This Shattered World

by Amie Kaufman

  “Hey, I’m right here.” I shift my hand so I can weave my fingers through his.

  Just let the water close over your head and trust your respirator. Don’t fight it.

  Gradually his breathing slows and his painful grip eases. I watch his face as the fear fades and his eyes focus. There’s nothing but stars as far as the eye can see, except for the sliver of Avon at the far left, little more than the gentle blue-gray glow of its constant cloud cover. It’s enough to illuminate Flynn’s features, though, as he leans forward against his harness.

  He can’t take his eyes off the stars, but I can’t take mine off his face. I can see the stars reflected in his eyes, can see the wonder of it in the way his mouth opens but no sound comes out. His eyes, his face—they’re beautiful.

  My eyes start to burn, and abruptly I let go of his hand. Clearing my throat and ducking my head so I can fumble with my harness, I manage hoarsely, “You hungry? We might not get a chance to eat later, and there should be an emergency pack or two somewhere.”

  Flynn has to hunt for his voice too, but when he murmurs, “Sure,” he gives no sign that he noticed my inexplicable surge of emotion. Maybe I’m just remembering the first time I saw the stars from space. That’s what I fight to tell myself, anyway.

  I shove the straps of my harness away and let myself rise out of my seat, using the handles to gradually walk myself back into the small cargo area. On the big passenger ships and space stations, they use rotating rings to generate gravity, but on the shuttles, we’re stuck dealing with weightlessness.

  I turn back to find Flynn watching me, studying the way I move in zero-g. I reach the lockers and hook my toes under the handles on the wall there. From his perspective it’ll look like I’m standing on the wall, but from mine, the lockers are now sunk into the floor and much easier to access.

  There’s a full emergency pack in the first locker I try. Two of them, I discover as I pull the first out. “It’ll be freeze-dried rations,” I warn him. “You can come back, if you move slowly. Tiny movements go a long way. Don’t overcompensate if you find yourself moving in an unexpected direction, just let your hand or foot graze something lightly to correct it.”

  Flynn unbuckles his harness and pulls himself along with exaggerated care, his face a study in concentration. “Just like poling a boat through the swamp.” His grip slips a little, and I reach out with my free hand to grab a handful of his jacket to steady him. “Well, mostly.”

  He’s doing what all the new trainees do, trying to keep the “floor” of the shuttle below his feet, though there’s no gravity to hold him there. I want to laugh at him—but I’m forced to admit he’s doing okay.

  I toss him one of the ration bars and then take a few bites of one myself before shoving the rest into my back pocket for later. Flynn looks as worn down as I feel, exhausted and restless at the same time. I know we need to find a way back down to the surface, but now that I’m able to breathe, I’m realizing how tired I am.

  I have to keep moving or I’ll never get up again. “Wonder what else we’ve got up here,” I muse aloud, reaching for the next locker over and finding more of the emergency packs, all with their seals unbroken. “Each of these is designed to keep a pair of soldiers alive for a fortnight, with the ship’s H2O recyc system.”

  “That’s months’ worth of food,” Flynn replies, finishing his bar and popping open a few more lockers, all stuffed with the emergency packs. “Or even years.”

  “There are dozens of them.” My mind is turning over slowly, inching around an idea, unwilling to look at it directly. “It must’ve been set up for a transport mission, so it could take a shuttle full of soldiers somewhere remote.”

  Flynn’s turned to the other side of the shuttle to see if there are more of the packs in the rest of the lockers. But I can’t stop looking at the one I opened. Months’ worth of food for a platoon.

  Years, for two people.

  “We could just go.” The words come out in a whisper, and as I say them, I find I can’t look up, can’t see Flynn’s face. I can’t bear to know his reaction.

  Still, I can feel him turn toward me. I can feel the air move as he makes his way back. He ducks his head to try to see my face, but I still can’t look at him. No matter what he’s about to say, I don’t want to hear it. Hearing it will make what I’ve just said real.

  “Never mind,” I say sharply. “I was just kidding.”

  But I wasn’t.

  “Jubilee.” He’s got one hand wrapped around a handle to steady himself, but the other reaches for me, his fingers tracing the outline of my face.

  “Just drop it, Flynn. Forget it.”

  He’s silent for a few seconds, speaking only with the weight of his eyes on me. I can feel my face flushing hot with shame, with guilt, under his gaze. “Where do you want to go?” he asks finally, a smile in his voice.

  I glance at him and then away again. “What do you mean?”

  “Where do we go? Anywhere in the galaxy. Where does Jubilee Chase want to live?”

  This time I look at him longer, properly, scanning his face for some sign of what he’s thinking—some judgment, some hint of blame or guilt that I’m standing there, talking about leaving his people and mine, about abandoning our whole lives. About running away. But he only smiles at me, his fingers sliding from my cheek to twine around a floating lock of hair, making it spiral slowly in midair.

  “Not Corinth,” I say finally, my voice emerging somewhat hoarsely. “Too busy, too many people. But not any place too new either. Maybe Patron, I liked it there. Haven’t been any rebellions for quite a while now.”

  He grins, his smile easing away some of my horror at my own impulse. “As long as there’s a sky there, like this one, I’m game.”

  “It’s not quite like this, the air gets in the way. But we could find ourselves a mountaintop where the air’s nice and thin, and it’d be awfully close.”

  Flynn shifts, sliding his foot more firmly under the handle bracing him. “And what does Jubilee Chase want to do with her life, if she’s not hunting down rebel leaders and skinning them alive?”

  “I don’t know. Something extremely boring. I could go to night school and learn dentistry.”

  That makes him laugh, a quick burst of a chuckle that makes my own lips curve. “Oh, God no. No way could you be a dentist.”

  “I could! I’d be a damn good dentist.”

  “Lots of call for dentistry on deserted mountaintops, eh?” He’s watching my face, eyes tracing over my features like he’s trying to memorize them.

  “Well, what about you? You could go be an accountant or a mechanic or something.” I try to gesture at him, but I end up unbalancing myself.

  Flynn leans forward, wrapping his arm around me to steady me and him both. “Definitely not an accountant.” His voice is low, thoughtful. “Maybe a mechanic, though. I could be the one to keep the engine of our…What do you drive when you live on a mountain, anyway?”

  I have absolutely no idea. The only time I was ever on a mountain was during basic, and I had to learn the bare essentials for snow combat. “Uh. Skis?”

  “Well, I’d make sure the skis kept running smoothly, didn’t break down.”

  His face is close to mine, his hand warm against my back through my shirt. Despite the smile on his lips, his gaze is so sad it feels like my heart is ripping in two, turning to ash as I look at him. He knows as well as I do that neither of us is leaving Avon alive if we touch down again. He’ll never see snow, and I’ll never teach him what skis are.

  I want so badly to just turn off communications for good, to go dark, to let this shuttle drift until we get captured by the gravity of some distant star. I want to wrap my arms around him and let my feet come free from the handles and just let our bodies go. His eyes move to my lips, and I know he’s thinking the same thing; I can feel it in the way the air charges between us. I can almost taste him half an inch away, can feel the way the tiny hairs on my skin lift and reach for
him like plants seeking the sunlight.

  It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, fighting the impulse to just lean forward that fraction of an inch, to close the gap between us. All I can feel is the heat, the roaring in my ears, the tiny shifts of our bodies, the twitch of his fingers against my back, the way his breath catches and releases, catches and releases. I see his throat move as he swallows. His dark lashes sweep low, his eyes on my mouth. We hang there weightless, on the edge, each waiting for the other to pull us over. To succumb to the gravity between us and fall.

  Then someone, one of us, moves just a little. I press my lips together and swallow. His eyes flick up, his jaw clenches. I let out a breath, and his arm loosens a fraction. Tiny shifts, imperceptible movements, as each of us steps back from the cliff, bit by bit, to a point where we can collapse, shaking, seeing in our minds’ eyes the leap we nearly took.

  “Oh, Flynn.” I barely recognize my own voice—it’s soft, brokenhearted, full of a grief I can’t name. “I don’t know how to be anything other than what I am.”

  His fingers curl around my shirt, crushing the fabric. He’s unwilling to let me go even after we agreed, silently, to turn our backs on the path not taken.

  “And I don’t think you do either,” I add.

  “I have to believe there’s a new way to be what we are.” His voice is weary, all humor gone. He’s sad, so sad—and I know it’s not all for me, and it only breaks my heart all the more to know that. He turns his head, and I can see the glow of Avon through the viewport gilding his nose, his artist’s mouth.

  I pull in oxygen, reminding my lungs how to breathe. “We don’t even know each other, Flynn. Not really. Not outside of this.” My gesture indicates the shuttle, but he knows I mean all of it. “Maybe we wouldn’t even like each other if we weren’t fighting for our lives every second of every day.”

  “Maybe someday we’ll get the chance to find out.” He eases back away from me, his hand sliding around as though his body is reluctant to part from mine. His fingers trail along my rib cage, the last thing to pull away.

  Someday. It’s the same day his people will be free and mine won’t be fighting anymore. The same day he’ll grow old—the way he never will because he’ll die young, the way I’ll die young, and we’ll both be gone before this never-ending war finally ends—and get to see the clouds clear, get to see the sunrise on Avon. It’s always the same someday.

  I listen to my heartbeat, pounding in anguish as the warmth of his arm around me begins to fade.

  “Someday,” I echo.

  It’s New Year’s Eve, and the girl is on duty. On Verona, whose year is nearly the same length as Earth’s, the holiday fell in the middle of spring throughout the girl’s childhood; and to her, that felt right. Resolutions budding with the leaves, warmth banishing the chill of doubt. Here on Patron, the New Year comes at random; the holiday is timed to Earth’s year, but the seasons here are tied to a calendar half again as long.

  This year it falls at the end of autumn. She tries to imagine shedding the past the way the trees shed the shriveled leaves clinging to their branches, but the leaves are never truly gone. They fall to the ground and lay there in a shroud around the tree, to rot.

  Someday, she thinks, I will spend New Year’s Eve in the sky.

  A wind picks up, robbing the trees of their last few leaves and making them dance sluggishly around her in a parody of the November ghost, like dead stars that have lost their shine, and as her breath steams the air, the girl thinks, Close enough.

  I’M ALMOST TREMBLING WITH THE effort of keeping myself from reaching out for her again, my head aching as I clench my jaw, force my hands down to my sides where they curl into fists. I know what she wants from me, though, and what I have to do, so I reach for an expression that feels nothing like a real smile. In a slow movement, so I don’t unbalance myself, I brace against a locker. “The things you don’t know about me are terrible, Jubilee.” A part of me marvels at how light my voice sounds. I hate this. I hate this. “I’m actually incredibly messy. Terrible with laundry.” Sean’s voice is in my head, another wound, with his stories of Oisín and Niamh. Their worlds couldn’t combine either, no matter how hard they tried.

  There’s something in her eyes for an instant that’s an acknowledgment of sorts—agreeing that together, we’ll find a way to push off from where we are and strike out for safer ground. I turn my gaze out to the stars, letting myself become absorbed in the swirls of light, trying to comprehend the distances between them. I never imagined anything so vast as the stars suspended in space.

  “We need our next move.” Jubilee’s voice breaks the quiet. “We’re not running away, and we can’t stay here forever. So that means…”

  “We go back.” My heart aches at the words. The idea of going home shouldn’t be so terrifying. “We do what Lilac LaRoux said, and we try to find proof of what LaRoux is doing.”

  I shift around in my seat until I can scan Jubilee’s expression for signs of the dread coursing through my own system. A week ago I wouldn’t have been able to find it. But I can see now the sharp angle of her brows, the way she blinks a little too often, the way she moistens her lips. She’s afraid too.

  “What you did back there at the spaceport,” I begin, hesitant. “For me—”

  She shakes her head, cutting me short. “Don’t.” Her quick smile softens what would’ve been a sharp reprimand. “We’re beyond thank-yous, Romeo. There’s no point in keeping score anymore.”

  “Still.”

  This time her smile lingers, her gaze meeting mine. We watch each other, illuminated by the stars and the glow of Avon’s atmosphere. I want to cling to this moment, a tiny shard of peace in the middle of the oncoming storm.

  The communications console crackles to life, splitting the quiet. “Eight-one-nine, this is base. Come in, over.”

  I jump, staring at the dashboard. “I thought you turned off the comms.”

  Jubilee swallows, her eyes fixed on the headset still floating above the controls. “I did. This isn’t background chatter—they’re hailing us directly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The voice, female and sharp, repeats its hail while Jubilee abruptly starts flipping switches, turning on scanners monitoring readouts. “It means they found us.”

  I lean forward, looking down at the scanner as she jabs a finger at five blips on the screen, approaching the center. Though I’ve never seen this technology before, it doesn’t take training to know what it means. There are ships coming at us on an intercept course.

  Jubilee reaches for her headset and pulls it back on with shaking hands. “Base, this is eight-one-nine. We are unarmed—tell your fighters to stand down.”

  “Captain,” says the voice on the radio, “is that you?”

  “Commander,” Jubilee replies. Her face has gone ashy in the planet’s glow, and I recall what she told me about her last encounter with the base commander. That Jubilee watched something take over her mind, right there in her office. “Yes, this is Lee Chase.”

  “Captain, we don’t want any further bloodshed.” The commander’s voice crackles and blurs with static, the interference from Avon’s atmosphere wreaking havoc with the signal from the base. “I don’t believe you have criminal intentions. Surrender now and be escorted back to base, and we can talk.”

  Jubilee’s eyes are on mine, her face unreadable except for the depth of mixed emotions there.

  I know what she’s asking. If she goes back, I’ll be arrested. I trust you, I mouth silently. I know what this second chance means to her. I know what it would mean to me, if my people offered me a way back.

  “Surrender now,” the commander says again, “and give up the rebel you’ve been harboring. He will be taken into custody, but he will not be executed without a fair trial. We can still discuss this, Captain.”

  Jubilee doesn’t hesitate any longer. She reaches up and pulls the headset off like it’s burned her. She shakes her head, slamming her p
alm down on the communications kill switch. “That’s not Commander Towers,” she says, closing her eyes. “It’s not real, what they’re offering.”

  I look out, finding the stars again, knowing I might not get to see them again in this lifetime.

  Jubilee’s eyes are on the scanner, watching the five ships flying in formation, approaching us from behind. “Flynn?” she says, dragging my attention back away from the endless panorama outside the viewport.

  “Yes?”

  She curls her hands around the controls, taking a deep breath. “Put your harness back on.”

  She’s having the drowning dream again. She gasps and gasps, but all she breathes is darkness, rushing into her lungs like water, hollowing her out, leaving her empty. She tries to scream, but the vacuum of space is quiet, and still, and black….

  Until a gentle, greenish light makes her open her eyes. The green-eyed boy is there, and he reaches out to take her hand and pull her close—and suddenly, she can breathe the darkness. Like the underwater dreams she had as a child, the girl can feel the darkness in her lungs, but it hurts her no more than air does.

  He speaks, and though she can’t hear him, the vibrations of his voice travel through their joined hands and she can understand him anyway. “Trust what you feel,” he says.

  THE DASHBOARD LIGHTS UP with warnings, alarms screaming at me from overhead; I’m coming in too hot, my angle through the atmosphere dangerously close to free fall. But that’s what I’m counting on. The ships in pursuit are fighters, and there’s no way for a simple transport shuttle to outmaneuver them in open space. So I’m going to have to out-dare them.

  The viewport shields slam closed as we hit the mesosphere, shielding us from the white-hot temperatures generated by our descent. The second we hit the denser air the whole shuttle starts shaking, its lockers and seats not designed for this kind of stress. I can hear the empty harnesses behind me clanging and slamming against each other.