Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (22 page)

I want to reach out and grab her, make her stay, make her listen. If I could just make her
listen.
But I can’t force her to stay. I can’t chase her, after all of this. Not anymore. “Please wait,” I manage instead. “Please—let me—”

She pauses in the doorway just long enough to glance back at me. “You come looking for me again,” she says tightly, “and I’ll kill you. Understand?”

I stare at her from where I kneel, my words lost.

And then she’s gone.

Their words fly through our world like waves, and we learn to catch hold of them and ride the messages they send to one another. The casualty letters from their wars are easiest to follow, leading us to grief and anger, emotions so strong we can cling to them and experience their world just a breath longer, the strength of their feelings tangible through the invisible walls between our universe and theirs.

There is nothing remarkable about the one that leads us to a little cottage surrounded by flowers. There is no reason to linger, nothing that should make us pause. These humans’ grief is no different from that of any other we have tasted.

And yet we find we can stay, drawn inward, pulled through the fields and up the hilltops and to a tree in whose branches huddles a little boy, clutching a notebook to his chest. He keeps his words on paper, so we cannot read them through their hypernet, but for just an instant we can feel them in his soul.

Then the poetry fades away, and we’re left waiting for the next wave of words to carry us closer to understanding.

JUST KEEP MOVING.

The words echo over and over in my mind, drowning out my other thoughts, keeping time with my footsteps. The background patchwork of noise from street vendors and traffic fades into a dull, throbbing hum beneath the roaring in my ears. I want to run, to put as much distance between me and the Knave of Hearts as I can—but running draws too much attention. I can’t look over my shoulder, I can’t duck low. I have to walk like I belong here. Pilfer a hat from this newsstand, a pair of smog glasses from that one, hide my face from any cameras LRI might be monitoring with facial recognition. I have to look like I haven’t a care in the world. If it weren’t for the steady staccato of words marching through my head like a drumbeat, I’m not sure I could.

First I need to get to my old apartment before he does. Get the gun, get my father’s picture. If I don’t get them now, I can never risk it again. I can’t think past today to the
Daedalus
—there is no
Daedalus
anymore, not with Gideon—but I have to get my things. It’s all I know. And after that, to my ID guy in the southern district for a new name, a new ident chip. Gideon—the Knave—knows Alexis. And he knows Bianca Reine—the White Queen. God, he
gave
me that name. I’m an
idiot.

And, worst of all, he knows Sofia.

I let him kiss me. I let him touch me. I let him—my eyes burn, behind the protective sheen of my smog glasses. I let
myself
think that maybe I wasn’t alone after all, that maybe I didn’t have to
stay
alone. That maybe my life wasn’t just going to be hatred and grief and revenge. And as a result, I let myself run straight into the arms of the person who turned the last year of my life into a nightmare. Heartbreak and sorrow and hatred tangle as they sweep across my body, making me shudder, making me want to find a shower, a
real
shower with water like they don’t have down here, and stand there for hours, for days, until I’ve washed away every skin cell that ever touched the Knave of Hearts.

Even by the time I reach the elevator to the other levels of the city, my skin hasn’t stopped crawling. The smog fades, gives way to sunlight, to clarity, and I barely notice. I remain on foot, remembering how easily the Knave tracked me when I was in LaRoux’s custody. My lungs ache—no, my heart aches.

Just keep moving.

My mind grabs only snapshots of the minutes, the hours, that follow. I know I have to focus, I know I can’t fall apart. Not yet. But the only fragments that stick with me are the ones that hurt, the ones that penetrate the thickening fog of panic. My fingernails catching on the loose brick in the alley where I keep my emergency glove, the key to Kristina’s apartment. My legs aching and heavy as I sneak past the doorman in my old building while his head’s turned. My hands shaking so much that I almost can’t use the key-coded glove to send the elevator to the penthouse suite. My eyes blurring and stinging as I scramble through the bedroom in search of the gun, praying LaRoux’s heavies didn’t return for it. The surging of my heart in my throat when I find it hidden beneath the duvet I pulled off the bed during my struggle. The line of fire along my index finger as I smash the glass of the picture frame concealing the drawing of my father. The sick nausea in my belly as I ransack Kristina’s jewelry box, grabbing the strings of diamonds and pearls I never touched in the three months I lived here. The stabbing of my heart as I wait for the elevator back down, dread rising with each beat that when the doors open, Gideon’s face will be there on the other side.

This time when I stumble back across the lobby I don’t bother to look at the doorman. I’m never coming back here again. It doesn’t matter if I look like I’m falling apart.

The sunlight feels like knives when the revolving doors spit me back out onto the street. My eyes are burning still, and when I bump into a couple as I head for the sidewalk, they take one look at me and draw away in a hurry. I glance at the glass-fronted doors and see red-rimmed eyes, a streak of crimson where I must have rubbed my bleeding hand across my face, hair wild. I have to get off the upper level—I can’t fit in here right now. I shove my stolen hat back onto my head, scrubbing my hand against my shirt.

I start retracing my steps toward the elevator but change my mind and head for the one in the opposite direction. It’s farther away, but it’s too much of a risk to use the one I used before, the one I took with Gideon. Too late I remember the burner palm pad he gave me, still in my pocket.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
Even I could track someone on a GPS-enabled device like this. I’m not thinking. I need to think.

A messenger’s waiting for the crossing signal at the end of the sidewalk, checking his own palm pad, his electrobike humming underneath him. I force my shaking hands to still long enough for me to slip the burner phone into the side pocket of the bag slung round his body.

Let Gideon—the Knave—track the messenger all around the city while I run. While I disappear.

When the heat and smog of the undercity wrap around me again, it’s like the comforting arms of a friend welcoming me home. Suddenly I remember why I hid here my first month or two on Corinth. It wasn’t just lack of funds. Here, despite the blood on my face, the panic in my movements, nobody looks twice at me.

It’ll be getting dark up above, and down here the lanterns are being lit. It’s getting harder to keep moving. I have to find a place to stop.

I can’t pay for a room somewhere without accessing my accounts, which he’s got to be tracking—using the stolen jewelry to buy my way in would throw up red flags in a respectable place and paint a target on my back in the rest. There are a number of free hostels and shelters here that don’t require ident verification or retinal scans to access, but Gideon will be searching those. He’ll know I’m too smart to use either the Alexis ident chip or Bianca’s, and he’ll assume I’ll go somewhere I can be anonymous. So I head for one of the police-monitored stations. It’d be mad to go to a place where the identities of all residents and tenants immediately go into the government system—even more easily accessed by a skilled hacker than the privately owned hostel systems.

Normally I’d hang around until I found a likely target to sneak me in—someone just desperate enough to be taken in by big eyes and a smile—but I can’t remember how to do it, how to gauge people. The faces that I pass are alien, their expressions written in a language I don’t know how to read anymore. So instead I head around back and wait until the fire exit opens a crack—a girl with a shaved head and fluorescent yellow earrings ducks out of it to smoke, wedging a platform boot in the doorway to keep herself from getting locked out.

I abandon everything and just shove a string of pearls into her hand. “I need to get in,” I rasp. “Quietly.” She stares at the pearls, then at me. She doesn’t know if they’re real. Any second she’s going to tell me to go screw myself and slam the door in my face.

But instead she licks the tip of the joint to extinguish it and stuffs both it and the pearls down the front of her shirt, then kicks the door open. She doesn’t say anything, though her eyes stick to me as I move past her. When I look over my shoulder, she’s already gone, shoulders hunched as she half jogs up the alley to vanish into the crowds beyond.

Inside, the gloom is as thick as in the alley outside. Steel-framed bunk beds line the room, topped by bare mattresses. A few heads lift when I come in, but if anyone notices I’m not the girl who left, they say nothing. That’s why I chose this place. Half of these people are felons checking in for parole, and the other half are headed that way in a few years. They don’t care who they sleep next to. The occupancy scans that sweep by every half hour or so don’t check IDs, as long as the number of people in the rooms matches the number of people who went through check-in.

I find a bottom bunk in the corner, vacant but for a few candy bar wrappers. I avoid the large stain toward the foot of the mattress, unidentifiable in the meager light, and crawl in against the wall until I’m hidden in the shadows.

I will my body to stop shaking. Tell myself I’m safe now. That he can’t find me. That out of sight of the security eye in the center of the ceiling, not even a thorough facial recognition scan through every security camera in the district could find me. But now that I’ve stopped, it’s not fear that’s making me shiver.

Eyes burning, I try to block out the smells, the noise, the scratchy mattress and the odor of mildew wafting up from the fabric.

Here at the bottom of the city, no one cares when you start to cry. Half the people in this room are suffering from some kind of withdrawal or another, and the rest know to leave well enough alone. You don’t come here seeking comfort. You come here to disappear.

The squalor should make me long for the penthouse. I should be imagining the cocktails the SmartWaiter can produce, remembering the feel of Kristina’s soft sheets, closing my eyes and seeing the false stars emerging on the windows in my mind’s eye.

But instead the only thing I can think of, the only thing I hear as I muffle the sounds of my weeping against my arms, is the Butterfly Waltz playing over and over in my mind.

When morning comes, my eyes are dry again. Sleep, if only in drips of a few minutes at a time, has brought me back to myself. I recognize last night’s storm for what it was: a panic attack. I haven’t had one for months, but they used to leave me shattered and empty all the time in the weeks following my father’s death. But even shattered and empty, I can keep moving.

I have to get onboard the
Daedalus
tonight. Nothing’s changed because of Gideon’s betrayal except that now I have nothing to lose, nothing sparking even a scrap of guilt. Even if he decides to go to the
Daedalus
on his own, to disable the rift without me, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the rift I’ll be aiming for. Gideon will be watching, certainly, waiting to see if I show up, but I don’t care that he’ll know where I’ll be. He’s proven that it doesn’t matter where I go, who I become—he’ll always find me. Whether he’s working for LaRoux Industries or has his own sick reasons for hunting me across the galaxy, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if he finds me on the
Daedalus
, because by then I’ll have my shot, the moment I’ve been working toward since I fled the orphanage shuttle that took me from my home.

Tonight I’ll be in the same room as the man who murdered my father. And if the Knave finds me there on the
Daedalus
, so be it. Nothing he can do to me could be worse than watching my father die. Let him take me. Let him kill me if that’s his ultimate goal. I’ll be dead by the end of the night anyway, one way or another. If I’m caught, LaRoux Industries will have my existence quietly erased from the world. And if I succeed, if I get my moment, the security guards will kill me anyway.

Because tonight I’m going to put a bullet in Roderick LaRoux.

On the gray world, it is so easy to find despair and anger. Their pain burns so hotly sometimes it blinds us to anything else. But there are moments, rare flashes of light in the darkness, joy so bright we cannot help but see it.

There is a little girl on the gray world whose father is teaching her to dance. Her steps are all wrong but she is laughing anyway, and so is he, and we feel, just for an instant, his heart filling at the sight of her dimpled smile.

Then the music stops, and the lights too, and darkness sweeps across the gray world as it often does when their machinery fails. Everywhere we feel fear and anger rising like hot spikes, but in the little girl’s heart she feels only contentment, as her father carries her to bed. We cling to that tiny light as the darkness closes in all around.