For Darkness Shows the Stars

the machines all by herself.
    Why was Kai being nice to her? Why now?
    FOR WEEKS ELLIOT DIDN’T see him. She was baffled. He must have understood her, but then he’d just walked away. Was Olivia keeping him so very busy? Did he just not care? That night, at Ro’s, she’d almost thought he’d wanted to stay. She almost wondered if they’d all been wrong about him loving Olivia. But he must, if he didn’t care enough to return and listen to the rest of her secret.
    Though it wasn’t as if Elliot didn’t have plenty to occupy her time, despite the frigid winter weather. Day by day, her grandfather drifted a little further away, the tether holding him to this life grown thin and brittle with age. Day by day, Dee lay in the birthing house, getting fatter and more frustrated with her sedentary state. Elliot visited as often as possible, bringing Jef and news of the estate’s preparations for the horse race and house party, which were planned to coincide with the first thaw.
    “I think I’m glad I’m not working,” Dee said, stretching a bit in her bed. “Bet Mags and Gill are being run ragged, though. A horse race in the depths of winter! What will your father think of next?”
    “The problem is that he built a racecourse out here in the wilds of the north,” Elliot replied. “Winter is the only time he’d be able to get people to visit for a house party, since the weather’s so much warmer here than in the south, and during the growing season, most of the Luddites are busy with their farms.”
    “Your father knows something of that, then?” Dee asked.
    Elliot dared to laugh, but immediately sobered. Nearby, the Reduced woman with the infant Dee suspected of being a Post slumbered peacefully in her cot. “I’m doing my best to curb his more lavish ideas, but party planning is Tatiana’s area of interest, not mine.” Across the room, another Reduced woman was crying into her pillow while the Post nurse, Bev, rocked her whining baby. Elliot cringed. “Can nothing be done for her?” she asked Dee softly.
    The Post shrugged. “It passes eventually. It’s worse in the winter—when it’s even darker in here than usual, when no one can bring flowers—well, except Ro, of course.”
    “I hate this place.”
    “It’s not that bad, honestly.”
    “Don’t bother, Dee. I don’t like seeing Reduced women here. There’s no way I’ll accept it when it comes to someone capable of taking care of herself.”
    Dee chuckled. “You sound like Thom. He—” She stopped herself.
    Elliot sighed. Her troubles with Kai seemed foolish in the face of Dee’s situation. “Dee, I’m not sure what you think you’re protecting me from at this point. Obviously I know you’re in contact with him. I see the evidence here before me.”
    Dee smiled. “Oh, Elliot, if it was up to me, I would. But Thom—he doesn’t know you like I do. He doesn’t know how things are now. He only remembers the bad time, and he’s very . . . wary.” She shrugged. “Besides, what would you do with the knowledge if you had it?”
    “Get him to come back here and steal you away? I’ve had no luck convincing you to leave yet.”
    “And could anyone convince you to?”
    “I don’t have a child to think of, Dee. You do. You’ll soon have two.” She remembered what Kai had said to her in the barn, and took a deep breath. “Do you really want them to grow up on this estate?”
    Dee threw her hands in the air. “There are a hundred children on this estate who need mothers. Grown children who don’t have anyone to look after them. Little children with hungry bellies who need to know that food is going to come, winter after winter.” She cast a glance at Elliot. “Rich children who think they are going it alone.”
    “I’m not a child,” said Elliot. “And if you think I am and stay, you’re as bad as Thom thinking I am and leaving. Neither of you can trust me to handle things on my own.”
    “If trusting you requires abandoning you,” Dee said harshly, “then I’m happy to say that no, I don’t.”
    And when Elliot wasn’t sitting at bedsides where she could do nothing to help the occupants, she worked. She rearranged the dairy, utilizing the freshly fixed machines to make the laborers’ jobs easier. She finished the maintenance on the remaining machines, surveyed the fields, and planned for the spring thaw and planting season. And, night after night, she debated with herself over whether she’d try again with