Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (18 page)

Just Sofia, and the purpose that’s burning inside me, hotter than ever.

LaRoux did this—he took my home, he took Mae—and he’s not taking anything else from me. Not from anyone.
Not one thing more.

We need to get as many levels down as we can, as quick as we can. We need to find somewhere nobody knows to look, a place we can disappear. A forgotten place.

Sofia squeezes my hand as we turn together for the nearest elevator, and I squeeze hers back tight, a tangle of fear and anger, pain and hurt. We’re in this together now, and I’m not losing her.

So we run.

Down.

Down.

Down.

To hide in the dark.

The boy, the one on the gray world with the sister full of fire. She has made her choices, and we can see her future, where all her paths will lead—to a life cut short. Too short for us to read, to understand.

But the boy’s future is still dark, as hazy as the clouds that shroud this planet. We cannot see where he will go, what he will become. His sister’s death will change him forever, plant the seeds of vengeance and forgiveness together deep in his soul—but which he will choose, we cannot say.

We will watch him too, this green-eyed boy, this child of the water and the reeds and the infinite gray sky.

WE CROUCH TOGETHER, SHIELDED FROM
the street by the bulk of a disposal unit, in an alley a few kilometers from where Gideon’s den was. Down here it’s impossible to say how much time has passed, but my body says it has to have been hours—dusk would be approaching, up above. Gideon still hasn’t let go of my hand, and I haven’t tried to free it. Despite the sounds of the undercity moving and breathing all around us, the silence is tight and hot and unrelenting. I close my eyes.

“We have to go there ourselves.” Gideon breaks the silence after an interminable wait.

I lift my head, focusing on his profile with some difficulty. “Where?”

“To the
Daedalus.
” His fingers shift, tightening slightly around mine. “Going to the authorities got us nothing but more heat. We have to stop him ourselves. Destroy the rift or disable it somehow, prevent him from taking over the senators on the Council.”

Everything in my nature screams against doing just that—shining a light on LaRoux means shining a light on myself, on Gideon, on my past. And even if we win, even if we stop whatever’s about to happen, LaRoux will never really pay, not truly.

But he will be there, himself, aboard that ship.…

A part of me wants to confess to Gideon, to tell him that stopping LaRoux’s plan is all well and good, but all I really want is for LaRoux to pay for what he did to my father. To me. I swallow. “It’s a huge ship. If he’s hiding the rift from the guests, how are we supposed to find it?”

“I can handle that,” Gideon replies, finally turning to look at me out of the corner of his eye. “The rift uses up a huge amount of energy—the day we met at LRI Headquarters I was starting to look at some weird energy spikes. I didn’t know the rift was in the same room as us, but I’m sure that’s what it was. If I could just get aboard, I could track the ship’s power usage. But they’ll have eight different layers of security—I’d never be able to sneak us in.”

My thoughts are shifting already to my contacts, separating out those least likely to have been compromised already, which ones I can still use. “I can get us to the ship,” I whisper.

“Sofia,” he murmurs, after a moment’s hesitation, “I know it’s—this isn’t what we do, either of us. But I don’t know who else will stop him.”

I speak carefully, trying as hard as I can not to let him hear the weight in what I’m about to say. “I wish someone would just…put an end to it. To him.” My heart pounds in the silence that follows those words. It’s the closest I’ve come to telling Gideon what my ultimate goal is, and I can’t be sure whether he’d be with me or revile me for even thinking of revenge.

Gideon sighs again and leans his head back against the imitation brick of the building at our backs. “That wouldn’t solve anything. There’d be half a dozen lieutenants in his company to take his place and pick up right where he left off. It’s the company, not the man, we need to stop.” His grip around my hand finally eases a little, like he might pull away.

I let my eyes close again. I think of the gun still on the floor of my apartment—I think of my father’s face, his blank eyes, right before he walked into that barracks—I think of Flynn the last time I saw him, the boy I once knew so utterly destroyed by all LaRoux had done to him, and to our home. What does the company matter, if the man behind it all never pays for what he’s done?

“You’re right,” I say hollowly, trying to ignore the way the lie cuts me. I can’t afford to let it. So instead, I tighten my hand, making it seem like I don’t want him to let go.

And the worst part is, I don’t.

We can’t risk staying in any legal lodging house, not when LRI’s bound to have surveillance looking for us in every corner of the sector. But it’s getting late, and both of us are beyond exhausted, and we need to find a place to sleep. Gideon has an idea of where we can hide for the next few days and swears it’s completely off the grid, no cameras, no people—which, down here, should be next to impossible. But he knows this place better than I do, and all the contacts I had here are long gone. I’ve got no choice but to trust him.

While Gideon heads into a secondhand store for some blankets and a few supplies, I start setting a few things in motion. Using one of his prepaid burner palm pads, I get one of my contacts to source invitations for us to the
Daedalus
gala, another to find us something to wear so we’ll fit in. By the time Gideon reemerges, I’m ready to dump the palm pad into the nearest trash bin.

Night in the undercity is not so very different from day as far as sunlight is concerned—not much makes it through the streets and parks and avenues of the middle and upper layers even on the sunniest days. Nightfall is merely a subtle tightening of the gloom, a shift in the light from dingy gray to true darkness.

But night in the undercity, where the people are concerned, is when the streets come alive.

Gideon leads me across streets and through alleys strung with lanterns of every kind and color—paper and fabric, so they can be easily replaced when the pollution discolors them—and bright like fire. The food vendors have tripled, and the smells of garlic and oil, coffee and allspice and yeast, fill the air and finally overpower the pollution. Somewhere in the distance I can hear music, with a thick rawness to the sound that tells me they’re playing live in the street. A fiddle and an erhu are dueling against the backdrop of a pair of cajóns, and for a moment I forget LaRoux, the
Daedalus
, the gun I left in my apartment. For a wild moment, all I can think of is how much I wish I could drop it all and just go dance to that music with Gideon.

A truck rumbles along the street and Gideon grabs for my hand, jerking my attention back to him. “Come on, let’s hitch a lift.”

“Wait, I don’t—”

But he’s not waiting, breaking into a jog and keeping hold of my hand so I have to jog as well or else be dragged along behind him. The truck’s not moving fast—it’s impossible to drive quickly through the clogged undercity streets—and as it passes us, Gideon reaches out to grab the bar beside the loading door and hauls me up after him.

Another day, I would make some cutting comment about him showing off, or using this as an excuse to keep an arm wrapped around me, pressing both of us close against the back of the truck. Another day, I’d have fought to keep my feet on the ground. But it’s not any other day, and once we make it to that gala everything could change—if I get the opportunity I’m hoping for on the
Daedalus.
When
I get the opportunity.

So I let Gideon tighten his arm around my waist, and I tilt my head back. The lanterns go whizzing by overhead, shooting past us like meteors in the thick dark night. I’d forgotten, in the months since I exchanged my squalid walk-up for a penthouse suite, how beautiful it could be down here.

The truck stops at a light and Gideon gives my arm a squeeze before hopping down off the back of the truck. He keeps hold of my hand as he helps me down after him, but then releases me as soon as I’m on my feet.

“This way.” He tips his head toward a particularly dark side street, this one lacking entirely in lanterns.

I let him pull me along, staying behind him just close enough that I can make out his silhouette. I pull another of the burner palm pads he loaned me out of my pocket and click it on, using the faint blue-white glow of its display to light my path. Gideon heads a few meters farther into the darkness, then stops at a boarded-up door. I expect a growl of disappointment—obviously this isn’t where we were supposed to end up, a closed-up, abandoned building—but instead he starts feeling around the edge of the boards. I can’t see what he finds, but after a few moments the whole panel of boards swings outward, and the door with it.

“After you.” He offers up a bow that even the fanciest of the fancy at that party on the
Daedalus
would approve of—a bow that belongs to the guy who knew which art to admire on Kristina’s walls. I tuck that thought away for later.

“You’re not planning on murdering me, are you?” I murmur, shuffling into the space beyond the door. It feels large, my voice echoing slightly; the palm pad’s light is too dim to disperse the darkness more than a meter or so in front of me.

Gideon doesn’t reply—I hear only his footsteps, moving away and fading into the quiet. Just before I can start to panic at having been abandoned, a light flickers on in the darkness. Some distance off, a neon sign comes to life—
LIVE MUSIC
, it says in bright, green and blue letters. Then another light comes on, and another, and another, until they become a cascade of glowing storefronts and streetlamps.

It’s an entire arcade of abandoned shops and restaurants. The floor is polished stone tile, and the fine layer of dust coating everything turns its reflections of the neon lights foggy—like row-house lights reflected in a river.

I spin around to find Gideon beside the entrance, shutting the door of an old-fashioned fuse box. My surprise must be obvious on my face, because when he turns to look at me, his own expression splits into a smug grin. “Nice enough to crash here for a few days?” he teases.

“What
is
this place?” I breathe.

“It used to be a mall of some sort,” Gideon replies, moving away from the entrance to join me. “It had to have been shut down at least thirty years ago—no hypernet boards, you’ll notice, all retro neon and digital signs. My guess is that they emptied it with the intention of leveling the place and building housing instead, but the developer changed direction, or the company dropped the project, I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s been completely forgotten.”

I hunt for a reply, too stunned by the strangeness of it—an entire part of the city lost in time—to speak coherently. I want to tell him it’s beautiful, because it is, and that it’s sad, too—lonely in the brightness of its signs, calling for customers who will never come, shining light on the marble floor where the only footprints in the dust are ours.

Gideon moves away, letting his pack slide to the ground, and the bag with our supplies as well. He uses one of the blankets to wipe away some of the dust, then piles the other ones on top to make a place to sit. I drift over to join him, still fascinated by the arcade, but too tired not to sink to the floor at his side. In the past two days, the only sleep I’ve gotten was the few hours I spent passed out in Gideon’s den. And he’s had even less.

“I pulled up some schematics from the
Daedalus
,” he says, retrieving a palm pad from his pack and waking it up. “Engineering, where the rift’s most likely to be, is a few decks down from where the gala’s being held. Security will be tight to keep people from leaving the public areas, but that’s where I come in.”

“You’re going to hack LaRoux Industries security that easily?” I raise an eyebrow at him, but he’s focused on his screen.

“I’ve done it before,” he says absently, as though that’s no great feat. “But that gala’s going to be swarming with people, and I don’t have a few weeks to try to get hired as an IT guy.”

“We’re going to go as guests.” When he lifts his head in surprise, I flash him a smile. “Don’t panic. It’s not that hard to fit in with that crowd. We’ll make nice for a while, drink the champagne and dance and carry on, but at some point LaRoux, and no doubt his daughter, too, will come out and make a bunch of speeches.”

Gideon’s mouth twitches, brows furrowing slightly. “What if LaRoux knows our faces from the security feeds? They’ll recognize us.”

“We’ll slip out as he takes the stage. The museum itself will be locked down—we’ll have plenty of time to make it to Engineering before they open the exhibits to the public.”

Unless I can get a good shot at LaRoux himself before we slip out of the ballroom.
I clear my throat. “Let me just run through the etiquette of this sort of event, so you don’t end up accidentally offending half the planetary delegations.”