For Darkness Shows the Stars

But, honestly? I don’t know if I do.
    When I was younger, the older Posts used to try to scare me with the old Gavin and Carlotta stories. I used to have horrible nightmares, before my dad told me that none of them are true. But that was ages ago. I’m twelve years old. I’m not scared anymore.
    Your friend,
    Kai
        
     
    Dear Kai,
    The Gavin and Carlotta stories scare me too. Tatiana makes me play that game with her in the star-cavern sanctuary sometimes. But they don’t need to be ghosts to haunt us. They were real, and what they did haunts all of us, every day, forever.
    Your friend,
    Elliot
        
     
    Dear Elliot,
    Well, I guess it’s your job to be scared of Gavin and Carlotta, right? I mean, you’re a Luddite. If Luddites weren’t scared of the technology, they would have done it themselves, and then everyone would be Reduced.
    Though that makes me wonder. If I’m a Post, it means my genes overcame Gavin and Carlotta. Overcame the Reduction. I wonder if it means that I’m immune now? Maybe I could stand in the mirror chanting a thousand times and Gavin and Carlotta couldn’t do anything to me. Maybe I could resist Reduction if I had ERV.
    Your friend,
    Kai
        
     
    Dear Kai,
    I’m going to burn your letter. Do you have any idea how much trouble we could both get in if anyone read this?
    Your friend,
    Elliot
        
     
    Dear Elliot,
    Then burn this one too. Sometimes I wonder about Gavin and Carlotta. What if they weren’t monsters like everyone says? They didn’t think they did anything wrong because it was all so natural, so simple. It didn’t take surgery, or billions of stem cells or whatever the Lost used to use. The blueprint was already inside of us. They just reached in and turned it on. They made us the best versions of ourselves—more human than human.
    I know what happened, and I still think I would have chosen to get ERV. But I guess that’s why I’m not a Luddite. Because I just sit here wondering what kind of machine breaks just because you try to use it to its full potential?
    Your friend,
    Kai
        
     
    Dear Kai,
    I don’t pretend to know as much about machines as you, but I know the answer to that question. Machines are designed to run a certain way. If you remove their safety constraints, if you put them in permanent overdrive or run them faster or harder than intended, they will break. That’s what Gavin and Carlotta’s enhancements did. They tried to make humans into Gods. They tried to make us work better than what God intended.
    And we broke.
    Your friend,
    Elliot
        
     
    Dear Elliot,
    I’m not broken.
    Your friend,
    Kai

Thirty
     
    THE SOFT LIGHT ILLUMINATING Ro’s window was not the flicker of a candle, but the steady white glow of a sun-lamp. Even there, Elliot had been trumped. No doubt Ro could garden all night now that she had help from Kai.
    Except who’d been taking care of Ro for the last four years while Kai ran off and made his fortune? They didn’t need his largesse. They didn’t need his pity. They most certainly didn’t need him sneaking around her barn, fixing her machines behind her back. She stomped up to Ro’s door and knocked. There was a quick shuffle inside.
    “Ro?” Elliot knocked again. “It’s okay. It’s just me.”
    But again there was no answer.
    “Ro!” Elliot pushed open the door, annoyed, but stopped dead on the threshold. Kai and Ro sat on the floor, their hands in mud up to their elbows, while an array of pots, half covered with a tarp, lay between them.
    “Oh.” Elliot began to back up, but Ro cried out, and she hesitated. What was he doing there so late at night? She hadn’t seen his sun-cart outside. Had he walked here? Had he run on swifter-than-they-should-be enhanced feet?
    Kai also seemed to be weighing the situation. He glanced down at the half-covered pots, then up at Elliot, his inhuman eyes blinking in confusion. “How is your grandfather?”
    Four words. Four words after days of silence, and yet they were the ones she expected least. It wasn’t about the past. It wasn’t about his secrets. It wasn’t even about his surreptitious and unwelcome repair work. He asked about the Boatwright, like he was just anyone. Like he was a friend. She balled her fists in her skirt and didn’t answer him.
    Ro looked back and forth between them and frowned. She was wearing her scarf like a turban tonight, with all her bright hair tucked up underneath its twists and weaves.
    Kai pushed