Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  I can hear him counting under his breath as we move, but not at the right pace to be keeping time—he’s counting out our steps. I’m about to ask why, when he reaches one hundred and pauses. I turn to see him holding something, about the size of a thumb drive or a gambling chip. He sucks in a breath and glances at me. “Brace yourself.”

  I don’t have time to ask for more details, because he’s pressing a button on the object and then a sound blasts down the tunnel, making me cry out in spite of myself and clap my hands over my ears. A shower of dust and cobwebs and other things I don’t want to know about patters down onto my hair and shoulders, and I have to fight the impulse to throw myself to the ground. I know that sound. I know it so well it echoes in my nightmares, makes my shoulder throb with remembered pain.

  An explosion.

  The echoes of it through the tunnel die away, leaving me gasping, shaking, staring at Gideon, who slips the device back into his pocket. “What the—you said—”

  He shakes his head, speaking softly. “The echoes make it sound bigger than it was. The charges were just to destroy anything left on my drives. Even if they were already inside, the worst they’d get would be some ringing ears and maybe some bruises if the force knocked them back.”

  My mouth tastes bitter, and though I’m trying to make myself move again, my muscles are tense and shaking. Through the dim red light of the LEDs I can almost see the first responders at the base on Avon running toward the flames, can almost smell the acrid smoke and chemicals, can almost hear the shouts and screams of wounded soldiers beginning to fill the air.

  “Hey,” comes Gideon’s voice, much closer to me. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I should’ve warned you—I promise we’re okay down here. This place could take a dozen blasts like that and survive.”

  I blink, trying to clear my eyes of smoke that doesn’t exist, and realize he’s taken my arm, his hand warm and real, unlike the remembered heat of a barracks on fire. “I’m fine,” I gasp, unable to stop my voice shaking. “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s go.”

  Gideon hesitates, eyes on my face until I turn away. If I tell him about my father’s so-called suicide, he’ll be able to figure out who I am the second he gets access again to the hypernet. And while he says he doesn’t still work for the Knave, I have no way of knowing how close his ties are, or whether he’d turn me over if he knew I was the thing the Knave had been chasing for the last year.

  I start moving, pulling away from his hand on my arm, and after another second of hesitation, his footsteps start up again behind me. A few jogging steps and he catches up to me, clearing his throat.

  “We’ll head to Mae’s,” he says, causing a ping of relief somewhere amidst the fog of memory in my head that he’s not pushing the issue. “She’s an old friend, and if anyone on the net has heard rumors about something bad going down at the Daedalus gala, she’ll know about it.”

  “Can we trust her?”

  “Absolutely.” Gideon glances at me, flashing me a smile in the dim red glow of our LED lamps. “She’s one of the only people on this planet I actually do trust. I knew her for years through the hypernet before we ever met in person. She’s good people. And she’s got a good rig, so we can use her place to regroup.”

  I let out a slow breath. It’s hard enough teaching myself to trust Gideon—secondhand trust is even harder to accept. But I nod, reminding myself that even though he trusts her, I don’t have to. I can still run, if I need to. I still know how to disappear.

  “Where is she?”

  “She actually lives in this sector, on the north side. Mid-level.”

  “Oh—perfect.” I try to bite back my surprise. Mid-level means money, at least enough to afford a decent place, a hover, a steady lifestyle. I was expecting the female version of Gideon, and had been bracing myself for another lair. “But Gideon—what do we do then? If something’s going down on the Daedalus, that doesn’t give us much time to stop LaRoux.”

  Gideon runs his hands through his hair, a gesture of frustration that’s becoming rapidly familiar the longer I know him. “I know. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we should tell the police—it’s not like we’ve got proof, but maybe if they launch even a halfhearted investigation, it might be enough to throw a wrench in LaRoux’s plans.”

  The police? I swallow hard, exhaustion making it harder for me to remember what I’ve told Gideon and what I haven’t. He knows I’m a con artist, knows I’d have no particular desire to bring the authorities into this. But he doesn’t know all the reasons why I really don’t want the police’s attention on me. Attention that could lead to questions like “Why do you own an illegal firearm?” and “What are you doing with the blueprints to LRI Headquarters?” and “Why are you hiding your genetag and your identity?”

  “Surely LaRoux’s got people in law enforcement,” I say finally. “Not to mention that the sector relies heavily on LaRoux’s private security force, and as much fun as it was dancing with them last time, I wouldn’t mind avoiding their eye this time around.”

  Gideon’s shaking his head, his eyes distant and his lips thin, his expression so clear I can almost feel his distress like it’s my own. Losing his den means a lot more to him than losing my apartment did to me.

  I soften my voice. “Can we really trust them?”

  “We’ve got to trust someone,” Gideon says finally. “We’ll keep it anonymous. We don’t even need to say it’s LaRoux—maybe even just a bomb threat, something mundane, something they have to look into. Anything to get their eyes on the Daedalus, because I don’t know what else we can do.”

  And the problem is, he’s right. We’re days out from the gala on the Daedalus, and our arsenal is down to a backpack of whatever we could grab before he reduced his hideout to rubble. We have nothing. I swallow against the bitter taste of adrenaline still lingering in my mouth, and let Gideon lead me on through the darkness.

  We wait on the gray world, and look for worth in the hatred and mistrust among its people but find little. Their moments of bravery and heroism are buried in the lust for violence and revenge that tears them apart.

  There is a girl with fire in her blood stirring the others with the same magnetism of the blue-eyed man, making others follow her with nothing but words. They rebel against their leaders as we once tried to rebel against the man with blue eyes.

  But it is the little boy often at her side who draws our notice most. These creatures cannot see into each other, or see ahead into the infinite branches of possible futures. But we can.

  And this green-eyed boy will be important.

  THE SOUND OF OUR FOOTSTEPS is muffled by the soft sand under our feet, and I can hear my breath in my ears, too loud and rasping for the speed we’re running. But of course it’s not the running that’s got my heart trying to thump its way out of my chest. I’ve got a chorus of voices echoing around my head, just to add to the noise.

  My den.

  This is what you get for letting someone in.

  Did I definitely wipe the drives in the corner?

  Did I pack my book? Yes, I packed it, I remember.

  Oh, hell.

  Is this what it feels like for Towers? Constantly grabbing her bag and running, expecting them behind her at any second?

  I damn well hope it is. I hope I scare the hell out of her.

  Every soldier under her command trusted her, and she turned her head the other way when it really mattered. She failed to protect them, just like all those years ago, my brother’s commander failed to keep him safe.

  They accepted the responsibility. They should be held to a higher standard.

  And accept the consequences, when they fail to meet it.

  But how did they find us?

  “How did they find us?”

  A moment later I realize Sofia spoke my own thought out loud, and I shake my head without breaking my stride. “I have no idea. Maybe they got one of our faces scanned, caught us on a facial recognition camera as we came bel
ow.”

  “One that showed us actually walking in that door?” She sounds skeptical. “I assumed you’d have those locked down pretty hard.”

  “I do. They’re not connected to any network but my own—there’s no way anybody could have intercepted the feed.”

  “We need to work out how they found us before we head to your friend’s, or for all we know, they could follow us right there.”

  My heart throws in a little extra syncopation over that idea. This girl is good at running—I hadn’t even thought of that. I let my pace slow. “Okay, think. Let’s assume they didn’t get us with cameras, because that’s hardest to confirm, and hardest to act on. Did you carry anything out of LaRoux Headquarters that you didn’t carry in?”

  She glances down at herself, conducting a mental stock take, then slowly shakes her head. “I’m sure I didn’t.”

  “Did you eat or drink?”

  “Nothing.”

  I let my frustration out in a growl, then cut the sound off as she raises one hand abruptly, her eyes widening in the dim red light. “They injected me.”

  I kick up a cloud of sand as I screech to a halt. “They what?”

  “I assumed it was something to make me more compliant, I wasn’t answering their questions. But I don’t know that for a fact.” She’s working hard to keep her voice level, but I can hear the fear—I’m listening for it, I guess, since the same thing is pulsing through me. “What if they injected me with something they can trace? With some kind of tracker?”

  I shake my head, closing my eyes, forcing myself to focus. Dragging my mind away from my ruined den, where it wants to linger. “They knew where you were, and they couldn’t have thought you’d escape. I mean, modesty aside, it was incredibly unlikely, especially given that they didn’t know we were in contact, or that you’d got a signal out. Injecting a tracker is beyond preemptive measures, and into paranoid territory.”

  Her silence is what makes me open my eyes again. Her face is perfectly still, and this time she can’t keep the tremble out of her voice. “They were going to make me into a husk, take my mind with—with the rift. I would have done anything they told me to, but perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to report back. Perhaps they would have needed a way to find me, if…I couldn’t communicate.”

  She swallows, hard, and I want to throw my arms around her and squeeze her until we both feel safe. Instead, I curl my hands into fists by my sides and keep my voice level. “It’s a working theory. Let’s see what we can find.”

  We’re both straining our ears now for the sound of pursuit coming up the tunnel, but we can’t move until we’re sure we’re not leading them closer and closer to Mae’s place. Sofia keeps watch in silence as I cobble together a scanner, cannibalizing one of my security sweepers and wiring it into my lapscreen, pulling my chip from my pocket to insert and bring it all to life—it’s my last security precaution, in case somebody gets their hands on my lapscreen. Paranoia, perhaps, but today turned out to be a good day to be paranoid.

  She turns, pulling down the collar of her shirt until I can see an angry red spot just below the fleshy part of her shoulder. I clench my jaw and press the scanner against her skin, trying to ignore the way it makes her flinch. Then she extends her arms so I can run it over each of her limbs in turn, moving slowly and giving the image on my screen time to stabilize.

  Whatever they’ve put in her arm, it’s moved a little—I find it nestled close to the shoulder joint, where it’s worked its way down from its entry point. No bigger than a couple of grains of sand, but I know what I’m seeing.

  “Cut it out,” she whispers sharply, staring down at the little image on the screen. “Do you have a knife?”

  I shake my head. “No time, no first aid, and there’s important stuff around your shoulder joint I could hit. We can neutralize it for now and get rid of it later.”

  She presses her lips together tightly as I pull out the handheld electromagnet I brought with me, clipped to the outside of my bag. I keep it clear of all my equipment, and instead press it against her skin before switching it on. I can sympathize—I’d want to hack it out of me too—but speed is everything, and we both know that.

  Once we’re sure it’s dead, she helps me stuff my equipment back into my bag, and we set off again as quietly as we can.

  We emerge from the tunnel in an alleyway behind a twenty-four-hour dance club, the pulse of the beat inside shaking the walls around us. The daylight, even diffuse and artificial as it is down here, makes me stumble and blink. I’m about to turn and stride for the mouth of the alley when Sofia grabs my arm, spinning me back to face her. My heart stutters—surprise, no more—and then she reaches up to pull my head torch free, and smooth back my hair, then pluck a spiderweb from my chest.

  “We don’t want to draw attention,” she says, lifting my hand and positioning it palm-up so she can dump both torches in it, then running her hands over her own clothing, straightening it quickly. It’s like she’s putting herself back together as she does it, and when she looks up at me once more, she’s composed. Everything that’s going on inside her is locked away tight. I envy her the ability.

  I stuff the torches in my bag and turn to lead the way. We take a direct route—we’re as sure as we can be that they’re not tracking us remotely, so now we need to clear the area before they get eyes on us physically. Keeping our heads down, we push through the marketplace, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be coming back here at all. It feels like we’re on a track now, heading toward the confrontation I’ve been planning for years, with no way to avoid it. The rift, the whispers—they’re here on Corinth, so either we take the fight to LaRoux, or somehow, he’s going to bring it to us.

  The elevator up to Mae’s level is quiet, and the difference from the cacophony of the market is obvious the moment the doors slide open. We squeeze past a bunch of door-to-door evangelists and a couple clearly on a date—locked at the lips and hips—and walk out into the neat and tidy streets of her neighborhood. The mid-levels lack the ostentation of Kristina McDowell’s penthouse, but the small, compact homes around here are nothing like the tenements in the slums, either. The buildings are no more than ten stories high, and most dwellings have a whole story to themselves. This is about the level where you start getting your own bedroom, even if it’s just a hidey-hole.

  Mae’s three blocks away, and she opens the door on the third knock. Her mouth falls open when she sees me, and though I summon up a ghost of my usual smile, it doesn’t seem to help any. “Honey, what the hell?” she whispers, stepping back to gesture us urgently inside. “Your whole setup went dark an hour ago, and there’s some serious chatter about something going boom in the Botigues quarter. I’ve been frantic. Get inside, quick.”

  I push the front door closed, leaning back against it and letting my breath out slowly. My heart’s still pounding, lungs aching as though I’ve been running for kilometers. This is Mae’s house, I tell my body. Start behaving. We’re safe here. “The truth is better than the rumors,” I say. “Mae, this is…” I pause. “Alice. Alice, this is Mae.”

  Whatever Sofia was expecting, I’m one hundred percent sure this wasn’t it—Mae looks about as wholesome as they get, in one of the vintage tea dresses in fashion right now, hair caught up in a neat ponytail, as if she just slipped in from a social game of tennis. She looks like she should be serving on the fund-raising committee at her kids’ school—and in fact she does—instead of partnering me on the galaxy’s most notorious hacks.

  Still, I’ve got to give my girl her due. She sticks out her hand to shake like she’s just been introduced to Mae at a cocktail party, and her smile looks a world better than mine. “We owe you,” she says simply.

  “My friend, that’s one complicated ledger, trust me,” Mae laughs. “I’m assuming if we’re doing introductions, you’re sure you weren’t followed, honey?”

  I nod, suddenly—uncomfortably—aware that I need to tell Mae not to refer to me as the Knave where
Sofia can hear. As if I needed this day getting any more tangled. “I’m sure, but my den is gone. I had to burn it all.”

  She lets out a slow breath. “You need gear?”

  I nod again. “We won’t stay any longer than we have to, but this is the only place that has what I need to work out our next step. I thought…” But what I’m asking for is huge—the average user’s private enough about letting somebody onto their system. For Mae to let another hacker into her rig is akin to her inviting somebody to waltz on in while she’s naked. There’s no reassurance I can offer that would matter—the truth is, I could do whatever I wanted once she let me in, and she knows it. So it comes down to trust.

  Mae nods slowly. “We’re in this deep, may as well go the whole way. Come on through, both of you. Let’s get you set up before the kids get home from school.”

  I see Sofia taking it all in as we head out the back—I’m good at electronic networks, and she dominates the social ones, after all. So she’s doing what she does best. I see her study the school schedules on the screen in the kitchen, the photos of Mae and her kids, the comfy, mid-priced furnishings. Mae and her partner Tanya used a donor for the kids, then Mae ended up a single mom when it turned out raising babies was hard work. She shrugged, and said better to raise two than three. That’s what Mae’s like—the kids are the thing that matter. Sofia’s working that out, I’m pretty sure, from what’s on show here.

  Though it’s very faint, she almost smiles when we head through into Mae’s office. I guess most of my kind don’t have well-tended potted plants and framed family portraits in their secret dens of hackery.

  Me, I’m just itching to get over to Mae’s huge bank of screens. It’s like a gap inside me, having no way to get online—it’s an addiction, and I know it, but it’s one that works for me just fine. I tug on my sensor gloves and sink down into Mae’s chair. It hums softly, contours adjusting as it folds around me, and just like that, I’m at home. Behind me I hear Mae talking to Sofia about food and drink, but I’m already submerging in my world.