For Darkness Shows the Stars

Posts CORs on the North estate who are my age—or even anywhere near seven years old, and none of the Reduced children can read.
    I hope I don’t get in trouble for telling you that word. Da says the Luddites don’t like it because it means the Reduction is behind us.
    Your friend,
    Kai
        
     
    Dear Kai,
    Your new glider is the best ever! It even does loops!
    If your da’s friends call him a Post, then I will call you that too. Because I want to be your friend. I have herd the word before, from the CORs that work in the big house, but they would never tell me what it ment. Now I know why. But it makes more sense to me than calling you a COR. After all, you are not a child of someone Reduced. Don’t worry, I won’t use it in front of my family.
    I was worried maybe you were mad at me for asking all those questions about the Reduced. It is just that you are the only COR Post who will talk to me. Did you know that you and I were born on the same day? That’s how I knew who you were, because the CORs in the big house were always talking about us both. There is also a Reduced girl born on our birthday. Do you know who she is?
    Your friend,
    Elliot

Two
     
    RO LIVED ALONE IN a cottage at the far side of the Reduced block. She’d once shared it with two other Reduced girls, but they’d borne children and removed to barracks nearer the nursery. Ro appreciated the extra space, and filled the cottage with her precious pots. Elliot had given her even more on their eighteenth birthday a few months back. Her presents had grown a bit more indulgent in these past four years, since it was just the two of them celebrating now.
    Ro had been on dairy duty that morning, and hadn’t been one of the laborers to help destroy the wheat crop, so Elliot had come to Ro’s for comfort. Tatiana and her father might prefer the darkness of the star-cavern sanctuary, but there were only two places on the North estate that Elliot considered a refuge, and the barn loft was too crowded with notes about her wheat to be a comfort today. Yet here, for a few precious minutes, she could be silent and fill her hands with soil and pretend that there were no worries that awaited her beyond the confines of this sun-drenched hut. It was pointless to dwell, anyway. What good would it do?
    Ro was already digging among her flowers when Elliot arrived. She dripped mud across the unfinished planks of the floor as she crossed the room to greet Elliot.
    “Good day, Ro.”
    The girl’s green eyes—so unusual, even among the Reduced—searched Elliot’s face, and she frowned.
    “Yes, I’m sad,” Elliot admitted. She’d never successfully lied to Ro. Reduced her friend may be, but not insensitive. Elliot had been taught as a child that the Reduced could sense your emotions, like dogs. Over the years, she’d begun to wonder if their general lack of speech made it all the more important for them to read faces.
    To some Luddites, the Reduced were children, fallen and helpless, but still human. To others, they were beasts of burden, mostly mute and incapable of rational thought. Elliot’s mother had taught her that they were her duty, as they were the duty of all Luddites. Cut off as the population of these two islands had been since the Wars of the Lost, they might be the only people left on the planet. The Luddites, who had kept themselves pure of the taint of Reduction, therefore had the responsibility to be the caretakers not only of all of human history and culture but of humanity itself.
    It had been generations since any Luddites had tried to rehabilitate the Reduced. Mere survival had taken precedence. But Ro was more than Elliot’s duty. She’d become Elliot’s friend, and sometimes Elliot even dared wonder what Ro could be—what any Reduced could be—if the Luddites had the resources to try.
    Ro brightened and took Elliot’s brown hand in her own reddened, muddy one. She pulled Elliot over to the pots, grinning, and Elliot allowed herself to be pulled. She knew what was coming. Ro’s pots had been yielding the same profusion of blossoms for the last four years, but Ro still greeted every one with squeals of delighted surprise.
    Ro led her to one particular group of pots set apart from all the others and Elliot’s eyes widened in shock. These flowers were different from any she’d seen before—not red or yellow or purple or white, but a pale violet with streaks of scarlet running in veins along each petal from the depths of a