Last Star Burning (Last Star Burning #1)
Caitlin Sangster
To Allen
PART I
CHAPTER 1
THEY SAY WAR IS NO dinner party. Not refined, graceful, courteous, or magnanimous. It’s complete devastation. Every foul human impulse distilled into quick bursts of chaos. And yet here I sit at a table, stones to mark my soldiers in front of me in pretty lines on a grid, the conversation perfectly quiet and polite. All I need is a snack.
“Yuan’s ax, Sevvy.” Tai-ge laughs as he flicks the edge of the weiqi board. “Is there a strategy buried under here somewhere? You don’t have anywhere else to play.”
“My game is too advanced for you to comprehend.” My stones are pitiful and lonely spots of white in a sea of Tai-ge’s black, a besieged army with no hope. Picking up one of the smooth pieces, I weigh each of the open spaces, attempting to keep dismay from leaking through my cheerful mask. “In one or two moves, I’ll have you right where I want you.” But Tai-ge is right. Most of my stones are dead.
Tai-ge twirls the gold ring on his middle finger, light catching the City seal stamped into the soft metal, then rubs the two raised white lines scarring the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “You’ve got as much chance to win as if you were fighting a gore with a broken bottle.”
“I don’t believe in gores. If gores were real, there wouldn’t be so many soldiers alive and well to spin stories about them.”
Tai-ge taps the board one last time. “You concede?”
I take a theatrical breath and let it out, bowing low over the table.
A little smile softens the angular lines of Tai-ge’s face as he shakes his head. Reserved gloating, as though smiling too widely would break something inside of him. “One more game? We probably don’t have time, but maybe if I walk you home . . . ?”
I nod and sit back in my chair as he resets the pieces, looking to the bay window behind him. The last streams of orange and pink fade into black over the smokestack skyline around us as I consider the view. The City makes a wheel shape cut into the side of our mountain, ringed entirely by a high outer wall. The three spokes of the wheel divide the City into thirds to keep the different parts to themselves, with a central market hub the only common point connecting them. Below Tai-ge’s house, I can just glimpse the chimney tops and factory lights above the wall that separates the industrial Third Quarter from the martial Second Quarter. On this side of the wall, peaked roofs as clean and orderly as the Seconds themselves rise up the side of the mountain. I can’t see the First Quarter from my vantage point here. Firsts reside higher up the mountain, towering above the other two quarters where they can keep an eye on the rest of us—that is, if they bother to take a break from their experiments and research to spare us a thought.
At least the Seconds and Thirds have their own quarters. I touch my collar, where my four metal stars are pinned. There isn’t a place for Fourths here.
The horizon beyond the outer wall seems unreal somehow, as if the mountaintops poking up through the clouds are just a painting, a backdrop the Firsts invented for us.
I shiver. I’ll take the fairy-tale painting. If Outside is distant and out of focus, I won’t have to watch the desperate survivors out there trying to kill each other.
Under the table, I continue digging a cluster of Tai-ge’s pencils point-first into the red candle I stole from the Hong family shrine downstairs. I hate seeing Tai-ge so smug from beating me, but it’s not like I can tell him I’ve been sabotaging his writing supplies, not to mention desecrating his ancestors’ shrine. But the next time he sits down with his Watch reports, he’ll know exactly why I was so distracted during our game of weiqi. He’ll swear over his red-smeared reports, but then I know he’ll laugh. And my friend needs more reasons to laugh.
Dark wood paneling makes the room seem small and dim in the waning light. Nothing has changed much in Tai-ge’s room since we were kids. Everything is so red. Down to his striped bedcover, the accents in the hardwood bookcase, and the portrait of our City’s founder, Yuan Zhiwei, matted in red on the wall. I suppose it’s typical in the Second Quarter to deck out everything in City colors. They’re proud to protect the City. Though I do wonder sometimes if sleeping in this room coats Tai-ge’s dreams in red paint.
Before the board is clear of stones, Tai-ge’s door pops open.
“Tai-ge, Fenghua just brought in . . .” Comrade Hong trails off as she notices me across the table from her son. “What are you doing up here?”
I jump to my feet, subtly dropping the pencils and pocketing the stolen candle so she won’t see it, keeping my eyes on my boots. The peeling leather toes are half-hidden by the City’s star-and-beaker seal cut into the deep red fibers of the carpet. I smile a little to make up for the humble bow, refusing to give in completely to the tight disapproval in Comrade Hong’s voice. “We were playing weiqi, Comrade.”
Tai-ge gestures to the empty board from his seat at the table. “Well, I was playing. I’m not quite sure what Sevvy was doing.”
Comrade Hong does not look amused.
General Hong and his wife may have graciously volunteered to reeducate me after my parents’ blunders—it was an honor for their family to be trusted with a subject as corrupted as I, and there are few families so true to Yuan Zhiwei’s vision that they’d even be allowed near me—but Comrade Hong’s eyes don’t seem to register that any improvement has taken place over the last eight years. Her hair is cropped short in the new City fashion, the utilitarian line only accentuating how beautiful she is. Tai-ge’s mother is shorter than I am, her heavy Watch uniform making her look as though she’s a child playing war. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows are raised in dismay, as though the neighbors might have glimpsed me sitting across from her perfect Second son with something other than reeducation materials in front of us. Not many of the high-ranking Seconds would permit a Fourth within a block of their homes up here on the Steppe, much less inside, playing an unsanctioned game of weiqi with their children.
“You were supposed to be back down in the Third Quarter over an hour ago, Jiang Sev. Just because the General is too busy for reeducation tonight does not mean you can sit up here wasting time.” Her eyes freeze on the pin hanging cockeyed at my collar, as if she can’t see me past those four red stars. “Sister Lei will be hearing about this. Now get out of my house.”
Tai-ge pulls himself up from the table, the lamplight glossing over his thick hair, trimmed so close to his scalp. He glances out the window where the lamps are starting to glow in the falling darkness. “Come on, Sevvy. I’ll walk you down.”
The little glow of warmth I feel at hearing my nickname on Tai-ge’s lips winks out when Comrade Hong snaps back, “No, Tai-ge, you stay here. And don’t call her that. It’s too informal.”
Tai-ge smiles at his mother as he guides me past her and out into the hallway. “That’s her name.” But when Comrade Hong’s expression blackens, he drops the smile and gives a respectful nod. “Sorry. Jiang Sev. I’m the one who told her to stay, so I’ll walk her back. The Watchman on the bridge at night is always crabby.”
“She knows the rules.” Comrade Hong follows us down the stairs and past the family shrine. Hongs long gone, somber-eyed in their portraits, watch us through the screen of smoke issuing from a garden of newly lit incense. The missing red candle makes the table look off balance, but Tai-ge’s mother is too busy arguing to notice. “Your father is never going to be able to teach Jiang Sev correct social theory or her place in it if she can’t even adhere to basic policy. . . .”