Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (29 page)

He’s even better than he was in the Avon Broadcast—
I’d
surrender, given half a chance. But the Lilac creature just looks at him blankly, unaffected by his plea. “I was going to crush him,” she comments, glancing over at Tarver, leaning hard against the wall. “But this is far better. Let him die knowing he couldn’t save her. Let him die the way he should have died—falling in a tomb of twisted metal and fire.”

The words ring in the air, punctuated by the distant creaks and groans of whatever’s happening to the ship, and for a long moment I can’t understand what the creature means.
Metal and fire…falling…
Then, suddenly, my knees buckle. “You can’t—” My voice comes out hoarse with fear, choked with disuse.

Sofia reaches the same conclusion I do. “Oh God,” she whispers.

Lilac is going to bring down the
Daedalus
.

How the others back on the gray world fare, I will never know. Whether my kin on the other side of the rift can see me, sense me, I cannot tell. All I know is the blue-eyed man, and the link of hatred between us.

He talks to me often, of his wife, of his young daughter, of his work. He has begun work on a pair of ships that will use our universe to move even faster through theirs, and he delights in sharing with me all the successes in his life, certain they will cause me pain.

I wish I had brought his wife back to him, for then I could use her to free myself from this prison. Marked by our touch, she would be vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. I could take from him the thing he loves most all over again, and smile at him with her lips until his mind crumbles.

I could tell him that his new technology risks tearing a hole into our world. I could tell him that to toy with the fabric of the universe is to risk destruction. I could tell him his new ships are doomed.

But I have no mouth with which to speak. And I will wait.

ANOTHER SHUDDER TEARS THROUGH THE
ship, throwing me against Gideon. I don’t protest the arms around me—hell, my arms go around
him
too—because in this moment, I don’t care.

I don’t care about the Knave, I don’t care about his connection to the LaRoux family, I don’t care that I work alone and I don’t commit and I don’t fall in love and I don’t become attached. We’re standing on a ship that’s falling from the sky and if these are my last moments alive I’ll spend them with my arms around Gideon.

“Crash this ship and you die too,” Flynn breaks in, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of destruction all around us.

“Please.” Lilac’s lips curve to a faint smile. My skin crawls at the sight—it’d be easier, better, if she looked and acted nothing like herself. But I’ve seen that smile a dozen times in magazines and in HV interviews, and if it weren’t for the terrible darkness in her eyes, I’d think nothing was different. This is nothing like what I saw with my father, who lost everything of himself right before he walked into that barracks. This…
thing
, whatever it is, is still Lilac. And yet it isn’t. Lilac’s smile widens. “I’m tearing a ship apart without lifting a finger. You think the crash will kill me?”

“Then think about the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people in the district below. They never did anything to you or your kind, and you’ll kill them all when this ship hits. Do that and you’re no better than LaRoux.”

Lilac’s smile widens a little, and she casts her glance to the side. I’d almost forgotten about LaRoux, that realization jolting through me—I’d almost
forgotten
about him. He’s still on his knees, where he’d been crouching after his daughter was shot. He looks up at her, face haggard and lined, the blue eyes seeming almost watery, weak, compared to the deepest black of Lilac’s gaze.

“True,” she replies, still looking at LaRoux, her expression a sick combination of loathing and love. “I am, I suppose, what my father made me.” She stoops a little so that she can lay a hand against LaRoux’s cheek, a tender gesture that makes me shudder. “But you are wrong, when you say I’m no better than he is.”

Flynn doesn’t answer, and I know why. He spent a lifetime surrounded by people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to logic, to compassion, to reason. He knows madness when he hears it.

Lilac waits, and when no reply comes, her smile drains away, leaving something full of steel and fire behind. “Roderick LaRoux is a creature who defines himself by power. And I…I am better than him in
every
way.”

The ship shudders again, in time with an explosion that makes my body seize, panic and adrenaline sweeping through and dimming the pain in my hand. Every muscle’s screaming at me to run. But run where? To get to the shuttles we’d have to go toward the sounds of destruction—if there even are shuttles anymore.

Lilac looks back down at her father and smiles. “Daddy,” she says softly. “You’ll come with me, right?”

Roderick LaRoux’s lips part, gazing up at the thing that isn’t really his daughter anymore—and, like a switch has been flipped, his face changes. The tension in his shoulders drains, his lips cracking into a tremulous smile. I see him will himself into believing it, with the same conviction that helped him believe the creature in the rift could never hurt his Lilac. “You forgive me,” he whispers. “For Simon, for the
Icarus
—you forgive me?”

The Lilac-thing reaches for his hand to draw him up to his feet. “You’re my father,” she says, kissing his cheek. “And I’m not done with you yet.”

LaRoux gapes at her for a long moment before a smile slides into place on his features—a deliberate sort of expression, as he chooses blindness over reality. “Oh, my darling.” LaRoux’s voice is muffled, and I’m half expecting his eyes to go black like Lilac’s—but they remain clear and blue. His own willingness to delude himself is all the control Lilac needs. “My heart. Yes. Let’s go.”

Lilac casts one more glance over her shoulder at Tarver, whose arm, the one not supporting him against the wall, is hanging oddly. He takes a lurching step forward, trying to speak, but without another word, the LaRoux heiress and the creature inside her mind turn away, leading her father toward the staircase and up into the destruction.

“Lilac!” Tarver’s scream is hoarse, and suddenly he’s running despite his injury, despite what must be a concussion making his steps falter. “Lilac—”

“Sir, no!” Jubilee’s abandoning her gun, turning to intercept Tarver and put her whole body in between him and the stairs Lilac is ascending. He collides with her hard enough to make her groan for breath, but she doesn’t fall—she wraps both arms around him and hauls back, boots skidding on the metal grille of the floor. “Help me!” she cries, and Flynn’s moving instantly to add his strength to hers in trying to prevent Tarver from following Lilac.

“Let go!” Tarver shouts, struggling, barely sparing a glance for the woman dragging him back. “Let go, let me—I have to—
that’s an order, Lieutenant!
” He’s stronger than she is, stronger than them both, half-mad with grief and fear and pain, and barely coherent.

She struggles with him, gasping for air and shouting in his ear. “You can’t save her—Tarver, the whisper will make sure she survives this crash, and you can’t save her if you’re dead!”

He roars some kind of reply and tears free of her grip for half a second—and then she’s swinging her arm, open palm catching him on the head and knocking him sidewise. Half-stunned, he staggers against the wall, where Flynn holds him, his own muscles rigid with the effort.

Lee’s eyes snap toward us, and like that look is a jolt of adrenaline, all the oxygen comes rushing back into my lungs. “Can you walk?”

I try, dizzy with confusion and shock, to draw myself up straighter. I nod, and feel Gideon start breathing again at my side. Abruptly I realize that the fingers of my good hand are tangled through his.

“I won’t do this again,” Tarver’s saying, still trying, half-conscious, to push Flynn away from him. “I won’t live without her again. I can’t. I can’t. Lee…please. Please, leave me here. Please, Lee…”

Jubilee glances back over her shoulder at him, and I can see the pain of seeing him like this etched in the tension along her spine. Then she’s moving, joining Flynn, slinging Tarver’s good arm over her shoulder. “Flynn?”

He seems to understand her at a glance and jerks his head toward the far end of the deck. “There have to be shuttles around here somewhere—we’ll never make it up to the ambassadors’ launch pads.”

I raise my voice to be heard over another shriek of metal, shouting, “Maintenance shuttles, they’re along the far wall.” The other side of this huge chamber is half the length of the ship away, barely visible in the dim shadows.

Flashes of memorized floor plans swim up in front of my eyes, too fragmented to be of any use. We were never supposed to spend more than a few minutes here, but I learned this entire deck anyway. Anyone can make a plan—what separates out the survivors is who bothers to prepare for the moment when things stop going according to plan. But the shock’s starting to fade and pain is radiating up my arm, and I can hear whispering voices in my ear, and my fear is too thick, too tangible, to see through.

“We have to go,” Jubilee’s roaring, still wrestling with Tarver. “We have to fall back, sir!”

“Gideon, get her moving,” Flynn shouts, from where he’s on the ex-soldier’s other side, still holding him back.

Gideon pulls me after him as he starts to run, and we both stumble as a wave travels the length of the floor, jolting us off our feet and sending us flying forward. We scramble upright, our hands still linked tightly, and as I glance behind, I see Tarver finally running, flanked by Flynn and Jubilee.

There’s a great, screaming sound above us that sets my nerves on fire, meeting with the agonizing bolts of pain shooting up from my burned hand, scrambling my brain until I can hardly remember how to run. With a deafening slam, one of the workstations bolted onto the walls above us rips away, hitting the floor just meters to our right.

I skid to a halt, so abruptly that Gideon loses his grip on my hand and staggers on a few steps without me as I drop to my knees. The fire in my hand is burning, my ears are ringing. Dimly I can hear his voice calling my name, muffled and fuzzy, as though I’m underwater. The far wall of the huge engine chamber swims out of focus as the ground quakes beneath me. This ship is falling out of the sky, and we’re never going to make it to the shuttles.

We watch, from behind the veil between worlds, piecing together what the others have found. The children are growing older, each choice they make drawing them closer together, binding their fates.

Our kin on the gray world cannot hear us, but we can hear them. They are torn between despair and hope, bringing us no closer to understanding these creatures. The others, held captive in the place where the thin spot first appeared, grow weak and tired. No one has come, either to end them or to release them, in many years.

There is one we can no longer see, no longer hear—the blue-eyed man has locked it away so tightly we feel only the dimmest sense that it still exists.

Perhaps it will find us the answers we seek.

THE FLOOR SHUDDERS BENEATH MY
feet, and I stumble back from Sofia, still shouting her name. As she sways, dazed, I grab for her good hand to pull her upright.

Cormac looks back as he, Merendsen, and Jubilee run past us, and I wave him on, pointing at the corner where I’m praying the shuttles are docked. He dodges a falling banister that hits the deck in a shower of sparks, then shouts something unintelligible to the others.

With a shove I get Sofia moving, but she’s cradling her injured hand against her body, face deathly white. We tear across the open space of the engineering department, as I desperately try to keep watch for falling debris, and just as desperately try to pick a clear path through the twisted workstations, balconies, and gantries that litter our path. For a frantic moment I wonder if the hull’s even intact—but if it wasn’t, we’d know it. We’d be a little short of breath.

Flynn and Jubilee haul Tarver along ahead of us, and I’m clutching Sofia’s good hand in mine, trying to block out her cries of pain as I drag her around the smoking ruins of a console. At the last instant I spot the sparking wires snaking along the ground in our path, and I swing her away by the hand I’m holding, sending her stumbling once more.