Beneath the Guarding Stars Read online

  Ruth had granted me entry to Starsgard on the promise that I would contribute to the community, which I’d promised to do through dance. I wasn’t sure what the man meant by teaching them.

  I glanced at Ruth, whose expression was gentle. “Your presence here gives us the opportunity to learn true compassion, to offer our care in a way that we haven’t been challenged to do before.”

  “Oh. Um. Thank you,” I said, not sure what to make of the earnest expressions on all their faces.

  “Please feel that you can call on us if you need anything,” the man said. I memorized his face—another skill I’d come to learn. Memorizing faces, escape routes, analyzing threats, it all meant the difference between life and death. Skills I’d hoped to leave behind when I crossed the border but somehow seemed important even now.

  I nodded to him as Ruth drew Michael away from his mother and brother toward the people dressed in blue vests and introduced them as the medical unit. Their clinical expressions reminded me of scientists, closer to the analytical expression Michael’s father had worn, and I didn’t think Michael missed the sharply curious glances they shot at me as he shook hands with the head of their unit—a woman who introduced herself as Agatha and told Michael to report to Tower Seventeen, level nineteen, the following day.

  Michael pulled me close and murmured in my ear. “They haven’t wasted any time assigning us work.” But he didn’t have the chance to say anything else before Ruth ushered us toward the door.

  Everyone watched us go, even those who pretended they weren’t. I reached the big glass doors with an inward sigh of relief, but only allowed myself a moment of calm before I began assessing my surroundings again, the habits of the last two weeks too difficult to shake. The corridor outside reminded me of the glass walkway to the Terminal, suspended high above the mall, except there were no shops below us here, no arcades full of people enjoying themselves. Down from this corridor was nothing, just rocks, after a long, long fall.

  A man dressed in dark gray ran up to Ruth. I heard her say something about a cleanup. “Make sure we get all the pieces of the crashed drones. They can’t be left lying around…”

  With Michael beside me, I pressed up against the glass, daring to look down this time. Far, far below, there could have been earth but it was obscured by a white sheen. Up and across, toward the north, two more towers were visible in the far distance.

  A gentle breeze whispered across my neck where the jacket didn’t reach, much gentler than the wind at the top of the tower but there still the same. I searched for the gaps in the glass to find out where the strange wind was coming from.

  Michael stayed close. “You feel it, too. There’s something going on here.”

  Despair crept into my voice. “I thought we could trust these people.”

  “We won’t ever be able to trust anyone, Ava.” He turned to me, enfolding me in his arms for a moment. “Not as long as you’re alive. And I plan on keeping you that way.”

  “I guess we won’t be able to trust anyone for a really long time, then?” I asked, trying to smile.

  “Nope. Not for a really long time.”

  The same whispering wind slid around us, slightly stronger, sidling between us as though it would push us apart. “Do you feel that?” I asked Michael.

  Ruth joined us again and I turned to face her. “The breeze,” I said, drawing away from Michael and lifting my hand into it, turning my palm to and fro against the push. “Where’s it coming from?”

  For a second, the wind was almost like a solid form around me, invisible and yet immovable, and then just as suddenly it dropped away and the air was still again.

  “It’s your body print.” Ruth’s voice was careful and light, as though she didn’t want to freak me out. “Starsgard has harnessed the natural power of the wind at this altitude to be able to map a person’s shape and features. We can reconstruct your entire appearance based solely on the air print we’ve just taken. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. I don’t even think about it anymore.”

  “In Evereach we have drones.” I wasn’t sure which I preferred, but she was right about growing to not think about it. I’d never noticed how many surveillance drones patrolled the skies until they were searching for me.

  “Not all of the corridors between the towers are like this,” Ruth continued, ushering us along the long path encased up and over with glass. “Tower One is the point of origin between Starsgard and Evereach. The most vulnerable point, so security’s heightened here. All of the outlying towers are the same, but the ones inland are more open.”

  “We can see seven towers from Evereach,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Three of those are outlying. The other four are a little further inland. Here we are.”

  A sudden gust of wind—natural this time—caught me by surprise as the corridor opened out onto a platform as long as a football field, although only a quarter as wide. “We travel only by train or by foot,” Ruth explained, and within moments a clear whistle echoed through the space around us, bouncing off the mountainside at our backs. I wondered what I’d see if I stepped closer to the edge of the platform.

  Ruth must have sensed my thoughts because she grabbed my arm. “We’ve never had to worry about safety rails,” she said, drawing me away from the edge.

  To my surprise, the train puffed steam as it chugged toward us, blowing its whistle so loudly that my ears smarted. Despite the steam billowing from the stack, the train’s doors opened like an ordinary electric train back in Dell City. Air panels, each about the size of a book, became visible at waist height inside the doors on either side.

  “Tap your first finger on the panel as you get on. That way you won’t trigger the security system.”

  I didn’t want a repeat of the moss, so I did as she said, half expecting my finger to slide right through the panel made of light, but as my hand connected, the light solidified for a second like something squishy. Michael did the same but I hesitated at the door.

  “Wait, how does it know me already?”

  “Our security control team have already taken everything they need, Ava. Blood, DNA, fingerprints. Your body print in the corridor was the last thing the system needed. Our defense system is designed to recognize even a single intruder.”

  All without me knowing about it. I thought about everything I’d touched or leaned against, the needle moss pricking my skin—especially the glass walls of the elevator down to the atrium. Even the air I breathed, taking my body print.

  “Hey, wait up!” Michael’s brother Jason sprinted up behind us, launching himself through the door with Michael’s mother close behind, following us onto the train. To my relief, the inside of the train looked a lot like the trains in Dell City: motley-colored seats designed to hide the dirt, metal handrails and standing room near the doors. There were already a handful of passengers, all wearing different colored clothes—all of them dressed for lower temperatures.

  I thought Michael’s family would crowd us, but after a brief smile Jason made his way down the car to a four-seat section and propped his feet up on the opposite side, while Helen positioned herself to stand in the aisle next to him. Ruth chose a seat near the entrance, and before I could puzzle over where I should sit, Michael grabbed my hand and pulled me to the side of the empty space near the door, leading me to one of the metal railings.

  He squeezed my hand as the train lurched forward. “Are you okay?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know. What did your mom say?”

  “That she missed me. She asked me—”

  Before he could say anything else, Ruth jumped up and joined us, pointing outside. “That’s Tower Two coming up.” She indicated a tower in the distance to our left. “The largest water vat is contained in the top of that tower. Each one stores more than enough water to supply the water gates at the base and around the outer wall that we use to put out fires inside and outside Starsgard. You can imagine how fast it comes down if we let it out.”

&n
bsp; I strained my eyes, trying to see the water gates, remembering the gush of water pouring over us after the electromagnetic pulse outside Starsgard, but the gates were completely concealed. “Like the one when the helicopter crashed?”

  “Just like.”

  “You used an electromagnetic pulse. Shouldn’t that have wiped out your electrical systems too?”

  She smiled. “Our electrical equipment is buried far beneath these mountains, protected by tons of rock. We don’t use electricity on the surface.”

  “But … the fingerprint thing and the opening doors…” I waved at the train’s doors.

  “Hydraulic doors and bioluminescent plant matter. There are biological sensors all around you, including microscopic organisms genetically programmed to repeat functions. Kind of like invisible worker bees.”

  “And the glowing plants at the top of the tower.”

  “Bioluminescent, yes. We’ve harnessed nature to its full extent. Even the trains run on renewable fuel from the fuel marsh.”

  Within a minute, the train pulled up to a station at the base of the tower and I glimpsed another glass-walled tunnel stretching from the platform to the atrium at the front of Tower Two as a passenger disembarked.

  “Tower Fifteen will come up on our right in about twenty minutes. It’s further inside the boundaries of Starsgard. That’s where the dance troupe practices.”

  “So, there’s a tower for the arts and a tower for science, that kind of thing?”

  “Oh, no, we never put all our eggs in one basket. Communities and professions are mixed throughout towers and even through levels. My home unit is next door to a farmer and a designer. It means that if a tower is ever destroyed, the occupants will always have somewhere to go, dispersed through other towers so there’s never strain on any single part of Starsgard.”

  I frowned as the train drew closer to the station, wondering how a tower could be destroyed. “Am I supposed to get off the train at Tower Fifteen? Seth said I was supposed to meet him there tomorrow.”

  “Not today, dear.” As the train pulled off from yet another station—Tower Four this time—she gestured to an approaching green density stretching out across a flat area between mountainous peaks. “That’s the first of the fuel marshes. We grow them in many of the gullies. There’s a roster for harvesting the plant matter they produce.”

  It looked like a kind of rice paddy. Or a giant lake. Except that fluffy green stuff grew in rows along the top of it. It was like hundreds of small bushes floating on top of a glassy surface.

  It was another few minutes before we reached the next tower, and as the train curved it seemed we were heading inland. “How many towers are there?”

  Ruth hesitated as though she was choosing her words carefully. “There are 176 towers in use throughout Starsgard. Seventy of those are located around the border, and the rest are dispersed inland. We have seven regions and they each have about twenty-five towers, including Region One, where we are now. Tower Eleven is coming up soon.” She glanced at Michael, averted her eyes, and inched her way down the car.

  Michael drew me aside. He’d been about to tell me something when Ruth interrupted us and I guessed I was about to find out what.

  He said, “I have to decide where I’m going to live. My family has a home unit in Tower Eleven, inland. Mom wants me to stay with them.”

  He searched my face. Nobody had said anything to me about where I was supposed to live, although Ruth had spoken of the dance troupe as my new family. I hoped that didn’t mean I’d live with them. Possibly not, since she’d said I didn’t have to leave the train at Tower Fifteen. Regardless of what happened with my living arrangements, Michael deserved to be with his family. I knew that better than I knew anything right then, but it didn’t stop my chest squeezing.

  My heart filled with the overwhelming sense that I’d been cast adrift. I tried to keep my voice from choking. “You should go with them.”

  “Yeah, but I’m worried about you. That guy back there—Seth—there are going to be others like him. They’re not exactly happy to have us here.”

  “To have me here.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Don’t be so sure it’s you they don’t like.”

  At first I thought he was trying to make me feel better, but the depth in his voice unsettled me. “I didn’t get this condition from my dad, Ava.”

  “But I thought you said he used to call you—”

  “One of the immortals, yeah, but he isn’t one himself.”

  I wondered what he was trying to tell me. I glanced at his mom, suddenly noticing the way the other travelers kept their distance, looking away from her as though she didn’t exist. Again, she reminded me of an island—a prickly, defensive island—close only to the boy who healed slowest second only to me.

  They didn’t belong here either.

  “She may as well have two noses,” Michael said. “And so might I. They’ll treat me the same way they treat my family.”

  We were outcasts no matter where we went.

  “I don’t want us to be separated.” The words were out before I could grab them back. “I’m sorry, I know that’s selfish. You need to get to know your family again, spend time with them. I’ll get in the way but … I’m going to miss you.”

  We’d spent days running and hiding together. We’d slept curled up underneath benches and hiding in parks, one of us on guard while the other slept, never leaving each other. He’d kissed me goodnight each time—never more and never less—and wrapped his arms around me, even if I was the one on watch.

  He wrapped his arms around me now. “I won’t leave you, Ava, even if we’re apart.” Suddenly his arms were fierce, his voice a deep throb against my ears. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I did. And I would never leave him either. In answer, I turned my lips into his neck and dropped a kiss there, inhaling the warmth of his skin and the tingle against my mouth, drawing in the sense of belonging somewhere. Just for a moment.

  There was movement as Michael’s mom approached. As she glided past the other travelers they inched away. Two noses, indeed.

  Ruth said nothing, and if Michael’s mom noticed the effect she had on the others, she was either used to it or ignoring it.

  “We’re almost at Tower Eleven,” she said to Michael, and the question was implicit in her statement: was he coming with her?

  “Okay.”

  The brightness around me dimmed, and I released Michael to follow his mom and brother up the aisle.

  Before the doors opened, he looked back, a smile on his face, and the full force of his hope hit me hard. My hands shook on the railing and I focused on my white knuckles. I remembered how tightly Josh had gripped the wheel of his car on his last drive home from school the day he died. The day he knew he was about to fight for my life. If he could get through that, believing he had a chance for a new life, then I could get through this.

  Michael stepped off the train and the landscape moved on.

  Chapter Four

  WITHIN MOMENTS, Ruth was at my side as though she knew I teetered on the edge of tears.

  “You must be exhausted.”

  I nodded, pressing my lips together, not trusting myself to speak as the train sped away and Michael’s last smile was gone.

  “I know you’d prefer to go with him. You and Michael have no doubt survived unspeakable things at the hands of Treble.”

  I frowned. “Treble?”

  “The group led by Michael’s father and his general, Neil Cheyne. Didn’t you ever hear them called that?”

  I shook my head. “I never knew they had a name.”

  She looked grim. “Our intelligence identified it as the codename for the operation to capture and contain your mortality.”

  There was something wrong with her choice of words. They’d captured me but… “Contain my mortality? You mean like not allowing it to spread.” I searched her eyes, remembering how Michael’s dad had pleaded with me not to leave the Terminal. He�
��d tried to convince me that he could keep me safe there. On our way to Starsgard, we’d retrieved discarded newspapers from trash cans, all of them announcing that mortality was lethal, that nobody was safe anymore.

  “Could it spread? Could I make people mortal like me just by touching them?”

  “No, Ava. No matter what anyone says, mortality is part of your DNA. You can’t spread it by touch.”

  I exhaled. Of course, I’d kissed Michael enough times that I should have known that already, but my experiences of late had taught me that any fear could be true.

  “The people back in Evereach, the media, they all said I was a threat.”

  The Hazard Police—charged with assisting regeneration in extreme accidents—had put out a warning that people shouldn’t come near me, although I wasn’t sure if that was really Michael’s dad’s people—Treble as Ruth called them—trying to keep people away so they could come after me unimpeded.

  “You’re just another human being, Ava, remember that.” Ruth placed her hand over mine. “You will see Michael every day. Our young people gather every evening in their local gallery after their work is done. But … boys and girls don’t live with each other unless they’re brother and sister. There’s no way you could stay with each other. We’re very traditional here.”

  I wondered what she’d think of me disguising myself by rolling up a blanket under my shirt and pretending to be pregnant on my way to Starsgard. Then I remembered Michael’s mom, how apart she was—not just different, but estranged from her husband. It was a wonder they didn’t throw rotten vegetables at her.

  “Michael’s mom doesn’t fit in here, does she?”

  “Not very well, no.”

  “I don’t think I will, either.”

  Ruth squeezed my hand. “I’d like you to live with me,” she said, surprising me.

  I assessed her expression, wondering if I’d find pity or menace or maybe even calculation there, but her face held only gentle hope.