Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (41 page)

As our keeper forces us to greater and greater acts of destruction, we…I…do what little I can to find balance. I cannot stop a father from strapping explosives to his chest, but I can reach inside the green-eyed boy and plant the idea to move just far away enough that the blast will not kill him. I cannot shield the girl with the dimpled smile from the grief of losing her father, but I can help her sleep, help her decide to keep breathing each day.

And I cannot save the girl with the beautiful dreams, the girl I once knew on another world, in another life, from all that is to come. But I can keep her safe from the others. And I can find faith in her dreams.

I GRAB THE BROKEN LIP
of a chunk of concrete, overtired muscles protesting all the way from my knuckles to my shoulders as I haul myself up, scrambling for purchase before I hook a leg over the edge and begin the controlled slide down.

I’ve seen disasters on the lower levels before, building collapses or fires threatening to spread through a whole quarter, but those times always brought out the best in people: whole families banding together to rescue trapped strangers, neighbors forming bucket chains to fight the fires. This is a different world, desolation as far as the eye can see, whole sectors of brightly lit, bustling Corinth simply wiped from existence. This world isn’t safe, and somewhere out there in it, Tarver’s alone.

He can’t have had much of a head start, no more than an hour, before I saw he was gone, plus the extra quarter hour it took me to rig my lapscreen to emit the shield frequency to protect me from Lilac. I’m not even sure how long it’ll work. I have to catch up with him, and fast.

I can guess at which direction he’s moving—most of my options are blocked, so I’m hoping he’s taking the path of least resistance, the one that will get him to LaRoux Headquarters as quickly as possible. My surroundings are mostly silent; emergency sirens occasionally wail in the distance, but no more firefighting drones zip overhead. Every so often, sections of buildings collapse with no warning, the crashes earsplitting, the echoes rumbling across the landscape.

Huge chunks of debris ripped through this block and the next when the ship fell, shearing straight through the buildings, turning everything above head height to rubble—on the ground floors, some of the doorways are still intact, offering glimpses inside, their upper stories spilling out into the street. They were apartments and offices, mostly, and clothes lie strewn across broken tables and chairs, electronics turned to so much recyc and wiring. Then there are the bundles I thought at first were clothes—the crumpled bodies, silent where they fell.

I pause to adjust my pack, then make my way through the broken lower level of a law firm, reception desks and ornamental plants crushed beneath piles of rubble. It’s half-dark in here, and I place my feet carefully to keep my footfalls silent, avoid the telltale crunch of debris. I can see light on the far side, and I’m hoping there’s an open section of road if I can get across there.

I climb over a fallen girder blocking a doorway, easing my head through the gap to check what’s on the other side. In a blur of movement, something comes swinging toward me. I duck, my torso hitting the girder and knocking the wind out of me. The iron bar—because that’s what it is—smashes against the doorframe with a clang. I throw myself back into the room I came from, scrambling across the rubble with no thought for the noise, my blood roaring in my ears, my body alive with electricity.

There’s a figure in the doorway, vaulting the girder to come after me in one smooth movement, lifting the bar again. I roll to the side, jamming myself under a broken desk that will give me a moment’s shelter, kicking at the far side of it to smash an exit point. I’m too broad for it, but I drive one boot into the splintered desk over and over, desperately trying to escape before the iron bar comes swinging down again.

Except it doesn’t.

“Gideon?” Tarver’s crouching beside the desk, the bar in one hand. “What the
hell
are you doing? I nearly killed you.”

“I noticed,” I murmur, letting my head drop back to hit the rubble beneath me with a thump.

“Quick, we made too much noise.” He’s instantly businesslike, offering me a hand to haul me out from under the desk. “They’ll be here in a minute.”

I don’t have to ask who. Instead, I follow him as he climbs up another girder, grabbing for a beam across the ceiling and almost silently scrambling until he’s above eye level, sitting on a broken ledge. I climb onto his perch, and he lifts a finger to his lips, turning his gaze down. Just a few seconds later, the first of the husks come moving through the space we left, slowly searching for whatever made the noise.

We sit jammed in place, side by side, for a full ten minutes as they move through the building. There must be a hundred of them, methodically combing through wreckage and climbing past each other. They’re not efficient or particularly creative, but they’re relentless. And as if I need a reminder of the fragility of our situation, my temporary lapscreen shield dies as we sit there, leaving me dependent on Tarver’s once more. Only once the last has been gone for a couple of minutes does Tarver speak in a low voice. “What are you doing here?”

“What the hell do you
think
I’m doing here, Merendsen? I heard there was a sudden drop in property prices in this area, I wanted to check out some places I saw advertised.” I snort. “I’m here to help.”

“
You’re
here to help
me
.” His look is flat, disbelieving. Face smudged with dirt, gaze tired, he couldn’t be further from the guy I saw climb onto the dais alongside Lilac in the ballroom of the
Daedalus
. I have to find a way in, and quickly, or I’ll lose him all over again.
What would Sofia do?

And in the instant I ask the question, I know the answer. She’d tell the truth. Why is it that I’m so sure of that, yet I can’t trust that she’s ever told me the truth? I draw a slow breath. “It’s not for you. I’m here to help Lilac. And Simon. This is what he would have wanted for her, and I’ve realized that she never changed at all from the girl I knew as a kid. I needed people to blame, and she was one of them, but we should have been grieving for Simon together. This is what he would have wanted, and I’m the one that’s left to do it.”

Merendsen meets my eyes, and after a long moment, he nods, as if I’ve passed a test. “Then let’s go.”

Within a couple of minutes we’re slowly making our way through the desolate landscape once more. Merendsen’s climbing ahead of me, looking utterly at ease in black fatigues. He’s lacking only his gun—killed by the EMP—to look the perfect soldier. Though his shoulder must still be aching after he dislocated it on the
Daedalus
, he’s moving more quickly than most healthy people could.

He looks at home amidst the ruins of Corinth, as if the destruction around us is an outward manifestation of the pain inside him. Though I’m dressed the same outwardly, I’m out of my element and I know it.

The physicality of our fight to cross the burning city doesn’t bother me—the climbs and scrambles are no worse than some of my onsite hacks—but I’m used to silent, sterile places, not bloodstained sidewalks and chunks of buildings lying across my path. I’m used to security teams I can track, not silent husks, single-mindedly dissecting the city in a slow, methodical search grid. As we work our way through the wreckage, a part of my mind is preoccupied—taking what I learned from Sanjana’s printouts, turning that information over and over in my head. I’m still grappling with even
understanding
the programming of the rift, let alone closing it down without empowering the whisper to end the world. And I’m on a countdown that’s elapsing far too fast.

We climb through a restaurant that was inhabited when the debris hit—food’s scattered everywhere, and blood’s pooled underneath one slab of fallen wall, congealing a dark red after so many hours. Fires are still burning as we make our way toward the center of the destruction, the acrid smell of entire city blocks laid to waste getting inside my nose, making my eyes water. We’re seeing parts of the
Daedalus
herself now, enormous chunks of metal half melted by reentry and impact.

Tarver pauses for a moment atop a broken wall, surveying the landscape below us—the twisted shards of metal, the broken escape pods. Eventually, when it’s clear he’s not going to move on, I speak. “Merendsen?”

He blinks, looking across at me like he had no idea I was there at all, then shakes his head. “I’ve seen this before,” he murmurs, turning his gaze back out to the ruined city.

“This…here?” With a whisper involved, a vision doesn’t seem out of the question.

He shakes his head again. “A dead ship,” he says softly. “I never thought I’d see something like the wreck of the
Icarus
again. And here I am, heading into its heart once more.” His mouth forms a dark hint of a smile. “You watched my interrogation footage. But I lied about what happened at the wreck.”

“What really happened?”

His smile curves a few degrees further. “Lilac saved my life is what happened. And we found a path that led us out. The wreck of the
Icarus
was our turning point.” Then he’s moving again, carefully sliding down the slope made out of a crazily leaning wall. I slither after him, landing with a grunt.

He speaks again when we hit the bottom and find level ground. “Lilac never let herself feel for anyone again, after Simon. Not until Elysium. Not until she thought her father would never know. A part of her died when Simon did, Gideon. You should know that.” The words are a gift—the only sort of thank-you he can offer me right now. I understand that.

“I do,” I say, and I know now that it’s true. That I should have known it all along—Simon was a dreamer, but he was never a fool. He wouldn’t have given his heart to someone who could say farewell to him without a backward glance. It took me until I was fourteen to find a way into the military databases and find out exactly how he died.

It was a friendly-fire incident—another terrified recruit, jumping at shadows, who turned his gun on Simon by mistake. He turned it on himself just a few weeks later.

But every time I’ve thought of Simon dying alone on the battlefield, every time I’ve thought of his fear and confusion, all that blame belonged squarely at the feet of Monsieur LaRoux. Never Lilac.

“She told me about him.” Merendsen’s voice is quiet. “If she’d known you still needed her support, I know—”

“I know that too.” We pause, navigating our way around a crack in the road, jumping across a gap that offers a view clear down to the levels below, where fires rage, sending up black smoke. “There was nothing she could do. After Simon died, my parents split. My father couldn’t take what LaRoux did to us. My mother swallowed it, because she was a businesswoman, and making an enemy of Monsieur LaRoux simply wasn’t something she could do, not without the sort of revenge that would ruin her. So they went their separate ways.”

“What about you?” The glance Tarver shoots me might have belonged to Simon—quiet, measuring me up.

“I took off. I couldn’t deal with my father’s grief, I couldn’t watch my mother’s betrayal. I was down in the slums by the time I was twelve.”

“And that’s where you learned hacking?”

“That’s where I learned the dirty tricks. I already knew a lot of it. Simon taught me.”

“He taught her, too. The skill with electronics she learned from him saved her life—both our lives.”

We’re silent as we make our way along the edge of an open section of road, both watchful, but for a time, it’s as if my brother’s the third member of our party, walking silently beside us. It shouldn’t be easier to think about him than about Sofia. I don’t want to imagine her face when she realizes we’re gone. I owe her nothing, after the way she lied to me. But as I walk through my burning city beside a man who’ll risk the entire human race to save the girl he loves, I know that ‘should’ means nothing, when it comes to my heart. I hope she turns and runs—I hope she finds a place to hide from what’s coming. Somehow, I know she won’t.

I’m torn from my thoughts when Tarver grabs my arm, yanking me back into a ruined storefront. I follow his gesture, sinking to a crouch behind the remains of the wall, and immediately I register the reason for his urgency. The low rumble of a heavy vehicle is making its way up the street behind us, and with the city as it is, there’s no reason to assume the folks we’ll meet will be friendly. Tarver finds a metal rod and hefts it in both hands silently, and I pick up a chunk of concrete from the pile of rubble at my feet.

The engine turns out to belong to a delivery truck, with a woman behind the wheel, and four guys sitting on the open flatbed. It’s on sturdy hover cushions, suspended a couple of feet above the ground, where it’ll miss most of the debris. All five of them have the eerie, black-eyed stillness of husks. Their heads turn in slow, constant arcs as they scan their surroundings. Judging by their clothing, I’d say they’re the warehouse workers and office staff of the firm whose logo is on the doors of the cabin. “This is not good news,” I murmur, watching them as they slowly cruise past. “If they can drive, they can cover ground far more quickly than we can.”