Darkness Between the Stars Page 5

  My skin crawled. My heart leapt against my ribs. I probably would've stood there all night asking the skypad again and again for a count of the stars.

  But I heard something behind me.

  I spun around and faced the open night. With the cloudless sky unpolluted by earthly light, it might as well have been midday. I squinted and saw a dark figure sprint out of the barn and toward the valley mouth.

  …the barn I was just in a few minutes ago.

  It wasn’t Dad. He didn’t run, especially since he’d hurt his back installing the irrigation system. And it definitely wasn’t Mom.

  It’s a man.

  A big man.

  What’s that he’s holding?

  I wasn’t sure what got into me. Rolling the skypad up in my fist, I tore across the fields after the man. I felt my socks rip and mud collect on my pajamas. I didn’t care. The man had seen me gazing into my skypad, but he didn’t see me chasing. And although I was still only a ten-year old boy, I was faster than him.

  Much faster.

  Thirty paces into a wheat field, he heard me. He must’ve known he couldn’t have outrun me, so he skidded to a stop and lifted an iron bar over his head to hit me.

  My first thought was, he came to our barn just to steal an iron bar?

  My second thought came out my mouth.

  “Skypad!” I shouted as I sprinted at the man, “Full flood lights!”

  At ten paces, at a hard run, I unrolled the skypad and aimed the screen at the man’s face. A sharp white light erupted into the darkness. Blinded, the man swung the iron bar at me, but I ducked and tackled him at his knees. He was twice my size, but I was a boy possessed. I rolled away, tore the iron bar from his loose hand, and hit him twice with it.

  Once in the neck.

  And again in the cheek.

  He rolled onto his side in the wheat, groaning. The skypad sat on the ground, its light a perfect beacon.

  “Daaaaaaaaaad!” I shouted. “Bandit! There’s a bandit! Daaaaaaaaaad!”

  The man sat up and shielded his eyes against the light. I hit his forearm, probably breaking both bones. He rolled right back onto his side.

  “If you move again, I’ll knock your brains out,” I said. More than anything, I was stunned by how calm I was.

  I shouted a few more times. I heard Dad and Mom coming. I stood over the man, ready to crack more of his bones if he moved again. All those years in the fields had done my body well. An iron bar was nothing compared to a sledgehammer, and the man was far softer than oak planks and mountain boulders.

  When Dad and Mom found us, they stopped at the edge of the skypad’s light.

  “Joff?” Dad looked confused. “What is this?”

  I pointed the iron bar at the man puddled in the crushed wheat stalks.

  “Bandit,” I said. “He was in the barn. He was trying to steal stuff, I think. He ran when he saw me.”

  “What are you doing out here?” Mom panted.

  I looked at my parents. Both of them fell silent.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said. “For now I think we should tie him up and call a hovercop from Donva.”

  And so we did.

  The Darkness is Real

  “You did well, Joff. Really well.”

  The officer from Donva had said it several times. Each time my reaction had been the same:

  I nodded.

  I said nothing.

  I looked no one in the eyes.

  Just outside our little house, the officer, Dad, and I stood in the warm afternoon sunlight. It was two days after I’d caught the bandit, and I was over the whole thing. I didn’t say it out loud, but I really wanted the officer to fly right back to Donva and never come back. I didn’t care about the bandit or what he’d meant to steal. I just wanted life to go back to normal.

  Mostly because I wasn’t sure how many normal days I had left.

  The officer was a towering man, bigger than Dad and I put together. But even with shoulders wide as a tractor, and even as his menacing, gun-decked hovercar hummed in the background, he looked down at me with nothing but compassion.

  “And you’re sure you didn’t notice anything missing?” he asked Dad.

  “No.” Dad glanced at me. “I mean…nothing other than that iron rod. Do you know who it was?”

  “Yes. We know. His name’s Wendall Wight. He’s a petty thief these days, but used to be he ran with some separatists out of Boulda. Disbanded, they are. He’s the last of them.”

  Separatists? I wondered. Way out here?

  “Separatists?” Dad echoed my thought.

  “Don’t worry, sir. Wendall’s being hover-jetted to the capital. In a few hours, he’ll be thousands of miles from here. You’ll never see him again.”

  Dad put his arm around me. He’d never been much for affection. I wasn’t sure how to react.

  “And you’re sure he’s not working for anyone?”

  “Not sure I understand the question, mister.” The officer raised an eyebrow. “Who would he be workin’ for?”

  Dad let out a sigh and shook his head. I knew he wanted to ask more. I saw it in his eyes, in the way he scratched his chin.

  But he didn’t.

  “I guess that’s all the questions we have,” he told the officer. “If you say we’ll be safe, I’ll trust you.”

  “Count on it,” the officer declared.

  After a few more formalities, including me signing an official crime report, it was over. I watched the black hovercar buzz between our fields toward Donva. When it disappeared, and when the wheat stopped swaying, I started back for the house.

  “Lots of work today,” I reminded Dad. “We’re already behind.”

  * * *

  We worked hard that day, harder than usual. One of our harvesting tractors had blown its engine during a test run, and we had to get it ready before summer’s end. It was exactly the sort of work I needed to forget all about Wendall Wight. And I did. With filthy hands and sweat running in rivers down my back, I dove so deep into my labor that by sunset I had nothing on my mind other than making the engine perfect again.

  But with a few words, Dad made me remember.

  “You deserve a reward,” he said. “You know…for doing what you did.”

  He’d stopped working an hour ago. He’d hurt his back again while drilling a piece of the tractor’s body back into place, and he’d sat down to watch me finish the job. Still sweating furiously, I put down my wrench and wiped my forehead dry on my sleeve. Rebuilding the engine should’ve been a three-day job, but I was so close to being done I could taste it.

  “I don’t want a reward,” I said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah. I just want dinner. Can I have another hour in here? I’m almost done.”

  “So…for your reward you want to work even longer?” he joked.

  “No.” I hid a smile. “I don’t want anything for catching Wendall. I didn’t like doing it. I want the whole thing to go away.”

  I had my back to him, but I still felt Dad’s pride.

  “That’s a good thing, son,” he said. “You didn’t want to hurt anyone. You just did what you had to do. Even so, I want to reward you. There’s no telling what he would’ve done or what he would’ve stolen if you hadn’t stopped him.”

  I sighed. I could tell he wasn’t going to back off.

  “What if I said you could have anything you want?” Dad continued. “Any one thing. You choose it; you get it.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “The answers to all my questions?” I asked.

  “Anything physical.” I felt him smiling again.

  And then it hit me.

  I knew exactly what I wanted.

  “A new skypad,” I said it.

  “A new skypad? What’s wrong with the old one?”

  I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth. Not just yet.

  “I fixed the old one,” I said, “but it’s…glitchy. I
used it to examine an engine the other day while you were out. I think the viewer’s off.”

  “Huh. I hadn’t noticed.” He sounded confused.

  “It’s subtle,” I explained. I hated lying to him.

  “Ok..” He grunted as he stood. “If you want a skypad, it’s yours. I’ll have Mom pick one up when she goes into town tomorrow.”

  “You mean it?” I faced him.

  “Of course I do. It’s not like you asked for a dream-maker or a sprite.”

  I jumped off the crate I’d been standing on to reach the tractor’s engine. A cloud of dust blossomed into the air where I landed. “If I’d have asked for one of those, would you have said yes?”

  “Well…” He paused. “I guess I would’ve.”

  “But you’d have been disappointed.”

  “Yeah. Maybe a little.”

  “Let’s go home.” I stretched my arms over my head. “I’m starving. I’ll finish the engine tomorrow.”

  “Ok.”

  The walk home that night was among the best walks with my father I’d ever enjoyed. He was slowed by his aching back, but a part of me knew we’d have ambled along slowly no matter what. We talked about our work, how beautiful the sunset above the mountains was, and how much we missed Aly. The wind picked up and whisked our sweat away, and the wheat fields rippled like ocean waves all around us.

  It was a good walk.

  I knew right then I’d never forget it.

  * * *

  For many weeks, I worked harder than ever in my life.

  Dad had hurt his back worse than we’d thought. His work slowed to a crawl, and it fell to me to keep the farm viable. I fixed the tractor engine, ran tests on our harvesting equipment, woke up at dawn to work the irrigation lines, and assumed control of our daily schedules. Not just mine. His, too. And sometimes even Mom’s.

  When the late summer rains came, I walked the fields in driving storms to make sure all our work was done.

  Whenever machines showed signs of being near to breaking down, I gave Mom lists of parts to order from Donva.

  Hours after nightfall every eve, I marched home, ate huge dinners, and collapsed into bed.

  I wasn’t a boy any longer. I was a man in a small body.

  But I wasn’t really small anymore. In Mom’s mirror, in pools of fresh rainwater, in the windows of our tractors, I saw my reflection. My pale blonde hair had turned sandy brown. My rosy cheeks were ruddy and tan. My hands, eternally dirty, were strong and covered in callouses. I was working harder, eating more, and learning to run a farm that should’ve required a half-dozen workers.

  I was good at my work. I didn’t love it, but I knew its importance. The farm was our livelihood, the only thing between us and living in a small, sterile apartment in Donva.

  And yet, no matter what work I did and where I did it, the farm and its future were never really on my mind.

  Only one thing ever was:

  The stars.

  Always, I thought of them. In my sleep, while eating breakfast, while fine-tuning the rotating speed of old world combine blades, my mind was up in the sky.

  Twenty-nine thousand, I always repeated to myself.

  Can’t be an accident.

  One night, after I’d turned off the irrigation streams and eaten a monstrous dinner of vegetable stew and buttered bread, I lounged in my room and waited until Mom and Dad went to bed.

  Dad and I hadn’t even opened the packaging for the new skypad.

  Untouched, it hid in a box underneath a worktable in the barn.

  It’s time, I told myself.

  Quieter than the wind, I snuck back into the kitchen and plucked a key ring off the wall. Since Wendall Wight’s little visit, Mom had insisted on new locks for every door, and so I’d installed them one-by-one. With a shake of my head at Wendall’s foolishness, I stuffed the key ring inside a sock so it wouldn’t jingle, and I crept out my window again.

  Outside, the night was the same as the one Wendall had stolen his way into our barn. The skies were clear. The wind was dead, lost somewhere up in the mountains.

  I made for the barn. It lay across two fallow fields whose dirt was pocked with puddles from a light afternoon shower. At the barn door, far enough from the house to pull the keys out without worrying Mom and Dad would hear, I stood still for a few breaths.

  No one inside.

  No bandits.

  No one else is coming.

  More nervous than I’d been in forever, I unlocked the barn door. I endured the stupid thought of wishing Alpo were with me, but then sucked in a breath and remembered I wasn’t a little boy anymore.

  C’mon Joff. Don’t be a baby.

  Inside the barn, no bandits awaited me. I stood in the darkness for a short while, listening, but hearing only crickets and dripping water. Dad had built the barn in the style of buildings used a few thousand years ago. Unlike every barn elsewhere in the world, ours creaked and groaned.

  But not that night.

  The wind was silent.

  The world was asleep.

  I crawled under the table by the big tractor door. There it sat, my fresh new skypad, fully customized and ready to use. I pulled it out of its polymer carrying cylinder and unrolled it on my knee. It conformed to the shape of my pants, sticking lightly to the rugged cloth.

  New design, I thought. I won’t even have to put it in my pocket.

  Still tense, I walked back outside. It was a night made for stargazing, cloudless and cool. As I wandered away from the barn, the rest of the world seemed to fall away. I almost forgot I was earthbound. I’d heard Dad talk about it before, how sometimes we focused so hard on something, and how that focus made everything else seem like nothing.

  I was focused. I had questions.

  In the exact spot I’d stood to count the stars years ago, I stopped and peeled the skypad off my pants. Tugging it rigid, I pointed the screen skyward and whispered a command to awaken it.

  “Skypad, you there?” I asked.

  “Yes, Joff,” she answered.

  “Skypad, is your viewer system set up to access orbital telescopes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re fully synced? No extra hardware needed? You’re ready to count stars?”

  “Yes.”

  Ok. Here goes.

  “Skypad, how many stars do you count in the sky tonight?”

  She paused. I almost interrupted her calculations, but then her soft, calm voice burbled in my ear.

  “Four-hundred million, six-hundred fifty- thousand, nine-hundred one.”

  I exhaled. I had math to do in my head. It was true; I’d lied to Dad about the reason I’d wanted a new skypad. I’d told him I was worried the old one was wearing out, that its calculations were off, and that its viewer was broken.

  None of that was true.

  I only wanted the new pad to see if it counted the same, to know if the stars were really vanishing.

  I remembered the last count of the old skypad. I’d written it down in several places in my room, all of them hidden from Mom.

  Four-hundred million, six-hundred seventy- thousand, seven-hundred sixty-two, the old pad had counted.

  I walked through the math in my mind. Mom might’ve been able to do it without a calculator or sprite, and Dad wouldn’t have even tried, but the numbers came to me easily.

  Nineteen-thousand, eight-hundred sixty one.

  Almost twenty thousand.

  Add it to the twenty-six thousand stars the old pad counted missing.

  That’s forty-six thousand stars.

  Forty-six thousand missing.

  I swallowed hard. I told myself to be rational, to remember that even forty-six thousand stars were nothing to the universe. The skypad could use the orbital scopes to count hundreds of millions, but beyond the scopes’ range the stars numbered in the billions of trillions. The old skypad had said as much.

  What did it mean?

  The old skypad wasn’t broken, I knew.

  It
s viewer was fine. Its sync with the orbital telescopes had been perfect.

  Stars are going dark.

  “Skypad…” My voice cracked. “Has anyone else asked for a count of the stars?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I have recorded nine-thousand, one-hundred eleven previous requests for a star count.”

  “Who asked?” I blurted.

  “The names and locations of previous requesters are classified.”

  Of course they are, I scolded myself. Stupid question.

  “Skypad, have the orbital telescopes been repositioned at any point during the last two years?”

  “No. Except for nominal adjustments, orbital positions have remained the same.”

  “Your field of view hasn’t changed?”

  “No. All skypads are tuned to the same selection of telescopes.”

  What she’s saying is – every time I ask, she’s looking at the same thing.

  The same as the old pad. The same as every pad.

  I rolled the skypad up and stared into the night. I didn’t see anything out of place.

  But I knew.

  Forty-six thousand stars are missing.

  No More Roads

  I lost myself in my work.

  I put away the skypad for two years.

  I became the hard-working young man my father wanted me to be.

  And on one summer morning, three weeks after my fourteenth birthday, I sat alone in my bedroom on the edge of my bed. I was still tired from the previous day’s chores. My hands hurt from too much work on our machines. I hadn’t taken a day off in months.

  Sitting on the old mattress, I floated somewhere between a state of shock and exhilaration.

  Mostly because I knew I’d worked my last day on the farm.

  I heard four distinct voices in the kitchen. The two men in black suits had arrived just after breakfast, and had been talking to my parents ever since. Mom had asked me to come out just as the black-suited men arrived, but Dad had come to my door a moment later.

  “Ten minutes, Joff. Give us ten minutes,” he’d told me.

  That had been forty-five minutes ago. But I wasn’t bothered. Over the years, Dad had sharpened me to be patient.

  Give them ten more, I told myself. And then go to the kitchen.