The band played a cheerful march while we greeted the guests. Nights like tonight were the reason the gentry relied so heavily on nuclear power. The powerful charges created enough energy for every bright light in every room and for the massive kitchen with its walk-in freezers and rows of stoves and ovens. Even when the winds turned bitter and icy, our houses stayed snug and warm. Solar power would never be able to sustain a proper winter season in a gentry house, nor would wind power. Only those little nuclear boxes could make an estate like Landry Park light up with glamour and music three to four times a week.
Strange to think that two or three hundred years ago, people still burned coal and gas for electricity, and that it took something as cataclysmic as the Eastern invasion and the ensuing treaty barring carbon emissions and oil trading to spark the new technology.
Power generation quickly became the delineator of class. Wind power, with its industrial nature, took root among the poor, with homemade turbines decorating every tiny house, factory, and small farm. The middle class favored solar power because it was easy to maintain, reliable, and more discreet than the noisy turbines. The nuclear charge—portable and immensely powerful—became the favorite of the rich, but the raw materials needed to produce it was rare, and by ten or fifteen years after the Last War, the gentry alone could afford to purchase the charges.
Mother and Father greeted the guests, and I was forced to stand in a dress I didn’t want to wear, with flyaway hair and stray locks that blew in the chilly breeze coming from the open doors.
Addison and Cara glided into the open doors, arms linked like girlfriends walking around a ballroom, the candlelight glinting off their blond hair. They were the type of mother and daughter who were routinely mistaken for sisters. Only Cara’s untamed nature set her apart; the feral streak that made her ride horses at a breakneck pace and dive naked into rivers and challenge the boys to fights, which she always won.
As they got closer, I could see that Addison’s other hand gripped Cara tightly around the elbow, as if she was forcing her ahead. I thought I could just barely detect traces of greenish-purple along Cara’s throat under heavy layers of makeup, and a slight limp hampered her normally confident gait.
Addison wouldn’t want to miss a chance to have Cara meet David though, no matter how battered or in need of rest Cara might be. Jamie had once remarked that Addison lived through her daughter, and seeing Addison force her along like an injured horse, I couldn’t help but agree. The Westoffs hardly needed the money from a marriage to the Danas, but that wouldn’t make Addison’s pursuit of David for Cara any less vicious. Especially when she was competing against my mother.
I felt a moment of intense kinship with Cara. We would both inherit fortunes, but those fortunes deprived of us of any agency we might have wanted in our lives, our loves, or our marriages. And I couldn’t imagine being paraded in front of a potential suitor after what she had been through this week.
Despite the hidden bruises and scratches, however, Cara looked stunning, and no less haughty or regal than usual. She wore a very tight gold dress that showed off her back and arms, toned and sun-kissed, as if she existed in a world without winter
“What are you staring at?” she asked, noticing my gaze.
“Nothing.” I looked away.
Addison gave my mother a warm hug and my father a kiss on the cheek that left a scarlet stain.
“Oh, Madeline!” Addison cooed. “I barely saw you there, you little imp!”
Ever since Cara and I were children, Addison had never missed a chance to point out how scrawny and short I was compared to her buxom daughter, as if we were puppies in a litter of hunting hounds. I suddenly recalled one of Jacob Landry’s speeches about breeding healthy, intelligent children, children who themselves could bear more children, and thus the upper class would be able to stem the tide of the inferior and sickly children issuing from the poor. I wonder how he would feel now, knowing that almost all of the Landrys had been plagued with fevers and debilitating illnesses in their adolescence. That almost all of us had been born thin and pale, red-haired and flinty-eyed.
Addison came over to me and fingered the strap of my dress. “This gown is darling on you. It really shows off your…” she looked from my scant chest to my face “ . . . eyes.”
The dress was gray. This could be true.
“And your hair,” she continued. “How natural of you to leave it down.”
Her deconstruction of my flaws was interrupted by the guest of honor, Christine Dana, her red dress rustling as she walked in, looking like a fairy-tale queen. All that was missing was the crown. The men in the room turned, and even the footmen glanced away from the floor, their eyes tracing her slim waist and long neck. This was the first time I’d seen her, and I had to admit she was striking. Her face was all angles, with wide eyes, and hair black as onyx.
“Christine!” Addison simpered. “How wonderful to see you! I know Olivia and Alexander have missed you so much.”
I was surprised Addison couldn’t feel my mother’s glare pierce through her skin.
“Where is David?” Cara asked casually.
Christine waved a hand. “On his way. He wanted to drive himself and he left a little after me. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”
Father checked his watch. “Let’s go inside and begin. No point in keeping everybody hungry over a teenage boy.”
“Right as always, Alexander,” Christine agreed. “Eighteen years, and you are still sharp as a knife.”
My father gave her a fleeting smile. Mother looked livid. She let the others go ahead into the ballroom, then seized my arm. She looked me up and down, as if looking for something else to be angry about. “Why didn’t you fix your hair?” she demanded.
“I—”
“Leave,” she interrupted. “Go fix your hair. If you hurry, you could be back before David even arrives.”
“I—”
“Go,” she seethed, and off I went.
I never liked having Mother angry with me, but I was more than happy to leave the stuffy dinner before it began. My remarks as a younger girl had cost my father more than one business deal, and so he no longer allowed me to sit near his colleagues or potential business partners. “You think you’re so clever,” he’d said, after one particularly awkward meal. “But everything you say has a price. When the man next to you asks if you enjoy the orchards and you tell him that the harvest has been poor for three years running, or when you mention that half our livestock died from disease—these things all have a cost.”
“I’m only telling the truth,” I had protested. “You always say that the gentry are supposed to honest and dignified no matter what.”
“There are matters more important than the truth. You do not want to get a reputation for being difficult, do you?”
“I don’t care if people think I’m difficult.”
“You will if it means you can’t marry.”
“But I don’t want to marry,” I’d objected. “I want to go to the university. Other gentry heirs have—why can’t I?”
“Because they were not Landrys,” he’d said simply. “Landry Park must have an heir dedicated to its survival. If you had an older brother or sister, it would be different.”
That ever-wanted older sibling of mine. My whole life revolved around their absence.
I shook off these bad memories and went into my room to find Elinor, who was spreading a new bedspread across the bed. I saw a flash of silver thread—the Landry crest stitched into the silk.