Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (37 page)

“This way.” His words are short, clipped, precise and efficient. “Fewer husks—narrower streets.”

I risk a glance behind me as I skid to turn the corner following the others, and my heart sinks. The husks might be slow to react, might shuffle along as they search for targets—but once given a task, they can move as quickly as any of us. There are at least a hundred of them, only a few meters back. If they catch us and rip the shields from Flynn and Tarver, or drag us beyond their reach, we’ll have no protection left against the mental net the whisper’s casting over the city. I’d rather they tear us apart where we stand, than become one of those things.

My breath rushes out in a sob, and I stumble—Gideon’s hand grabs at my arm, and together we lurch to our feet and take off, Tarver bringing up the rear behind us.

The streets spin dizzyingly around us as we sprint through the maze of rubble and sinkholes. The pavement starts to crumble beneath me at one point and I have to jump for the far side—I don’t have time to look back, but I can hear a distant crash a few seconds later as the debris from street level drops down, down into the mid-city below, to shatter. We turn one corner, then another, then another—then turn back again, hitting a dead end, losing valuable seconds. The street funnels in, narrowed by the debris on either side. Then, abruptly, ahead of us is a wall of stones and twisted metal supports, part of a nearby skyscraper that’s sunken and tumbled into the street. My feet pause only for a moment before I take off again, this time dragging Gideon behind
me
as we move, start climbing the mountain of rubble.

Our hands and feet scrabble against the loose detritus, and my mind seizes wildly on a memory.
Keep your body close to the wall. Don’t look down. I’m right behind you.
All the little things Gideon called as I scaled the sheer wall of the elevator shaft in LaRoux Industries, what feels like years ago.

What I wouldn’t give to be back in that elevator shaft.

We’re not moving fast enough—though the pile of rubble isn’t that steep, it’s impossible to tell what’s solid and what’ll give way as soon as we grab it. And the husks are closing in.

Tarver turns, throwing himself back against the rubble and bringing his gun around to train on the things now starting to climb up through the broken building toward us. “Keep moving!” he shouts, his words punctuated by the squeal of the military-grade Gleidel. A bolt rips through the fleshy part of an arm, making the husk reel back and drop. Another shot, and another—two more go down, but the first one’s already moving again, resuming the climb, barely even slowed by the wound on his arm that’s now bleeding freely.

Pain doesn’t stop them—and none of us, not me, not Gideon, not Tarver or Jubilee or Flynn—none of us would be able to shoot to kill an innocent. Because that’s what the husks are: real people, with real lives, their brains and bodies hijacked.

Jubilee joins Tarver, pausing in her climb to draw her own weapon again, gasping to catch her breath as she fires once, twice; they’re barely making a dent in the mob surging up after us. I reach for the edge of a boulder-size hunk of cement—the bigger pieces usually move less—only to feel it shift and start to shudder toward me. I shriek and lurch to the side as it goes rolling down the slope, crashing into one of the husks and sending it sprawling.

I glance over at Gideon, whose eyes meet mine—and then we’re both reaching for whatever pieces of rubble we can find, hurling them down the slope at the mob, the sounds of shattering cement mingling with the shrieking of weapons fire. Flynn scrambles sideways so his concrete missiles won’t hit us, and joins the fight.

Then Gideon’s voice cracks in a shout, and I see him go skidding down the slope. I dive after him, grabbing at one of his arms just as my eyes pick out the hand wrapped around his ankle; a hand belonging to an old woman, her face horrifyingly serene as her thin, bony fingers dig into Gideon’s skin hard enough to turn it white. I give a wordless cry, wrapping both hands around Gideon’s and bracing my feet against a steel girder, as Gideon flails out with his other leg, trying to kick her off. Tarver’s there a breath later, unhesitatingly letting his gun drop and skitter away down the slope as he uses both hands to grab for Gideon’s other arm, helping me pull him out of the husk’s grasp, scrambling just inches ahead of the mob.

My arms wrap around Gideon and his around me, and my body’s no longer listening to the frantic staccato drumline of commands from my brain—
climb higher—keep moving—run—fight—stay alive
—and for a heartbeat neither of us moves, and I don’t have to look at him to know he feels it too, that this is it, and none of it should’ve mattered; the lies, the deception, the fake names and the false pretenses, none of it was real or true, and now we’re never going to have the chance to know each other as we really are.

A pulse of pressure explodes across us, erupting against my ears, leaving my head ringing with…silence. All I can hear is my own breath, tearing and gasping for air—my breath and Gideon’s, the force of it stirring my hair. And Tarver, a few feet away. And…I open my eyes to see Flynn with his arm around Jubilee, supporting her—she’s hurt somehow, I can’t tell how—and holding her gun in a shaking hand. He’s pulling the trigger and nothing’s happening, the gun silent and dark now, as dead and useless as an inert hunk of debris.

Everyone is still, like someone’s pressed “pause” on the playback of this moment, and my mind tries frantically to figure out what’s happened.

I turn just in time to see the husks—all of them, every single one in the mob of hundreds surging after us—drop in unison, falling like marionettes whose strings have been cut. Only after they’ve hit the ground is it possible to see the one figure still standing, only a few meters beyond the bottom of the rubble. It’s a woman, older than us but not by much, clad in a dirty, battered suit of some kind. One hand hangs useless and still at her side, the other clasped, trembling, around an object that, from this distance, looks like some kind of grenade. Something about her dark skin and hair feels familiar, though I know I’ve never seen her before. Something, something at the back of my mind…

“Hey, you,” she murmurs, voice thin and wobbly. I follow her gaze to see Tarver there, stunned, grip gone so nerveless he actually slides a few feet downward in a trickle of debris. The woman sways, and it’s only then that I realize not all the grime on her jumpsuit is dirt—there’s dried blood there too, spread across one side of her torso. “You guys make an awful lot of noise.”

Movement behind her makes my heart give an abrupt lurch—Tarver sees the husk at the same time, and suddenly he’s descending the pile of rubble without slowing, causing a landslide of debris and dust. But he’s not going to get there in time. There’s a boy stumbling toward the woman in the jumpsuit, stumbling because one of his ankles isn’t working right—he must’ve been so far behind the rest of the group that whatever took them out missed him entirely.

The woman, seeing Tarver’s sudden headlong slide down the rubble, looks back. She gasps, drops the thing in her good hand, and pulls something else out of the satchel at her side just as the boy reaches out for her. She jabs it into his ribs, and the crackling sound of electricity splits the air. The whisper-controlled boy jerks and seizes—
it’s a Taser, the thing in her hand
—and then drops to the ground, as motionless as the sea of bodies between us.

“Sanjana!” Tarver calls as he lands in a heap at the bottom of the rubble, then leaps unsteadily to his feet.

Recognition surges through me, as quick and sharp as the Taser blast. I’ve seen this woman’s personnel picture before—one of dozens I sorted through while making myself an LRI employee ID months ago—but I never knew who she was.

Sanjana. Dr. Rao. Our rift expert.

“You rang?” she retorts weakly, the Taser falling from a hand gone nerveless. She sways again—making Tarver lurch forward—then drops into a heap, Tarver diving for her barely in time to keep her head from hitting the shattered pavement.

Their faith gives us strength, strength enough to try, in the only ways we can, to reach them. To ask them for help. To beg for an end.

We reach into their thoughts and try to speak through the images of people they knew, souls lost in the crash, but are met with fear. We try to speak, to use the words learned from long years under observation, but they cannot understand us. We try to show them they are not alone—we give him his home, the poem held closest to his heart; we give her a flower, a reminder of the unique and fragile thing she is fighting for.

We pave a path for them in fragile petals and every step closer they take we feel stronger. They have taught us faith, and hope, and in them we have found our strength again.

And then she dies.

WE MAKE IT ONLY AS
far as a shopping arcade a few blocks away. Tarver carries the scientist part of the distance, but as soon as she starts coming back to consciousness, she starts mumbling about being able to walk—she seems to accept the compromise of being half lifted along, supported between Tarver and me. Jubilee’s hand is torn up a little, where her grip slipped while climbing and her palm slid across a jagged bit of steel, but she’s on her feet, Flynn by her side. Sofia’s the one who finds the cavernous opening beyond a fallen portico façade, crawling through and then gesturing for us to follow.

Normally, carrying Sanjana would be nothing—she’s not very heavy, and there’s two of us—but by the time we ease her through the gap in the façade, I’m ready to drop myself. I stumble and let her go a bit too abruptly as soon as we’re inside, making Tarver sag under the sudden additional weight, and we all end up sinking to the dusty, cracked floor in a heap.

The only light’s coming from the partially blocked entryway, and Sofia—also on the floor, I didn’t even notice her drop—groans and drags her pack over to rummage for a flashlight. Nothing happens when she flicks it on. I can see her profile backlit by the sun on the street outside, see her stare blankly at the flashlight as though its failure has turned her brain off, too, and this last obstacle is too much to bear.

“EMP blast,” Tarver rasps, voice hoarse with exhaustion and catching as he chokes on the dust stirred up by our entry. “Don’t know why it hurt them, but that was that pulse out there. Flashlight won’t work. Guns either. Nothing that runs on power.”

Sofia drops the flashlight with a clatter and slumps back over on the floor, defeated. If my leg wasn’t pinned under Sanjana’s half-conscious body, I’d drag myself toward her to make sure she’s all right—but I can’t even tell if I’m all right. My muscles keep shaking, which suggests that at least all my limbs are still attached. Unless they’re phantom twitches. Isn’t that what they call it, when you lose an arm or a leg, and you still feel like it’s there? Phantom twitches—phantom exhaustion—phantom sensations from bits that aren’t there anymore…a laugh that even I recognize, dimly, distantly, as somewhat hysterical, whispers out of my lips before I turn my face against the stone floor, not even caring as the dust sticks to my sweaty brow.

There’s a crack, a whoosh, and then red light blossoms against my closed eyes—my eyes are closed? When? I force my lids open to see Jubilee’s face glowing. Then she’s moving, and my tired brain makes sense of what I’m seeing—it’s an emergency flare, something she must have had in her pack. She hands it to Flynn, sitting beside her, who tucks it in under a rock, shielding the glow so that it offers us only a little light. Hopefully, it’ll be invisible from the outside.

Most of the arcade has collapsed—though the wreck of the
Daedalus
is still a few kilometers away, the shock from its impact has leveled over half the buildings in the city this far out. A few storefronts are still intact, promising high-end shopping experiences that their battered, darkened interiors certainly can’t deliver. A jewelry store’s security grate has been smashed apart by a fallen column of marble; the fact that the dust and rubble on the floor have been undisturbed makes my skin prickle. Under normal circumstances, even in the upper city, this place would’ve been picked clean by looters.

The weight on my leg shifts, yanking me back to the present, and I remember Sanjana. I sit up, reaching out to ease my foot out from under her as she lets out a groan. Tarver bends over her, brushing her hair out of her face so he can scan it.

“You okay?” he asks, intent. “Sanjana?”

She groans again, as though protesting the need to reply, but then opens her eyes and struggles up onto her elbows so she can eye Tarver wearily. “You do keep saving my life, Captain.”

“It’s ‘Major’ now,” notes Jubilee, glancing up from her torn-up hand, which Flynn is inspecting in the unsteady light of the flare. “He got promoted after Patron.”

“Actually, it’s just ‘Tarver’ now,” corrects the ex-soldier, the grim line of his mouth finally easing into something almost like a smile. “And to be honest, I’m pretty sure you just saved our lives. How’d you do that?”

Sanjana grimaces as Tarver helps her up into a seated position, easing back to lean against a block of stone. “Electromagnetic pulse. I was pretty sure that the rift entities’ seemingly supernatural abilities are actually directly linked to the power differentials between their dimension and ours, and that their method of control is nothing more than an electrical interception of the signals firing in a person’s neural path…ways…” She trails off, eyes flicking from Tarver’s blank face, then across to Jubilee’s, then across what can be seen of the others in the dim light. “Huh. Wrong audience.”