For Darkness Shows the Stars

indefensible, aberrant, heretical page. In every line, she read hubris; in every word, she read defiance. She’d convinced herself she was only defying her father. But that wasn’t true. She was defying nature itself. She was doing exactly what Kai and the other Fleet Posts had done.
    She was courting death.
    What had she been thinking? It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth it, even to save a single life. The protocols were in place for a reason. Yes, it could make lives easier. Yes, it could save people when nothing else could. But it wasn’t worth it. Humans were not meant to play God. They couldn’t play God, or they’d wind up as something less than what humans were meant to be. They’d be Reduced.
    Her father had been right to trample her wheat if he suspected what she’d done. She was surprised he hadn’t gone further. He could have turned her in to the Luddite tribunal for reprimands or worse. After all, she was eighteen. Granted, it was just wheat, but even that—who knew what it would become inside the humans who ate it? Who knew if it would never grow back, or if it would infect the other crops with a plague, or if it would turn to poison? Before the Reduction, the Lost had enhanced crops to use them as weapons. They could make enemies sick or destroy countries’ entire ecosystems.
    And not always on purpose, either. Long before the Reduction, people had killed off entire species of food by attempting to improve it, just like Elliot had done. The ways of the Lost had brought only death and destruction. Elliot knew that. She was a Luddite, charged with protecting the survivors of the Reduction—human, animal, and vegetable—from the horrors that lurked in the heart of their own twisted DNA.
    Only God could make a tree.
    And only God could make a man. Only God had the right to decide how far a man might leap, or how well a man might see. If these Posts had done what she suspected . . .
    Never mind all that. She knew they’d done it. She’d looked into Kai’s eyes—eyes she’d once known as well as her own—and she’d seen the truth.
    And he knew it, too.
    At last, she left the room. She locked the door behind her. She walked back down the hall and descended the stairs, and she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to see Kai waiting for her at the bottom.
    He stood in darkness and didn’t even squint when the lantern hit his eyes. Now that she finally saw the truth, it was all she could see. His pupils didn’t contract in the glare of the lantern, and strange lights danced in his irises. His face was utterly flat.
    “I need to know,” he said. There was no Elliot this time. And why should there be? He hadn’t come to apologize.
    “How is Olivia?” Elliot asked instead. “Has she woken up yet?”
    But Kai didn’t answer her question either. “The knowledge I suspect you possess can be very dangerous.”
    “I suspect the thing you bear is more dangerous still.”
    “So you do know.”
    “Only that the things I saw today were actions that could not be performed by the boy I knew.” But the man who stood before her was not the boy she’d known. Wasn’t that what he was always saying to her? “Or by any natural human.”
    “I am a human. I am a most human of humans.”
    A dozen generations of her ancestors recoiled at the thought. “I know what you are. I know what you did.” Her voice was very soft, her tone very grave. It was the sound of the Luddite speaking to the liege, but she couldn’t help what slipped out next, Elliot to Kai. “How could you?”
    He seemed to grow several centimeters. Was it a trick of the light, or some other kind of trick, some monstrosity she’d not yet discovered? “I will not stand here and be judged by a Luddite who knows nothing of my life.”
    There was no point in continuing the conversation. Yes, she was a Luddite. There had been times she’d doubted it, but the proof lay in every churn of her stomach as she thought of what he’d become. For weeks now, Elliot had told herself there was no way Kai could hurt her anymore.
    Every day, she was shown to be wrong again. He hurt her when he looked her way, and when he did not. He hurt her when he spoke to her with derision, and when he ignored her.
    But now . . . now, surely, it was over. For this man—this Malakai Wentforth—he’d killed her Kai. Overwrote his very DNA.
    It was ERV. She’d never seen it, but she knew the signs. They’d been the stuff of nightmares since she’d