The One-Star Husband

Chapter Two: What He Gave Away

Enzo Moretti had been a one-star for ten years, and in all that time, nobody in the Commissioner's house had ever asked him why.

Ten years ago, he had five. He was seventeen, top of his year, with a place waiting for him at the Founders' Academy, the school that turned out the city's judges and surgeons. His mother, Graziella, was a one-star seamstress who altered other people's clothes in a back room and never once complained about what the city gave her. Then, in a single week, the votes came. Thousands of them, from strangers, for no reason anyone could name. By Friday she was below one, and the notice said dawn. Six-year-old Lucia would cross the bridge with her.

The law allowed a child one gift in a lifetime. A son or daughter could give their rating to a parent and keep a single star for themselves. Almost nobody did it. Enzo had read the rule three times to be sure it was real.

He went to the Bureau in the small hours with Lucia asleep on his shoulder, because there was no one to leave her with. The night counter was a long room of hard chairs and humming lights. He laid her on a bench and wrapped her in his coat, and she was still shivering when the young Deputy Commissioner on duty slid the form across.

Benedict Abernethy read it twice. Even then he was sure of himself, with grey just starting at his temples. "Do you understand what this is? Five stars to one. You'll never get them back, son. One-stars don't climb."

"I understand."

"Then you're a fool. You're throwing your life away for a woman who couldn't hold on to a single star."

Enzo signed. Benedict stamped it with a small shake of his head, the way a man might watch someone drop a fortune into the river. The night judge who countersigned was a tired woman with reading glasses on a chain, and the name printed under her signature was Abena Quaye. Enzo asked her to please be quick, because his sister was cold, and she was.

His mother didn't thank him. She was waiting at the shop door in her coat, ready to walk, and when she saw the new number on her phone, she sat down on the step and cried. She cried the whole way home, quietly, as if he had lost something she could never give back.

He lost the Academy within the week. Benedict had been right about the rest. One-stars rarely climbed, because nobody ever bothered to rate them up, and the doors that had stood open for him closed one after another. He took work on the docks, hauling crates beside Teo Santoro, his oldest friend, who had grown up two streets over and never once asked if he regretted it.

Five years ago, at the end of a shift, an elderly woman in a Bureau records cardigan found him on the pier. She said her name was Dorcas Wolsey, and she pressed a small brass star into his palm, five points with one filed flat.

"I'm the Steward of the Lodestar," she said. "This belongs to you now."

He laughed at first. Then she explained, and he stopped. The city's founders had set a secret seat above the Bureau, older than any Commissioner, with the power to strike any vote and overrule any order. It had one law, known only to the holder and the Steward. The Lodestar had to stay a one-star and could never touch their own rating. The day that rating reached two, the seat passed to whoever the holder had named as successor.

"The last Lodestar named you," Dorcas said.

"Who was it?"

She never told him. He asked her every year, and every year she changed the subject.

A year after that, Benedict Abernethy was running for re-election while half the city muttered that the stars were rigged. He needed proof that the system was fair, and he decided to marry it. On his daughter's own channel, under studio lights, he gave Ottoline away to what he called the most respectable one-star in the Bureau's files. The city loved it. He won by a landslide.

Ottoline agreed because her father ordered it. She said her vows the way she read the evening headlines, clearly and without a wasted word, and since that night she had kept a polite, careful distance. She had never rated him. Not one star, not five. In four years, his wife had never decided what he was worth.

Enzo agreed because Dorcas asked him to. "The Critic has a client in the Commissioner's house," she had told him. "I need someone inside it that nobody will ever look at twice."

Nobody had.

That evening, Enzo was wiping down the car in the Abernethy garage when Benedict stopped in the doorway with his phone to his ear.

"File it tonight," the Commissioner said. "A Fairness Hearing. I want the girl reset."

Enzo kept the cloth moving. A Fairness Hearing was the Bureau's court for disputed evidence, and everyone in Asterholm knew what it could do. If a judge ruled Lucia's video forged, the law would reset her to one star for the lie. A one-star's word could not be heard against a five-star's, so the video would be worthless, Davey's death would become nobody's fault, and Lucia would be one bad afternoon from the bridge again.

Benedict hung up and went inside without looking at him.

It was past ten when Enzo reached the alterations shop in the Underbank. His mother sat at her machine under a single lamp, a pair of trousers feeding steadily through the needle. If she had seen the Starboard that afternoon, she didn't mention it. She asked if he'd eaten, put a plate in front of him and went back to her hem.

Lucia was at the kitchen table with her phone turned face up for the first time in two days. She kept glancing at the number, four point one, as if it might change its mind. When their mother's machine started up again, she leaned closer and lowered her voice.

"There's something I didn't post."

Enzo put his fork down.

"Davey wasn't the first," she said. "There were other boys before him. They got carried out of that pit and just stopped coming to school, and nobody asked where they went." She swallowed. "And Raff's holding another fight night. Tomorrow. Same place."

"After this? With the whole city watching?"

"That's why," Lucia said. "He wants everyone to see that he can."

Behind them, the sewing machine hummed on without a pause. Lucia looked at her brother, and for a moment she was six again, wrapped in his coat on a Bureau bench.

"Somebody else is going to die down there, Enzo. And this time, nobody will be filming."