The Stars Never Rise

My scores were fine. But not good enough to get me recruited by a company willing to pay for my education in exchange for my employment. My spare time was spent working, not studying, and without a recruitment scholarship, I didn’t have the money for college. I didn’t even have the money for dinner. The Church would provide for any higher education required for Church service, of course. But only once I’d pledged. Which brought us back to the starting point of this logic merry-go-round.

“You could still marry …,” Anabelle suggested softly, as the last of the sophomores filed past, their shoes whispering on bright white linoleum tile. “It won’t matter what you do for a living if you’re in love, right?”

I gaped at her, momentarily unable to hide my contempt.

Yeah, in a few years I could marry. If I could find a husband who either didn’t want children or had also been sterilized. But what kind of life would that be? Disqualified for parenthood because of my flat feet and occasional runny nose. Disqualified for everything but retail and factory work because I couldn’t afford an education.

Could love make that kind of misery bearable? The only thing I knew about love was that Mellie read about it in her taboo books—along with a host of other improbable fantasies.

Joining the Church to become a teacher was the only way I could think of to stay near my sister yet have a life and a career of my own. Well, a career, anyway.

“I want to pledge, Anabelle,” I insisted, speaking over the voice inside me that argued otherwise.

She studied me for a second, and she must have bought my sincerity, because then she smiled and squeezed my arm. “Great! It’s good work, Nina. And I know you love the kids.”

“Yeah, I—”

“Miss Kane, please step back into line,” Sister Cathy said, and the rest of my sentence died on my tongue at the mention of my last name. I thought she was talking to me, until I looked up to see my sister standing alone in the middle of the hall instead of against the wall in line with the other girls.

Melanie stared at the floor, her arms stiff at her sides, and though I couldn’t see her face, I recognized her posture. She was trapped between an idea and its execution, like when she was little and she realized she could sneak an extra cookie from the package but knew she shouldn’t. Any second, she would either step back into line or … she wouldn’t. She hadn’t yet decided.

“Melanie Kane, get back in line. Now.” Sister Cathy’s voice was sharper this time, and suddenly everyone was watching. Mellie looked at her. Then she looked at the line of her classmates. Then she looked at the door leading into the courtyard, where rain still poured in thick gray sheets.

My heart hammered in my chest, and I felt like I was on that precipice of disobedience with her.

Get back in line, Mellie.

Running wouldn’t get her out of the physical, and it would get her into serious trouble. The kind of trouble that would require a conference with our mother. Which would quickly land us in Church custody.

Melanie’s right hand twitched, and I knew what she’d decided a fraction of a second before she lurched for the double glass doors and threw her full weight at them. The doors flew open, and she disappeared into the rain.

There was a collective gasp from the sophomore class and a startled yelp from Sister Cathy as a gust of wind and rain pelted her navy-embroidered pale blue cassock in the two seconds it took the doors to fall shut in my sister’s wake. Then there was silence, except for a clap of thunder and the steady, loud patter of rain on the roof.

“Find her!” Sister Cathy shouted, soaked and obviously furious, and two of the sophomore class teachers sprinted for the exit, their cornflower cassocks flapping behind them.

I started to follow, blood racing through my veins, spurring me into action, but Sister Anabelle grabbed my arm and hauled me into the restroom alcove again.

“She’s just scared,” I said.

“I know,” Anabelle whispered. “It would be better if you find her and get her to come back voluntarily. Ready to atone. Disobeying a Church official is a sin, Nina.”

“I know.” Melanie was drawn to trouble like a cat to raw meat—she thrived on it—and I’d always known that eventually she’d make a mistake I couldn’t fix. I’d just hoped “eventually” would come a little later in life. And that it wouldn’t involve my sister disobeying a Church official in front of dozens of witnesses, then fleeing the scene.

What the hell was she thinking?

“Is there somewhere she goes when she’s upset?” Anabelle asked.

“Not lately.” But when we were little … I glanced over my shoulder at the sophomores still filing into the gym four at a time. “I’ll find her. Can you cover for me?”

“Of course. Go on.”

I made myself walk away from the gym, then into the courtyard through a different door, when I really wanted to run. The rain had slowed a little, but the day looked gray, viewed through the steady drizzle, and my hair was drenched again by the time I got to the dais. The only sounds were the constant loud patter of raindrops, the occasional roll of thunder, and the quick tap of my school shoes on the sidewalk.

Matthew Mercer looked up from the dais when he heard me coming, and one glance at his rain-soaked misery urged me to move faster.

If they’d force a five-year-old to kneel all day in the rain for blasphemy, what would they do to a disobedient fifteen-year-old fugitive? I couldn’t remember anyone else defying the Church so openly, except for … Clare Parker.

My stomach clenched around my breakfast at the memory.

One day, the year I was nine, Clare had refused to kneel for worship. They gave her three chances. When she still refused, Brother Phillip said refusing to recognize the Church’s authority was the first sign of possession. He called in an exorcist, and two hours later, Clare was sentenced. The exorcist said that since her possession was recent, her soul could be returned to the well of souls—if it were purified by fire.

They forced her to her knees on the dais, closed the steel cuffs above her calves, then burned her alive in front of the entire school.

She was seventeen years old.

What if they thought Melanie was possessed?

Terror pumped fire through my veins and pushed my feet faster. At the rear entrance to the administration building, I turned to make sure no one was watching, then slipped inside. My shoes squeaked on the tile and left wet footprints, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Careful not to slip, I snuck through the back hall, then ducked into the laundry room. When Mellie was little, she loved to hide in the bundles of freshly laundered sheets before they were folded and distributed in the children’s home attached to our school. The laundry was the only place I could think of to look for Mellie on campus, and at first I didn’t see her.

I’d almost decided to climb over the fence and go look for her at home, when the pile of clean white sheets in a huge wheeled cart moved.

“Melanie? It’s me. Come on out.”

But she didn’t move or make a sound, so I had to pull the sheets off her one by one and pile them on a table until I found my sister curled up in a ball at the bottom of the cart. Her hair was soaked, her braid destroyed. Her face was red and swollen from crying, and the terror in her eyes made her look about ten years old.

“Mellie, you have to go back. It’ll be okay if you apologize and take your punishment.”

Fasting? A week of silence? Public lashing? Any of those would be better than suspicion of possession.

“It’s not going to be okay.” Melanie sat up, sniffling, and wiped her nose with the back of one hand.

“Not if you don’t get up, it won’t. Hurry, before they decide you’re possessed.” Any reasonable person could see that she was just scared and upset. But the Church saw what it wanted to see, and it wouldn’t want to see a fifteen-year-old it simply couldn’t control.

Melanie shook her head slowly, and two fat tears rolled down her cheeks as she stared up at me. “I’m not possessed, Nina,” she said, her voice raw and hoarse. “I’m pregnant.”

FOUR

“Pregnant …?” My voice sounded hollow, and when Melanie nodded, I sank to the floor on legs that would no longer hold me up.

No.

My sister climbed out of the cart, then knelt next to me on the floor, wrinkling her navy slacks and her drenched white blouse. “Nina, say something. I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you sure?” I grabbed her hand and squeezed it, looking for any sign of doubt in her eyes.

“Pretty sure. I missed last month entirely, and I’ve been feeling sick all week.” She sniffled and swiped one hand across her dripping nose again. “Not just in the morning, though. Kinda off and on all day.”

But for one long moment, I could only blink at her, and even once I was capable of speech, the words seemed to get stuck on my tongue. “How …? Who …?” She looked at the floor, and my eyes narrowed. “Adam Yung?” I demanded in a harsh whisper, and she nodded miserably. “Melanie, how did you think you’d get away with this? You knew your physical was coming up, and even if you hadn’t gotten pregnant, they can tell when you’ve lost your virginity!”

I could get away with having sex. Because I’d been declared unfit to procreate, then rendered unable to procreate, the Church no longer cared whether I preserved my virtue, so long as I still presented a facade of innocence and purity to the world.

I had gotten away with it, several times in the months following my sterilization, when my anger at the Church couldn’t be controlled without an outlet. I’d met in the dark, in the middle of the night, with boys who would hardly meet my gaze in school. A private screw-you to the system that had defined my future without so much as a “Hey, Nina, what would you like out of life?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, and I certainly hadn’t been sure at fifteen. But I was damn sure I didn’t want anyone else making that decision for me.

Had I done this? Had Melanie seen my months of rebellion—back when I’d had time for such things—and assumed that what had worked for me would work for her too?

“We weren’t really thinking about that,” my sister said in response to a question I’d almost forgotten I’d asked. “We weren’t really thinking about anything. We were just … I love him, and he loves me, and it just happened, Nina!”

“Once?” I sat on my heels to keep my slacks off the laundry room floor. “You got pregnant the first time?” Not that that mattered. Once was enough.

Studying in the basement, my ass.

Melanie shook her head, and more tears filled her eyes. “We tried to stop. We knew it was wrong, but it didn’t feel wrong.”

“How does it feel now?” I demanded. Fornication was a sin. Melanie wouldn’t have been the first fifteen-year-old to present a torn hymen at her annual physical, and if the whispers in the bathroom were accurate, several of my own classmates had already lived to tell that tale. They were sterilized, of course, and they’d been punished privately because our school didn’t want smudges on its record any more than the offenders wanted to be outed as sinners.

But Melanie was giving them no choice. A pregnancy couldn’t be hidden by a school uniform. Not for long, anyway.

My head spun with the details, and the consequences, and the potential outcomes, but in that deluge of possibilities, I couldn’t see a single good way out of this. Not one.

“Does Adam know?” I rubbed my forehead, trying to fend off the pressure growing behind it. We were screwed.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell him. I just kept ignoring it, hoping I was wrong, until I saw the calendar and remembered about the physicals.”

“Unlicensed pregnancy is forbidden, Melanie. For—”

“Please don’t say ‘Fornication is a sin.’ “ More tears rolled down her swollen cheeks. “I know fornication is a sin. Please don’t be mad at me right now, Nina. I need your help.”

“I’m not mad.” I was furious. I was so angry I could hardly think, but I couldn’t deny my own hypocrisy, and being mad at Melanie wouldn’t help either of us, so I pushed my anger back. Way back. All the way to the back of my mind, where anger at my mother festered, rotting our thin familial bond. “I just …” I didn’t know what to do. For the first time in my life, I had no clue how to get Melanie out of trouble. “You can’t have this baby, Mellie.” I squeezed her hand when her tears started falling faster. “You know you can’t have this baby.”

There were places women could go to fix that particular problem. I didn’t know where any of those places were, but I could find out. Maybe we could put Mellie’s physical off if I told them she was sick, and then when she showed up for the makeup physical, we’d only have to deal with the fornication issue.

We could survive fornication, even if the Church took custody of us and split us up. But fornication, unlicensed pregnancy, disobeying a Church official, and any other sins they uncovered when they looked into our living situation …?

The more sins they charged her with, the greater the chance of a conviction.

But one look at my sister’s tear-streaked face told me she wouldn’t even consider what I saw as our only option.

“No! Nina, there’s a person in here.” She pressed one small fist against her flat belly, and something deep inside me cracked open and fell apart. “It’s a baby—or it will be. It’s my baby, and it’s real, and it’s defenseless, and I’m going to be a great mother.”

But it wasn’t that simple. She was too scared and confused to see the real problem. “We don’t have a soul for him, Melanie.”

“Or her. It could be a girl.” Her words came out in broken, halting syllables half choked by wrenching sobs.

“The gender doesn’t matter if the baby doesn’t live.”

“Maybe Mom will …” She couldn’t finish the sentence, and I couldn’t finish it for her. The thought was too horrible to voice.

“You know she won’t.” Our mother was only thirty-nine years old, and I couldn’t say for sure why she’d ever had kids in the first place. The chances of her giving up her life—miserable as it was lately—for an illegally conceived grandchild she would never see were slim to none.

“One of Adam’s parents, then. They love him. They won’t want his baby to die.”

She was right. But Adam’s parents weren’t much older than our mom, and … “Do you really want to take one of his parents away from him? Away from Penny?” Adam’s little sister was only twelve—way too young to lose one of her parents and half of the family’s income. “Would you really make them decide who should die to pay for a mistake you and Adam made?”

She looked crushed by the realization that that was exactly what she’d be doing. “What about the public registry?”

“Melanie, that’s no guarantee!” And I wasn’t even sure they’d put her baby on the list if the Church declared her unfit to procreate. They would never make her end the pregnancy—in fact, they wouldn’t let her—but they wouldn’t hesitate to let the child die a natural, soulless death.

“Then I’ll pledge to the Church!” she cried, swiping tears from her cheeks with both hands, and I glanced nervously at the closed laundry room door. We couldn’t hide forever, but we couldn’t afford to be discovered before we had a plan. And my sister pledging to join the Church was not a good plan.

Sure, if she pledged, they’d put her baby on the very short, very elite Church registry—a list of elderly Church officials who were ready to give up their souls to support the next generation of life. But then they’d take the baby, not as a ward, like the orphans, but as an ecclesiastic dedication. A human tithe. In another town. She would never see him again, and at eighteen, he would be ordained without choice, his soul to be paid for with lifelong service to the Church by both mother and child.

“You don’t want to pledge, Mellie,” I said, though I couldn’t make myself voice the reasons.

She wiped her eyes again and looked at me with more determination than I’d ever seen from her. “What I don’t want is to let this baby die.”

I stared at her. I wasn’t sure I recognized my own sister in that moment. Melanie had changed in the hour since we’d walked to school. She was still young and impulsive, and still wasn’t quite thinking things through, but at some point she’d come to value her unborn child’s life more than her own, and that made her a better mother than ours had ever been.

“I can do this, Nina,” she said, and that determination I’d seen in her eyes echoed in her voice. “I know you think I never take anything seriously, and I mess everything up, but I can do this, and if you’ll help me, I may not have to join the Church. I’ll do whatever you say.” She took my hand in both of hers. “I’ll do all the laundry, and the dishes, and anything else you need me to do, if you’ll just help me keep my baby. Please, Nina!”

She was too young. We couldn’t guarantee her baby a soul. Even if it lived and the Church let her keep it, we couldn’t afford to feed and clothe a baby. And I wouldn’t be able to pledge and become a teacher, because Melanie couldn’t do this on her own. To give her baby even a chance at life, I would have to spend the rest of mine in a factory.

I knew I should say no. But I couldn’t.

“Okay. I’ll help you. But you have to understand that there are no guarantees. If the Church decides to prosecute”—and they would if Deacon Bennett saw her as an embarrassment to the town—”you could serve serious time.” Unpaid prison workers were the nation’s largest source of factory labor, producing everything from paper cups and clothing to car parts and traffic signals, in every plant that had survived the war. “And even if you don’t go to jail, you’ll have at least two convictions on your record.” One for fornication, one for conceiving a child without a license. “Those’ll keep you out of college.” Which was a real shame, because Melanie was smart. She had a head for numbers and a memory for facts and dates. “And they may still take the baby. But I’ll do the best I can.”

My sister threw her arms around me, sobbing her thanks onto my shoulder, where her tears and snot mixed with the rainwater already soaked into my shirt.

I held her for a moment, trying to squelch the sudden certainty that I’d just nominated us both for execution. Then I let her go, hyperaware of the clock ticking over the door. We’d been sequestered in the laundry room for ten minutes. It didn’t seem possible for so much to have changed in less than a quarter of an hour, but clocks don’t lie.

Melanie sniffled. “So … now what?”

“You go home.” That was the only part of the plan I had worked out so far. I waved one hand at the utility sink in the corner. “Wash your face, and don’t cry anymore or you’ll attract attention. Go out through the admin building so you won’t have to climb the fence, but do not get caught in here. Follow the tracks home so no one will see you on the street either. I’ll tell Anabelle you’re sick—that you ran out so you wouldn’t throw up on the floor—and see if she can buy us some time by scheduling a makeup physical. But they’re going to find out, Melanie.”

We’d just have to make sure they found out on our terms.

My sister and I parted ways in the hall, where I watched her sneak around a corner, and then I headed in the other direction, letting my wet shoes squeak on the tile floor in an attempt to cover the sound of hers. If I got caught, I could say I was looking for her. If she got caught …

She couldn’t get caught.

When I got to the quad again, the rain had almost stopped, but poor Matthew Mercer was still soaked, and this time he didn’t look up when I passed him or when a neat line of second graders filed past us both on the way to the worship center.

Back in the gym, I pulled Anabelle aside and told her that Melanie was sick, and that I’d told her to go home and rest. When I asked if she could schedule a makeup physical, she looked suspicious but promised to try.

I wanted to sneak out and follow my sister home, where I could consider our options without the distraction of teachers and classes and other students whispering—some outright asking—about Melanie’s breakdown. But if I snuck out, my absence would be just as obvious as my sister’s.

During third period, the front office sent a note for me to deliver to her after school. It was a formal notice for her to present herself for discipline first thing in the morning.

After school, I stuffed the discipline notice into my satchel along with my books and walked home the long way, which led me past the Grab-n-Go. I stood across the street for several minutes, watching through the window for Dale, the assistant manager, to take his afternoon break. That would leave Ruth at the register, and Ruth never looked up from her crossword puzzle long enough to notice that I’d paid for the gum on the counter but not the food in my satchel.

I hadn’t come for food this time, and that fact made me even more determined to avoid Dale.

When he disappeared into the back room, I jogged across the street and into the store, wishing for the millionth time that there was no bell to announce my presence. Ruth looked up, focused on me for half a second while I perused the selection of candy, then went back to her puzzle.

As usual, I hesitated in front of the locked display case of cola, where a single bottle had been gathering dust for most of the last year because no one in the neighborhood could afford it. Then I drifted silently toward the half aisle of toiletries and over-the-counter medications while the screen mounted at the front of the store played the news.

“The badly mutilated corpse of April Walden, the teen who went missing from Solace two days ago, was discovered in the badlands south of New Temperance yesterday, less than a month after her seventeenth birthday. Church officials believe she was killed by a degenerate.”

“No shit …,” I mumbled, wandering slowly down the aisle, listening for any mention of the degenerate killed fifty feet from where I stood.

“Still no word on why Walden left the safety of Solace’s walls, but one high-ranking Church official ventured to conjecture that she was, in fact, possessed before she ever left the town.”

After that, the reporter transitioned to the latest death toll from the front lines in Asia, where brave soldiers and elite teams of exorcists were steadfastly beating back the last of the Unclean in the name of the Unified Church. As they’d been doing all my life. The location sometimes changed as one area was pronounced cleared and troops moved to cleanse another region, but the battles themselves were always the same.

We always won, but it was never easy. Losses were inevitable. Sacrifices would be honored and remembered.

I’d taken three more steps toward a narrow white box on the top shelf when a familiar six-note melody signaled the switch to the local news, which played on the hour, every hour, to keep citizens informed about the happenings close to home. The happenings the Church wanted us to know about, anyway.

I’d sold our television almost two years before, when I realized I’d rather have a functioning microwave than hear the same pointless recitation of “news” over and over, night after night.