Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (48 page)

I can feel Lilac’s eyes on me, the weight of her hatred nearly dropping me to my knees. There’s nothing there, no hint that the girl I met on the
Daedalus
is still in there. Then she turns and sees Gideon, half hidden behind the rift.

In a heartbeat, everything unspools frame by frame—Tarver diving for Lilac, desperate to give Gideon a chance with the virus—Jubilee grabbing for Flynn’s weapon and rolling to find cover—Lilac thrusting out a hand to shove Jubilee, and the fallen block of marble she’s hiding behind, against the far wall—Flynn giving a wordless scream and sprinting toward Jubilee, who lies motionless now…

Lilac turning toward Gideon. She roars her fury, tearing an impossible sound from her human lungs, lifting both hands as the ship around us starts to scream in duet, metal twisting and wrenching at the seams. A shudder runs the length of the floor, and the ground beneath Gideon bucks violently, sending him tumbling from his place by the rift.

He seems to hang in the air forever, and my heart with him. Then he’s crashing to the ground, the thumb drive flying from his hand. He scrambles on all fours, lunging after it—and I scream a warning as a piece of the roof shears away, tumbling down to crush the drive, grinding it into the floor. It grinds every last hope we had into the floor, and I’m reeling, the breath driven from my lungs.

A great chunk of the ceiling drops onto the broken chandelier where it lies on the floor, sending up a spray of glittering glass, and I dive for cover as the deadly shards arc through the air.

“Lilac,
please
!” Tarver’s shouting, fighting his way toward her as she turns for the rift, which is now pulsing brighter than ever, casting blue light over every inch of the wrecked ballroom. I can’t see Flynn and Jubilee anymore, or Monsieur LaRoux.

Lilac doesn’t even bother turning. She simply lifts one arm, and Tarver goes flying—he connects with the wall with a sickening smack, his gun tumbling from his hand. It ricochets off the heaving floor, skittering across to land at my feet. As he staggers upright, his gaze is fixed on me.

The gun is within reach. The virus might be gone, but there’s still a chance. All I have to do is stoop and pick it up. Aim it at Lilac’s heart. She’s facing the rift. I could move before she can turn.

This instant hangs suspended, the energy from the rift lifting the hairs on my skin, crackling against my face, filling my mouth with the taste of metal.

Gideon staggers to his feet, and our eyes lock. I told him he didn’t know me, so he couldn’t love me. Couldn’t trust me, so couldn’t love me.

But it was never about that. It was never about Gideon, or wanting to let him in, or believing he was the kind of person who could love what he found there.

It was always me. I’ve spent so long convincing others to trust me that I no longer trust myself. My own heart. My own instincts and faith.

My choice.

My muscles tense, ready to move. I meet Gideon’s eyes again, the warm hazel-green flashing with blue light.

This much I know: I love him.

This much I trust.

I’m not the thing LaRoux made me. I’m not the girl I was on the
Daedalus
anymore. I choose who I am, every day. And I’m choosing now to be
me
.

In this moment I don’t need to read Gideon’s mind to see into his heart, to share his thoughts—he loves
me.
All of me. The good, the bad, the struggle between the horrible impulses I can never share and the glimmers of hope for things I’m too frightened even to whisper—he sees all of me.

They’re trying to come through,
Lilac said, and in this instant—which stretches to an eternity—I know what to do. I know that what Gideon and I imagined in the arcade is true—they can see us, they know us. Lilac’s whisper said it herself:

You were meant to show us whether you were worth knowing.

The other whispers, in their universe on the other side of the rift, have been watching us. Judging us, testing us, setting us up like pieces on a board to see who we are. And if Gideon can know me, love me, trust me, and I can learn that lesson in return—if we and all our friends and allies can make choices and sacrifices that come from our hearts—then I’m ready for us to be judged.

I’ll let the whispers through. I’ll short-circuit the rift, just as Tarver and Lilac did once before. I’ll make my leap of faith—and trust in their choice.

It’s as Gideon holds out his hand that I realize he understands my intention—and that, in every way I could ever have imagined, he’s with me.

I leave the gun and everything it made me behind. I break into a run, dimly aware of Tarver’s voice shouting something; of Lilac’s outraged shriek as she fights him off; of the fact that she ought to be able to crush him with a thought and yet she’s struggling, pushing at him with her hands, screaming to be let go. Of the fact that I
must
be beyond the range of the shields now, and yet my mind’s my own. I stumble over a pile of debris and scramble, scraping my palms and knees and using the jolt of adrenaline pain brings to move that much faster. I throw myself forward and feel Gideon’s hand wrap around mine, the warmth of his touch more real than anything else.

I choose you.

Our fingers interlock, made for each other, like two halves of the same pendant—and together we leap into the rift.

The others, the children we were meant to watch and judge, swarm around me in a futile attempt to either kill Lilac or save her, but they mean nothing now. I have seen humanity. If my brethren have not yet learned how to make choices, then I will make the choice for us all. And those who are not killed when their link to our world is severed, I will seek out myself and destroy.

It is so easy, now, to see the choices these five souls will make. Some will choose to try to kill me—some will try to save me instead. Whichever they choose, they will fail.

But then I see two of them sprinting toward the rift itself, moving too quickly for me to stop. A choice I did not see—a decision I could not have predicted. I reach out to rip their minds away only to have something pull me back, a force coming from within me, a voice saying,

NO
.

LILAC
.

It comes like a light in the dark. Not a voice, not a thought, but the brush of something intangible, like a warm breeze…though there’s no air, no warmth. Only that sensation:
Lilac.

I cling to it, desperate for this one glimmer of something in a world of nothing, and it leads me onward through the emptiness until I feel another touch, and then another, and then suddenly I’m surrounded by others like me, overwhelmed by being a part of them again.

I’ve been here before.

Yes.

On the planet…when I was something else. Someone else.

Lilac LaRoux.

I remember. You…

We are the…
Their name for themselves comes not in words but in a rush of feeling—of a billion minds together, infinite thoughts, combining like every color in the universe to form a blinding white truth that, had I breath or voice to do so, would make me cry out.
We have brought you home.

Home?

When we gave you life, we told you it wasn’t time for you to join us. Not yet. But we have seen what we have done to you, and you may remain with us if you wish. Become one of us.

My whole self still aches and throbs with the force of what they are, and the longing to join them, to truly understand, makes it impossible to think.

But…there is someone I’m supposed to be. There was a surge that brought me here, memories coming in disjointed flashes. A pair of joined hands, two souls whose choice to sacrifice themselves opened the door to this world. The creature in my body trying to stop them, as I gathered the last of my strength to pull it back.
No…you will not hurt them.
The beings on the other side of the door reaching out to pull the tortured creature back into its world.

And there’s someone whose face is the only image my dazzled thoughts can summon, like afterimages from staring at the sun.

Tarver.

You are energy, you are of the light. He is humankind, one of billions, and unique. We cannot bring him.

I want to go back.

We have had a decision to make, ever since your people’s first ship pierced the stillness—what you call hyperspace. Whether to close the door between our worlds, or leave it open. You have flooded our world with images and words and ideas so powerful that, unchecked, they will destroy us. Pain and loneliness and hatred, and beautiful things too; love for family, for lovers, for friends. Faith. We have learned this from you. And the five who came to save you.

You’ve been watching us? All this time?

Time, for us, is not quite the same as it is for you. We see all the possibilities ahead. We had to follow those who would know pain and loss and rage, for it is not a fair test to observe those whose lives are free from sadness.

And it’s what…fate? That we all came together, here, to this spot?

Small nudges, here and there. Within the confines of your father’s cages there is little we can do. But tiny changes—ensuring two survivors of a deadly crash, or preventing an explosion from claiming a rebel’s life, or drawing a particular identity to a hacker’s attention—that we can do.

No. I refuse to believe that all of this was somehow predestined. That we’re just puppets performing some play for your amusement.

Not at all. We see the possibilities, Lilac. We know what
might
happen, not what
will
happen. And if there is anything we have learned from watching you, it is that mankind never stops surprising us. Your actions are your own. Your choices, good or bad, are yours. As are the choices of your companions.

And you’re basing this decision of yours, whether we’re cut off from hyperspace forever, on whether we’re good people?

We have no desire to destroy your kind. We know the one, alone, would have done so. But we seek only to preserve our own world’s existence. We would allow enough time for your worlds to prepare for the separation, to become self-sustaining, or else relocate their populations. We would then shore up the walls between our universes so that your engines, your signals, could no longer enter.

You said that you have a decision to make. Does that mean you haven’t decided yet?

We were waiting for one last emissary to return home.

You…you mean the entity that took me over. Used me to kill all those people, threaten the ones I love, threaten our entire way of life.

Yes.

My father tortured that creature—it’s horrible, what happened to it, but you can’t judge a whole species by the actions of one man. There are monsters among us, it’s true. But there are heroes too. There are people who fight men like him. Who will never stop fighting men like him.

Our choice remains ahead of us. Blow open this rift for good, allow our kind to explore your world and understand it, and there is no guarantee your human qualities would not eventually destroy us, as they destroyed our last emissary. Or, sever your universe’s tie to ours once and for all, guaranteeing the survival of our species, the preservation of our world. We can send you back to them, or keep you here with us if you choose, but whether we open the gates to join your world or close them to you forever…that we cannot decide.

Why not?

Of all the things mankind has taught us, the strangest one for us to comprehend is choice. For us all things are possible, and all things that can be, will be. To choose one existence or another…it is a human ability, to shape your own fate. We need your help.

I let my thoughts open to them, my sense of self blurring at the edges as I try to feel what they feel, to understand what they’ve absorbed from us. The rage is there, a simmering force like a storm about to break. This is what the whispers fear, the fire consuming their world.

I let them touch my grief over Simon’s death, the newly opened wound of my mother’s death all those years ago, the sadness and guilt at being one of the only survivors from the
Icarus.
I let them see my anger at my father, the gut-wrenching stab of betrayal, the simmering rage at the creature who used me to wreak such destruction. Then, with an effort, I reach for those other, deeper memories, slipping past the coating of pain and hatred into what lies beyond.

Because behind it lies something more, a rainbow of deeper forces, waiting to be summoned. The joy of a little girl whose dreams have been painted the color of the sea. The loyalty of a boy who is ready to defend his home with his bare hands and the force of his will. The love of a man whose faith transcends death, whose strength feels like fire and poetry.

The fire of a girl who had everything taken from her, and still found it within herself to leap into the unknown to open this door. The determination of a boy who held out his hand to leap with her, who had faith in that moment that we were all worth saving, if only we had the chance to prove it.