For Darkness Shows the Stars Read Free

girl’s green eyes—so unusual, even among the Reduced—searched Elliot’s face, and she frowned.
    “Yes, I’m sad,” Elliot admitted. She’d never successfully lied to Ro. Reduced her friend may be, but not insensitive. Elliot had been taught as a child that the Reduced could sense your emotions, like dogs. Over the years, she’d begun to wonder if their general lack of speech made it all the more important for them to read faces.
    To some Luddites, the Reduced were children, fallen and helpless, but still human. To others, they were beasts of burden, mostly mute and incapable of rational thought. Elliot’s mother had taught her that they were her duty, as they were the duty of all Luddites. Cut off as the population of these two islands had been since the Wars of the Lost, they might be the only people left on the planet. The Luddites, who had kept themselves pure of the taint of Reduction, therefore had the responsibility to be the caretakers not only of all of human history and culture but of humanity itself.
    It had been generations since any Luddites had tried to rehabilitate the Reduced. Mere survival had taken precedence. But Ro was more than Elliot’s duty. She’d become Elliot’s friend, and sometimes Elliot even dared wonder what Ro could be—what any Reduced could be—if the Luddites had the resources to try.
    Ro brightened and took Elliot’s brown hand in her own reddened, muddy one. She pulled Elliot over to the pots, grinning, and Elliot allowed herself to be pulled. She knew what was coming. Ro’s pots had been yielding the same profusion of blossoms for the last four years, but Ro still greeted every one with squeals of delighted surprise.
    Ro led her to one particular group of pots set apart from all the others and Elliot’s eyes widened in shock. These flowers were different from any she’d seen before—not red or yellow or purple or white, but a pale violet with streaks of scarlet running in veins along each petal from the depths of a deeply crimson heart.
    “They’re beautiful, Ro!” she blurted, while inwardly, she tried to work out the genetics. A simple cross-pollination perhaps, the purple flowers set too close to the red ones . . .
    Ro bounced and clapped her hands. She pointed at the red and purple flowers planted nearby and then at Elliot herself. Elliot narrowed her eyes, remembering evenings Ro had spent by her side in the barn loft.
    No, it was impossible. She was Reduced.
    A few words, a few signs, and simple, repetitive tasks were the most the Reduced could handle. They were capable of being trained, but not for any skilled labor. And they required close observation. The young, the sick, the pregnant, and the elderly had an odd propensity for self-violence, which is why the Luddites were forced to confine them. The birthing house that Dee had feared was an unfortunate necessity for Reduced women, but torture for a Post like Dee.
    But Ro was nodding eagerly, miming picking flowers then pressing her palms together. “Ro wheat,” she said, in the awkward monosyllabic speech that was all the Reduced could manage.
    Ro wheat. Ro’s special wheat. It was impossible. A Reduced could never comprehend what Elliot had been working on in secret, could never re-create the grafts herself. Ro was Reduced. It was impossible.
    But no repetition could truly banish Elliot’s suspicion. “Ro,” she said, “you mustn’t show these flowers to anyone, do you hear?”
    Ro frowned, her pretty, freckled face wrinkled with confusion.
    “I love them, I do!” Elliot took the girl’s hands in hers. “They are beautiful flowers and I’m proud of you. But it must be a secret, right?” She pressed a finger to her lips. “Shh.”
    “Shh,” Ro agreed, muddying her mouth with her forefinger. Elliot wished she could be sure the girl was doing more than just parroting her. But this was the way it was, the way it had always been, ever since the Reduction. Each generation of Luddites would