LITMIR.BIZ

      THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

      On the morning of her twelfth birthday, Legacy Petrin woke from a dream about playing tennis with a winged racket.

      She was smiling when she blinked awake. For a few moments, she let herself focus on the tawny lines of the stain on the ceiling. The webbed shape had been spreading for years, the result of water damage from a storm that had raged through the countryside before she could remember. Now the stain was almost comforting, like the unfolding map of a secret magical city.

      Only once her eyes reached the edge of her secret city did the uncomfortable thoughts start flooding her mind. She remembered how funding for the orphanage had been cut. She remembered the new white strands in her father’s close-cropped hair and how his hands had trembled when he lit the lamps after dinner last night.

      By the time Legacy sat up in bed, her worries had formed a knot in her throat. When she swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, the tumbled stones of the floor pressed their cold fists into her arches. Shivering, she reached under the bed and pulled out her racket.

      The wood frame was warped, and the old strings were fraying. The bark grip was now nearly black, imprinted with the shape of her palm. But Legacy loved that racket more than any object she’d ever possessed. Holding it, she felt like herself. A new sense of calm spread through her body.

      When she stood and crossed the room, carrying her racket and a balding tennis ball, the stones underfoot were no longer so cold. Trying not to make any noise, she passed the long row of beds where the littles were sleeping. She paused only to kiss Ink on the forehead.

      In sleep, Ink’s face was angelic: soft brown, dimpled, and surrounded by a halo of sun-kissed curls. With both of her little hands, she was clutching her beloved blanket.

      It was the same blanket she’d been fearfully gripping when, not even a year ago, Legacy found her abandoned on the stone steps of the orphanage.

      Back then, Ink had been too frightened to talk. She’d been too frightened to sleep. Now Ink was braver. Legacy had taught her to wear her blanket as a cape. And whenever she did, she became a new little girl: bossy and bold, capable of ordering the older littles to take parts they didn’t want in the elaborate plays she directed.

      Smiling to herself, Legacy moved on toward the door. She only paused again before the last bed, where Van—Legacy’s best friend, and the only kid at the orphanage who was her age—was still sleeping as well. His head was always hot when he slept: there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. His skin was the color of wet cycapress bark. The colossal book he’d been reading—Eleander’s Novica: A History, Scientific and Otherwise, of the Republic of Nova—was splayed over his skinny chest, and his mouth was open, a silver thread of drool trailing out of the corner and down his chin. He’d forgotten to take off his glasses. They rested crookedly over the bridge of his nose.

      Legacy smiled. While he was still sleeping, at least, his face was peaceful. He hadn’t yet picked up his daily delivery of the Nova Times. His eyes hadn’t yet darkened in indignation, and he hadn’t yet begun to rant about the historical reasons for poverty in the provinces or the lingering effects of the Great Fire, despite all of High Consul Silla’s reforms.

      For now, he was only occupied with his dreams. And that was how it should be, Legacy thought as she slipped down the back stairs and out through the kitchen.

      She sat down on the stone steps that led to the garden and laced up her sneakers. Outside, it was still dark. Surrounded on one side by dusky olive trees of the agricultural valley, and on the other side by the slope leading up to the Forest of Cora, the garden seemed to sit in a big bowl of silence. Only occasionally was that silence broken by a faint boom from deep in the mines, somewhere beyond the agricultural district, Agricio. The vibrations spread through the earth and crept up through Legacy’s sneakers, stirring memories of the articles Van liked to read over breakfast, about dangerous mining conditions and pollution in the provinces.

      For a moment, the knot formed again in Legacy’s throat. But as soon as she was hitting the ball against the stone wall of the garden, the last of her worries slipped away. She was alone. Not even the birds were awake. There were no chores to be done, no little faces to wash, no small socks to wrestle onto wriggling feet. For now, all Legacy had to do was play tennis.

      She started with ground strokes. The morning was cool, but while she moved, her body grew warmer. The only steady sound was the plonk of the tennis ball bouncing on stone and the ping of the ball striking her strings. In the darkness, Legacy could barely make out the ball as it bounced off the rough stones of the wall, spewing off in unpredictable trajectories, as though she were playing an extraordinarily skillful opponent. Sometimes, the ball got lost in shadow, and she had to search for it in the weeds choking the garden or in the roots of the cycapress trees.

      But once she’d settled into her rhythm, her eyes began to adjust. The pale light of the moon began to seem brighter. Legacy found that she could make out every crack and divot in the rough stone of the wall. She could anticipate the ball’s angle. She moved into her shots, taking them faster and faster, swinging hard over the top of the ball so that the sound it made when it struck her strings was cleaner.

      Then she began to aim for the same stone in the wall. Then she forced herself to aim for the same divot in the same stone. Time and time again, she hit her mark. She poured her whole weight into each shot. Certainty spread through every muscle in her body.

      When she finished that drill, she moved up to the wall, practicing volleys. Between shots, she felt a smile creeping over her face. She was so lucky, she thought. Even if they were down a goat since the day before yesterday, when the new kid wandered into the forest. Even if now they barely had enough milk for the littles. Even if she’d been hungry for days.

      Even so, she had her racket. She had the wall to play against in the mornings.

      Maybe she wasn’t as good as Gia, the top tennis player in Nova, who attacked her ground strokes with a long, honey-blond braid swinging behind her and those thick stripes of black paint under her eyes. In Van’s copy of the Nova Times, Legacy had read all the stories about how Gia’s grana was growing stronger every day. About how she could make the sky turn dark over her opponents, how she could cause the shadows to lengthen so that it was difficult for her opponents to keep the ball.

      But that didn’t matter to Legacy now. All that mattered was the feel of the ball striking her strings, and the certainty in her own body.

      Or at least that’s what she was thinking when the sound of something stumbling around in the garden startled her and caused her to lose track of the ball.

      “How are you doing that?” Van called out through the darkness.

      Legacy breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, she’d allowed herself to imagine one of those monsters from the Cora stories. A giant crackle, maybe. Or a lural with ice-blue eyes and sickle-shaped fangs.

      “Seriously, bud,” Van was saying. He must have finished taking care of the goats. Now he was moving toward her, feeling his way through the darkness, until he tripped over a root, caught himself, ran a hand over his hair, then propped himself casually against the trunk of a cycapress tree.

      Legacy

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