Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (10 page)

I can see my father’s face in the gloom, exhaustion making the shadows swim and wriggle into familiar patterns before my eyes. I can see him in the moments before he turned and walked into the barracks on Avon—I can see his pupils dilate, swallowing the clear blue of his irises, I can hear his voice go cold, I can see his muscles seize up and propel him away from me. It’s always that moment that I relive, not the explosion itself. I see my father’s soul vanish again and again. I see the moment he died, seconds before he was blown to pieces.

I force my terror down away from my heart, force myself to breathe. Panic will only make me slip. My eyes search the perimeter of the room, difficult to make out past the lights blinding me. I know what’s through a couple of these doors, from the floor plan I memorized. But I’m betting I can’t use the same escape route twice, even if I could get past these guys. Even if, after hours of sitting here, I could manage to run faster than my captors.

Maybe if I were braver, I could do it. Maybe if there was any part of myself worth saving, beyond the need for vengeance. But…I don’t want to die. I
can’t
die. Not when I’m so,
so
close to reaching Roderick LaRoux.

One of the men—the one who fought me—pauses abruptly, signaling for the others to quiet. He presses one finger to his ear, and I realize someone’s giving him orders through a micro-earpiece. “Yes, sir,” he says, spine stiffening even though whoever he’s speaking to can’t see him. “I understand, sir.” There’s a long pause, in which the man listens. Then he nods to one of the others and gestures back into the shadows, in the direction of the ring. “Yes. Yes—understood. Thank you, monsieur.”

My body stiffens. Only one man’s arrogant enough to resurrect a dead language just to come up with a unique title for himself. This man’s orders are coming directly from Roderick LaRoux.

“It’s your lucky night, sweetheart,” the man says, pulling off his earpiece. “I’ve heard it doesn’t hurt a bit, and you don’t even know it’s happening. You just—pop,” he says, miming a tiny explosion with his fingers by his temple, “and you’re gone, replaced by something much easier to deal with. This is a much more humane way to get answers. Though much less fun.”

No. God, no.
I can feel the ring’s vibrations through the floor, traveling up the chair legs, as the machinery begins to turn on. I can feel the floor moving the way the ground moved beneath me when my father turned himself into a bomb.

The man who was speaking to me replaces his comms device with something else, another bit of electronics that hooks over his ear. “Suit up,” he orders the others, who dutifully outfit themselves with similar devices with the air of workers donning their helmets or surgeons pulling on gloves.

As the men turn their attention to the metal ring dominating the middle of the room, I try to look around, try to see if there’s any way out. The exits will be locked, and even if I could get them open, I’d never make it there before they grabbed me. They’re too far for me to grab a weapon off them without them noticing me getting up from the chair. I’m rooted here, just as surely as if they’d bound me to it.

I’m staring so hard through the gloom that at first, I don’t register when something changes. A tiny light comes on in the darkness, a single green LED that winks once, twice, then steadies. I stare at it blankly, reminded absurdly for a moment of the will-o’-the-wisps back on Avon. And then, all at once, in the same instant that my interrogator turns to come back toward me, I realize what it is.

One of the cameras just turned itself on.

I jerk my gaze away, shutting my eyes so they can’t see where I was looking. I don’t even care that they jolt my chair again to prevent me from resting. It’s a foolish hope, a wild hope—for all I know, it could be LaRoux, turning them on so he could watch what’s about to happen.

“I have permission to make you an offer,” says the leader of the men, watching my face. “If you know of some way to contact the young man you encountered at LRI Headquarters, and if you can convince him to meet you at a specific time and place, we’ll let you go.”

That brings me up short, the adrenaline surge in my body flatlining. “Let me go?” I whisper, caught off guard. “No—it’s a trick.” The words come out before I can remember the role I’m supposed to be playing. They’ve planned this perfectly, waiting until I
know
what’s coming, what will happen to me, to give me this way out. Alexis should’ve jumped at the chance.

Nobody would blame her for that, if she were real. She’d be scared, and alone, and she’d take any way out. But I should be better than that. I should be fighting. I hate that for an instant, I was more Alexis than Sofia.

He shakes his head. “No tricks. We have no quarrel with you. We can even promise you that the boy will not be harmed. He’s just the next rung on this ladder, and we’ll get to him one way or another. Work with us and you’ll both survive.”

The next rung on the ladder to the Knave. My heart pounds in my ears, so loud I can barely think. LaRoux Industries’ security thugs can have the Knave—all the better, as far as I’m concerned. Let them destroy each other. All I want is the man at the top. I lick my lips with a dry tongue, trying to buy myself even a couple more seconds to think.

Beyond the man, I can see the camera’s LED. It flashes twice as I look at it. Then three times in rapid succession. Then five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen…

Prime numbers.

I swallow down a sob of relief and try to make it sound like capitulation. “Okay,” I gasp. “Okay, I’ll tell you how to find him.” All eyes turn toward me—the perfect distraction.
Please, Gideon.
Please
let that be you. Tell me it’s a signal, that you got my message, that you understood, because I’m running out of lies to give them.

All I need is just one more.

The man has some of us moved, and he uses a ship traveling through the stillness to do it, and for an instant we’re so close to home we can feel the others just a whisper away.

The world is opened to us just enough for us to reach out and discover that this place, unlike the place where the first thin spot appeared, has many others like the man with the blue eyes. It is the perfect place to learn. To understand. To decide whether their existence is worth knowing or if they should be condemned to darkness.

We find a little girl in the slums, and from her we discover dreams. She dreams of beautiful things, and in the way of children, she is not afraid of us. She calls us friend. We show her the ocean she longs to see. She lets us ride through her dreams the way we let ships ride through the stillness faster than light.

All around her on this world is darkness and pain, but in her dreams is beauty. She is worth watching. Worth learning. But then one day she’s gone, and we’re alone.

IT’S INCREDIBLY CRAMPED IN THE
air vents. I can’t even crawl on my hands and knees—I’m forced to wriggle along using my elbows, which slows me down and means I have to calculate every move before I make it. It’s pitch-black as well—if I hadn’t thought to grab my night-eyes on the way out, I’d be screwed right now. Pulled down, the goggles cast everything in an eerie green tint that overlays my fear with a momentary spark of anticipation. Sensory memory is a powerful thing, and usually when the world looks green like this, I’m hip-deep in some kind of crime. This is the kind of place where I cut my teeth—and filled my bank account. This is how I created the Knave, working every hour of the day to learn what I needed to find LaRoux’s secrets.

The most valuable servers are kept completely isolated from the outside, no hypernet connection to send my electronic spies down. The only way to access them is to physically break in and attach my equipment. But on a hack like that I’ve usually got a lot more time, a lot more equipment, and—most importantly—a fully formed plan.

This better work, Dimples. I’ve only got one idea.

I’m close enough now that I can’t whisper commands to my headset to voice-activate it anymore, or I’ll risk being overheard. I huddle in the air vent above the holosuite, fingers silently swiping across my lapscreen. I’ve got my backpack pulled around to my front, my equipment tucked in against my chest to make more room for crawling through these too-small tunnels.

Though they could hear me if I talked, I let their voices fade away as I steady my breath and focus completely on the screen in front of me, firing up the windows I’ll need. Then, a shouted curse—a man’s voice below me yanks my attention back from the place it always goes when I’m working.

“It’s
true.
” Alexis is sobbing, head bowed. “I promise it’s true.”

“You had your shot, sweetheart.” The man sounds
pissed
now, his earlier calm vanished. “If you’re going to tell us stories, we’ll do it the other way.”

“But there
was
a hoverbike, I got the license plate, why won’t you listen to me?” She’s scrambling, voice high and raw, and I have a feeling that note in her voice is real desperation. The way the lights are directed, I can’t see much through the security feed. Instead I inch along until I’m over a vent opening and can peer through the grille to see if I can pull this off. They’ve got lights aimed at Alexis—and at the cameras, no wonder I couldn’t see—but that’s not what makes my heart start trying to hammer its way out through my chest. They’re powering up the rift, and while I still haven’t seen firsthand what that thing can do, Alexis has. And it was enough to make her go white with terror.

Shit. I’m not ready. I don’t have time.…

My fingers fly across the screen, my heart slamming against my rib cage. I need to even the playing field, take out those lights, but that’s a program that takes time, seconds I don’t have. Seconds Alexis doesn’t have. Any minute I know my concentration’s going to slip, my fingers will fumble, I’ll lose. And lose her.

I can hear the gorillas talking, and Alexis’s voice as she tries to convince them she’s ready to sing like a canary. The rising hum of the rift overtakes the voices until the ventilation tunnel I’m in vibrates against my elbows and knees. I grit my teeth.

I’m not going to make it.

That truth explodes in my mind so abruptly that my fingers falter. This is it. They’re going to make a husk of her. A split second later, the rift machinery gives a shudder and a screech and whirs back down into silence again. The blue sparks that had begun to gather at its perimeter vanish.

“Damn it.” The leader of this group, the one who took Alexis, stalks over to the machine, then lifts a hand to his ear. “No, sir, there’s been some kind of—Yes, I understand. She’s not going anywhere.” He drops his hand, then glares at the others in the room. “Get a team of techs in here,
now
. We’ve got a week, and if this hasn’t been fixed by then, I’m not going to be the one Monsieur LaRoux blames, you hear me?”

I’m still frozen, heart stuttering.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I don’t even know who, or what, I’m thanking for the reprieve. Reminding myself to breathe, I run my fingers along the vent opening beneath me until I’m sure I know where the pressure points are. Then I study the screen, check my on-the-fly hack one more time, and breathe a silent prayer to the only person I know who might care to watch over me.
Let’s not meet again today, bro. I’m not ready just yet.

I tap the screen to execute the program, and the lights all over the building ripple out, plunging the holosuite into darkness.

For a moment, no one moves. Then I punch down against the grille sealing the air vent. It clatters to the floor, and Alexis turns in the direction of the sound, leaping to her feet with incredible reflexes. A muzzle flash from one of the gorillas’ guns illuminates the room for an instant, and, like a perfectly still picture, I see their leader lunging for her, hands outstretched. No,
no.

He catches her shirt and they both go toppling to the floor, grappling in the dark, washed green from my vantage point in the ceiling. Her shriek cuts off when she hits the ground, the impact winding her, and her wild kick glances harmlessly off his arm. He flips her onto her back to prevent her scrambling away, his own breath ragged, and her foot flies out again—this time it connects with his crotch and he moans, backhanding her blindly as he folds in on himself, half pinning her to the ground.

I yank my climbing rope out of my pack and clip it through my harness, throwing the looped end down into the room. I brace my feet on either side of the air vent’s opening as she struggles to wriggle free of her captor, movements jerky and desperate, washed in green by my night-eye goggles. “Here!” I hiss, knowing that in the dark, she’s completely blind. She kicks at the man’s grasping hand as he tries to grab her ankle, and scrambles to her feet. Three quick steps bring her across the room to collide with the rope—it takes her a few seconds to feel for its end, then slip her foot through. She’s a small girl and this should be easy, but I’ve got no leverage, and only the belay device on my harness to help me haul the rope back. It’s not until I feel the rope slacken a little that I see one of her hands grasping at the edge of the vent, and I can lean forward enough to reach for her.