Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (26 page)

The hair on the back of my neck stands up on end, instinct warning me before my brain interprets the sound my ears are reporting: the faint hum of the elevator doors opening. “Someone’s coming,” I hiss, grabbing Gideon’s arm to get his attention.

His head snaps up, and he yanks the leads out of his lapscreen, ducking in underneath the console—there’s no time to make a dash for the other side. I slide in after him on my knees, grabbing at handfuls of my layered skirts, shoving them into the free space around me to keep them out of sight. It’s like the dress has a life of its own, fighting me, trying to slither free. My heart thumps in time with the footsteps hurrying down the same metal stairs we took from the elevator.

“Son of a…” It’s a girl’s voice, rough and irritated. Her boots are visible as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, and then she’s in view. She’s tall, with dark skin and eyes, only a few years older than me.

She’s in a security uniform, and though her stance is casual, her right arm is just inches from a holster on her thigh containing some sort of weapon. It’s not an LRI uniform—she’s one of the security officers with the visiting planetary delegations. The very ambassadors we came here to protect.
Or at least, that Gideon came here to protect.
She turns before I can see the crest on her jacket, looking back at the stairs, where her companion must still be.

“It’s not here,” she calls over her shoulder. “There’s nothing. You’d better call them and say it’s safe for her to come down here. They need to see this.”

My mind’s racing, confusion tangling with excuses. Is she here for the rift? For the engine? Will that matter, if she hauls us out from underneath the console? Already my instincts are kicking in, stringing together a story. My hair is mussed, Gideon’s askew. I can say we snuck away from the party. I can say engines do it for me, and I wanted an adventure in engineering.

“Done, I just buzzed him.” The guy up on the stairs speaks, and his voice goes straight through me, electrifying. I
know
that voice. Instantly, it summons a pair of laughing green eyes, a tumble of dark curls. That voice is
home
.

My body takes over without even an instant for me to think better of it, and I go scrambling out from underneath the console, tangled for a moment in my dress, bursting to my feet. “Flynn!”

He’s standing on the staircase, his mouth open, still as a statue—in his black suit, he couldn’t be further from the boy I grew up with, but at the same time, nothing about him has changed at all.

A click to my left snaps me out of it, and I realize the girl beside me has drawn her weapon.

That sound jerks Flynn out of his shock and sends him scrambling down the stairs. “No, no, don’t touch her!” He opens his arms and I throw myself into them, closing my eyes as he wraps me up tight. To my horror, I feel my eyes starting to burn with tears.
This
is what trust feels like—I’d thought I’d begun to find it with Gideon, but now that bond, battered and broken by his lies and mine, pales in comparison to this.

The girl speaks again, her tone dry. “I guess you’re sure, then.”

“I’m sure,
a ghrá
,” he tells her as he releases me. “This is Sofia. She’s the one who hid me, in town, when…” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She knows. I can see it in her eyes—who I am, my place in their story on Avon. My father.

“I had no idea you were here with the Avon delegation,” I say, fully aware that I’m babbling. “Oh God, Flynn, I can’t believe—you have no idea how much I—” I ease away from him to see the girl standing and watching the pair of us. Gideon’s crawled out from under the console—he doesn’t look pleased to see me in Flynn’s arms. Whereas Flynn’s girlfriend doesn’t look even remotely threatened.

Because that’s who she is. Though I left Avon before we had an official flag, I recognize the crest on her jacket: a Celtic knot around a single star. And now that I have context—not to mention Flynn beside me calling her
my love
—I recognize who she is. Captain Lee Chase, scourge of Avon. Protector of Avon, if you listen to Flynn’s version of it.

Flynn’s shaking his head. “I thought they were taking you to Paradisa. What the hell are you doing here?”

My breath tangles in my throat.
I’m here to end Roderick LaRoux,
my thoughts scream. But Flynn’s never been one for violence, and Gideon would try to stop me if he knew I still wanted LaRoux dead. So I swallow the tangle of emotions and say, instead, “I’m guessing we’re here for the same reason you are.”

Flynn’s gaze flickers over toward Gideon, brows lifting. “Who’s your friend?”

To anyone else, the rapid subject change would be a non sequitur. But I know why Flynn’s asking. “Someone with reason to believe the Avon Broadcast was true,” I say carefully.

“You trust him?” Flynn’s eyes go back to meet mine.

I have no answer for him.
No, I don’t trust him. No, he’s the monster who terrorized me for the last year. No, and you can shove him out the nearest airlock. No, but he’s my only ally.

“We’re here together,” Gideon says, when my continued silence begins to stretch uncomfortably.

“We had reason to think LaRoux was planning something tonight for the gala.” I brush past the issue of trust, trying to ignore the way Flynn’s eyebrows shoot up at the word
together
. I glance at the girl—Chase—who’s still looking wary, though her hand’s no longer hovering over her gun. “Something to do with…uh…”

“With the rift.” Flynn finishes the sentence for me, earning him a sharp look from Jubilee and a startled one from Gideon. “Might as well acknowledge the elephant in the room. Or not in the room, as the case may be.” He tips his head toward the empty spot where the hyperspace engine—or the rift—would have been.

“If you’re from Avon,” says Chase, stepping toward us, “then you’ll understand. We have to make sure what happened there doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Flynn puffs out a breath. “Look, in a minute, the rest of our team will be here. I sent them a signal when we found the rift was missing. And you’re going to have a hard time believing this, but—”

He trails off. He can see from our faces that we’re looking past him now, taking in the staircase. At its head stands Tarver Merendsen in his impeccable evening suit, and beside him Lilac LaRoux, in all her perfectly coiffed glory.

How is this possible?
I can feel my pulse pounding at my temple.
The rest of our team,
Flynn said, but this is Roderick LaRoux’s family, standing and staring down at us.

How could
these
four people be in
this
place? And together?

And then I find myself remembering Gideon’s words back when we first met: that he was certain the
Icarus
survivors had encountered the same creatures that had terrorized Avon last year—whispers, Flynn called them in his broadcast.

I’m still gaping up at them, every last play from my hard-earned book emptying out of my head, when I realize Lilac LaRoux is staring straight past me. I glance over my shoulder to find Gideon standing there. My heart kicks up another impossible notch as I see his face. Grave, unsmiling, rigid; and when I look back again, Lilac LaRoux’s face has gone absolutely white.

Her mouth opens, lips working the shape of a word I can’t identify. It takes her long seconds to put breath enough behind it to speak, and when she does, it’s in a thin, frightened whisper.

“Simon?”

Our keeper’s daughter; the green-eyed boy of the gray world; the girl whose father will die and leave her broken; the poet with steel and beauty in his soul; the orphan whose dreams hold such hope…

They will all soon shatter because of the man with the blue eyes, and when they do, we shall see what they become. For if they fall as we are falling, we will turn away from this universe forever and leave it to its darkness.

Tracing their paths, their possible futures, we see a dimness where the lines intersect. A nudge this way or that and they will go their own ways, never meeting, never showing us what humanity can be.

But there…a sixth path. Add him to the others and the dimness clears. It is not so very hard, for his path lies close to that of our keeper’s daughter already.

Six lives, six threads. We shall see what fabric they weave.

TARVER MERENDSEN’S GAZE SNAPS FROM
my face to Lilac’s, his own expression tightening with surprise. “Simon?” he echoes—the name means something to him. “Simon, the boy who…”

“Who she was supposed to be with,” I finish for him, when Lilac makes no move to answer. “Simon who died for her, Simon who she forgot the second he was shipped out to the front lines.” I don’t want to look at Lilac’s face, but I can’t help it. She’s staring at me like I’ve risen from the dead—she’s staring at me like I’m simply one more ghost, one ghost too many.

Tarver has to take her elbow as they make their way down the stairs—she’s not looking where she puts her feet, and she nearly stumbles. “What the hell is going on?” he demands, all but ignoring Sofia now. Sofia, who’s standing just a few feet away, silent, expressionless. Sofia, hearing me reveal yet one more lie—I hadn’t realized just how much of what I’d given her was false. But now, seeing the lies lined up one after another…and I’d thought I couldn’t trust
her
?

“Simon—” Lilac’s voice is barely a breath, but her brow is furrowing, the initial shock of seeing me starting to wear off. What’s more surreal than anything about this moment is that neither she nor Tarver seems to think it’s impossible that I
could
be Simon, even though he’s been dead for years.

“No,” I say finally. “But you’re close.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers.
“Giddy.”

I haven’t heard that nickname in four years, and it goes through me like a knife. Suddenly I want nothing more than to curl up in the bottom of my brother’s closet again, stowing away amongst the shoes and circuits and card collections. I swallow, forcing my voice to come out level. “Bingo.”

Tarver reaches out, hand coming to rest in the small of Lilac’s back—how many times did I see my brother touch her like that?

“Lilac,” Flynn says carefully. “This is my friend Sofia, she’s from Avon. This guy’s here with her. You know him?”

Visibly pulling herself together, Lilac straightens and swallows hard. “This is Gideon. Tarver, he’s Simon Marchant’s little brother.”

Tarver’s eyes widen a little, and though he doesn’t relax, his voice is calmer when he speaks. “Simon, the boy you were…the one your father had killed for falling in love with you?”

“The very same,” I reply before Lilac can. “But actually, you both know me.”

The man’s eyes narrow. “I don’t think—”

“You call me the Knave.”

In the silence that follows my voice, I can hear Sofia’s intake of breath—when I glance out of the corner of my eye, I can see her take a slow step toward the stairs. I can almost see her thoughts as she considers making a run for it. And I don’t blame her, really. She’s still reeling from learning I’m the Knave who’s terrorized her for the last year of her life—now I’m adding that I’m an old family friend of the people responsible for her father’s death.

Though “friend” is stretching the definition a bit.

“He’s the one who dug up the information you sent to us on Avon?” Jubilee asks, staring at me.

Lilac ignores the question. “
You’re
the one who helped us set up our security system?” she bursts out, breaking through her shock, finally sounding for a brief moment more like the girl I knew as a child. “But why…you weren’t really helping us, were you?”

The muscles in my jaw seize, a flare of anger making me want to grind my teeth. “What a conclusion to jump to, Miss LaRoux. I’m hurt. Historically speaking, it’s not usually my family screwing yours over.”

Lilac takes a step forward, moving away from Tarver’s hand, her eyes on my face. “I’m sorry I never came to see you after—” Her voice cracks, and she tries again. “I was only fourteen. I was heartbroken, and it was my fault, and I couldn’t…”

I can feel Flynn’s and Jubilee’s stares, but worse, I can feel Sofia’s eyes on me, and some distant part of my mind wonders how much of this story she’s able to put together from the fragments.
Focus on that. Focus on her. Don’t think about Simon.
The blood’s roaring in my ears, rushing like wind, like whispering voices. I try to focus on that and not on the girl in front of me.

“I loved your brother, Giddy.” Lilac pauses, not coming any closer to me, though I can tell from her body language that she wants to. “I never wanted anything to happen to him. And I never,
never
forgot him.”

Behind her, her fiancé is silent. If hearing Lilac talk about her so-called love for another guy hurts him, Tarver doesn’t show it.

“Yeah, well.” I long to shove my hands into my pockets, slouch my shoulders, hide away from all of this. Face-to-face stuff is Sofia’s thing, not mine. “That makes two of us. At least you had no problem moving on.”

“That’s not fair.” Lilac’s voice quickens a little, making the blood surge harder in my ears. “Giddy—Gideon—just because I fell in love with Tarver, that doesn’t change the way I felt about Simon. Simon is—Simon will
always
be—with me. The same way he’ll always be with you.” She lets her breath out, long and slow. “You look so much like him.”