For Darkness Shows the Stars

sang that would grind all the shards into irredeemable dust.
    Elliot turned to Andromeda in shock and under-standing. Now she knew why Donovan had been so cowed by Felicia’s lecture in the sanctuary. “He’s singing about Felicia’s daughter, isn’t he?”
    Andromeda sighed. “Yes. Sophia Innovation died six months ago. She was sixteen. It has been hard on the admiral and on Felicia, but most of all on my brother.”
    That much was clear to every person in attendance. Donovan walked off the porch steps, and nearby Elliot caught sight of Horatio wildly gesturing to his sister, who looked near tears. Eventually Olivia took the stage and began to sing an old folk tune. The spell over the attendees broke at the more familiar sound, and a few even began to clap along.
    “I am so sorry for their loss,” Elliot said to Andromeda.
    “All our loss. Sophia was . . . special. I don’t expect you can imagine it.”
    No, Elliot was sure Andromeda wouldn’t expect that.
    “She was the first free Post I’d ever met,” said Andromeda.
    “You must have known her a long time.”
    “Three years,” Andromeda said, shrugging. “When the Fleet was formed. She was the embodiment of everything we all wanted. She was the future. We all knew it. We all loved her.”
    “I can imagine that,” Elliot said.
    But Andromeda did not, for once, rise to the bait. “If you want to know why Felicia is always so motherly, now you do. She can’t turn it off for anyone—not even—”
    “Not even me?” Elliot finished, unable to keep her tone from turning snide. She could no longer bear the older girl’s casual cruelty. Though her primary objective when visiting the Boatwright estate was avoiding Kai, she was going to have to start steering clear of Andromeda as well.
    “Not even you,” Andromeda said. “Motherless you, poor little rich girl you, the Luddite who gets her hands dirty in the mud, who plays at farming while she allows her family to let the farm burn—”
    “Miss Phoenix,” said Elliot, “I think you are done assuming you understand anything about my life, no matter what you may have been told.” If she was done putting up with abuse from Kai, there was no way she’d accept it from Andromeda. “In return, I will not assume that I can guess what it is you have against me.”
    “You know one at least.”
    “That I’m a Luddite?”
    “No. That you betrayed him when he needed you most.”
    Elliot lifted her chin. No one, least of all this girl, would know what it had cost her. “Yes, I did. It was either him, or everyone else I knew.”
    Andromeda opened her mouth, then shut it again and stared very intently at Elliot. Even in the gloom of twilight, her eyes seemed more intense, as if she could see through Elliot’s skin and divine the inner workings of her brain.
    But Elliot had had enough. “If you can’t be civil to me, Miss Phoenix, I wish you’d leave me in peace. I have never done anything to you, and if you seek to punish me for past misdeeds, there is nothing you can devise that I haven’t already suffered.” Four years of worrying about Kai, followed by all these weeks of having him back here, but hating her. Was that not punishment enough?
    “You baffle me, Miss Elliot,” Andromeda replied in the same high-wrought tone. “I can’t reconcile the young woman I see before me with the reports I have had.”
    What lies had Kai been spreading abroad? “I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s none of my concern. I am the same person I’ve always been.” She turned her face away from Andromeda, away from the crowd and from Kai. “Maybe you should ask yourself why, if I am the person you’ve been led to believe, someone would put their faith in me at all?”
    “People are foolish when it comes to love.”
    Elliot hadn’t been. She’d been rational, logical, reasonable, prudent. She’d been cold and cruel and disloyal and distant.
    She hadn’t been foolish.
    She’d been the most foolish girl on the island.
    Olivia’s song ended and behind her, on the porch, Donovan reemerged, carrying his fiddle. He started playing a familiar song, and the other musicians took up the tune on their pipes and string-boxes. Olivia kept singing, but Donovan easily outshone her voice, and everyone else’s playing, too. Elliot had never heard music like that. The finesse and precision she’d witnessed in these Cloud Fleet explorers came across in his musical abilities. His rhythms were complex but