“Can’t wait,” said Daphne, and she took Zada’s hand.
Zada turned to look at her.You came back for me, she thought.And I would do the same for you in a heartbeat.
She realized then there was no reason not to kiss her. The nuns were occupied and they wouldn’t mind. All of the people ready to ruin Zada’s life because of who she wanted to kiss—they were gone. Zada and Daphne were free.
When Zada reached for Daphne, no music played. There was no sense of fate inextricably tying them together, and no guarantee that they would find perfect bliss with each other forever. But with every fiber of her being, Zada wanted to try.
“Hey,” said Daphne quietly.
“Hey,” said Zada, bringing their lips together. They kissed and kissed, until the outside world sprang into view, and they caught their first glimpse of the new life waiting for them, away from every creature comfort they’d been told their whole lives that they needed.
The land was lush and beautiful, and it was almost impossibly green.
EpilogueAt the End, a New Beginning
The chickens are loose again,” said Carine.
Zada looked up from her triple cello. After three months at Beluga Settlement, it was still a joy to see her old friend Carine again. That didn’t mean she loved to be interrupted in the middle of her work: The Beluga residents, overjoyed to have another musician among their number, had tasked Zada with gathering and preserving as many old songs as she could, and this one was nearly good enough to record.
“How loose?” asked Zada, stalling.
Carine snorted. “It seems like whoever fed them this morning forgot to shut the gate. In fact, it seems like two whoevers in particular left the gate wide open because they were too busy making out in the goat pasture at ass o’clock in the morning. Truly mystifying.”
It wasn’t that mystifying. Daphne had looked so wonderful in the gentle early dawn light. Zada stood, cheeks flaming, and leaned her triple cello against the generator.
“Not to fret,” said Carine. “People make mistakes, it’s fine. But Daphne’s in the middle of story time so it’s your job to help me chase down some very silly little dinosaur descendants before they get themselves eaten by coyotes.”
“Right,” said Zada. So far, the hardest lesson to unlearn had been shame. She’d had no idea how entrenched within her it had been until moving to a place where children weren’t taught that they were perpetually teetering on the edge of some horrific unspoken consequence or catastrophic social ruin.
She couldn’t help noticing how often the other townspeople wound up telling her variations of “It’s okay” or “You don’t have to worry about this.” The very fact of needing to be reassured so often sometimes made her ashamed, to which Daphne would say, “You can’t feel shame about your shame. You’ll never climb out of that pit. Focus on something else instead. Let’s charge up the generator and listen to another Hope Springs Nocturnal song. Come on, we’ll dance it out.”
They’d danced a lot in the past three months. Sometimes Carine joined them, and sometimes she just sat in a chair and unstrapped her wooden leg, waving it in the air like a baton. Carine had lost her leg from the knee down somewhere between her Extrication and arriving at Beluga. She’d been Extricated too quickly to meet up with the sisters beforehand, that was all Zada knew about it. Carine never spoke about what had happened, only about the fierce joy she’d felt when Tobias the carpenter had shyly offered her a custom-made prosthetic.
The music they danced to varied. Sometimes Zada played old hits with the other handful of musicians in the settlement. Sometimes Zada, Daphne, and Carine sang melodies from their school days. Sometimes it was grotto rock. Zada would always treasure the songs she and Daphne had heard on that fateful night, but lately, a new track was playing on a loop in Zada’s head, a reworking of a much older tune, with newwords that she repeated to herself as needed: “You count for more / than they ever swore / down at the core / for you have worth / more than your work / here on this earth . . .”
“The sisters are coming by after lunch,” Carine announced as they herded the chickens away from the goat pasture.
“More letters?” Zada guessed hopefully.
“And those apricot cakes they love to make,” Carine said.
The latest batch of correspondence had been promising. Flora’s systems job had her tracking all of the unauthorized changes made to the Core, and she was secretly working on a formal proposal to have it shut down—with the cracks in the system on full display, it became harder every day for those in charge to pretend that dictatorship by algorithm was a good idea. It was unlikely that the proposal would be adopted, but it was a start, as was the firing of Mozelle Drogace. Undoing the legacy of the billionaires who had turned New Ionia into the monstrosity that it was would be difficult and slow work.
Buford and Legislator Bassey were reintroducing her bill to allow non-Heartsong couples to marry. He claimed Flora’s husband, Aiden, had somehow been a big help with it, although reading between the lines, it seemed like Buford and Aiden simply had feelings for each other.
Augusta now worked closely with the nuns, who were teaching her how to operate and maintain a printing press. She’d printed quite a few secret pamphlets to help elect a legislator who was running against Chancellor Fallow, and to expose the truth about Counseling.
Aubrey had kept in touch as well. Trading music with them was fascinating, although slipping them new albums still carried a certain degree of risk for everyone in Aubrey’s circle. Theunderground was, if anything, busier than before.
But there was no word from Zada’s parents, or Carine’s parents, either. No word, of course, from Daphne’s grandfather. Sometimes Zada woke up humming one of her father’s old favorite songs. She still wasn’t used to the way her stomach tightened when she remembered how far away he was, or what it was like to look her mother in the eye as she was fleeing New Ionia.
Buford’s next legislative effort was an attempt to loosen travel restrictions between New Ionia and the world outside, and some part of Zada still hoped this would make a difference. Nothing would make a difference for Daphne, who was essentially left without a family. She kept insisting it didn’t bother her, but Zada noticed the longing in Daphne’s eyes whenever she saw a parent from Beluga hug their child.
Luckily, they could stay busy. Between their Beluga jobs—Zada had her music archives to manage, and Daphne worked at a library made up entirely of paper books—and an hour of farm chores each day, they were also taking classes at night, on any subject they could. Carine herself taught Intro to Practical Biology to whoever was interested, and seeing her in her element helped to soothe the ache of missing their other friends. Maybe Flora and Augusta and Aubrey could make it out to visit someday.
Carine and Zada were chasing the last of the stragglers back into the chicken coop when Zada spotted a dot on the horizon.
“What’s that?” Zada asked. “It’s not stirring up the ground enough to be a ship.”
