Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (5 page)

I slide my other hand past the hacker’s lap, toward the door controls, the movement quick but smooth. The driver’s going to get over his confusion and outrage at some point, and I need to get the door open so we can bolt. I’m about to palm the scanner when the boy’s lips curve under mine—he’s smiling,
grinning
—and it’s the only warning I get before he’s parting his lips and taking full advantage of my ploy by trying to stick his tongue down my throat.

Asshole.

The fabric grows thin, translucent. Just on the other side of it is a young man with dark hair and blue eyes, gazing at the fabric as though he can see through it. This is what we have waited for.

“I wish I knew what the hell this is,” the young man mutters, in the language of the words and images and sounds that pierce the stillness.

The thin spot pulses, and the young man takes a startled step back. He’s staring even harder at the translucent place in the fabric, but after some time he gives a nervous laugh. “I’m imagining things,” he tells himself. “It’s not like it can hear me.”

The thin spot pulses again, more brightly this time.

The young man’s face goes white. “Rose,” he calls, voice suddenly urgent. “Rose, come quick. I think…I think it’s sentient.”

ALEXIS’S FINGERS FIND THE SCANNER
on the door behind me, and I’m ready when it suddenly gives, breaking away from her to tumble out of the car with my make-out partner a beat behind me. Somehow I get my feet on the ground, and we dodge a gaggle of shoppers and a pair of electrobikes, the cab driver roaring behind us. For a moment we’re in perfect sync, and then she ruins it by swinging her arm sideways to whack me in the chest as we turn up an alleyway, sending a line of pain snaking down my injured arm.

“Hey, what was
that
for?” I hiss.

“You know,” she snaps, breath coming quickly.

I’d love to think her breathlessness is from our moment of passion in the cab, but we’re running pretty fast. “
You
kissed
me
, Dimples. How was I supposed to know you didn’t want me joining in?”

“My name’s Alexis!”

“I’m really sure it’s not.”

We spin around a corner, coming to a halt beside the back entrance to a designer boutique, chests heaving. She grabs my good arm, spinning me around to take a look at my bloodied sleeve. “How bad is it? Can you make it another few minutes?”

“No longer than that,” I reply, pressing my hand down over the wound once more, buzzing with a heady mix of relief at our escape, and the gut-twisting knowledge that whatever I saw today in that holosuite, it was a bad, bad thing.
Merciful mother of fried circuits, my arm hurts.
“Got somewhere I can seal it?”

The girl goes silent a long moment, then nods. “I’ve got a place.”

She leads me along another alleyway and between a couple of showrooms, then past the gated entrance to Regency Towers, the place she named for the driver, and through the garden next door to it. I can tell she’s mapped out her routes around this neighborhood, and I respect that. From there, we cut through a maintenance gate, so that when we approach the entrance of Camelot Heights—
please, our actual destination, damn this hurts
—nobody from the street has seen us go in. She pauses to pull a thin, close-fitting felt hat from her purse and uses it to conceal her blue hair as she keys in the security code and we slip inside. My stomach’s growing uneasier by the second; a girl who lives in a place like this isn’t a criminal, at least not the same kind I am. Was she sneaking into the holosuite today just for kicks? An image of the metal rift flashes before me once again, and the fear in her eyes. If she thought she was in this for fun, she sure knows now that it’s more than that.

“Kristina!” It takes me a moment to realize the smiling doorman is talking to us—or rather, to Dimples. “Who’s your friend?”

“That’s for me to know, Alfie.” She laughs, leading me into the elevator. Her game is flawless, like her laugh. The fear I saw back at LaRoux Industries is gone, and she’s not missing a beat. She hits the top button—penthouse,
of course
—and with a barely audible hum, we’re moving. It’s not until we’ve passed the penultimate floor without anybody else joining us that she starts digging through her purse. She produces a pair of dainty lace gloves and slips on the right one. When we reach the top floor, she presses the gloved hand against a square panel that glows with an ivory-colored light. It crackles briefly, as though the whole thing’s bristling with static.

I only have a moment to size up the security system, and then the doors are rushing open, confronting me with the sort of luxury I haven’t seen in years. Dimples tosses her purse down on the couch and vanishes behind a wall of frosted glass, calling instructions as she goes. “Sit down before you fall and crack your head open.”

With the slightly guilty feeling I’m making the whole place dirty—ridiculous, under the circumstances—I peel off my shirt and sink down onto the edge of the couch. Her apartment is insane. I haven’t been anywhere like it in years, and if this kind of place felt like home once upon a time, it sure doesn’t now. The floors look like real marble, and I can’t be sure, but I think that could be actual wood by the fireplace. The far wall is top-of-the-line smartglass, with that faint, iridescent sheen that tells me it’s compensating for the smog outside to render the view of the Corinth sunset clean and sparkling. Ha.

“Nice place you got here,” I call out, using my wadded-up shirt—it’s beyond ruined anyway—to stanch the bleeding from my arm. I need a moment to catch my breath, to work out how to play this. “Is this the moment you admit you’re secretly a LaRoux, and loaded with cash?”

“Hey, I’d look good as a redhead.” The way her voice is echoing, she must be in a bathroom.
One redheaded LaRoux in the galaxy is more than I’d like
. She’s keeping her tone casual, just like I am, though I’m sure we both know we have to talk about what happened. I hear a cabinet open and close, and then she’s walking out with a sleek little black box.

Judging by the contents of her med kit, this girl comes from an altogether different background than the celebrated Lilac LaRoux. There’s all kinds of stuff in there you don’t see in a standard first-aid kit, from hospital-grade burn treatment to stomach purges. She pulls out a handheld cauterizer and eases the shirt away, getting to work. And despite the flawless manicure she’s sporting, this clearly isn’t the first time she’s come across a gunshot wound.

“Well,” I say, reaching for distraction from the pain I know is coming. “I don’t know about you, but that wasn’t the day I was hoping for.”

Her gaze flicks up to me, and she shows me that lopsided, one-dimpled smile again, just for a moment. And like that, I know. That’s the real smile. One dimple, real deal. Two, she’s faking it. And damn, do I like that lopsided one.

Yeah,
smarter
definitely ain’t showing up anytime soon.

“Could have been worse,” she says, only the top of her blue-streaked head visible now as she finishes cleaning the wound. “A few inches over and I’d have had to do something far more drastic to convince the cab driver to carry me and a dead guy home.”

“Hey, if I’m ever actually dead, you have my blessing to leave me wherever I am. You can even chop off any bits of me sporting incriminating evidence. I won’t need them anymore.” I’m talking too fast, partly because I know the cauterizer’s going to sting far worse than a tattoo needle.

What I
should
do right now is see what she knows, then go to ground and keep my head down until I’m sure it’s safe. I can reach out to my contacts—I’ll start with Mae—and work out how to fort up, then go after more information. After what we saw, they’re going to be looking everywhere for us, and it
won’t
be to congratulate us on excellent teamwork in a tight spot.

She’s quick about it, at least, and with the blood gone I can see the scar shouldn’t mess up my ink too much—that’s the one I got after the Avon job. I concentrate on that, rather than the nerve-jangling pain where she’s working, or her hand braced against my chest, holding me still. Once she’s done, she slathers on burn ointment, and the pain fades into blessed numbness.

“There,” she says, inspecting her handiwork while I inspect her. “Good as new by tomorrow.” She leans down to pack up the med kit and snaps it closed. “I’ve got to go wash this stuff out of my hair or it’ll stain.”

“I could use a shower, if you’ve got room in there for two,” I shoot back immediately, and she simply gazes at me, one brow lifted, all
Really? Is that the best you can do?
“Hey, I just had minor surgery over here,” I point out. “You’d be disappointed if I didn’t try, but I’m not in my best shape.”

“The elevator will go down without my glove,” she says, catching me off guard. I can’t go, not yet. But before I can answer, she adds, “Or if you’d like to stay, the SmartWaiter makes a pretty mean screwdriver.”

She doesn’t wait to see what I decide—she simply turns away to disappear into the bathroom, and a moment later I hear the water start up.

So I do the only thing I possibly can: start snooping through her stuff. I mean, never pass up a chance to learn more about someone who interests you, right? And I can’t go anywhere until we’ve talked about what happened, so this is something to do while I wait.

There are framed pictures along the table of her and an older couple who could be her parents—one shows them on a ski trip on a super-expensive holovacation—I think I recognize the Alps on Paradisa—the other in front of the Theta Sector skyline right here on Corinth, the sea in the background. They’re almost perfect—whoever made these for her did a very good job indeed—but there are tiny signs they’re faked, if you know where to look. I’m positive now that this place isn’t hers. It certainly belongs to a Kristina McDowell—I can see parcels with her name on them by the door, and when I coax the console in the little office to life there’s a hypernet history, mostly mail and online shopping. But “Kristina” isn’t this girl’s name any more than “Alexis” was.

So whoever Dimples is, all I really know is that she’s seen some kind of situation requiring serious first aid before, she knows more about LaRoux Industries than she’s letting on, she could sell rocks to asteroid miners, and she’s definitely
not
rich girl Kristina McDowell. I shut down her console and head back out of the office to the SmartWaiter, ordering up a screwdriver for her and a mineral water for me. I don’t drink—I need every brain cell I’ve got in working order, often on short notice.

She emerges just as I’m thinking about checking out what else she keeps in her purse besides circuit-breaking gloves and illicit security passes. Her hair’s back to platinum blond, curly and light around her face, and she’s clad in an expensive-looking black sweater and a pair of jeans. I briefly mourn the loss of the tiny dress, but I find I like this more casual version of her, too. Not that I should be thinking about something like that at a time like this.

“I like your hair like that.” Oh God, did I just say that out loud?
Smooth, buddy.

She grins, walking across to take her drink. “It’s easiest to keep it this way. Hard to go blue or pink at a moment’s notice if your hair’s black. Windows, preset five.”

The smartglass flickers subtly, and the sunset outside begins to darken, the stars coming out one by one, despite the fact that stars haven’t been visible on Corinth for generations. The light from the buildings stretching on forever into the distance doesn’t come close to eclipsing the brightness of the stars overhead. I’ve seen the illusion before, of course; the micro-projectors in the glass track your eye position and shift so that it looks like the stars are far distant in the heavens rather than a trick of the light a few feet away.

She watches them like they’re something incredible, though, and I stay quiet, watching her instead. Her brows are drawn in, and though her face is calm and still, there’s something about the set of her mouth, a firmness that doesn’t quite mesh with her air of innocence and nonchalance. Perhaps this is what she looks like when she’s simply being her.

This is getting out of hand.
This is
not
the time to be gazing at her like I’m hypnotized. I’m smarter than this. Time to shove some distance between us, start using that brain of mine. “So,” I drawl, making myself sound casual. “Is this where we talk about what happened today? I’d ask what you were doing there, but you’ve lied to me so many times already, I wouldn’t believe the truth if I heard it now.”

She’s silent, clutching her drink. Eventually she takes a long swallow, then sets the glass down on the table beside the fake pictures, turning away to walk over to the couch. “I lie because I have to,” she says, sounding more tired than anything else. “Corinth is a cold place. You tell the truth, you end up down there.” Her nod takes in the slums, far below us—my territory, though she doesn’t know that. Perhaps she guesses.

“It’s a world of opportunities, down there.”

“But not the ones I want,” she replies. Then, after a slow breath out: “My name really is Alexis. But it’s my middle name, and no, I’m not going to tell you my first name. Especially since you’ve lied just as much as I have today. I was at LaRoux Industries because of my father. He’s dead, and it’s because of them, and I want to know why. And that’s the truth.”