Starbreak

Начало книги

I’ve never kept a journal before.

Never thought about it. It’s not how my brain works, not really. I see colors, the ways that shadows mingle with the light. But words? I could take them or leave them, or so I always thought.

One of my ancestors kept a journal. All about how she arrived on the Asherah, how she came to live inside the ship’s dome. How she hated it there. She thought she was trapped inside the deepness of space. She could never forget it—how her freedoms had been taken from her, one by one, by the High Council.

Her journal was passed from hand to hand to hand among the women in my family. My grandmother gave it to my mother, and eventually it found its way to me. The leather cover shines from the oils of our fingers. The pages are falling out. But it’s an important reminder of where we’ve been before, and what we’ve lost.

I needed that. Without that book I never would have joined the rebellion on our ship. I never would have tried to escape either and taken off for the surface of Zehava when the riots broke out. I would have tried to force myself to be happy. I would have gone ahead and married Silvan Rafferty, a boy I didn’t love. All because it’s what normal girls did on our ship. They got married whether they loved their husbands or not. They didn’t think about how they were trapped. We were all prisoners. Powerless, voiceless. I understood that only because centuries ago someone decided to write it all down. She told me with her words, her pen.

Читать дальше →