Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (45 page)

She leans forward, tilting her face up, and I give in and let my lips find hers rather than search for words. This much, at least, is true. This warmth, this need—whatever else has come and gone between us, and whatever else may come, this moment is true.

It would be such a leap, and in the end, neither of us is very good at remembering how to trust. At least alone, she with her plan and I with mine, there’s a chance one of us might be right.

So instead of making a new plan, instead of taking our leap, we ease down into the blankets, my heart hurting every moment, to say our good-byes in the only way we both
can
trust. Without any words at all.

We feel the loss of our kin on the gray world as keenly as we felt the loss of the first of our kind to die. We try to understand death, to understand how a thing can cease to be. Learning about the uniqueness of these creatures only deepens our confusion, for how can something so rare and so precious exist one moment and vanish the next?

We have only one of our kind left in their world, the one we cannot see. But because of the boy who lives in the hypernet pathways, we know the final prison is somewhere on the world at the heart of the galaxy. We must bring the six to this place, to find our last emissary and send it home so we can learn, finally, whether we can coexist with these strange, brief creatures who live and die without letting uncertainty destroy them.

The others, their paths all lead to this spot—all but the girl with the dimpled smile. We must bring her there somehow, twist her thread closer to the rest.

We learn that the boy wrapped in wires and data is searching for someone he believes can lead him to the blue-eyed man. We will nudge him onto the girl’s trail instead…and he will drive her here to us.

THE DARKNESS AS I CREEP
with Jubilee and Flynn from the abandoned restaurant is absolute, and I’m forced to move with agonizing slowness. Unwilling to risk drawing attention with flashlights, we’re picking out each step by feel, navigating the debris-littered streets of the undercity based on my memory alone. What I wouldn’t give for Gideon’s knowledge of this place—I was never truly at home here, but he knows these streets like the back of his hand.

I left him while he was still asleep, making my way back to the others and praying they wouldn’t notice how long I’d been gone. As I lay there through the rest of the night, wishing for sleep that never came, my head was still ringing with the things we said to one another, and the things we didn’t. With images of black-eyed husks, and planets plunged into isolation. Of a whisper twisted and tortured until it became a weapon—of the moment I realized the same thing had happened to me. Even now, I can’t stop shivering, and it’s not from the bone-deep chill settling into the streets at the bottom of Corinth.

Jubilee’s hand on my arm signals a halt, and I jerk my thoughts back to the present. It’s still a few hours until dawn, and the electrical grid has yet to be restored after the
Daedalus
crash. I’ve been figuring out where we are based on landmarks I could touch, and gut intuition when that failed, but now…even Jubilee and Flynn, strangers to this part of Corinth, recognize the thing looming out of the darkness.

A maintenance shaft.

The climb leaves me breathless and shaking, but I’m still on my feet when we emerge into the apocalyptic landscape of the upper city. I’ve spent so much of the past few days afraid that I’m not sure my body processes fear the same way anymore.

The light pollution from other sectors of Corinth paints the skies a dark, ruddy orange, and I’m able to pick out the buildings much more easily—or where the buildings had been. Nothing looks right—where there ought to be skyscrapers I see only empty space, and where there should be the broad, green expanse of a park is a massive, hulking structure I’ve never seen. For a moment, I’m not sure I led us the right way, until I see the expanse of the LaRoux Industries courtyard below us, the color of its bright green grass leached away by the gloom.

We’re here. And that structure is no building at all.

The
Daedalus
wreck squats on the landscape like a vast, hulking beast. Its metal skin has been peeled back in long, jagged gashes, exposing wires and spilling conduits like viscera onto the ground. Twisted metal supports two meters thick have been torn free like splinters of bone, stretching toward the sky. Smoke still rises here and there, as though the creature isn’t fully dead yet, as though it’s still breathing its last, labored gasps that steam in the predawn air. It’s half-sunk into the ground, as if the concrete and steel supports below gave it no more resistance than water would—like at any moment it might rise up again, out of the depths.

It’s impossible to connect this dark, monstrous leviathan full of jagged metal and burnt chemicals with the glittering ballroom my memory conjures up when I think of the word
Daedalus.
Everything that happened there—coming face-to-face with LaRoux, discovering who Gideon was, the missing rift, seeing Flynn again, shooting Lilac LaRoux—it all feels like it happened to someone else, a lifetime ago. And the idea that any of us, that anyone at all, was ever inside this thing, the carcass of the great orbital ship, seems insane.

The idea that people are inside it still, crushed on impact or choked to death by the vacuum of space rushing inside the great rents down the ship’s side…it’s unthinkable.

We stand there in the shadow of the maintenance elevator, shrinking back against it as we stare at the immense thing sprawled before us. We’ve emerged at a level that once must have been a couple of floors above the courtyard, rubble stretching down from us in a steep slope. Even fearless Jubilee makes no move to descend, and when I glance back at my companions, I can see two sets of wide, glittering eyes scanning the wreck.

It’s with monumental effort that I swallow, trying to clear my dry throat and break the silence that has stretched the past hour as we traveled underground to reach this place unseen. “We should keep moving.”

I study the ground between us and the
Daedalus
, trying to pick out the smoothest course over the ruined terrain. The ground swims for a moment, moving before my eyes, and I try to blink away the tiredness, squeezing them shut. When I open them, it’s still moving, because it’s not the ground at all.

There are husks everywhere. Like insects pouring from a nest, they clamber over the broken landscape, thick between us and the gashes in the ship’s side that will let us inside the
Daedalus
. My knees nearly give as a wave of nausea pushes its way up my throat—if I thought fear was losing its hold on me, I was wrong.

My mind jumps to the shield Gideon built, tucked inside Flynn’s vest. It might protect us from becoming one of them, but it won’t protect us from being ripped apart. Not once they see us. Did Gideon and Tarver emerge from beneath the ground in the hours since I left him, to find this same sight before them?

“How the hell are we going to do this?” Jubilee murmurs, echoing my thoughts.

“We need a diversion.” Flynn’s voice is heavy, as exhausted and heartsick as I feel, at the sight of this impossible task. “I could—”

“No.” Her voice is a slamming door, cutting off the idea before it’s born.

But the truth is, neither she nor I has a better idea, or
any
other idea. We’ll be swarmed before we make it a quarter of the way to the wreck.

I watch, my throat dry, heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my temples, as a fresh wave of husks crest the top of a broken building to our left, starting the climb down the other side into the newly created valley below. They’re led by a blond woman, hair caught back in a ponytail, balancing herself with one hand as she grasps something black and rectangular in the other.

Then I look again. She’s not moving properly. Or rather, she
is
moving properly, not in the loose-limbed shuffle of the husks. She’s scrambling down, and others are cresting the hill behind her, sliding down through the debris on her tail.

Oh my God.

Recognition hits me in the gut, familiarity sliding into focus in one breathtaking instant.

It’s Mae.

Gideon’s friend is at the head of the group, and as I make a strangled, wordless sound, batting one hand against Jubilee to draw her attention, Mae lifts her hand and fires a Taser at the nearest husk. It drops like a stone.

“Who the hell is that?” Jubilee whispers, going perfectly still.

But before I can answer, a new group crests the ridge, and Flynn’s gasping. “Sanjana’s here!”

The scientist’s dead cybernetic hand is bound across her chest in a tight sling, and she’s using her good hand to fire her Taser. All around her are bedraggled figures in LaRoux Industries uniforms, merging with Mae’s crowd—they’re forcing back the husks, dropping them one by one.

“Damn, Flynn, that’s Mori.” Jubilee’s animated now, and the same energy—the same hope—is surging through me. From the other side of the valley come Mori and at least twenty-five of her black-clad ex-soldiers, scrambling over the ruins to take on the husks. It’s like the first ray of light shining into a darkened prison cell—the hope I thought was gone infuses me, straightening my back and lifting my head as Mori drops a black-eyed husk in the remnants of a business suit. Taser at the ready once more, she lifts her head to scan the remains of LaRoux Headquarters, eyes on the horizon.

“She’s looking for us.” The words burst out in the instant I realize it, and I’m scrambling forward. “They know we’re here—they’re clearing us a path. Let’s go.”

We plunge forward together, debris giving way under our feet as we half run, half fall toward the rapidly clearing courtyard below. Mori bellows a command in a voice worthy of a battleground, and the soldiers surge toward us. Up close I can see some hold palm pads in one hand, some have them strapped to their belts, and others have the square shape of them pressing through their clothes—Sanjana’s taught them how to rig shields. Enough to keep their minds safe, as long as their batteries last.

“We’ll hold them as long as we can, Captain,” Mori calls as we hit level ground.

“How the hell did you get here?” Jubilee swallows up the distance between her and her former corporal in a few long strides.

“Dr. Rao told us where you were headed when we picked her up,” Mori replies, turning to take in the fight underway further up the courtyard. She stands at the ready, Gleidel raised, and lifts her voice to shout over the laser shrieks of the guns, the guttural buzzing of the Tasers. The husks are moving more quickly now, perhaps as Lilac’s whisper turns its attention to the source of the disturbance. “Rao’s got a bunch of LRI’s people with her—most of them are pretty damn horrified to learn what their boss has been up to.” Mori pauses, catching her breath. “And the blonde up there was watching networks, trying to get a handle on where the Knave ended up. She found us, once she found him. She’s got a bunch of hackers I don’t think ever saw daylight before, and the Corinth Against Tyranny conspiracy crowd, and those guys are
pissed.
” Mori shakes her head, but she’s grinning—despite the wreckage around us, some part of her is enjoying this. “Guess they finally found somebody who really
is
out to get them.”

But as Jubilee’s opening her mouth to reply, a new wave of husks appear to our right and to our left, shuffling into view with a grim determination, yanking us back to reality. There must be hundreds of them. The brief hope that had taken root in my chest flickers, then dies. There’s no way Mori and her crew can hold this back.

“Go, they’re in there,” Mori barks. “We’ll buy you as much time as we can. Good hunting.”

Jubilee grasps for her hand, clasping it in both of hers for an instant before Mori lets go and turns back to the fight.

From a distance, our entry point into the
Daedalus
looks like a crack only barely wide enough for someone to slip through, but the scale of this thing defies understanding—the gash in its side is wide enough for us to run through without needing to duck. We have to climb past several layers crushed into unrecognizability before we find an area clear enough to move through, as the sounds of the battle fade behind us. Then it’s quiet, and we’re in our own, silent world once more.

The gash opens up onto a maintenance deck, sparsely furnished. The metal grid of the floor is tilted at a steep angle, forcing us to brace our feet in the corners and cling to the window frames lining the wall as we inch our way inside.

The ship is so vast that under normal circumstances, we’d have no hope of finding Lilac and the rift inside it—but even the husks wouldn’t have been able to move the massive rift far inside, over this kind of terrain. They have to be close.

My nose, half-numb from the stench of burning chemicals, pricks as we locate a staircase leading down further into the wreck and a new odor assaults me. I choke, reeling back a step and running into Flynn, who grunts and grabs onto a railing to keep from slipping.

“What is that?” I mutter, lifting the edge of my T-shirt to cover my nose.