For Darkness Shows the Stars

first learned them in her nursery. The insidiousness of ERV lay in its very simplicity. You didn’t need to replace your body with computerized parts. You didn’t need to insert tiger or jellyfish or hawk genes into your spinal fluid. ERV simply reached into your DNA and flipped a few switches. Anyone could do it, and once, long ago, nearly everyone had.
    He was Kai, and yet not Kai. More than Kai, better than Kai, different than Kai. All this time, she’d thought it had been his years of living free that had brought him back to her so strong, so swift, so fine. But it was more than that: he’d mucked around with the body God had given him. Didn’t he care about the risk? Didn’t he care what he might have done to his descendants?
    “You don’t know what it’s like, down in the enclaves.”
    Elliot shook her head. “I surely don’t, you’re correct about that.”
    “It’s not just stories the Luddites tell to scare their Posts into submission. There are desperate people there. They do desperate things.”
    “And that’s what you did?” she asked him. “Something desperate?” Her voice broke on the words, shards of hope bursting through the skin of her anger.
    Was this how frail her entire upbringing was? There was no excuse. None!
    “I would have been desperate if I hadn’t taken this risk,” was what Kai said. “There are people who’ve done things far worse than this. When you’re hungry, when you’re cold, when you’re alone —I consider myself lucky that this was what came along and not something worse.”
    “There’s nothing worse,” Elliot insisted.
    “There is. You know people who could tell you about it.” Kai’s face was cold, his jaw set. “There are bad people in the enclaves. There’s opportunity, yes, but a lot of danger. People whose slavery is worse than that on any estate. I learned to start measuring risk on a different scale. You can’t judge me. You weren’t there.”
    Her skin burned. No, she hadn’t been there. Was this her fault? Could she have stopped him, if she had been there? Or would she have been just as desperate? Would she have been willing to risk her values, her future children, her life?
    “So I did it. Me, and Andromeda, and Donovan. We were all part of an experiment, and it succeeded. We have faster reflexes, stronger stamina, keener vision. It’s what makes us such extraordinary pilots.”
    “And what makes you still Kai?”
    “I told you not to call me that.” His face might have been made of marble, it showed so little feeling. “You must know by now that I am not that person anymore.”
    “Oh yes, I know.” Everything she was raised to believe had taught her that what he’d turned himself into was an abomination. A dangerous one, that if allowed to live, to thrive, would bring about another disaster, a second Reduction.
    She knew it, and still she didn’t care. Elliot hated herself for that, but she couldn’t deny it. He could have come to her in a tin body with glass eyes and a metal heart, and she’d still know him for Kai. Always always always Kai.
    “Will you betray us?” he asked.
    “You know me better than that.”
    “I know you are a Luddite,” he said. “And that what I have become must disgust you.”
    Then he didn’t know her at all. For she was something less than Luddite, and she felt so much more than simple disgust. “I don’t know how you could do it,” she said instead, staring into eyes that were so much like the ones she knew, and yet so different. “How you could take that risk. You say your experiment was successful. Were there others that were not? Other subjects who wound up Reduced? Dead?”
    He was silent for a long time, and Elliot began to think she didn’t want to know that answer.
    “How could this be worth it?” she asked. “To what? See in the dark? Sail your ship with a little more finesse?”
    “Is there a reason you’d find acceptable?” he asked. “Can you not imagine what could drive a person to break the protocols?”
    Her jaw grew tight. “Not to become a better pilot,” was all she trusted herself to say.
    “What about to save a life?”

Twenty-five
     
    SHE CLOSED HER EYES, but she doubted it hid her response from him. He knew her too well, and now he saw too much. “Whose life?” she asked. “Whose life was worth risking a dozen generations of your children?”
    “Sophia Innovation,” said Kai, and she opened her eyes. “Her mother was looking for a cure for