and stockpiled food, because of the horrors that genetic manipulation had visited upon their world. And now, because of a few lean years, she had chosen to tread down that same, dangerous path. Of course, her wheat grafts weren’t ERV, but the idea was the same. Gavin and Carlotta had introduced Endogenous RetroViruses into the Lost in order to trick their God-given DNA into turning on only the best and most powerful expressions of their genes and delivering those same traits to their offspring. Elliot’s grafting methods hadn’t been nearly so intricate, but the result was the same: horizontal gene transfer and a transgenic wheat that produced thicker, heavier seed heads far sooner in the season.
    She’d told herself it wasn’t the same. She hadn’t been mucking around with microscopes and DNA strands. It was safe, hardly any worse than the type of cross-pollination that occurred naturally when one plant sat too near another in the field. Of course, that was God’s plan, same as when he’d cursed those with ERV and caused the virus to mutate within their genes and Reduce all their progeny. Elliot had manipulated this wheat herself. And she doubted her Luddite ancestors, who’d experienced much