For Darkness Shows the Stars

for a different reason than the one that so disturbed her sister. “Well,” Tatiana continued, shaking road dust from her pale blue skirt. “She’s only fourteen.”
    Elliot knew too well how little that meant.
    The girl in question bumped and jostled her way up to the barn, cutting it quite close to the other machines. Horatio, in the backseat of the cart, was barely holding on to the rails and his breakfast, in that order. Kai’s expression was one she knew well—carefully veiled frustration. Perhaps he wasn’t as enamored of Olivia as everyone seemed to assume. And yet a moment later she watched him laugh and put his hands around Olivia’s waist as he helped her down from the cart, and Elliot averted her eyes. He’d grown so much more graceful in the past four years. He moved now rather like one of the machines he used to fix—every motion swift, precise, and perfect.
    Perfect. What words she was tossing around! She was pathetic.
    As always upon entering the building, her gaze instinctively shot to the knothole, and then she ducked her head in embarrassment. Kai wasn’t looking, but she wondered if he might have caught her doing so.
    If he had, he gave no indication. Perhaps he’d forgotten their ritual entirely, or perhaps he preferred to triumph in secret over the fact that she hadn’t. Elliot couldn’t decide which option she preferred, for they both burned inside her.
    Dee had already removed the dairy equipment, but Kai still found fault with the arrangement of the stalls, in the few bits of machinery still fastened to the walls, even in the stench. Tatiana’s nose wrinkled as she gingerly picked her way across the hay-strewn floor.
    “Yes, it stinks in here,” Kai said. “Too bad for Innovation’s horses—I mean, Baron North’s horses. Can you imagine having to spend any length of time in here, especially in the summer?”
    Tatiana shuddered. Elliot wished to sink through the earth. Had it really been so wretched? And if so, why had the thirteen-year-old Kai begged her to let him stay in the barn rather than go to live in the Reduced children’s barracks or Mags and Gill’s cottage? Had it only been the lesser of two evils?
    “Elliot practically lives here,” Tatiana said. “I don’t understand it, personally.”
    Now Elliot wished her sister would sink through the floor alongside her. Kai was not looking at her, but what else could he be thinking of except that locked room above?
    Olivia was busy recounting, in breathless detail, their adventures on the sun-cart. Andromeda and Donovan were listening, their wry expressions so similar that it left no doubt of their relation. Elliot watched them with a mixture of awe and jealousy. She had never once seen Tatiana’s face mirror her own. What would it have been like to grow up with a sibling she liked? What if Tatiana had been a girl she could trust, could count on, could have turned to when their mother died and things got so confusing?
    “Our ride with Elliot was much smoother,” Donovan said at last.
    “I don’t doubt it!” Olivia’s eyes were shining, her face flushed. “She has far more experience driving than I do. She can even drive this tractor.” She kicked at the tires of the rusted-out bulk. Its chipped paint and curling metal edges looked all the more pathetic after the time they’d spent in the gleaming, lithe sun-carts. “Well, when it’s working, that is.”
    “It doesn’t work?” Every syllable of Kai’s words buffeted her like swings from an ax.
    “Rarely,” Tatiana sniffed. “We haven’t had a decent mechanic around in years.”
    Elliot nearly groaned at this. How could her sister be so blind?
    “Let me take a look at it,” Kai said, and heedless of his fine coat, he crawled beneath the axle, as he’d done countless times before. “This is a mess,” he called from the shadow of the machine. A moment later he was out again, brushing the dust off his coat. “Who has been working on this?”
    The Luddites looked at Elliot, who refused to confirm the answer only Elliot was aware Kai already knew. Why wouldn’t they just go away and leave her alone?
    “Can you fix it?” Olivia asked.
    “Yes,” he said, and Elliot was glad for once that he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “But what good will that do? It’ll fall to pieces again once I’m gone, with no one here who knows the first thing about upkeep.”
    Elliot balled her hands up inside the pockets of her skirt.
    “They should really have a