For Darkness Shows the Stars

It’s disgraceful.”
    “Not by Post standards,” Felicia piped up. “But, I suppose, to each his own. For instance, the Posts are not so keen on close family relations. But it’s common enough among Luddites.” Her smile said it all. She knew Tatiana’s complaint was not with Olivia’s age, but rather with her admirer’s identity.
    Later, after the Innovations had left, Tatiana let herself fume. “That Post woman forgets herself sometimes, I think.”
    “What is it to you,” Elliot asked, “if she approves of a relationship between two people so unconnected to you?”
    “It’s the principle of the thing!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Olivia is a Luddite. No matter how rich these Posts are, they do not have the right bloodlines.”
    “And yet Mrs. Innovation implies otherwise,” Benedict said. “You heard her disparaging the Luddite practice of family intermarriage.” There was a cunning little smile playing about his lips as he addressed his two cousins. “She’s quite bold.”
    “That’s the problem with Posts,” said Tatiana. “They think they’re invincible because they overcame the Reduction. It lives inside of them. There is no escaping that.” She gave a little sniff.
    But what if there was? It was heresy to say it out loud, but the look on Benedict’s face reflected the thoughts that were threatening to burst out of her. The Posts had come to believe that they had escaped it—that they had overcome the genetic taint of Reduction. They believed it so thoroughly that they would even risk ERV.
    “Perhaps if they didn’t think themselves so mighty,” Tatiana continued, “Olivia would never have been injured.”
    She glared at Elliot, as if somehow she was responsible for anything Kai had done in the last four years.
    At that moment Mags appeared in the doorway, her face pale and somber. “Miss Elliot,” she said softly, and then remembered who it was she should be addressing. “Miss North.”
    Tatiana rolled her eyes. “What is it, Mags?”
    “The Boatwright, miss. He’s passed.”
    IT WAS VERY LATE when Elliot was finally left to her own devices. She hadn’t had a chance to do more than look upon the sheet-wrapped body of the Boatwright in the presence of her father and sister. She hadn’t had a chance to go into her own room and cry. Tatiana had squeezed out a few ladylike tears in the parlor, but Elliot was not the type to quietly weep and dab at her face with a handkerchief while the baron and Benedict looked on. She couldn’t let herself go in front of them. Just like with her mother’s death, when she did cry, it would be volcanic.
    And she had to do it alone. But she never got the chance to excuse herself and go to her room. Her father didn’t seem to see why it was necessary. There were so many preparations to be made—the body needed to be moved and dressed, and adjustments had to be made for the party plans to accommodate a funeral. Elliot would have preferred to cancel, but her father wouldn’t hear of it.
    “People will want to come and pay their respects to the Boatwright,” he argued. “Why not combine the events?”
    He made the same argument, it seemed, whether Elliot’s grandfather was alive or dead.
    At last she knew that to get any real peace, she’d have to leave the house entirely. There was only one place to go. Elliot had long ago made peace with herself over the fact that, every time things in her house became too unbearable, she needed the barn. It was no great mystery. In the barn is where she’d known almost every moment of peace, happiness, and triumph in her life. It was her secret joy, her refuge . . . and her shame. She couldn’t pass through the doors without her eyes going immediately to that little knothole as if, magically, a letter from Kai would be waiting as they used to be so many years ago. She couldn’t enter without cursing her own body’s memory.
    One day she was going to get a new door put on the barn. No more knothole. No more ritual. No more pain, every time she passed through and remembered all she’d lost. But for now she just wanted to escape to the little room in the loft and rest. Rest for a moment. Forget about everything that had changed and everything that hadn’t. Lie down on the pallet that still sat on the floor, though all trace and scent of Kai had long ago been leached out of it. Look at the gliders that fluttered down from the beams—her final gift from Kai, though for all she knew, he’d left her