Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (15 page)

We wait on the gray world, and look for worth in the hatred and mistrust among its people but find little. Their moments of bravery and heroism are buried in the lust for violence and revenge that tears them apart.

There is a girl with fire in her blood stirring the others with the same magnetism of the blue-eyed man, making others follow her with nothing but words. They rebel against their leaders as we once tried to rebel against the man with blue eyes.

But it is the little boy often at her side who draws our notice most. These creatures cannot see into each other, or see ahead into the infinite branches of possible futures. But we can.

And this green-eyed boy will be important.

THE SOUND OF OUR FOOTSTEPS
is muffled by the soft sand under our feet, and I can hear my breath in my ears, too loud and rasping for the speed we’re running. But of course it’s not the running that’s got my heart trying to thump its way out of my chest. I’ve got a chorus of voices echoing around my head, just to add to the noise.

My den.

This is what you get for letting someone in.

Did I definitely wipe the drives in the corner?

Did I pack my book? Yes, I packed it, I remember.

Oh, hell.

Is this what it feels like for Towers? Constantly grabbing her bag and running, expecting them behind her at any second?

I damn well hope it is. I hope I scare the hell out of her.

Every soldier under her command trusted her, and she turned her head the other way when it really mattered. She failed to protect them, just like all those years ago, my brother’s commander failed to keep him safe.

They accepted the responsibility. They should be held to a higher standard.

And accept the consequences, when they fail to meet it.

But
how
did they find us?

“How did they find us?”

A moment later I realize Sofia spoke my own thought out loud, and I shake my head without breaking my stride. “I have no idea. Maybe they got one of our faces scanned, caught us on a facial recognition camera as we came below.”

“One that showed us actually walking in that door?” She sounds skeptical. “I assumed you’d have those locked down pretty hard.”

“I do. They’re not connected to any network but my own—there’s no way anybody could have intercepted the feed.”

“We need to work out how they found us before we head to your friend’s, or for all we know, they could follow us right there.”

My heart throws in a little extra syncopation over that idea. This girl is
good
at running—I hadn’t even thought of that. I let my pace slow. “Okay, think. Let’s assume they didn’t get us with cameras, because that’s hardest to confirm, and hardest to act on. Did you carry anything out of LaRoux Headquarters that you didn’t carry in?”

She glances down at herself, conducting a mental stock take, then slowly shakes her head. “I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Did you eat or drink?”

“Nothing.”

I let my frustration out in a growl, then cut the sound off as she raises one hand abruptly, her eyes widening in the dim red light. “They injected me.”

I kick up a cloud of sand as I screech to a halt. “They what?”

“I assumed it was something to make me more compliant, I wasn’t answering their questions. But I don’t know that for a fact.” She’s working hard to keep her voice level, but I can hear the fear—I’m listening for it, I guess, since the same thing is pulsing through me. “What if they injected me with something they can trace? With some kind of tracker?”

I shake my head, closing my eyes, forcing myself to focus. Dragging my mind away from my ruined den, where it wants to linger. “They knew where you were, and they couldn’t have thought you’d escape. I mean, modesty aside, it was incredibly unlikely, especially given that they didn’t know we were in contact, or that you’d got a signal out. Injecting a tracker is beyond preemptive measures, and into paranoid territory.”

Her silence is what makes me open my eyes again. Her face is perfectly still, and this time she can’t keep the tremble out of her voice. “They were going to make me into a husk, take my mind with—with the rift. I would have done anything they told me to, but perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to report back. Perhaps they would have needed a way to find me, if…I couldn’t communicate.”

She swallows, hard, and I want to throw my arms around her and squeeze her until we both feel safe. Instead, I curl my hands into fists by my sides and keep my voice level. “It’s a working theory. Let’s see what we can find.”

We’re both straining our ears now for the sound of pursuit coming up the tunnel, but we can’t move until we’re sure we’re not leading them closer and closer to Mae’s place. Sofia keeps watch in silence as I cobble together a scanner, cannibalizing one of my security sweepers and wiring it into my lapscreen, pulling my chip from my pocket to insert and bring it all to life—it’s my last security precaution, in case somebody gets their hands on my lapscreen. Paranoia, perhaps, but today turned out to be a good day to be paranoid.

She turns, pulling down the collar of her shirt until I can see an angry red spot just below the fleshy part of her shoulder. I clench my jaw and press the scanner against her skin, trying to ignore the way it makes her flinch. Then she extends her arms so I can run it over each of her limbs in turn, moving slowly and giving the image on my screen time to stabilize.

Whatever they’ve put in her arm, it’s moved a little—I find it nestled close to the shoulder joint, where it’s worked its way down from its entry point. No bigger than a couple of grains of sand, but I know what I’m seeing.

“Cut it out,” she whispers sharply, staring down at the little image on the screen. “Do you have a knife?”

I shake my head. “No time, no first aid, and there’s important stuff around your shoulder joint I could hit. We can neutralize it for now and get rid of it later.”

She presses her lips together tightly as I pull out the handheld electromagnet I brought with me, clipped to the outside of my bag. I keep it clear of all my equipment, and instead press it against her skin before switching it on. I can sympathize—I’d want to hack it out of me too—but speed is everything, and we both know that.

Once we’re sure it’s dead, she helps me stuff my equipment back into my bag, and we set off again as quietly as we can.

We emerge from the tunnel in an alleyway behind a twenty-four-hour dance club, the pulse of the beat inside shaking the walls around us. The daylight, even diffuse and artificial as it is down here, makes me stumble and blink. I’m about to turn and stride for the mouth of the alley when Sofia grabs my arm, spinning me back to face her. My heart stutters—surprise, no more—and then she reaches up to pull my head torch free, and smooth back my hair, then pluck a spiderweb from my chest.

“We don’t want to draw attention,” she says, lifting my hand and positioning it palm-up so she can dump both torches in it, then running her hands over her own clothing, straightening it quickly. It’s like she’s putting herself back together as she does it, and when she looks up at me once more, she’s composed. Everything that’s going on inside her is locked away tight. I envy her the ability.

I stuff the torches in my bag and turn to lead the way. We take a direct route—we’re as sure as we can be that they’re not tracking us remotely, so now we need to clear the area before they get eyes on us physically. Keeping our heads down, we push through the marketplace, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be coming back here at all. It feels like we’re on a track now, heading toward the confrontation I’ve been planning for years, with no way to avoid it. The rift, the whispers—they’re here on Corinth, so either we take the fight to LaRoux, or somehow, he’s going to bring it to us.

The elevator up to Mae’s level is quiet, and the difference from the cacophony of the market is obvious the moment the doors slide open. We squeeze past a bunch of door-to-door evangelists and a couple clearly on a date—locked at the lips and hips—and walk out into the neat and tidy streets of her neighborhood. The mid-levels lack the ostentation of Kristina McDowell’s penthouse, but the small, compact homes around here are nothing like the tenements in the slums, either. The buildings are no more than ten stories high, and most dwellings have a whole story to themselves. This is about the level where you start getting your own bedroom, even if it’s just a hidey-hole.

Mae’s three blocks away, and she opens the door on the third knock. Her mouth falls open when she sees me, and though I summon up a ghost of my usual smile, it doesn’t seem to help any. “Honey, what the
hell
?” she whispers, stepping back to gesture us urgently inside. “Your whole setup went dark an hour ago, and there’s some serious chatter about something going boom in the Botigues quarter. I’ve been frantic. Get inside, quick.”

I push the front door closed, leaning back against it and letting my breath out slowly. My heart’s still pounding, lungs aching as though I’ve been running for kilometers.
This is Mae’s house,
I tell my body.
Start behaving.
We’re safe here.
“The truth is better than the rumors,” I say. “Mae, this is…” I pause. “Alice. Alice, this is Mae.”

Whatever Sofia was expecting, I’m one hundred percent sure this wasn’t it—Mae looks about as wholesome as they get, in one of the vintage tea dresses in fashion right now, hair caught up in a neat ponytail, as if she just slipped in from a social game of tennis. She looks like she should be serving on the fund-raising committee at her kids’ school—and in fact she does—instead of partnering me on the galaxy’s most notorious hacks.

Still, I’ve got to give my girl her due. She sticks out her hand to shake like she’s just been introduced to Mae at a cocktail party, and her smile looks a world better than mine. “We owe you,” she says simply.

“My friend, that’s one complicated ledger, trust me,” Mae laughs. “I’m assuming if we’re doing introductions, you’re sure you weren’t followed, honey?”

I nod, suddenly—uncomfortably—aware that I need to tell Mae not to refer to me as the Knave where Sofia can hear. As if I needed this day getting any more tangled. “I’m sure, but my den is gone. I had to burn it all.”

She lets out a slow breath. “You need gear?”

I nod again. “We won’t stay any longer than we have to, but this is the only place that has what I need to work out our next step. I thought…” But what I’m asking for is huge—the average user’s private enough about letting somebody onto their system. For Mae to let another hacker into her rig is akin to her inviting somebody to waltz on in while she’s naked. There’s no reassurance I can offer that would matter—the truth is, I could do whatever I wanted once she let me in, and she knows it. So it comes down to trust.

Mae nods slowly. “We’re in this deep, may as well go the whole way. Come on through, both of you. Let’s get you set up before the kids get home from school.”

I see Sofia taking it all in as we head out the back—I’m good at electronic networks, and she dominates the social ones, after all. So she’s doing what she does best. I see her study the school schedules on the screen in the kitchen, the photos of Mae and her kids, the comfy, mid-priced furnishings. Mae and her partner Tanya used a donor for the kids, then Mae ended up a single mom when it turned out raising babies was hard work. She shrugged, and said better to raise two than three. That’s what Mae’s like—the kids are the thing that matter. Sofia’s working that out, I’m pretty sure, from what’s on show here.

Though it’s very faint, she almost smiles when we head through into Mae’s office. I guess most of my kind don’t have well-tended potted plants and framed family portraits in their secret dens of hackery.

Me, I’m just itching to get over to Mae’s huge bank of screens. It’s like a gap inside me, having no way to get online—it’s an addiction, and I know it, but it’s one that works for me just fine. I tug on my sensor gloves and sink down into Mae’s chair. It hums softly, contours adjusting as it folds around me, and just like that, I’m at home. Behind me I hear Mae talking to Sofia about food and drink, but I’m already submerging in my world.

Most of the screens are taken up with forums, which Mae must have been checking when we arrived. They’re her specialty, though I dabble there as well. Say what you will about the conspiracy theorists, their paranoia comes in handy. If anything of interest makes it onto any corner of the hypernet, one of them’s going to notice it—and a couple of well-placed comments will send them marching off like an army of ants to investigate. Then all you have to do is sort the truth from the imagined shadows. Still, it’s worth it for the occasional gem, and that’s why the Knave provides anonymous, protected venues for their discussions. Looks like Mae was checking in on the Corinth Against Tyranny group—after their protest the day Sofia and I met, a bunch of their supporters are still missing. With the LaRoux stranglehold on the media, they’re not having any luck raising a fuss. This is the problem for all the groups who listened to Flynn Cormac’s infamous Avon Broadcast. Even if they do believe him, they’re never going to get the word out.