Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (42 page)

“That’s not the worst of it,” Tarver replies in a low voice, and I turn my head to follow his gaze. A slow procession of husks is rounding the corner. There are dozens—no, hundreds—of others, some on foot, others in cars, moving toward the heart of the crash site. All of them with that fluid, unnatural gait. All of them with empty faces and black eyes. There must be a thousand of them between us and Lilac.

Oh, hell, Sofia. This is bad.

And it is. The possessed are everywhere. We scale the ruins of buildings, we climb through the rubble and run across the dangerous, open spaces of the streets. Our hands bleed from grabbing at broken edges, our eyes sting from the dust, and our throats burn from the smoke we can’t help but inhale as we work. The sounds the city makes as the ruins settle help to mask the sound of Lilac’s black-eyed, loose-limbed army. There are thousands of them now, and every route we try is blocked.

Tarver is single-minded and unflinching. As dusk begins to fall, I’m afraid of what he might do if we can’t find a way through soon. Eventually, when we stumble across a burst water pipe, I convince him to halt for a few minutes, and we crouch by it in the shadows, drinking from our cupped hands.

He’s the one to break our silence, gazing out at the ruins beyond our temporary shelter. “The whispers saved her, on Elysium. They did it willingly, gave her the last of their energy. Enough to make her real, permanent.”

“That’s an incredible gift.” I don’t know what else to say.

“The ultimate gift,” he agrees, gazing down at his cupped hands, letting the water trickle slowly through his fingers. “In the instant it happened, Lilac said that she was a part of them, for the briefest moment. That they could see her, all of her…all the good, all the bad, and that they felt she was worth saving. This creature is the same species. How could it do such a thing? How could it harbor such hate?”

“Humans are all one species,” I reply. “But we’re all different. Perhaps, under harsh enough circumstances, any of us might be driven to do the unimaginable.”

And there she is—Sofia—appearing in my mind’s eye right on cue, that plas-pistol in her hand.
Under the right circumstances, any of us might be driven.…I’m beginning to understand, Dimples. Pity I’m probably not going to live to tell you so.

Tarver pushes to his feet. “We should get moving.”

I rise beside him, my knees and back screaming in protest. “This isn’t working. They’re multiplying by the hour—they’re going to spot us again, and we won’t make it out if they chase us.”

Tarver’s face is grim. “Then we fight.”

I can’t help it—I stare at him, trying to tell if he’s making some wildly inappropriate joke. “There are thousands of them. The best fighter in the world wouldn’t last five minutes, and we don’t even have real weapons. We need another way through.”

“You have an idea?” His voice is rough, his face filthy, but his eyes are burning when he looks across at me.

“We have to go down. Use one of these fissures, one of the old elevator shafts maybe. Get into the undercity, use the cover of the slums and hide in plain sight among the people there. Down there, I can get my hands on more equipment. There’s only so much I can do in my head, and I
have
to have the calculations finished for this program before we get there.”

“We’ll waste time,” he snaps, and I can see it in every line of his body—he wants to walk straight through the silent armies between us and Lilac, his desperation to get to her driving everything else from his mind.

“You want to get there, or die trying?” I snap my reply, and that gets his attention. “Because if we stay up here, that’s what’s going to happen. We have to go down. We can get close, that way, and hole up until she’s not expecting us anymore. We’ll be ready to climb up into the middle of LaRoux Headquarters by first light. This is what helps Lilac—this is what gives us a chance to reach her. Fighting our way through is impossible. It can’t be done.”

He’s strung taut, hands laced together behind his head as he gazes out over the ruins, knuckles white with the force of his grip. Then he curses, dropping abruptly into a crouch, arms curling around his head. As though he’s trying to physically hold himself together for her.

I dig deep, make my voice hard. “Time’s wasting. Let’s go.”

The others are so focused on the tasks our keeper sets us that they do not sense the rage building on its own, deep in the swamps. They are so focused on the place filled with soldiers that they do not see the madness simmering underneath the shield of rock and mud that conceals the green-eyed boy’s home.

I can see what this madman will do, and it will shatter the green-eyed boy’s heart. I have so little strength that I cannot stop the madman or touch anyone near him. My only hope is to reach out to the girl whose dreams I have shared, whose mind is as familiar to me as anything in this world. She will stop this horror—she must.

It is not until I am watching through her eyes as she stumbles upon the bloody massacre that I understand I am too late. It is her own horror that drives me from her mind once more—the last thing I see through her eyes is the face of the green-eyed boy, full of shock and betrayal and a grief so deep that the pain in the girl’s heart is a torture more painful than any our keeper could have inflicted upon me.

Forgive me.

THE UNDERCITY IS IN CHAOS
. Without electricity everything is in shadow, a false midnight blanketing the slums. There are no smells from street food vendors, no music from performers in the distance. The lanterns are dark, strings of them fallen into the streets and crushed underfoot.

But here, the horror of what’s happened to Corinth is all too real.

Everything is coated in a fine layer of debris the size of sand grains, a mix of ash and fragments of cement that crunches underfoot. People have armed themselves against looters with whatever they can find—we pass a young woman gripping a chunk of cement in her hands who watches us with frightened eyes until we turn the corner.

I try to imagine myself as she sees me—a threat, capable of robbing her of her home, or her life.

You’re leading others to Lilac, knowing they’re going to kill her. Doesn’t that make you exactly what she sees?

I shove that voice away, telling myself that it’s because some other idea will come to us, some way around what’s looming ahead, some alternative. Sanjana’s final warning was crystal clear.

We have one shot to stop this.

I’m still shaking from the climb down, bile and adrenaline bitter in my mouth. The elevators to the undercity don’t work without electricity, forcing us to descend via a ladder in the elevator’s maintenance shaft. Many, many times higher than the elevator shaft I climbed with Gideon—and without him next to me, without his harness supporting me. And then I was climbing up, out of danger.

He was right to say that climbing down is much, much worse.

I clear my throat, trying to banish my fears. It ought to be ridiculous that climbing down a ladder still frightened me when only a few kilometers away, an interdimensional being is slowly and methodically destroying the world—but reason plays no part in fear. Maybe it’s just that this is a fear I recognize, a fear I can digest. The other thing—I can’t wrap my mind around it.

It takes hours to cover ground that would take no time at all in the clearer streets above—or would have, before the crash. Jubilee finds a working radio after spotting someone in military gear—turns out he’s not a soldier, but once Jubilee makes it clear she’s not going to arrest him for theft of government property, he lets her send a distress call to Mori to come pick up Sanjana. Mori’s voice crackles and surges, her worry audible, but she promises to find the scientist. It’s clear, even through the distortion, that she’d rather be with us, heading into danger.

Jubilee gives the guy with the radio less choice about handing over the Gleidel he’d stolen, and even though it’s only one weapon between the three of us, it’s something.

Closer to the crash site, most of the upper- and middle-city levels have been destroyed, but underneath, sections of the undercity are almost completely intact. Ahead, a shaft of light illuminates the spot where an upper-city skyscraper has fallen, and chunks have broken through the supports meant to separate the layers of construction. As we draw nearer, I can see up into the ruined city above—it’s only a block away from my old penthouse.

It feels like years ago that I was sitting on the couch, patching up Gideon’s arm and ordering drinks from the SmartWaiter.

“You’re sure this is going to work?” Jubilee speaks without looking at me, her gaze too busy scanning our surroundings. I can understand why she’s nervous—there are too many people, too many bodies crowding here and there, to track everyone. We look too competent, I’m sure, to be an easy-looking target for opportunistic thugs taking advantage of the chaos, but that doesn’t mean some desperate gang won’t still attack. And that’s assuming—hoping, really—that the whisper’s reach doesn’t extend down here, and that there aren’t any of Lilac’s mind-controlled husks roaming the slums. We’ve got the shield Gideon left us, shoved deep in my inside pocket, and we left the other with Sanjana, but it’s the same below as it was above—if they see us, she won’t need mind control to hurt us.

“When I was trying to find a way inside LaRoux Industries,” I say, ill-fitting boots crunching on the layer of fine dust littering the pavement, “I must’ve mapped every physical entry point to the compound a dozen times over.”

“And you can reach LRI Headquarters from the slums?” Jubilee’s tone is dubious at best.

“You can get anywhere from the slums,” I answer. “If you know how.”

“Better trust her,” Flynn notes, sounding amused. “Sof can get inside anywhere.”

Jubilee hesitates—after all, we don’t have time to try another route if mine doesn’t work—but only for a split second before nodding and picking up the pace. “It’ll be total chaos as the day goes on,” she warns, as though the disorder now is only inconvenient. “It’ll be like it was on Verona when the rebellion broke out.” She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, but she sounds as though she’s speaking about something that happened only yesterday. Her mouth is set tight, her hand resting on the new gun at her hip. “Stay close.”

My eyes keep picking out familiar features—a man of just the right height, or a flash of sandy-colored hair, or a flash of indigo fabric that matches his backpack—but it’s never Gideon I’m seeing, only fragments of memory. If he and Tarver have run into the husks above by now, then it’s possible they’re somewhere down here too, trying to bypass Lilac’s army the same way we are.

But I can barely keep Jubilee and Flynn within line of sight with the jostling and milling of the frightened crowds—Gideon and Tarver could walk by ten meters away and we’d never see them.

Abruptly a hand closes on my arm and jerks me back, my lips forming a half scream before I can stop it. I’m whirled around to see a middle-aged woman with a curtain of dried blood down one side of her face—her pupils are dilated, and for a moment I’m certain it’s one of Lilac’s husks. But the woman’s eyes search my face vaguely, and I realize: she has a concussion. She must’ve been struck by a piece of debris.

“Mandy?” she’s asking. “Mandy, is that you?”

“N-n-no,” I stammer, my mouth dry and heart pounding. I cast a frantic look around, but Flynn and Jubilee have vanished in the press of the crowd. “Sorry, I don’t—”

“Mandy?” the woman asks again, drawing me closer; her fingers tighten painfully when I try to pull my arm away.

Then Jubilee appears again, elbowing her way back through the crowd. No sign of Flynn. “Let her go,” she orders, voice quick and sharp, hand on her gun.

“It’s fine,” I gasp, prying at the woman’s fingers. “She’s confused. Not dangerous.”

“I’m just trying to find my daughter,” the woman moans, before her hand slides away from my arm.

Jubilee pulls me away, dodging the crowds. “Too many people,” she says in my ear, over the noise of voices and sirens and destruction. “We’ve got to find some place to hole up until night, when it’s safer to move. We’ll get trampled if we don’t.”

I glance over my shoulder and see, for a brief, frozen second, the woman standing still where we left her, hands clasped, confused gaze sweeping back and forth; then the crowd swells, and closes around her, and she’s gone.

We barricade ourselves inside what had been a restaurant before looters got to it. There’s no food left, and most of the chairs and tables are gone, or in pieces. The front part of it was little more than a stall, but farther back the door is still sound, and the kitchen’s one of those hole-in-the-wall places with a metal security gate. It’ll hold for now, especially since there’s nothing left inside worth stealing.

Flynn and Jubilee are efficient, working together like they were born to it, moving tables and chairs toward the door, searching for other exits—one leads to the back alley but has a deadbolt strong enough to suit them. It isn’t until the work is mostly done that I see Jubilee’s hands are shaking where she’s dragging furniture, and that her face looks ashen despite her darker skin. It’s Flynn who finally puts a hand on her arm, saying something in her ear that makes her nod and take a breath. “We’ll have to stay until nightfall,” she says quietly. “It’s chaos out there.”