Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (25 page)

The blue-eyed man holds a hatred in his heart for the boy, and as time moves forward, all the future possibilities for the boy his daughter loves narrow into one: he will die, and her heart will break.

What we cannot see is what will happen to her heart after.

THE ROARING IN MY EARS
won’t stop, even as the plush carpeting in the corridor swallows up the sounds of my stumbling steps alongside Gideon’s. The small handbag at my side feels as though it’s made of lead, the weight of the unfired gun inside it heavier than any physical burden could be.

I was in the room with him.
My mind won’t let the words fade.
I was in the room with Roderick LaRoux and I didn’t kill him.

But the faint shimmer surrounding the dais guaranteed the presence of a security field, and with Gideon at my side I never would’ve gotten close enough for my one shot to have a chance of hitting its target. The security team was right there. For a moment I lost myself, and if Gideon hadn’t grabbed my arm, I think I might have tried anyway. I might have wasted my one shot.

Though I know the smart thing was to walk away and wait for a better moment, I can’t help feeling like I should’ve found a way around it. I’m running through a list of a thousand things I should’ve done—convinced Gideon that we needed to disable security shipwide to decrease our chances of being caught, gotten him to remove the field for me. Rushed the dais when the room’s attention was on the daughter and her fiancé. Anything would’ve done, especially since I wouldn’t have needed to stay under the radar any longer. This was supposed to be a one-way trip.

And instead I just stood there, the Knave’s hand on my elbow, his lips by my ear, while Roderick LaRoux and his whole happy family stood up there and smiled. It’s all I can do not to scream—or cry—or throw up.

The corridor leading to the exhibit and the elevators beyond is dark, the carpet the decadent red that would’ve been the style when the
Icarus
made her doomed maiden voyage. My bare feet make no sound, and even Gideon’s footfalls are nearly silent. The muffled music and laughter from the ballroom fall away as we move. Rooms open up on either side of us, re-creations of what the
Icarus
once looked like to show how her passengers lived before they died. To the right, a simulation of the observation deck; to the left, a series of cabins and common rooms from various levels of the ship, from the staff’s quarters up through the military personnel deck, on through to first class. Beside each is a sign informing
Daedalus
visitors that by donning their “
Icarus
Experience” glasses, they can view what these rooms looked like after the crash.

Without, I suspect, the dead bodies.

I swallow hard, wrapping my arms across my chest to stop myself from shivering.

Gideon glances at me and his hands fly to his lapels. “Are you cold?” he whispers, his voice shattering the silence—and the spell holding me.

“No,” I murmur, forcing myself to sound calm. He lets his hands fall. “Let’s get down to engineering.” I brush past him, trying desperately to organize my thoughts.

Gideon still believes we’re both here to find the rift, sabotage LaRoux’s plans. Let him think so—maybe I can still use him after all. To access the computer he’ll need to bypass security, and perhaps I can get him to take out the security field protecting the dais as well. Or else I can trip an alarm while he’s doing his thing, and while security’s busy chasing him, I can loop back around to the ballroom.

He claims to want to expose LaRoux’s wrongdoing to the galaxy. I can’t believe he’s so naïve as to think that would accomplish anything. What justice would there be in seeing a man like LaRoux arrested? Even if his lawyers failed to clear him of all charges, the best-case scenario would see him spend a few months at most in a “prison” cell that would make my penthouse look more like the halfway house where I slept last night. Far more likely, it’d all get pinned on some underling in his company, and LaRoux would get to dominate the next fifty news cycles expressing his shock and horror at what was done in his name. He’d probably throw another benefit for the families “affected” by the crash, and by the massacres on Avon, and end up coming out of it all more loved than ever. Though the number of us who see him with clear eyes is growing, we’re still a drop in the ocean of the masses, and against the narrative people
want
to believe, we’d simply be washed away.

The re-creation of the first-class salon opens up before us as we make our way toward the elevators, and my footsteps falter. The room is lit low and warm, but the holographic projectors are off—no ghostly passengers milling around, no music, no hovertrays. The utter stillness makes it all too easy to see that we’re not alone.

I grab for Gideon’s arm as he starts to move past me, and his gaze snaps over. Off to the side, near one of the plush leather-lined booths, are Lilac LaRoux and Tarver Merendsen.

Gideon and I draw back into the shadows, waiting for some sign that they noticed us. But the soldier’s arms are around her, and her face is buried in his shoulder, and neither of them is looking our way. I was so busy making sure Gideon and I weren’t spotted as we slipped away that I must not have noticed when these two did the same. As we watch, Lilac LaRoux lifts her head. Her face is white beneath her makeup, the red of her lipstick standing out and highlighting the tight set of her mouth. She wears a black dress, as if she’s in mourning for everything around them. Now that I look closer, I can see that the soldier’s eyes are red-rimmed.

The soldier murmurs something I can’t hear, and in reply, the girl whispers, “Like ghosts, you and I.”

For a moment, I can almost feel sorry for them. Whatever else they’ve done, whoever they’re connected to, they’re the only two surviving people in the universe who were here, who knew the people modeled in the holograms, all dead now, who might have even been inside the first-class salon before the
Icarus
went down.

I’ve seen that look on the LaRoux girl’s face a dozen times on Avon. Like everything of her has been stripped away, leaving behind only the skeleton of who she was. If it weren’t for the hair, the dress, the rich surroundings, she could almost be one of the war orphans, waiting for the scars of trauma to fade. I could save her the time and tell her that they never do.

She reaches one hand out suddenly, grabbing the edge of the booth’s table to straighten herself, grimacing, and the soldier’s arms are around her, lightning-quick. His voice rises in alarm, and his words are clear. “You’re here, you’re with me, Lilac.”

“I can feel them,” she whispers, jaw clenched, lips barely moving, the tendons in her neck visible for an instant. Then it’s over, and she’s letting out a slow breath, straightening once more.

Gideon and I exchange glances, and he mouths,
Them who?
at me, but I don’t have the answer. The ghosts of her past, I assume, asking why she’s complicit in the plans of a man so evil as her father.

The soldier speaks again, the lower timbre of his voice making his words harder to decipher now, and the girl nods. He dips his head to kiss her temple, and when he pulls away, she’s Lilac LaRoux again. Smile bright, spine straight, all signs of what I thought I saw erased.

“There’s my girl,” the soldier says with a grin, and all shreds of sympathy flee. I wish I could dismiss tragedy so blithely.

I glance at Gideon, about to tilt my head and suggest we move on—we don’t need to know what these two are doing, we just need to keep out of their way—only to find him watching the pair as intently as I was. Blinking, I realize that his hands are clenched so tightly at his sides his knuckles are white, and that the salon lights reflected in his eyes are glimmering, his eyes wet. He looks at them the way I look at the picture of my father; like the man with his arms around Lilac LaRoux is the last scrap of some part of himself he lost long ago.

I hesitate, then touch my fingertips to his sleeve. He breathes in sharply through his nose, then turns away, not looking at me. Without another word, we continue on past, leaving the
Icarus
survivors to haunt the halls of the
Daedalus
alone.

The elevators Gideon wants to use are located in a wing of the exhibit on the crash itself, in a hall displaying about two dozen fragments of wreckage. Holographic text explaining each piece leaps out at us as we walk by, our movement triggering the displays to try to pull our attention away. But Gideon only has eyes for the ornate doors at the end of the room, making his way up to them in silence.

We step inside, and I’m still searching my mind for the words I need. As we silently glide past the floors on the way to engineering, I can feel LaRoux getting farther away. But what’s my next move?
Gideon, I know we’ve got a lot of…of things going on. This isn’t the time or place to talk. But maybe—maybe when it’s all over, once we’ve gotten the info we need, we can…
Yes, something like that. With a bit of
don’t you need to cut the security fields everywhere, just to be sure there’s nothing hidden?
mixed in.

I draw in a careful breath.

“Okay, I cut the alarm,” Gideon says, before I can speak, his eyes on his lapscreen. “I managed to isolate just the engineering floor—if we shut down the whole ship, all hell will break loose.”

Damn it.

I’m still searching for a response when the doors slide open to reveal the engineering department, and I’m forced to follow him out into the hallway. Perhaps, if we follow Gideon’s plan and disable the rift, it’ll draw LaRoux away from the fully secured ballroom and give me the opportunity I need. Part of me sickens at how easy it is to smile at Gideon and pretend everything’s fine again. But I can’t ever forget that it’s the Knave walking beside me now—he’ll never be just Gideon again.

This floor lacks the ornate trappings of those above—it’s purely functional, scaffolding running up the walls to our left, a metal gantry leading away toward the center of the department. I know from the plans I studied that this whole level is open, several floors high. It’s like a huge stadium, set up around the hyperspace engines in the center, with workstations clinging to the walls like metallic nests, linked by a complex series of staircases so the engine can be viewed and accessed from dozens of angles.

Gideon’s moving quickly, and I’m grateful my shoes are hanging from one hand so I can keep up, hurrying along the hallway after him in my bare feet, the metal grille of the floor biting into my skin. Perhaps this will be quick—perhaps we’ll find the rift quickly, disable it, return to the party. There’s still time for my shot. I can fix my hair, fix my makeup, blend back in—I’m so busy mentally reassembling myself that the breath goes out of me with an undignified squeak when I suddenly run into Gideon’s broad back.

“What the hell?” He whispers the words, but his body’s blocking my view.

It’s only when I step to the side that I can take in the scene before us. Our hallway ends in a balcony fixed to the wall, opening up onto the huge engine space, several floors in height. Staircases lead in both directions, part of the giant metal spiderweb of scaffolding and gantries…but that’s not what stopped him in his tracks.

In the huge void where the hyperspace engine should be—where the rift should be—there’s nothing. The massive metal claws that should hold the engine in place simply grasp at empty air. For a moment, I’m struck with the same confusion as Gideon—we’d been so sure that LaRoux’s plan with the rift was being executed here, tonight. Then I’m fighting my instinct to turn on my heel and march back into the ballroom, security field or no security field, so I can take my shot at LaRoux.

“I’ll get into the system,” he says, mobilizing abruptly before I can speak, striding along our little balcony to the stairs at the end of it. He continues speaking as he clatters down them, and I race after him. “The rift at Headquarters caused enormous energy fluctuations. It must be somewhere else on the ship. I’ll track the energy readings and work out where. It
has
to be somewhere.” There’s a note of desperation in the back of his voice, though, an uncertainty he’s not ready to face. There aren’t many places on a ship like this that could hide something as massive as the rift we saw at LRI Headquarters.

“We don’t have long,” I warn him, as we reach the base of the towering installation. It’s a long row of consoles, mostly dormant, display monitors layered above command trackpads. “Not if we’re going to head to a second location on the ship.”

Gideon doesn’t even answer, his attention riveted on his work. Before, I almost enjoyed watching him do his thing—the utter concentration there, more focused than anyone I’ve ever seen. I probably could have stripped naked and laid down on his desk and he would’ve just moved his monitor so he could see over me. There was something fascinating about that, something appealing in the way he’d just vanish into the task.

Now…now I can imagine him tracking me that way. Following me with that single-minded attention.

I watch over his shoulder as a blueprint of the ship leaps to life on his lapscreen. My mind circles back again, relentlessly, to my plan. If our route takes us back past the ballroom, there’s a chance I could slip away from him, look for an opportunity with Monsieur LaRoux. I could—