But she would never say any of that out loud.
Instead she mimicked Leera’s prayer symbol, and held her own hand to the two stars.
An older woman walked toward them, across the scuffed place in the ground where everyone walked. Her breasts shook with each step, even wrapped tightly in her tunic dress. Leera quickly grasped Agapanthus’s wrist. She unfolded it from the prayer symbol and dropped it to her waist.
“You’re getting too old to be copying me, especially in prayer. Don’t forget where you’re from,” Leera whispered. “Don’t forget that these are not your Gods.”
“Then why do I have to do what they say?”
Leera’s wiry lips came together. As the old woman passed—her wide eyes unnaturally pink from vision-enhancement-lens surgery—the two women made eye contact and nodded. Agapanthus blinked at the rocky, red-brown soil.
When the old woman was behind them, Leera said, “I don’t expect you to understand. You’re not Deeyan.”
Nothing more was said during the walk home. Agapanthus ignored the stark, folded cliffs, beaming red against the darkness of the Waters. Usually she loved to take them in, and the heaviness of the sky, and the warm, dry wind as it caught her blonde hair by the roots; sneaking, sluggish, full; catapulting her long hair outward in all directions. But, for now, in the windy silence, she took big steps to keep up with Leera.
Agapanthus’s nose constricted with effort. She opened her mouth so she could breathe more easily. Even on short walks, her thighs burned along the insides, so much so that she imagined hydrothermal vents were magically popping out of the ground just to burn her. She had only seen a vent once, during the last Festival of the Underworld. It was on one of the other islands, just a pool of black water. The distant steam rising from it.
“This is what keeps us alive,”The guard standing next to the vent had said.
He bent down close to her. She remembered how he smelled like sweat, and, the vent, like dust.
The lights were on in the men’s side of the house. The women’s windows were dark, as black as the stone that framed the windows, and so were those of the children’s hall and the meeting hall connecting the two wings.
“Looks like we’re the first ones back,” Leera said. The door slid open as it recognized her body signature.
The white orbs high on the ceiling lit up. Leera and Agapanthus stepped inside. It felt, as always, surprisingly cold inside the thick walls. Geometric carvings patterned the crack between ceiling and floor. Leera swept into the next room, but Agapanthus stood in the front hall a moment. She tilted her neck to look at the recessed mural of the Waters, right above her head, ornately carved into the wall directly facing the door; each stroke was a tiny etch, the work of the ancestors who had first inhabited the house. The picture of small waves was flat and gray, but realistic in its illusion of movement. Agapanthus didn’t like the mural. She didn’t know why, but it wasn’t beautiful to her. It always looked dusty, even though it wasn’t, and that made her want to touch it and scrape her fingers against it to wipe away the powdery sheen. She wasn’t allowed to, though. Oh, no, of course not. It was too old—too precious—to soil with the hand-oils of an alien, or even a Deeyan— none of the women had ever touched it. Not even Grandmother Surla, and she was the oldest of all of them.
Agapanthus didn’t feel like following Leera around until the other women came home, when they would meet with the men to walk to the cafeteria. She was the only child living in the house, so she escaped to the children’s hall to be alone.
The floor was lined with animal skin. Agapanthus kneeled, and its softness embraced her bare knees. She dug out her storyteller from her chest in the corner. A deep, woman’s voice rose from the hand-held machine. Agapanthus stretched back on her bed of leathery-soft skins. It was the story of how the Gods brought the Deeyans to Deeyae. She listened to it often enough that she had memorized certain parts.
“The Water Planet was the first home of the Deeyans,” the recording and Agapanthus said in tandem. “There, they ate plants, and they climbed trees. They lived off the sun, not the hydrothermal vents.”
That was all Agapanthus knew about her home planet. There were more audiobooks with information about it; after all, most scientists exclusively studied the Water Planet and its inhabitants, at the request of the Gods. But neither Leera nor Pittick would buy them for her. They told her she was too young for that sort of thing, and the Gods may not like it. Besides, she would go back someday, and then all of her questions would be answered.
Her eyes began to close. The weight of the data-reading with the scientist came over her. She felt it in her limbs; every step, every turn, every motion she had made throughout the day pulled her down further into her bed.
When she sat up again, the storyteller had shut off automatically. She’d missed the end, where the Gods drop the first Deeyans on their new planet and the First Age begins. Agapanthus swallowed hard. Using all the strength in her thin arms, she pushed herself up. She needed to stay awake, or else she would miss the meal. She plodded toward the men’s wing through the other door in the hall.
There stood Pittick. As he smiled, his forehead wrinkled all the way up to his scalp, a red swath behind a veil of black hair.
“We’re leaving soon, Aga,” he said, tapping her on the head. “But first, come look at this.”
She followed her foster-father to the study room. Comfortable piles of blankets dotted the marbled floors. Aunt Imari’s husband, Uncle Sonlo, sat on one of them with his naked legs crossed. Both men carried the faint scent of the water creatures which they harvested. They managed the fisheries together.
“Hey, how did the visit go?” Uncle Sonlo asked her. He smiled, and his white teeth seemed to glow against his dark lips.
“Fine,” Agapanthus said.
“I can’t believe they still make all of you exchangers go there every year,” Uncle Sonlo said. “They must be busy, with all those test subjects. You’d think they would cut back a little. Don’t they have enough data yet?”
“They’ll never have enough data, Sonlo,” Pittick mumbled. He picked up a thick, crunchy-looking sphere. “Ah, here it is.” He squinted at her, smiling.
“What is it?”
“Take it.”
She pinched it lightly from his hand. It was bumpy, unmoving; like a strange, orange stone.
“It used to be a karap shell,” Pittick said. “I found it just underneath the boat, floating in a shallow area of the Waters. It’s not even molting season.”
“Good thing it’s not, or you’d be in trouble,” Uncle Sonlo said loudly.
“If it was molting season I wouldn’t have taken it.”
Pittick knelt in front of Agapanthus. Of everyone’s eyes, his were the yellowest, she thought. They were nothing like the orange scientist’s.
“This is very valuable. It’s breakable, and it’s rare, and it’s beautiful, too. If you were to buy one of these, it would cost a lot of money, more money than anyone has, except maybe the Contact.” He took the shell back from her and shook it in front of her nose. Agapanthus shuffled backward slightly.
Pittick continued, nodding as he spoke. “You have to get lucky and find one. And I did. And I want you to have it.”
Agapanthus nodded, too, mimicking the short pulses of his neck.
“But you have to promise me you’re not going