Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  Most of the screens are taken up with forums, which Mae must have been checking when we arrived. They’re her specialty, though I dabble there as well. Say what you will about the conspiracy theorists, their paranoia comes in handy. If anything of interest makes it onto any corner of the hypernet, one of them’s going to notice it—and a couple of well-placed comments will send them marching off like an army of ants to investigate. Then all you have to do is sort the truth from the imagined shadows. Still, it’s worth it for the occasional gem, and that’s why the Knave provides anonymous, protected venues for their discussions. Looks like Mae was checking in on the Corinth Against Tyranny group—after their protest the day Sofia and I met, a bunch of their supporters are still missing. With the LaRoux stranglehold on the media, they’re not having any luck raising a fuss. This is the problem for all the groups who listened to Flynn Cormac’s infamous Avon Broadcast. Even if they do believe him, they’re never going to get the word out.

  I slide in a couple of thumb drives to set up the programs I want, and watch the information start to fly by. For a moment I can see it before me, a vision of all my files streaming through the hypernet, locked down and encrypted beyond the wildest dreams of government agencies, part of an endless river of data. Does it all slide through hyperspace in some form recognizable to those who live there, the whispers? I wonder what they make of the stories we send—our love letters, our tax returns, and everything in between.

  I shake away the question, and while I wait for them to run their security scans, I turn my attention to a discussion about Avon that takes up the top two screens on the right.

  Nothing new on the first—a rehashing of the same old arguments about whether Flynn Cormac’s just a crackpot, no mention at all of Towers, some new data on the latest terraforming reports on Avon…and then. Oh, very nice. Kumiko and her band of Avon veterans, alleged Fury survivors, are chattering like I’ve never seen before. The author of the Avon Broadcast himself is coming to Corinth.

  Someone’s copied and pasted the press release, with some sarcastic comments about how “the Man” keeps trying to pretend Cormac’s speech was all a lie. “Part of the official delegation from Avon, arriving in Corinth to present the credentials of the planet’s first elected senator to the Galactic Council and participate in the peace summit, Cormac is known for his involvement in the much-discussed Avon Broadcast, in which he claimed…” I know the rest.

  My Avon expert’s probably got more info on the delegation than she’s posted in the forums, but my curiosity on that front will have to wait. I can picture Kumiko in her own den to the south of this sector, hunched over her screens. She’s a more reliable source of information than most, especially when it comes to the Fury on Avon, but I never quite trusted her enough to tell her I was after Towers. I don’t know who Kumiko served under on Avon, and since Towers’s role in the Fury epidemic there isn’t exactly public knowledge, I can’t be sure where Kumiko’s loyalties would fall.

  The text boxes I’m waiting on pop up, and I start my search as Mae cracks open a stim can and sets it down beside me. I set my parameters quickly—I’m creating a series of backdoor user profiles, so that I can send in a bomb scare for the Daedalus gala to get the police looking their way without being able to figure out who alerted them. Behind me, Mae and Sofia are talking quietly about the Daedalus—I can hear the surprise in Mae’s voice. Even she, queen of the hypernet rumors, has heard nothing about any drama planned for the gala.

  Now that my program has introduced me to Mae’s system, it starts bringing up my regular windows one by one. My Towers subprogram springs to life, though there’s nothing in there to report, as usual. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think she’s left Corinth. I first found her when she evacuated Avon—allegedly for a quiet retirement. At the time I didn’t buy that she’d just pack up and settle down after all that, after years of looking the other way, then doing LaRoux’s cleanup for him. So I set a program to look for oddities in travel patterns—people who check in for a hyperspace jump but don’t check out on the other end, passenger manifests that end up one person short, that sort of thing.

  That’s the easiest way to work out what you should investigate. Don’t comb through terabytes of data until your eyes cross. Just look for the exceptions, data points behaving the way they shouldn’t, and track those. They’ll be the interesting ones. And right around the time Towers resigned her post, an ident number popped up on the grid supposedly belonging to a war orphan on the next transport leaving Avon. The alleged orphan, a regular citizen of Avon with absolutely no resources to her name, vanished from the transport headed for the orphanage and proceeded to defy every expectation and probability by bouncing from planet to planet and changing her ID more often than most people change their clothes. This was someone who wanted to throw the hounds off the scent, and the only thing on Avon worth that kind of secrecy was what LaRoux put there.

  So for the last year, I’ve been Antje Towers’s personal bloodhound, and I never let her rest. She’s somewhere on my planet, and even when I’m sleeping, my bots and subprograms are searching for her. As hard as it is for me living off the grid, I’m making it absolute hell for her. The longer she runs, the more tired she’s going to get, and the more sloppy her evasions will become. Eventually she’s going to slip up. And I’ll be there when she does.

  With a soft chime, the screen flashes me a dialogue box asking me if I want to send my message. I realize I’ve been sitting there with the anonymous scare threat typed up for a full ten minutes, and it’s not until Sofia drifts over from her conversation with Mae that I shake off my fog. Usually the police are the last people either of us would want to call, but we don’t have any other choice left to us. I glance at Sofia, who’s reading over the message—she takes a breath and nods at me, and with a flick of my fingers, I send our alert winging out into the hypernet to do its work.

  I let my breath out and lean back into the chair, abruptly feeling every ounce of tension and exhaustion catching up with me. We’ve passed the torch, and even if the cops don’t know the real reason they’re being sent to investigate the situation onboard the Daedalus, their presence will throw enough attention on the gala that LaRoux can’t dare do anything to stop them.

  Sofia exhales beside me, and I don’t have to look at her to know her face will show that same release. “What do we do now?”

  “Now we wait.” I draw my shoulders back, wincing as the movement causes a series of pops along my upper spine. “And sleep, while we’ve got somewhere safe to rest.”

  For the first time in all our existence, we are conflicted. We have always been one entity, infinite selves all linked, every thought shared. But those of us who have existed in the thin spots, who have touched the minds and hearts of these beings who carry such passion inside themselves…we are different now.

  Difference, in an existence of utter harmony and completion, is destroying us.

  Some wish to banish the individuals, to close our world to them forever and deny their ships and their data streams and become, once more, one self.

  But there are those of us who are not so certain. Those of us who have seen, who have been, however briefly, something else…

  Something…unique.

  “YOU’RE SURE I CAN’T GET you anything else?” Mae’s sliding dishes into the washer slot while we sit at the kitchen counter, eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea. It’s been an hour, and though Gideon hasn’t picked up any increased chatter from law enforcement regarding the gala, he seems confident that it’s just taking time to trickle through the appropriate channels.

  “Nah, thanks, Mae.” Gideon’s chowing down on his sandwich, more relaxed than I’ve seen him since he woke to find people breaking into his den.

  I resist the urge to reach up under the sweater Mae gave me and scratch at the bandage on my shoulder. Gideon borrowed Mae’s first-aid kit, and with a little anesthetic spray, one quick slice, and a second spray of NuSkin, he got rid of LR
I’s disabled tracker. The gash in my shoulder where he dug it out feels like it was never there. Better safe than sorry, he said, and he’s right.

  I’m finding it harder to settle. This room, this woman—they’re so unlike what I’m used to that it’s a struggle to know exactly how to fit in. I’m at home in squalor and in riches—whether it’s the slums of Corinth or the swamps of Avon, or a penthouse apartment in the richest district of this sector, I’ve learned those worlds. I know how to navigate them. But this…this is just somebody’s mom, which is already unfamiliar to me, in a room that could be a set from one of those “average Joe” sitcom shows.

  I nibble at my sandwich and let my eyes scan the room as Mae and Gideon chat, though my mind’s automatically parsing everything they say. If I seem to be focused on something else, they’ll feel a bit less like I’m listening in, and I can learn more about them. They’ve clearly known each other for years, and the length of that bond causes a little, aching ping of envy somewhere inside me. I don’t think they see each other in person all that often, judging by a comment of Mae’s about Gideon’s height, and his exclamations when she fetches a picture of her kids—Mattie and Liv, fraternal twins. But despite all this evidence of a long time apart, they pick up with an ease of conversation like they speak every day.

  Maybe they do. I’m remembering the dozens of windows Gideon had open at any given time, many of which were text chats with usernames I didn’t recognize.

  “Whoops, that’s the kids’ school,” Mae exclaims, straightening up and lifting a hand to the earpiece she wears. “I’m gonna go take this, you guys finish eating.”

  That comment’s more for me than for Gideon, whose sandwich vanished entirely several minutes ago. As Mae ducks into the living room, Gideon tucks his feet under the crossbar of his stool and swivels back and forth, eyeing me askance. “You okay?”

  I take a quick bite of my sandwich and then nod, indicating my mouth to point out I’m just following Mae’s orders. Gideon waits, though, and eventually I have to swallow and answer. “Just letting you guys catch up. She seems really nice.”

  “She is,” Gideon replies with a grin. “I’ve known her since I was twelve, though she didn’t know then that was my age. Most people on the net still don’t. Nobody takes a teenager seriously.”

  “True,” I reply, taking one more bite and then sliding the last quarter of my sandwich over toward him. “But that just makes my job easier. No one suspects I’m up to anything at all.”

  Gideon takes my offering without question, and the gusto with which he finishes off my sandwich reminds me that all he had in his den were stim packs and protein gels. “Mae’s a predictive data specialist for one of the big drug companies, so she can work from home. Gives her all the opportunity and time she needs for side projects. And for her kids.”

  I glance through the archway into the living room, where Mae’s still on the phone, her back to us. “She seems happy.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  I blink, refocusing on Gideon. “No, I just—” I hesitate, toying with the straw in my iced tea. “I suppose I tend to assume that everyone who does what we do has to give up this kind of life. We’re criminals. Most criminals don’t get to be happy.”

  Gideon dismisses that idea with a flick of his fingers. “This stuff, it’s just what we do, not who we are. You’d still be you if you stopped conning people tomorrow.”

  “And you’d be the same without all your screens and data ports?” I raise an eyebrow.

  Gideon hesitates, but he’s saved from answering when Mae comes back into the room, flashing us each a bright smile.

  “How about a movie?” she asks. “I’ve got HV Instant, so there’s about a million options to choose from.”

  “Don’t you have to go pick up your kids?” I ask, glancing at the display on the wall as it flickers from showing info about the weather back to the time.

  Mae’s eyes follow mine, then skitter away. “They’re going to a friend’s house after school. It’s fine. Maybe a rom com, you think?”

  Gideon grimaces, sliding off his stool and turning to follow Mae back into the living room. “I’m outnumbered, aren’t I?” he complains.

  I’ve seen maybe one romantic comedy since I came to Corinth—and I didn’t really like it—but I don’t particularly want to let on to either May or Gideon that I grew up in a swamp with no HV or hypernet access. So I trail after them, trying to ignore my sense of uneasiness.

  Mae’s turning on the HV, which takes up half the living room wall—her kids are clearly entertainment junkies, the floor littered with the toys and tie-ins that make kids’ programming more immersive. The channels flicker by too quickly, and Mae clears her throat. “Sorry, the eye-trackers have been acting up.”

  Gideon flops down onto one of the couches, pulling out a palm pad and no doubt scrolling through to see what movement, if any, there’s been on our message to the detective. But I keep my eyes on Mae, watching her struggle with the controls, blinking too rapidly for the trackers to function properly.

  Something’s not right.

  She finally gets a movie going on the screen, then makes a shooing motion at me toward the couch. “I’m going to go clean up some more in the kitchen, I’ll join you in a bit.”

  I trail over toward the couch as she bustles back into the kitchen—the now-spotless kitchen—and pause where I can still see at an angle via the mirror in the front hall. As soon as she’s out of direct sight of the living room, she’s got her hand pressed to her earpiece again, lips moving but voice inaudible over the sound of the movie’s opening credits. She never got off the phone call she took earlier.

  My heartbeat quickening, I drop down onto the couch a few feet from Gideon, trying to catch his eye. He doesn’t even look up from his screens—when he’s in, he’s in—so I make a show of scooting closer until my hips come up against his. That brings him up short, palm pad device dropping into his lap as he glances up at me, eyebrows raised.

  “You feeling okay, Alice?” he says, and though his voice is a tease, I see his hand start to creep toward me.

  “Keep your voice down and try to look normal,” I say quietly—not a whisper, because the sibilants in a whisper carry further than a low speaking voice—but a murmur, as though we’re relaxing together. “Something’s wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” Gideon glances at the palm pad, as though the answer to his question might be there.

  “It’s Mae. Something’s going on with her—her body language has completely changed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gideon leans back, but it’s impossible to see the kitchen from where we are now, even in the mirror. “Sofia, you have to relax sometime. We’ve done what we needed to do, the police will take it from here. And I’ve known Mae for four years. She could’ve sold out the—my identity online dozens of times over, and never did. We’re safe here.”

  “It’s precisely that you know her so well that makes it impossible for you to see.” I’m not above using our closeness to get his attention, and reach over to lay my hand on his arm. “I don’t know her at all, no bias whatsoever, and I’m telling you, whatever that phone call was, something’s going on. She’s turned us in, or she’s thinking about it, or something I can’t even predict—but something’s wrong. You have to listen to me.”

  Gideon hesitates, then pulls his arm away abruptly, brows furrowing. “What are you trying to play me for now? Turning me against my friend? What does that get you?”

  I glance at the archway to the kitchen, making sure frustration doesn’t cause my voice to rise. “Nothing! God, Gideon, you don’t think I’d give anything to just sit here and watch a movie and be safe, for once, for once?” To my horror, I can feel my eyes starting to sting, and not because I’m trying to cry. Tears now would just make Gideon even more certain I’m trying to play him. Yet there they are, threatening to spill out, making me blink hard to keep them back.

  Because even as I’m saying t
he words, I’m realizing that they’re true. For the first time since my father’s death, the desire to be here, safe, on a couch with this boy I barely know, feels more real than the need to make LaRoux pay. And that scares me more than anything.

  “I trust Mae,” he says, voice low and tight. Just now, I can see the toll the loss of his den has taken on him. He’s not ready to lose this last safe haven on top of it. “I trust her a hell of a lot more than I trust you.”

  I take a slow breath, trying not to acknowledge how much that cut actually burns. But I can’t really blame him—he shouldn’t trust me. “Anyone can be bought,” I reply softly. “Everyone has a weakness. Does her loyalty to you outweigh her value of her own life? Her kids’ lives?”

  In spite of himself, Gideon’s gaze flicks over to the mantel shelf over the HV screen, where pictures of the twins adorn every empty space.

  I press my advantage, as hard as I dare. “Tell her we’re going to go check on a lead, meet a contact, anything. Make some excuse for us to leave, and if she tries to get us to stay, then you’ll know she’s stalling us here for a reason.”

  Gideon just shakes his head, mute now, staring hard at the HV screen as a scene plays out aboard a space station to the strains of a recent pop hit. When Mae comes back in, bearing a large bowl of popcorn, he looks up at her with a smile, his anger melting away. My heart sinks.

  “Here you go,” she says, handing us the bowl. “None of that synthetic stuff—this is real corn. Made the mistake of getting it once, now my kids won’t touch the other stuff.” She clears her throat and turns away to go back to the kitchen.

  “You’re not going to watch with us?” Gideon asks, resting the bowl on his lap.

  “Oh, no, got some things to do.” Mae doesn’t turn around.

  Gideon pauses, looking down into the bowl, jaw clenching visibly. Then, slowly, he says, “Well, we can’t really stay long either. I’ve got a ping on one of my contacts, and we need to go to the drop point before the hit goes cold.”