Zara - A Name Among The Stars
by
Mark Henwick
Your family’s been murdered, the estates illegally
confiscated, and they’ve turned it around so people think you’re the criminal.
The warrant for your arrest is a fiction, and you face a stone cold certainty
you’d never make it to the prison cell alive.
To get off the planet, you forge a new identity and
take the first job you might be qualified for.
You didn’t expect what happens next. To fall in love
with everything about your new role – everything – including a man who can’t
possibly respond. And then to find that the same conspiracy that destroyed your
family is intent on destroying his as well, using you as a weakness in his
defences.
Run away? Stay and fight, knowing that even victory
will leave you alone again?
Read the first two episodes for FREE!
You are nothing without me.
Nothing! It will serve you best to remember that.
My grandfather shouting, looming over me. Terrifying
man, utterly terrifying. Strong and confident adults were afraid of him, let
alone a fifteen-year-old slip of a girl as I was at the time. Those wild
eyebrows over the cold, piercing eyes. That cruel mouth, and the voice that
issued from it; born to command. The way he carried tension in his body, as if
it could break out into violence at any second.
…remember that.
I remember. He’d spoken those words standing in front
of the panoramic window in his study.
That window looked over the formal manor gardens, past
the ornamental lake and down into the stretching crop fields below. There were
misty woods in the far distance. No inch of ground that he saw from that window
was not under his ownership. The manor itself bore his Name.
You are nothing…
Quivering in fear, I had stubbornly refused to believe
it then.
The arrogance of untried youth. I’d put a lot of faith
in the weight of history that lay on the manor and estates. Even later, as I
began to see the troubles that he’d long known, I refused to believe.
Nothing!
The weight
of history, I’d thought, though I’d not dared to say it aloud.
But history has no weight, and forms no shield.
History is simply a long time to collect enemies.
…without me.
And I am without him now. He is dead, murdered by
exactly the enemies he warned me about, not six years after that lecture in his
study.
The large counter at the front of the room clicks
loudly. Everyone’s eyes jerk up, even though we know the number displayed is
one more than the last number, and we all know what number we hold in our
sweaty hands.
The last woman who’d entered the office at the front
hadn’t come back. She’d gone out another way, gone through. They’d let her through.
As a distraction, I try to call her to mind. Young,
tall, thin, short blonde hair, serious look. Nervous, but then all of us are. Who
is she? A student perhaps, hoping to join some distant university off-world? A
course unavailable here?
I don’t know. All I really know about her is she has
been let through; that she’s getting off this planet.
Would I trade places with her? Without even knowing
who she is and where she’s going?
She didn’t look stupid; she wouldn’t trade with me,
even if it were possible, not for all my ‘privileges’ and ‘history’.
And neither would I trade with her.
Fool! Arrogant imbecile! Your
pride will slow you, and then the hounds will drag you down into the dirt where
you will die. I imagine my
grandfather’s anger at my refusal to trade places with the student, spitting
out the kind of hunting metaphor he always used.
In a strange way, it is comforting to imagine him
still here, still angry at me.
