Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

My mother unpacked and delivered her suitcases to the basement. She didn’t discuss the assignment she’d left behind when she resigned, other than to assure me that another humanitarian had taken her place, and that she hadn’t abandoned the girls and women she’d been helping. When I found myself alone in the living room with her purse that first day, I peeked into it. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. A diary, perhaps, or notes from the girls she’d helped. The purse held nothing but her wallet and a new notepad, just waiting to be filled.

For most of the day, my family stuck close together. We ate meals in the kitchen and sat together in the living room. We talked, and we sat in long stretches of silence. Finally, by late afternoon, my mother went upstairs to take a nap. My father headed to the kitchen to scour the dirty pans. And Miles—Miles retreated to his room, and came out again with red eyes, and smiled at me loopily. I wanted to tell him that bloodflower took part of him away from us, made him feel already departed. I wanted to tell him I feared for not just his life but also the loss of our life together, as a family. But my brother was not clearheaded enough to listen.

I went to my own room. On the wall above my bed was the framed impression card my friends had given me for my sixteenth birthday. A black-and-red lick of fire. I stared at it until the image blurred and I started to imagine it into something else. Not a flame, but movement, like wind. Like coming change.

At my desk, I pulled out a notebook and a pen. I remembered what it was like to read Victoria’s markings, that trembling, treacherous sensation when I came up against her abduction prediction. If I could only express what it felt like, what mix of instinct and magic led to that interpretation.

I sat at my desk and wrote for hours. I crossed out and recast and doubled back. I consulted the back of Mapping the Future, where the addenda were published. I recalled the revision requests Miles had sent the Office of the Future, how he’d tried but failed to describe the abduction marking. I also made lists of every class I’d ever taken on the mountain, every lesson that had been most important to me. I considered what other kinds of classes could be helpful—classes for boys, for instance, to help them understand how to interact with girls and treat them with respect. A class to prepare girls who were fated for abduction, and another to support those who returned. Unlike the Mountain School, these offerings would be available to girls of all economic classes.

Finally, I set down my pen. I had drafted a proposed roster of classes I envisioned creating. Some I could teach myself, but others, like gender theory, would require outside help. I’d have to write to Professor Reed to ask for her contacts. Perhaps we could receive materials or even host a visiting teacher from the northern country that published the gender expression revisions.

Aside from this course list, I’d produced one more document: an addendum for Mapping the Future that described how to read the abduction pattern in juvenile girls. It was a draft, an opening attempt in need of Miles’s review, but it was a start. I titled it “Addendum X” even as I knew it stood little chance of ever being published in Mapping the Future.

“Celeste?”

I turned to see my mother in the doorway. As she stepped into my room, I held out my papers to her. I was tired of secrecy, privacy, holding my plans close. I wanted her to know everything.

She stood behind my desk reading, her face expressionless.

Finally, she looked up. “The Office of the Future will never publish this addendum.”

“I know. Miles has already petitioned them to add this information, and he failed. But I thought—well, maybe we don’t need to go through the official channels. We could print a whole stack of these and slide them into copies of Mapping the Future. In bookstores, libraries, schools. An underground way to offer people the truth.”

My mother shook her head. “It’s too risky. If you run around planting an unauthorized addendum, you’d surely be caught. And the penalty for tampering with an official document can include jail time, Celeste.”

I was about to protest, to tell her we at least had to try, when she continued speaking. “If we’re going to do this, we have to be smart about it,” she said. “Fortunately, ambassadors know how to work without attracting attention.” She paused, looking at me. “Do you understand?”

I stared at her. My mother, marked to marry and have children. My mother, marked for so much more.

*   *   *

We checked on Miles, but he was still in his room, sleeping off the bloodflower.

“Once he’s awake, I’ll have a talk with him,” my mother said. “I won’t allow him to waste his remaining time like this.” She closed his door. “But we can get started without him. Let’s go to Julia’s. You two can catch me up.”

My mother drove us to the interpretation district. It had been so long since she and Julia had spoken in person—that open house Julia held years ago, back when Miles was still uncovering his gift—but once reunited, they fell into an easy rapport. In Julia’s office, my mother spent a long time studying the chart on the wall. She was taken by this chart, obsessed with it, even. She recited the marking outcomes like a chant: negative, negative, negative, negative, positive, negative, negative, negative.

“You’re detecting a decline over time?” she asked.

“That’s the hope,” Julia said. “We need to wait and see.”

My mother had plans. She had connections. She talked of secrecy, of not attracting attention from the Office of the Future. Distributing the addendum locally, in a small and centralized area, would