For Darkness Shows the Stars

best.”
    They’d been taught to her by a boy who now delighted in detailing exactly how poor they were.
    “Maybe we should return you to the shipyard now,” Elliot said. “I’d love to see your work. After all, I’ve shown you mine.”
    Except she hadn’t. Not really. Elliot wondered what the Post would think of her wheat—her desperate rebellion, her miniature heresy. Would she be appalled? Would she be proud?
    And why did Elliot care so much what she thought?
    “I am glad to see the shipyard in operation again,” she added. “Especially for so worthwhile a project.” And she’d been dying to get a glimpse at the Fleet’s work. She’d only resisted because Kai had made it clear that, to him at least, she wasn’t welcome.
    “I’m glad you approve,” said Felicia. “There are those Luddites who have no desire to reestablish contact with the rest of the world.”
    “I have always wondered what else was out there.” She and Kai had spent years fantasizing about it.
    They rode along the cliff that bordered the sea, and as a salty wind wound its way through her hair and swept across her face, Elliot began to breathe easier. Off to the west, the shallows glittered golden in the sunlight and gave way to a darker blue in the deeps.
    The shipyard was situated at the northernmost bay of the island. Beyond it, the land rose steadily upward like the prow of a boat jutting into the sea. No buildings graced this high plain, and it wasn’t used for crops or pastures. Before the Reduction, the area had been reserved and off limits for development, and though the rest of the world had changed, this hadn’t. Back when the Boatwright estate had been fully functional, they didn’t need the land for their own food, and they derived all their extra income from shipbuilding. And now Elliot simply didn’t have enough resources to devote to working this steep piece of land. It remained lonely and wild, and beautiful—a testament to a history that even the Reduction could not obliterate. It had been through this portal that Elliot’s Boatwright ancestors had first come to these islands.
    Whenever things got particularly bad on the estate, Elliot escaped to the cliffs to stand on the very edge, to stretch out her hands and feel the wind pulling at her, threatening to carry her away like she was nothing more than one of Kai’s gliders.
    Today, however, she was weighed down, by her own thoughts as much as by the giant horse she rode. As they steered their mounts toward the narrow path that cut through the cliff to the shipyard, Elliot gave one last, longing look at the promontory, at its rocky sides and the towers of broken rock that stood beyond. At the water that circled around it, turquoise on the side of the sea, blue on the side of the ocean. They were too low to see now where the waters mixed, where the constant upswell of warm and cool sent swirling, ghostlike ribbons of sediment up from the depths and as far as the eye could see. When she was young, her mother had told her stories of the old days, when the bridges to the rock towers remained intact and the Boatwright family had revered the cliffs and promontory as a sacred spot, the way that the Norths honored their ancestors through the underground sanctuary. But though the Norths never thought back farther than the Reduction, the Boatwright line was older, and they chose to remember that part of their heritage, too.
    She hadn’t been to the promontory in months. All summer, she’d been too busy with her experiment and trying to find a way to feed the estate. Then she’d been occupied with preparing for the Cloud Fleet’s arrival and the harvest. And now, since they’d come—she’d avoided her grandfather’s lands.
    “Are you all right?” Felicia asked, as the horses picked their way down the narrow slice between the cliffs. “Should we have taken the supply route instead of the footpath?”
    “I’m fine,” Elliot replied through gritted teeth. She should be a better horsewoman than this. Her father would find her an embarrassment. Felicia Innovation no doubt thought her pathetic.
    “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable back there,” Felicia said. “I have spent so much of my life caring for young people like you. It’s become a bit of a habit.”
    Even when the young person in question is a Luddite, and not a homeless runaway Post. Elliot could finish that thought on her own.
    “I would like us to be friends, if possible, Elliot,”