Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (33 page)

The LaRoux estate occupies an area covering at least ten city blocks, and even after catching a ride with some of Kumiko’s soldiers, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Thankfully they had the spare supplies to outfit us—otherwise we’d all be trying to infiltrate the LaRoux estate in battered formalwear. As it is, seeing Sofia clad in black cargo pants and a military-style vest and boots is strange enough to do my head in.

The massive wrought-iron gate at the street entrance is mostly for show—the air shines with the telltale glimmer of a security field. Tarver punches in a string of numbers that makes the field shimmer, then vanish.

“Lilac’s code,” he murmurs. “No one’s bothered to change it.”

Beyond the gate stretches a field of lush, green grass, and gardens planted with dozens upon dozens of pale pink roses. Lilac’s favorites, according to the gossip columns and architectural magazines that interview the family. We pass a bench shaded by a weeping willow that makes Tarver’s jaw clench. Something about it is familiar, nagging at me until it clicks. This is the garden where their engagement photos were taken.

The grounds, like the city outside, are eerily empty. If there was to be a summit here, even an informal one, there should be…people. Valets, servers, bodyguards, staff…Instead all is still, and silent, like the castle in a fairy tale abandoned for a hundred years. I half expect to find servants and cooks asleep at their posts. Instead there’s only us, our footsteps in the grass and on the stones, like the five of us are the only people left in the world.

Us, and the ghost of Lilac LaRoux.

I’ve never been to the LaRoux estate on Corinth. Simon and I used to go after school to their mansion on Paradisa, one of their many vacation homes, and play—Simon played, anyway. I’d spend my afternoons watching them through the banister of the loft over the playroom, which was as far as I was allowed to come before Simon would chase me off. I remember them giggling over electronics as Simon showed her how to rewire the automatic cleaning bots to play music at random intervals or start eating all the fringe on the rugs. I’d watch, longing to be included with the big kids when they set off firecrackers in the tennis courts with Lilac’s cousins, or, later, as they’d watch movies in the den, carefully sitting a hand’s breadth apart. I remember watching that distance close, week by week. I remember thinking—as my big brother watched her out of the corner of his eye instead of the movie, gathering his courage to put an arm around her shoulders—that I’d never end up like that, terrified of a girl.

And now Sofia can pretty much stop my heart with a glance.

Tarver steps off the path and leads us around toward the east wing of the house, where a servants’ entrance might give us more cover as we break in. Despite the emptiness of the grounds, there’d surely be guards on the front door—if nothing else, the bodyguards brought by the various senators and their delegations. I catch glimpses of the house through the windows as we go. A grand piano here, a sun-filled solarium there. Every room empty.

The servants’ entrance has both a keypad and a hand scanner, and while the system cheerfully accepts the code Tarver enters, it offers up only a blaring tone and a flash of red when he places his hand on the scanner.

“Did they know we were coming?” murmurs Jubilee, reaching—unconsciously, I’m sure—for the gun strapped to her hip.

Tarver tries a second time, with the same result, expression grim. “Hard to say. He could’ve easily revoked my access a week ago, just to piss me off. We’re not exactly father and son, LaRoux and I.” He moves off to the side to cup his hands around his eyes and peer through a window.

Sofia glances at me, and I know why—I give my head a little shake. “I might be able to hack the security pad, but it’d take me a while, probably a couple of hours. It’d be different if I’d had time to plan ahead, but…” I grimace.

“Maybe we try the front door after all, then.” Sofia’s quiet, eyes shifting from me to the others. “Flynn’s part of the Avon delegation, and we could leave Tarver out here and then come open the door for him once we’ve talked our way—”

Her murmur is interrupted by the loud, sharp crash of breaking glass, making me jump back half a step. Tarver, ignoring the rest of us, shakes shards of glass off the elbow of his jacket. “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do that,” he comments as he reaches through the broken windowpane to unlatch the frame.

We’re all on alert as we make our way across the first floor, but no one seems to have heard the breaking window. I can’t shake the chills creeping up and down my spine, the wrongness of a house like this, barren of life.

“You’ve been here before,” Flynn says to Tarver, as we creep past a large, darkened kitchen. “Where would he hold an impromptu summit meeting?”

“Probably the formal dining room,” Tarver replies, brow furrowed. “Or the grand hall. We never spent much time there.” He pauses, steps faltering, then takes a deep breath. “Stop for a second and listen—we ought to hear them speaking if they’re either place.”

We all pause, our footsteps on the marble floor echoing half a breath longer before fading into silence. A grand staircase sweeps off to the left, curving around a fountain in the form of a column, some invisible force drawing droplets of water from the pool sunk into the floor up to disappear somewhere above. For a few seconds, all I can hear is the quiet burbling of the water.

Then there is a sound—but not of voices. It’s a low hum, mechanical, vibrating deep in my stomach. I look up, glancing round to the others. They hear it too, and for a moment we all stare at each other.

Then Jubilee gasps. “It’s a shuttle. Warming its engines.”

Tarver’s moving before any of the rest of us, abandoning stealth to break into a sprint, and we all take off after him. Despite my own fitness—climbing and abseiling aren’t nothing—my lungs are aching trying to keep up. If there’s any chance Lilac is here, Tarver’s not letting her go.

We burst through a set of wide French doors into a sunlit courtyard and skid to a halt, blinking. One shuttle—an orbital craft, designed to reach the Corinthian spaceport station—is already lifting off, vertical takeoff engines slowly rotating as it angles up toward the sky. Tarver’s got his weapon drawn, and for half a heartbeat his hands waver, starting to jerk up toward the craft, then falling.

“You’re earlier than I’d anticipated.” The voice belongs to Roderick LaRoux, and this time Tarver’s hands are rock steady as he swings his gun around to train it on Lilac’s father.

“Where is she?” he demands, taking a few steps forward.

He’s forced to stop, however, as a number of people in the courtyard turn to face him with a subtle—but very noticeable—threatening air. They’re not guards—most of them are too slight, too well dressed, or too old for that role. And it’s only after I’ve scanned their faces and found some of them hauntingly familiar that I realize who they are: senators from the Galactic Council. I’ve seen them on the HV, in the newsfeeds.

And every one of them has the black eyes and blank faces of the whisper’s husks.

“I don’t imagine you want to shoot a dozen elected officials just to get to me,” LaRoux says, and though he’s trying to sound calm, amused, even, I can see something’s wrong. His suit, normally so impeccably tailored, is frayed at the cuffs, and marred by spots of ash and dust. His white hair is in disarray around his temples. His eyes sweep to the side to rest on Sofia, and the amusement in his gaze hardens. “You again. You’re the one who tried to hurt my girl.”

Sofia doesn’t bother to hide the hatred in her own expression, but her voice is even. “No. I tried to hurt
you.
”

“So shortsighted,” LaRoux replies, and if it weren’t for the setting, the blank-eyed senators and their staff, the guns trained on LaRoux, the shuttles whirring to life behind him, it’d sound like he was scolding a schoolchild. “Killing me would do nothing but brand you all murderers. Even if you destroyed every person standing here, enough good senators are already on their way back to their planets.”

“Why are you doing this?” I demand. How many times did I tell Sofia that nothing would be solved by killing one person? Right now, it’s sounding like a better idea than it did before. “You already have more power than anyone in
history
. What more could you possibly want?”

“I want peace!” LaRoux’s voice is sharp and quick.

Half a dozen senators turn in unison, as if on some inaudible command, to begin piling into the other orbital shuttlecraft. The third, smaller craft is just a transport, not designed to break the atmosphere—LaRoux isn’t leaving Corinth. Not yet.

“Peace,” he repeats, regaining control of his voice, pitching it just loud enough to be heard over the shuttle engines. “You children, you have no understanding of loss. Of the tragedy of war, the innocents who get caught in the exchanges of pointless violence.”

“We have no understanding of loss?” Jubilee gives a sharp bark of laughter. “There’s not one person here who hasn’t lost someone to the pointless exchange of violence, LaRoux. You think age is necessary to learn pain?” Her gun doesn’t waver as she moves forward, ranging to the side so that between them she and Tarver have him covered.

LaRoux barely notices.

“Their brothers,” she says, tilting her head toward Tarver, and toward me. “His sister.” Flynn, not far from Jubilee’s side, exhales, his spine straightening. Jubilee swallows. “My parents.”

“My father,” Sofia whispers, making me long to reach out to her.

“And my wife,” replies LaRoux, his voice cold. “Lilac’s mother.”

Tarver shakes his head. “Lilac’s mother died in a shuttlecraft accident on Paradisa. When she was seven. She told me.”

LaRoux slips his hands into his pockets, legs braced as his head dips for a moment. “She did die in a shuttlecraft. But it wasn’t on Paradisa. And it wasn’t an accident.” His gaze flicks up, the line of his mouth grim with a pain as real as any of ours. “I was visiting one of my research stations on a LaRoux Industries planet, and she’d come with me. Riots broke out—rebels protesting God knows what—and I had my people put her on a shuttle back to the spaceport to keep her safe. The shuttle was sabotaged.”

Jubilee’s shifting her grip on her gun. “What planet?”

“Does it matter?”

“What planet?”

“Verona. It was—it was Verona.”

Jubilee lets out a curse, voice strangled, gun dropping for a fraction of a second before her training steadies her and she clamps down on the shock and confusion in her expression.

“You never told Lilac?” Tarver’s not wavering even an inch.

“Why would I?” LaRoux’s eyes shift toward him. “Why would I hurt her, give her reason to hate anybody? Lilac is kind, and generous, and innocent—the truth would only cause her pain. An accident—you can let that go. Why would I ever tell her that her mother was murdered by the very people I was trying to help?”

“Help?” Jubilee grinds out.

It’s Flynn who has to take over, his partner’s anger too thick for her to speak through. He takes one of the same slow, careful breaths I recognize from the Avon Broadcast before he speaks. “Your ‘help,’ sir, has led to countless deaths on Avon. Your experiments, the Fury, the return of a rebellion that we would’ve easily, instantly given up in exchange for the tiniest bit of humanity—”

“Avon.” LaRoux’s lip curls a little. “Avon’s nothing. A few thousand people. Yes, I built a rift on Avon, moved the entities there from Verona. You can’t tell me it would have been better to leave them in a place where millions, instead of hundreds, would die?”

“Why did
anyone
have to die?” Sofia blurts, eyes reddening, the blood rushing to her face.

“To save
billions
,” LaRoux snaps. “I discovered these creatures, found out what they could do, if only I could harness them. If a fraction of us have to fall in order to elevate the rest? It’s a sacrifice, and a horrible one. Most people could never bring themselves to make that choice. Most people don’t have the vision—most people aren’t strong enough to weigh life against life. But imagine a golden era, a time of absolute peace—imagine no murder, no sabotage, no pain. No grief. Imagine—imagine never having to lose a loved one ever again.” For the first time, LaRoux’s voice falters, cracking.

“It’s not for you to choose what sacrifice is worthwhile, who should die,” says Tarver. “You might have tried to keep Lilac by lying about her mother, but you lost her when you murdered Simon Marchant.”

LaRoux’s eyes flicker toward me, and I realize his nonchalance on the
Daedalus
was at least partly an act—there’s guilt in his gaze. He knows exactly who I am. “I—Simon Marchant was a mistake. I intended for him to be sent away. I didn’t expect…His death was an unforeseen side effect.”

Side effect.
The words burn through my brain, wiping out everything else. I can’t move, can’t speak, an anger and grief I thought I’d put behind me surging up like a tide. It’s not until I feel a touch on my hand that I realize I’ve closed my eyes; I know before I open them that it’s Sofia, her fingertips brushing against my palm, opening my fist, interlocking her fingers with mine.

“Enough.” Tarver’s voice is quiet, almost gentle if not for the hint of ice behind it. “Where is Lilac?”

“She’s safe.” LaRoux’s gaze meets that of his onetime future son-in-law. The piercing blue of his eyes is all the more intense in the morning light, and the look he directs at Tarver is just a little too wild, a little too fierce. “She’s
happy.
That ought to be enough for you, if you truly love her.”

For a moment, everyone is silent, shocked. I find myself staring at LaRoux, searching his face for signs of the self-delusional madman inside. For him to believe that his daughter’s change of heart, her sudden willingness to go along with his plans, stemmed from anything other than the whisper taking control of her…He’s insane.

“Happy?” Tarver’s still cold, calm. Ruthless. “She’s one of them. The creature in the rift, that’s what stood at your side, smiling at you, calling you ‘Daddy.’ You say you never wanted Lilac to hate, but that’s all she is now—the thing inside her is nothing more than hate. And you’re what she hates more than anything in the universe.”