For Darkness Shows the Stars

leaner times than this in their years spent huddled in the caverns, would accept her excuse that she’d been desperate to find a way to feed the people on her lands. She felt her cheeks burning in humiliation, and was glad for the dim lights that hid her shame.
    Elliot braved a glance at Kai, wondering what he thought now that he saw the North star cavern for himself. He was staring straight up at the darkness in the ceiling, just like the Phoenixes, with an amused expression painted across his features. “So this is all of it.”
    “Fascinating,” Andromeda said softly. “Well, at least I can say I have honestly never seen anything like it.”
    “You haven’t seen anything yet,” said Olivia Grove. “Shall we turn out the lights, Tatiana?” She leaned over and extinguished a nearby sconce when Tatiana nodded.
    Elliot and the other Luddites began putting out the lights. As the cavern dipped into twilight, she looked back at Kai, waiting for the moment when the miracle overtook him, but his expression did not change.
    “Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into utter darkness, “were forced to take refuge during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction. They destroyed technologically backward countries that didn’t have the money for the enhancements. They attacked each other, too, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.
    “For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.
    It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.
    Olivia began to sing, a soft Luddite hymn they’d all known since childhood. And as her voice grew, the stars glowed brighter, twinkling down on them with promise. As a child, Elliot had been amazed by this—that the stars in the cavern responded to human voices, when the ones in the sky did not. Now, even when she knew the truth, the effect was still quite beautiful.
    “In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.”
    It was more complicated than that, though. When Elliot’s ancestors emerged, it was into an unrecognizable world. A world where even some of the machines the Luddites were willing to use no longer worked. A world where there was no sign of life beyond the islands, where the needles of compasses spun uselessly, where there was no direction at all save the stars. All the Luddites knew was that they were alone, and that they alone bore responsibility for gathering up the shards of humanity.
    “Amazing,” whispered Felicia.
    “Interesting,” said Andromeda, her tone pedestrian.
    “Ann,” Donovan warned under his breath.
    Elliot, standing close to the Phoenixes, heard the girl shift in the darkness. “Miss Grove,” Andromeda said. “That’s a very pretty song. You should hear my brother sing. It would no doubt blow you away.”
    “I would like that,” Olivia replied. “He could sing now. The stars glow brighter with song.”
    “I wonder why that is,” Kai said. “Do you think they suppose their food is closer and they hope to attract it into their webs?”
    Tatiana made a choking sound. “How . . . do you know?”
    Kai sounded bored. “That they’re bugs? I thought it was common knowledge.”
    It wasn’t. Elliot had told Kai herself, years ago, when she’d learned the truth about the glowworm “stars” her family venerated in the sanctuary. They were bugs—tiny, bioluminescent insects that crept into crevices in the rocks and attracted prey through their glowing lights.
    “Really?” asked Olivia sadly. “I was so disappointed when I learned the truth. I was ten years