For Darkness Shows the Stars

her condition. She needed controls—other young Posts, especially second generation like me. I was looking for a chance. We each had what the other needed.”
    “But Felicia didn’t find a cure,” said Elliot.
    “No.” Kai shook his head. “Unfortunately not.”
    Sophia had died, and Kai—her Kai—had the seeds of Reduction sown within him. For nothing. For nothing!
    “They used you,” Elliot hissed. “They ruined you.”
    “They employed me,” he replied coldly. “They saved me. Do I look like nothing more than a test subject to you, Elliot? Felicia’s experiments failed with Sophia, but they didn’t fail with me. And the Innovations are my friends. We’ve turned the project into something so much greater, something that means all our work, all our risk, was not in vain. I’m a captain of the Cloud Fleet. I’m building a ship that can travel across the ocean. I have everything I’ve ever wanted in my life. Power, freedom. Who was I here? A mechanic? Living in a barn? You think about that and then tell me who it was that used me.”
    Elliot squeezed her jaw shut to keep the sob from escaping. She had no response. But it wasn’t fair. The Cloud Fleet had had options. What could she have done for Kai? Nothing. He was a North estate Post, and she was a North. She couldn’t change it. They’d known it back then. He’d had to leave, and to be together, she’d have had to go, too. Once, she’d told him she was willing to give up everything for him. And if it was only Elliot that would have been sacrificed, she might have gone through with it, too.
    But she hadn’t, and now everything was destroyed. Did he even care? Did he even want children someday?
    He spoke again, and his tone was soft for once. “What choice do we have, Elliot North? What is the purpose of escaping Reduction if we are still forced to live within its limits?”
    In his face dwelled a sadness she knew well, and a perception she could not comprehend. He was not her Kai. He could not be, for his DNA had been changed. He was an alien, an abomination, a ticking bomb that could set fire to everything her ancestors had managed to salvage of the world.
    He was not her Kai.
    He was not her Kai.
    He was not her Kai.
    But it was no use. She could burn the words into her skin and she would still not believe them. She breathed in the scent of hay and wet wood. Of manure and spoiled milk, of oil and leather, of lanterns and the night wind. The scents she’d known all her life. The ones that said barn, and freedom, and him. She took two steps toward Kai and laid her hand on his chest.
    His heart pounded beneath his shirt, but he did not move. The deep thrum sounded so normal, so familiar. This, at least, they had not changed.
    Elliot raised her face to his, recognizing in every plane and line the boy who lived inside her heart. He was breathing hard, matching the pace of his pulse. She was sure she was in the same state. For four years she’d subsisted on memories of this—his voice, his face, the sound of his breath and his heartbeat. She felt him like a leaf feels the sun, like a magnet feels metal.
    “Elliot . . .”
    She listed toward him, unwilling to reply with his name and risk breaking the spell. For four years, she’d been looking for direction, spinning as uselessly as the compass on her grandfather’s wall. She’d tried her hardest, but without Kai she was lost.
    “Please . . .”
    His voice sounded like all the Kais in her memory. The ones who’d asked for books, for string-boxes, for company on his adventures. He sounded now like the Kai she’d once loved, like the Kai she still loved more than she loved the life she’d been born to lead.
    “I’ll give you whatever you want. Whatever it takes for you to keep our secret. A sun-cart? Or money? I have plenty. How much will it take?”
    She blinked, as the dream smashed around her. So this is what it had come to. Kai didn’t trust her. He’d never trust her. If he did, he wouldn’t think he’d have to buy her silence. Because now it was Elliot, the Luddite lord’s daughter, who was the beggar, the desperate one, who’d compromise the principles she’d had drummed into her since birth . . . for money . He thought she was a hypocrite, a traitor to her people, and he might be right. But not the way he thought. She’d do it for him. Not for money. Not for a sun-cart .
    He loved the people who’d stolen his humanity, but he’d never loved her.
    She