Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  “I find it’s safer not to ask,” I say, which is technically true, if only for other people. “But I’d have been screwed out there, bleeding all over their solid-gold streets. If there’s something you need, anything you want looked into, I can talk to him about doing that for you.”

  “No,” she says quickly, before her voice softens, clearly reaching for calm. “No, if you want to pay me back, don’t mention me to the Knave at all.”

  “The stories about him aren’t true, you know.” I can’t help myself. “Most of them, anyway. He’s a hero to plenty of people. Screws the corporates pretty good, and you know they deserve it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I’ve seen this girl walk out of a building where everyone around her was going mad and shooting at her, and step into the smoothest con I’ve ever seen—but this, she can’t fake. This scares her more than the blank-eyed stares we saw today. She’s terrified—her lips are pressed tight together, pale skin paler still. “You should go.”

  “Just me, then,” I try, gentle. I’d kill to know who’s been feeding her stories to make her so afraid of my online persona, but this isn’t the time to press. “I’ll add in a second mailbox on your system. It’ll look exactly like the regular way you’d log in and send a message, but it’s a private network. If you send a mail using it, it’ll come straight to me. And only me.”

  She swallows, and nods toward the comscreen I busted into while she was in the shower. “Fine,” she says simply, and I can’t shake the feeling she’s agreeing just so I’ll stop bothering her and leave. “Show me.”

  I retrieve my lapscreen from my satchel and lead her over to the comscreen, hooking the stool out with one leg and sitting down. Fishing around the back, I run through the cables by touch until I find the one I want, pulling it free and plugging it into my lapscreen. I insert my chip, and it only takes a couple of minutes to install a shadow box.

  “Here,” I say, tapping her screen, where a new mail icon sits just beside her regular one. “This’ll be my contact, under Jake Cheshire. Send mail here, and it’ll come straight to me, without leaving any trace in your own folders. Keeps the trail clean.”

  She nods, still grave. “Thank you, Gideon,” she murmurs.

  “Sure. Let me know if you work out how I can return the favor. Or if you need anything, after today.” I return the cables to where they belong, stowing my chip in my pocket and getting to my feet with a wink. I want to make her smile again before we part. “Preferably something that won’t get me shot. It really hurts.”

  That last draws a wry little smile. “I’d much rather leave that part of it to you. You’ve got practice.”

  “It was very nearly worth it,” I say, as I scoop up my satchel and cross over to the elevator. “Though next time you tell someone we’re engaged, I’m making you go through with it.”

  Now she laughs properly. “You have no idea what you’d be getting yourself into.”

  The elevator doors hum open, and I step inside, turning to face her. Somehow wanting to remember her face. Even if they find her, she won’t be able to tell them where I am—but I’m hoping with everything I’ve got that they don’t. I hope she’ll be safe.

  She speaks just as the doors start to close, gray eyes locked on mine. “Gideon, can I trust you?”

  I have no idea why, and I can count on one hand the people for whom my answer is true—but I do know the answer, even if I don’t know why. I grin. “Take a bullet for you twice, if I have to.”

  And then the doors are closed.

  Agony. Fear. Despair.

  Stop. Stop. The thin spot pulses, flashes with urgency, but the young man ignores it all except to make notes upon a tablet. Only when he glances back at the end of each day is there a flicker of guilt there, the only thing that proves he knows exactly what he is doing.

  This was not what we glimpsed. This was not what we wanted. They are an infection, bombarding the stillness with their data and their ships and their pain.

  We must find an end.

  IT TAKES ME A FEW days to get a new security code for my door, and even longer to comb my apartment for bugs carefully enough to be certain my guest didn’t leave anything of his behind. I pore over the footage from my security camera, watching where he goes while I’m in the shower. It’s better to let visitors believe they have time where they’re not being watched, because they’ll do whatever underhanded thing they plan on doing straightaway. If you don’t offer them a blatant opportunity they’ll be sneakier, hiding it, possibly well enough that I wouldn’t be able to pick it up on camera. Back on Avon, this sort of thinking just wasn’t a part of my life—I specialized in sweet-talking extra supplies and inside information out of the guards, not in living an elaborately faked life in someone else’s world. I learned to give visitors a little carefully monitored alone time on my third stop out from Avon, a freighter called the Alanna. Seeing what they did in my tiny quarters when they thought I wasn’t looking told me which crew members I could trust far quicker than anything else would.

  He goes over my photos—I think he guesses that they aren’t real—flicks through my browser history, inspects the packages waiting by the door for Kristina when she gets back from the health spa she’s been at for the last month. He stops to look at the Miske multimedia works on the wall, probably the most expensive things in the apartment, but he leaves them alone. I don’t see him plant anything, and I don’t see him do anything shiftier than a bit of snooping.

  I check my messages four, five times a day—but there’s nothing from Sanjana Rao, the woman I was supposed to meet at LaRoux Industries Headquarters before the entire holosuite went mad. I can’t afford to lose her after all I’ve been through to find someone with a high enough security clearance to have the information I need, and a reason—whatever it may be—to give it to me. LaRoux proved on Avon that he has powers and defenses far beyond what a normal man possesses, and unless I find a way to neutralize his whispers, I’ll never get close enough to him to repay him for what he did to my father.

  I dictate and delete half a dozen messages to Dr. Rao before I decide I can’t improve upon the language, and try to screw up the courage to send it. She’s spooked, no doubt, after the security scare. For all I know, she’s vanished into the woodwork completely, and I’ll have no chance of getting her to trust me again.

  That mess last week was just a case of poor timing, my message reads, and had nothing to do with me or you. Please say you’ll meet me again. You can name the time and place, you can take whatever precautions you need to feel safe. Please. Alexis.

  I blink at the “send” button and the screen chimes to inform me that it’s done. The address she gave me is gibberish, but it’s how I contacted her before—it’s not her official address, but she’d have been mad to give me anything that could be traced back to her. Not if she wanted to keep her job. Or her sanity.

  It’s taken me nearly four months to get this close to LaRoux. Four months, spending every night researching LRI employees who might have the connections I need, following them to learn their interests, inserting myself into their lives, making them trust me, like me, just long enough for them to introduce me to my next mark. Four months before I caught even a whiff of information about the mind-control experiments and abuse LaRoux was perpetrating on Avon.

  And I lost it all in a single day.

  It’s three days after I sent the message to Dr. Rao—eight days after I met Gideon—when my inbox finally dings to tell me something’s arrived beyond the usual newsletters and spam Kristina gets. I’m fresh out of the shower, finishing up with the pack of disposable skin-patches and the concealer I use to hide my genetag. Over the past year I’ve made hundreds of thousands of galactics, pulling jobs here and there to support myself, putting every single credit I can spare into tattoo-removal treatments. But it’ll take two or three more before it’s faded enough to be illegible, and half a dozen before it’s impossible to tell there was ever anything there branding me a nati
ve of Avon. But hopefully I’ll get my chance to get near LaRoux before then, and it’ll all be moot anyway.

  When I hear my inbox chiming, I wrap a towel around my torso and bolt out into the office, shedding water as I hurry over to the screen. For a moment, my heart’s racing so quickly I can’t focus long enough to work the eye-trackers. But once the message opens, my heart sinks.

  It contains only four words—no signature, no code, nothing I can use.

  Burn this connection. Run.

  I want to scream. I want to throw the screen out the window. I want to leave this apartment and head down into the slums where I started and be among people as pissed off as I am. I know Gideon had something to do with turning off those holo-projectors and triggering the meltdown at LRI Headquarters, and I want to click that stupid fake contact he left me and write him a message telling him exactly what he’s done to me. What he’s taken from me.

  I’m not interested in the part of my brain that points out that it isn’t his fault, not really. That machine—the rift, as he called it—was there, hidden, all along. Maybe it would’ve happened anyway, and maybe without him we wouldn’t have had warning to escape.

  So instead I just sit there at my desk for a long moment, my eyes sweeping across the brief message as I force myself to breathe.

  The lights are dim—I keep them at setting two or three whenever I possibly can, to avoid a spike in the electric bill that might alert Kristina to the fact that she’s got a squatter. I leave them where they are, letting the glow from my screen guide me as I push back from it, coming to my feet and walking out of the office, willing my pulse to slow. Trying to think clearly.

  I’m just moving into the kitchen when the hairs lift on the back of my neck in a warning I’ve learned not to ignore. Growing up it meant there were trodairí nearby, that I had to pay attention. Now…

  A shadow shifts, visible at the corner of my eye where there should be nothing. I drop silently to the floor, barely able to stop myself from gasping. My heartbeat is roaring in my ears, but I can still hear two—no, three, four—sets of footsteps moving quietly across the floorboards.

  I pray they’re just thieves who caught onto Kristina’s absence the same way I did. Because the alternatives mean I’m probably already dead.

  Fighting the instinct to freeze, to make myself tiny and quiet and invisible, I reach up to grope for the drawer above me, pulling it out as quickly as I can without making any noise. The chef’s knives are on a magnetic strip on the other side of the kitchen, but there’s a paring knife in there. It’s not much, but if they’re expecting the place to be empty, maybe it’ll be enough to get me to the elevator.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling with my fingertips around teaspoons and chopsticks, moving with agonizing slowness for fear of causing a telltale jangle of silverware. I have to stop holding my breath or I’ll pass out, I have to open my eyes or I won’t see them coming for me, I have to move, I have to get ready to run, I—

  “Hands out of there.” A harsh voice rips me out of my concentration, sending me lurching against the cabinet with a clatter and a cry. Looking up, I see a gun first, then the man aiming it between my eyes. Another man steps up alongside him, also armed. They’re not wearing black, or even the sleek body armor favored by some of the higher-operation thieves in Corinth’s underworld.

  They’re wearing uniforms. Green and gray, and as the third man turns to inspect the other rooms to be sure I’m alone, I can see the lambda emblazoned on the back.

  For a moment all I can do is clutch at the towel twisted around me, feeling every ice-cold drip of water from my hair against my shoulders, tasting metal and bile and wishing for my father so hard my heart aches. Then my mouth opens by itself, and words come out, like there’s some part of my mind that knows what to do without needing the rest of me to function.

  “Take whatever you want,” I gasp, pretending that the uniforms mean nothing to me, pretending I think they’re thieves. “Please, I won’t stop you. You don’t need to hurt me, I won’t tell anyone. Just let me go.”

  The first man, difficult to see clearly in the gloom but tall and in his mid-forties, snorts. “Well,” he says slowly, gesturing with his gun for me to stand up. “That’s a problem, because we’re not here for your stuff.”

  For once I don’t have to hide the terror coursing through me as I reach with a shaking hand for the edge of the counter to pull myself up. My legs are barely working. I was never one of the warriors on Avon—I know how to duck and cover, but fight? The adrenaline is making me nauseous, making my vision blur and my nose sting as I try to keep breathing. “Whatever it is,” I whisper, “just take it and go.”

  “That would be you.” The man’s eyes flicker, just for a moment, down toward where my other hand is gripping the towel closed in front of me. It’s only for an instant, but I’m swept by a wave of fear so tangible I nearly choke on it. “You paid us a little visit the other day at Headquarters. The boss wants us to ask you a few questions.”

  They know. My last hope of throwing them off my identity falls away into tatters.

  The man watches me, enjoying this, the moment when I realize I’m probably going to die tonight, when they’re done questioning me. Then, softly, he says, “You should be more careful who you write to over the hypernet these days.”

  My gaze snaps to my comscreen before I can stop myself. Dr. Rao’s last, brief message to me hovers in front of my blurring eyes: Burn this connection. Run.

  She was trying to warn me. Did they catch her, too?

  “I have friends.” It doesn’t even sound like my voice. I can’t think. I can’t move. “They’ll know why I vanished, if I don’t show up. They’ll know who did it, they’ll call the police.”

  “We are the police,” says the second man, sounding impatient. My act isn’t fooling them—the realization closes over me like water, leaving me drowning in its wake. When I look again at their uniforms I realize they’re from LaRoux Industries’ security branch, which explains how they were able to access my apartment. And why they’re doing this so brazenly outfitted in LRI’s uniform. Kristina McDowell uses an LRI alarm system to protect her belongings. Any call to the police will also get patched through to them—even if what I was saying were true. Even if there was anyone waiting for me, anyone who’d realize I was gone.

  One of the other men—there are four total, all distinctly unimpressed with my attempts to find sympathy or hesitation in what they’re doing—emerges from the bathroom with the clothes I left on the floor before getting in the shower. He tosses them at me and grunts to the others, “All clear. She’s alone.”

  “Put your clothes on,” snaps the first guy, the one whose eyes keep flickering over me like he’s imagining what’s beneath the white terry cloth. “Unless that’s what you’d like to wear when you come with us.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak, and turn toward the bathroom. My mind’s running through an inventory of everything in there. The mirror—no, they’d hear it breaking. Perfume—the alcohol would burn their eyes if I could throw straight. My hair spray—if I had a lighter I could use it as a makeshift flamethrower. The hair dryer—the puddles I’ve left on the floor—are they wearing rubber-soled shoes?

  But I don’t get more than a step in that direction before a jerk of the man’s gun halts me in my tracks. “You can change right here,” he says, those roving eyes narrowed.

  My skin crawls so violently that for a moment I think I might sink back down onto the floor. I grip the edge of the counter, white-knuckled. “I can’t change out here,” I blurt, no longer acting. “I can’t—while you’re—”

  Roving Eyes grins a little, and though there’s smugness there, it’s a grin that so contrasts with the hacker’s smile that for a moment, a detached part of my mind focuses on Gideon, wondering what he’ll think when my body turns up somewhere on the news. If it turns up. Roving Eyes’s voice drags me back. “You can step out there. I’ll turn my back and you’ll have
ten seconds. You’re not dressed in ten seconds, or I hear you moving in any direction or doing anything other than dressing, you’ll come naked.”

  “But—” My voice tangles, my mind finally blanking entirely. I’ve run out of words. I can’t think. I can’t escape.

  “Clock’s ticking.”

  I lurch out into the center of the living room and glance over my shoulder to see the man do as promised and turn his back. I can see two of the others behind him, speaking to each other; they could turn their heads and see me. But the man’s beginning to count down from ten, voice crawling into my ears and prompting me to drop the towel and scramble as quickly as I can into the tank top and lounge pants I was wearing before I took my shower. I’m still pulling my top down when the countdown finishes, but he can hear the rustle of fabric, and he waits a half a breath longer. In another time, some other situation, that lenience might have given me some hope. But by the time I pull my shirt down, the gun’s aimed squarely my way, the glow of the comscreen from the office glinting blue off the metal barrel.

  The comscreen.

  “My boyfriend!” I gasp, throwing a plan together as I speak. “He’s meeting me here tonight for a date. He’ll be here any minute—he’s a reporter—I don’t think your boss would like to read about this in the papers. Me disappearing, days after being harassed by LRI security at Headquarters.”

  The man rolls his eyes, then jerks his chin at the screen. “Call him. No—write him. Don’t want him hearing anything unusual in your voice. Cancel your date. I’ll just stand behind you and make sure you don’t make any errors.”

  I force my face to fall, my expression to crumble, even as a tiny flicker of hope kindles, my first since I realized I wasn’t alone in my apartment. Two of them follow me into the office, and as I move across to sit in front of the screen, Roving Eyes stands so close behind me I can feel his body heat. With a swipe of my trembling hand, I select the name—Jake Cheshire—from the list.