This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  As the night wears on, the other soldiers drift away until the only ones left at the table are Jubilee and her old captain. A few late drinkers line up along the bar, and Molly tallies the till as I clear up. Jubilee’s tracing a design into the spilled beer on their table, knotwork. It’s Irish. I wonder if she knows.

  I can’t slow down my head. Regret and relief crowd my thoughts, which won’t stop turning, won’t stop reaching for Jubilee. Then I look up, and she’s standing a few yards away, speaking to Molly. I drop the glass I’m polishing, and it shatters on the floor. Molly frowns at me and tilts his head at the door that leads out the back. I go.

  Jubilee slips through the door not long after me. My heart jumps as I recognize her silhouette in the half darkness, and I make myself stay where I am, leaning against a stack of crates. My head’s swimming with tiredness, and just having her in the room hitches my pulse up a notch, though I don’t know if it’s wanting or anger or something else completely. My heart is so tangled I can’t think.

  “Molly says you can stay here in the back room.” She sounds tired, at least as tired as I am. “If anyone asks, you’ll say you’re his cousin.”

  Posing as the cousin of a three-hundred-pound Chinese man would be beyond even Sofia’s talents. “I don’t—”

  “Molly’s an orphan, like me. He was adopted. Off-world, families who aren’t blood-related happen all the time. You’re just not used to it here.”

  Lapsing into silence, she leans against the stack of beer crates opposite me and folds her arms across her ribs, tight and uncertain. She just stares at me, for so long I feel I might shout to break the quiet, until finally she blurts, “Are you trying to get yourself arrested out there, breaking glasses and drawing attention?”

  Frustration takes the lead among my competing emotions, and I come to my feet. “You’re the one who left me working behind the bar for hours, under the same damn camera that’s broadcasting my face to the whole—”

  “Because you stormed out! If you’d stayed, I would’ve been able to plan our next move, someplace to hide you while I figure this out.”

  “Hide me? While you figure it out?” The frustration coursing through me is real, but right behind it, the knowledge that she wasn’t the killer. I could touch her now and not hate myself. But she’s still a trodaire—I can’t let myself think this way.

  I search for words that will push her away, put some distance between us so I can’t reach for her. “So you think I’m going to hide somewhere safe and trust you to fix this while I’m sidelined? You and your old captain have it under control?”

  “Sidelined?” she snaps, incredulous, though there’s relief in her gaze too. Her eyes rake over me, unable to look away. Neither of us can talk about how everything is different now that Jubilee’s innocent. Anger is easier. “Damn it, Flynn, I’m betraying everything I’m sworn to, hiding you here. I’m a traitor now. I’m the bad guy.”

  “You’re doing it for the right reasons,” I offer, but I know for Jubilee, the words ring hollow.

  “I know,” she replies tightly. “I know that. And I’d do it again. I just—I never thought I could ever in a thousand years be here, in this spot.” She turns away, twisting the heel of her hand against her eyes for a moment. “I told you my parents died in the uprising on Verona. But I didn’t tell you that it wasn’t even rebels who killed them. The men who killed them were sympathizers. Supporting the rebels. People like me.”

  I stay silent. This isn’t a conversation—she’s not expecting me to argue or tell her it’s not her fault. I just listen.

  “They wanted to use my mom’s store as a staging area. My parents wanted no part of the rebellion, so they refused. And the sympathizers killed them for it.” She swallows, hard, and steadies her voice. “They were people we knew, Flynn. Neighbors. Coworkers. People you’d say hello to in the park. And because they picked a side in a war that wasn’t even theirs, they shot two people while their eight-year-old daughter hid under a counter.”

  Slowly, I ease in closer to her. “That’s why you hate it when I call you Jubilee. Because that’s what your parents called you.”

  “I don’t hate it anymore.” She swallows again. Her voice, when she can continue, is wrenching. “You’ve ruined my life, you know.”

  I can’t speak, my breath coming as quickly as hers, frustration and longing twisting together, like a quick-burning fuse.

  “I was fine before you turned up here and dragged me into the swamps.” Her voice rises, halfway between tears and violence. “I was supposed to have no soul—I was supposed to be dead. Jubilee was supposed to have died with her parents, in their shop in November; Lee was no more than a dream.”

  In the bar, the jukebox comes on. Molly must be trying to drown out the sounds of raised voices. I move toward her, unable to resist; her eyes are wet, her face flushed, and I can finally look at her, want her, let myself touch her without grief turning everything to ashes in my mouth.

  “You’ve ruined me,” she repeats, her voice quieting a little as it catches. “You’ve ruined me—you made me wake up. And now I can’t get rid of you.” Her voice surges again as I reach out, curling my hand around her arm, her skin flushed hot under my fingers. “You won’t leave me alone.”

  I scan her features, my eyes trying to make up for too much time spent trying not to look at her. I can’t look away. “You think I want to be here with you?” I reply, my voice hoarse. “You think if you walked out right now, I’d chase you?”

  She gazes back at me, her eyes a challenge. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “You know I would,” I snap, surrendering. “And I have no idea why that’s such a problem.”

  She jerks her arm free and backs up a step until she hits the door. “It’s a problem because I’d let you!” she blurts. Then, after a harsh breath, she murmurs, “It’s a problem because I’d want you to.”

  I move after her and duck my head to find her lips with mine. It’s all I want to do. She surges up against me like she’s been waiting for this, lips parting, arms curling around my neck. Everything crowds together—grief, desire, anger, and beneath it all, a desperate hint of hope, and I can feel the sharing of it in the energy that wells up between us. I drag my hand up from her waist, my fingertips finding bare skin and the dip of her spine as hers tighten in my hair. She gasps against my mouth, a split second pause, and then we’re together again as if we’d been parted for an eternity.

  With a strained noise she breaks away and turns her head to stop me from picking up the kiss where we left off. Her breath comes quick and heavy, and I lean in closer to pin her against the door, my hips finding hers. This is what I want.

  “God, Flynn, we can’t.” She’s panting the words. “We can’t.”

  I bend my head to kiss her beneath the line of her jaw, and I feel her body shift against mine. “One true thing,” I breathe into her hair, remembering what she said the night I brought her back to the base. The night I washed the blood from her hands. “Something real in all of this. This is real.”

  “We’re enemies. That’s what’s real.” Despite her protests, her arms are tight around me, unwilling to let go. I press a kiss to her temple and rest my forehead against her dark hair.

  “I’m not your enemy, Jubilee Chase,” I whisper. “And I don’t think you’re mine.” I lean after her until I can capture her mouth again. My hands burn where I touch her, everything else fading away into the background, drowned out by this, by her, by us.

  The music coming from the bar changes, and as if the shift broke the moment, Jubilee gasps and mumbles, “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Don’t care.” And I don’t, finding bare skin at her neck beside the chain of her dog tags, hearing her lose her words as I nip, push her collar aside to find the juncture between her neck and shoulder, kiss her soft skin.

  Her body arches against mine, responding to my touch. A split second later, though, she goes still, and I lift my head to find her biting her lip, grief in h
er eyes.

  “Flynn, we can’t.” Her lips are flushed, eyes dark, but as she swallows and tries to collect herself, I can see the determination bleeding back into her gaze. “It’s not that it’s too dangerous for us, Flynn. It’s too dangerous for them. If you had to choose, if it came down to it, who would you save? Your people, or me?”

  She lets me brush her hair back from her face, trail my rough fingertips down the smooth skin of her cheek, waiting as I try to gather my scattered thoughts. I picked my side in the cavern when we ran from McBride, but I don’t know which side I chose. Was I trying to save this girl, or was I trying to stop a war? I can’t let myself think ahead to the day when I’ll have to choose one or the other.

  It all threatens to well back up, the tangle of things I’m too exhausted to face. There’s only one thing I know with absolute certainty, and as I whisper her name and lean in to her again, she lets me. Her hand leaves my chest and invites me in—she cups my cheek as our lips meet, drawing me away from the frantic heat and toward something slower, something quiet. Something real.

  We both pause to breathe after a time, and she ducks her head. I kiss her temple and wait for her to speak.

  “Sooner or later one of us will have to make a choice, and if we do this we’ll make the wrong one. We’re the only ones who can see what’s happening. They need us.” She turns to slip out of my arms, putting herself out of my reach—or me out of hers.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being needed?” Suddenly that’s all I am—tired, heartsick for my sister, my cousin, my friends. Worn down by McBride’s anger, Sofia’s grief, by my own helplessness. I want refuge. I want Jubilee.

  “Not until this moment.” She’s stricken, but she stands there by the door, and she doesn’t reach out to me. Everything in me aches, but I don’t reach out to her either. Because she’s right.

  “Go.” It takes everything in me to let her leave. For the sake of people who’d shoot me on sight. Who think she’s a murderer and I’m a traitor.

  She doesn’t speak, standing and staring at me for two long, slow breaths. Then her hand fumbles for the door handle, wrenching it open so she can stumble out into the night. The door bangs shut behind her so hard it misses the latch, shuddering open again with its momentum.

  I slam my palm against the wall, feeling the sting of it, the pain shooting up all the way to my shoulder. As the door eases back open, I can see her walking away. I watch her as she passes under the floodlights.

  Just before the door swings closed, I think I see her catch her step, start to slow. Then the gap I’m watching through is gone, and with a click, we’re both alone.

  The girl is waiting. She’s at a spaceport she’s never seen before, orbiting a planet she doesn’t recognize. All she has are the clothes she’s wearing, but she’s glued to the viewport, heart jumping with each new ship that eases into the docking bays. She’s certain she’ll recognize hers when she sees it.

  A man comes to find her, to tell her that the exploration vessel she’s been hired on is ready to depart. He escorts her to the right docking bay, where a small but sleek ship waits for her. The viewports are glimmering gold-and-green, and through them she catches glimpses of people—a child with dark hair, a sullen teenager with a fake ident, an older woman she doesn’t recognize.

  Her escort, who is also somehow the captain too, gestures toward the gangplank.

  “Well?”

  Somewhere, deep, deep in her thoughts, something stirs—the certainty that this never happened, that it couldn’t be happening now. This isn’t how her life will go. It’ll be dark, and cold, and likely very short; and the glittering lights of the spaceliner were never for her.

  “I can’t,” she whispers, the words wrenching at her soul. The captain turns toward her, and she can see her own heartache reflected in his green, green eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE WALK back to my quarters. But abruptly I’m there, my head still spinning, skin tingling. It’s easy enough to run myself through the motions as I get ready for bed, my routine ground into me through years of being too tired at the end of the day to do anything else. I can’t let myself think, can’t let myself dwell on the fiery adrenaline surging through me. I can’t let myself replay what happened with Flynn.

  I can’t let myself continue to fall for a boy who represents everything I’ve been fighting against since I was eight years old.

  But since I can’t actually stop myself from doing any of those things, at least I can stop myself from touching him ever again.

  I’m not on duty the next day until mid-morning, but I wake at sunrise anyway, the habit too well ingrained to set aside. There’s no word from Merendsen about our next move, giving me no outlet for the need to act, to keep my thoughts away from dangerous territory. I should be giving my body as much time to recover as I can before I’m out on the fences again. It’s cold, wet, hard work out there; the rebels are invisible in the swamp, the bullets coming from nowhere. They keep too close to the base for us to call in an airstrike, but too far for us to pick them off from behind our fortifications. We’re forced down low, and the mud oozes inside my combat suit, itching like mad once it dries, and I smell like a swamp no matter how hard I scrub afterward. When we follow them farther into the swamps they vanish into nowhere, drawing us onto unsafe ground like will-o’-the-wisps.

  It’s hours before I’m on duty, but my skin’s crawling for action, and every time I sit still—every time I close my eyes—Flynn’s there.

  One true thing, he said, his lips finding a hidden spot behind my jaw. This is real.

  I throw on the fatigues I was wearing yesterday, wrinkled and untidy—but laundry is the last priority on the base right now, and no one’s about to judge me for looking disheveled while going for a run. Hesitating only briefly, I buckle on my holster and my Gleidel. Awkward to jog with, but this is the wrong time to go anywhere on Avon unarmed. I choose my running shoes over my regulation boots and duck out into the misty, cold dawn. With Avon’s overcast skies sunrise is slow to take, as though the light itself is slowed down, oozing over the landscape gradually. It’s still dark, but I can see the fog lit overhead as the diffuse sunlight peeks through.

  It’s too dangerous to do the usual training run, the eight-klick perimeter of the base that culminates in the obstacle course by the gym. There are rebels beyond the fences who know the land better than we do, and I don’t relish the idea of running ten feet away from someone with a gun pointed at me that I can’t see.

  So instead I weave through the buildings, ignoring the way the mud splashes up at my pants legs. It’s a struggle not to push myself harder, to get to the point where I don’t have the focus to think about anything but one foot in front of the other, but I can’t waste all my energy while off duty.

  I head past security, my breath steaming in the clammy air, and aim for the road that heads toward Central Command. It’s less torn up than the other paths, not as muddy. Easier to run on.

  My path takes me straight up past Central Command in time to see Commander Towers disappear into her office. I stop short in a spray of mud. We need proof of what’s happening—Lilac LaRoux said as much. And while she and Merendsen might be content to put our fates in the hands of some hacker on the other side of the galaxy, I’m not used to waiting for someone else to save me.

  I know Commander Towers knows more than she’s telling me. And I can’t believe she’s dirty. If she was in LaRoux’s pocket, why would she have warned me about telling Lilac’s fiancé what was going on here?

  I wish Flynn were here. I hate the idea of leaving him in the dark, especially after seeing his anguish last night at having to continue hiding instead of finding justice for the massacre. But I’m not ready to face him yet; just the thought of him makes my cheeks burn. I shove his image away and turn toward Commander Towers’s office. My feet thud in time with my heart against the wooden stairs up to the prefab trailer.

  “What?” Her voice shou
ts from inside; she’s not happy about being interrupted.

  “It’s Chase, sir. Can I speak with you?”

  The silence from the other side of the door stretches a fraction too long. “Of course. Come in.”

  I shove the rickety door open and slip through. “Commander.”

  “Shut the door!” she hisses, standing by her desk.

  I blink, taken aback, but instinctively slam the door behind me.

  “Sorry about that, Captain Chase. But you can’t be too careful. You don’t know who’s watching us.”

  I suppress a shiver and take the seat she gestures at, expecting her to take a seat behind her desk. Instead she starts to pace, her eyes on the door instead of on me. I wait for her to gather herself, to speak to me, to let me explain why I’ve come—but it’s like she’s completely forgotten I’m in the room.

  “Uh—sir?”

  She stops pacing mid-stride, turning toward me. Her blue eyes are glittering, too bright. I don’t think she’s slept since I last spoke to her. “I’m sorry, Captain. You wanted to speak with me?”

  “Yes, sir.” I swallow, my mouth suddenly gone dry. Trust what you feel, Lilac LaRoux told me. I believe in Commander Towers. “Sir, I know what’s going on. I know about LaRoux Industries, I know there was a hidden facility to the east, and I know it all has something to do with the Fury. And I know you know something about it.”

  The silence is broken only by the frantic pounding of my heart, echoed briefly in the distance by a patter of gunfire. Commander Towers watches me, her breath coming rapidly, the circles under her eyes more pronounced than ever. I find it hard to meet her gaze; there’s fear burning behind her blue eyes, the desperation of a woman on the edge.

  Then she closes her eyes. “God, Lee, you don’t know what a relief it is to hear you say that. This can’t leave my office, but…” She trails off, shoulders drooping as if with the weight of her secret.