by Amie Kaufman
Movement behind her makes my heart give an abrupt lurch—Tarver sees the husk at the same time, and suddenly he’s descending the pile of rubble without slowing, causing a landslide of debris and dust. But he’s not going to get there in time. There’s a boy stumbling toward the woman in the jumpsuit, stumbling because one of his ankles isn’t working right—he must’ve been so far behind the rest of the group that whatever took them out missed him entirely.
The woman, seeing Tarver’s sudden headlong slide down the rubble, looks back. She gasps, drops the thing in her good hand, and pulls something else out of the satchel at her side just as the boy reaches out for her. She jabs it into his ribs, and the crackling sound of electricity splits the air. The whisper-controlled boy jerks and seizes—it’s a Taser, the thing in her hand—and then drops to the ground, as motionless as the sea of bodies between us.
“Sanjana!” Tarver calls as he lands in a heap at the bottom of the rubble, then leaps unsteadily to his feet.
Recognition surges through me, as quick and sharp as the Taser blast. I’ve seen this woman’s personnel picture before—one of dozens I sorted through while making myself an LRI employee ID months ago—but I never knew who she was.
Sanjana. Dr. Rao. Our rift expert.
“You rang?” she retorts weakly, the Taser falling from a hand gone nerveless. She sways again—making Tarver lurch forward—then drops into a heap, Tarver diving for her barely in time to keep her head from hitting the shattered pavement.
Their faith gives us strength, strength enough to try, in the only ways we can, to reach them. To ask them for help. To beg for an end.
We reach into their thoughts and try to speak through the images of people they knew, souls lost in the crash, but are met with fear. We try to speak, to use the words learned from long years under observation, but they cannot understand us. We try to show them they are not alone—we give him his home, the poem held closest to his heart; we give her a flower, a reminder of the unique and fragile thing she is fighting for.
We pave a path for them in fragile petals and every step closer they take we feel stronger. They have taught us faith, and hope, and in them we have found our strength again.
And then she dies.
WE MAKE IT ONLY AS far as a shopping arcade a few blocks away. Tarver carries the scientist part of the distance, but as soon as she starts coming back to consciousness, she starts mumbling about being able to walk—she seems to accept the compromise of being half lifted along, supported between Tarver and me. Jubilee’s hand is torn up a little, where her grip slipped while climbing and her palm slid across a jagged bit of steel, but she’s on her feet, Flynn by her side. Sofia’s the one who finds the cavernous opening beyond a fallen portico façade, crawling through and then gesturing for us to follow.
Normally, carrying Sanjana would be nothing—she’s not very heavy, and there’s two of us—but by the time we ease her through the gap in the façade, I’m ready to drop myself. I stumble and let her go a bit too abruptly as soon as we’re inside, making Tarver sag under the sudden additional weight, and we all end up sinking to the dusty, cracked floor in a heap.
The only light’s coming from the partially blocked entryway, and Sofia—also on the floor, I didn’t even notice her drop—groans and drags her pack over to rummage for a flashlight. Nothing happens when she flicks it on. I can see her profile backlit by the sun on the street outside, see her stare blankly at the flashlight as though its failure has turned her brain off, too, and this last obstacle is too much to bear.
“EMP blast,” Tarver rasps, voice hoarse with exhaustion and catching as he chokes on the dust stirred up by our entry. “Don’t know why it hurt them, but that was that pulse out there. Flashlight won’t work. Guns either. Nothing that runs on power.”
Sofia drops the flashlight with a clatter and slumps back over on the floor, defeated. If my leg wasn’t pinned under Sanjana’s half-conscious body, I’d drag myself toward her to make sure she’s all right—but I can’t even tell if I’m all right. My muscles keep shaking, which suggests that at least all my limbs are still attached. Unless they’re phantom twitches. Isn’t that what they call it, when you lose an arm or a leg, and you still feel like it’s there? Phantom twitches—phantom exhaustion—phantom sensations from bits that aren’t there anymore…a laugh that even I recognize, dimly, distantly, as somewhat hysterical, whispers out of my lips before I turn my face against the stone floor, not even caring as the dust sticks to my sweaty brow.
There’s a crack, a whoosh, and then red light blossoms against my closed eyes—my eyes are closed? When? I force my lids open to see Jubilee’s face glowing. Then she’s moving, and my tired brain makes sense of what I’m seeing—it’s an emergency flare, something she must have had in her pack. She hands it to Flynn, sitting beside her, who tucks it in under a rock, shielding the glow so that it offers us only a little light. Hopefully, it’ll be invisible from the outside.
Most of the arcade has collapsed—though the wreck of the Daedalus is still a few kilometers away, the shock from its impact has leveled over half the buildings in the city this far out. A few storefronts are still intact, promising high-end shopping experiences that their battered, darkened interiors certainly can’t deliver. A jewelry store’s security grate has been smashed apart by a fallen column of marble; the fact that the dust and rubble on the floor have been undisturbed makes my skin prickle. Under normal circumstances, even in the upper city, this place would’ve been picked clean by looters.
The weight on my leg shifts, yanking me back to the present, and I remember Sanjana. I sit up, reaching out to ease my foot out from under her as she lets out a groan. Tarver bends over her, brushing her hair out of her face so he can scan it.
“You okay?” he asks, intent. “Sanjana?”
She groans again, as though protesting the need to reply, but then opens her eyes and struggles up onto her elbows so she can eye Tarver wearily. “You do keep saving my life, Captain.”
“It’s ‘Major’ now,” notes Jubilee, glancing up from her torn-up hand, which Flynn is inspecting in the unsteady light of the flare. “He got promoted after Patron.”
“Actually, it’s just ‘Tarver’ now,” corrects the ex-soldier, the grim line of his mouth finally easing into something almost like a smile. “And to be honest, I’m pretty sure you just saved our lives. How’d you do that?”
Sanjana grimaces as Tarver helps her up into a seated position, easing back to lean against a block of stone. “Electromagnetic pulse. I was pretty sure that the rift entities’ seemingly supernatural abilities are actually directly linked to the power differentials between their dimension and ours, and that their method of control is nothing more than an electrical interception of the signals firing in a person’s neural path…ways…” She trails off, eyes flicking from Tarver’s blank face, then across to Jubilee’s, then across what can be seen of the others in the dim light. “Huh. Wrong audience.”
“No, I get it.” My weariness is fading, making way for a spark of curiosity. I’ve got no idea who this woman is, beyond someone Sofia was trying to reach at LaRoux Industries, but whoever she is, she’s brilliant. “They’re hacking people’s brains, essentially.”
Sanjana’s lips twitch into a smile, eyes meeting mine. “Not really how I’d put it, but that’s more or less right.”
What she’s saying makes perfect sense—it fits with LaRoux’s little devices, explaining why the electromagnetic fields our shields produce would hide us from the whisper. And then I see something else, something more urgent, and I scramble to rip my vest open, and pull my kit out from inside it. “Oh, hell.”
Six sets of eyes swivel to me, and I point at Tarver, then Flynn. “We just fried them. I don’t know how quickly the whisper can find us, but it won’t need a husk to lay eyes on us anymore. Our minds are unprotected.”
Soft curses echo around me, horrified glances are exchanged, and then Tarver and Flynn are both scrambling to pull the p
alm pads from inside their vests, sliding them across to me. “Can you fix them?” Jubilee asks, pressing down on the folded bandage Flynn had been using to stop the bleeding on her hand. “Did the EMP fry your equipment, too?”
I hold up the bag. “It’s aluminized.”
I get the same blank stares Sanjana was on the end of a minute ago.
“Any techie worth their salt carries their gear in one of these, protects against static charges, magnetic fields—and EMPs.”
Sanjana slowly pulls a palm pad from a pocket sewn into her jumpsuit, pushing it across to me with her good hand. “I followed the specs you sent. Smart. How far do they project when they’re working?”
“Several feet,” I say, starting to unscrew the casings to get at their innards. “They might even turn the husks back, but I think it’d take minutes at best, and minutes up close with those guys is longer than we’ll ever have.”
In the silence that follows, I know everybody is thinking about what those several minutes would entail. Flynn breaks it by introducing himself, and then the rest of us, and Sofia stirs to hand Sanjana a water bottle and a granola bar.
Flynn’s brow is furrowed throughout the introductions, though, and I don’t blame him—this is physics beyond my understanding, and I didn’t grow up on a backwater swamp planet halfway across the galaxy. “So, Dr. Rao…you know how she’s doing this? Controlling people?”
Sanjana pauses, clearly reorganizing her thoughts, figuring out how to explain the concept. “Basically…our brains run on electricity, right? Biochemical electricity, of course, not like a battery, but…all the little impulses in our brains are electrical sparks that tell us what we’re seeing, tasting, hearing—and everything we do, all our muscle responses and movements, they’re responses to electrical signals too. I believe that the rift entity—”
“Rift—ow!” Jubilee starts to interrupt, then hisses as Flynn applies alcohol from their first-aid kit to the gash on her hand.
He glances up, lips twitching. “Crybaby.”
“Shut up.” But her lips seem to respond to his, twitching once, then twice, into a smile. Her eyes flicker back toward Sanjana. “I meant—rift entity? What’s that?”
“They’re…right, you wouldn’t know about that. You know how everyone’s…acting strange? The people out there, the ones who mobbed you?”
“The ones being controlled by the whisper, right.”
“By the…” Sanjana’s brows lift. “Whisper? That’s what you call them?”
“Lilac came up with the name,” Tarver interjects quietly. “She was the first person to know about them. They showed up like whispering voices in her mind when we were shipwrecked.”
Sanjana hesitates, sympathy in her gaze as her head turns back toward her old friend. Her hesitation lingers, as she clearly wants to ask him about Lilac—she might be fooling her father and the public, but Sanjana knows something’s not right. “Right. Well, then you know what they can do. Cause muscle spasms, pupil dilation, a taste people describe as metallic—”
“Tastes like blood,” mutters Jubilee as Flynn finishes wrapping medical tape around the pad against her palm.
“I’d describe it more like the sensation you get when you lick a battery, but I suppose that’s accurate. Under the right circumstances, they can even cause auditory and visual hallucinations—the whispers Lilac was hearing. And in the most extreme cases, they can control a person’s motor functions completely.”
“But what does this have to do with the EMP grenades?” Tarver’s voice is quick, carrying far more animation than before Sanjana’s arrival.
“Well…the whisper’s abilities all have to do with ‘hacking’ the electrical impulses in the brain. My theory was that a large enough electromagnetic pulse might interfere with that control long enough to sever the connection. I grabbed these from the lab when I got your text—I was working late, that’s the only reason I was even at LRI when the Daedalus went down. I couldn’t get you on the phone and knew you’d be walking straight into…well, that.” She tilts her head toward the opening of our makeshift cave, where moments before we’d been running for our lives.
“You came to find us without knowing whether those things would work?” Flynn’s eyebrows go up, clearly impressed.
“It wasn’t much riskier than staying where I was. Half the trauma center had fallen to those things already, I wasn’t about to stick around and become one of them. I rigged my palm pad in line with the instructions you sent, and I’m not a husk yet, so I’m guessing it works.” Sanjana rubs at her arm, just below the elbow. I’d thought she was wearing some kind of metallic mesh glove, but as she massages the spot where the “glove” begins, I realize what I’m looking at—it’s a cybernetic prosthesis. And the EMP grenade knocked it out just as surely as it knocked out the husks—that explains why she couldn’t afford to test her theory before she found us.
“You gave up the use of your hand to save us?” Sofia’s been quiet during all of this, but her eyes are on the same movement I noticed.
“I owe Tarver a lot,” Sanjana replies quietly. “I’d have lost much more than a hand if it weren’t for him.”
When Tarver doesn’t answer, Jubilee clears her throat. “She’s one of the survivors from the outpost on Patron that Tarver liberated. In a way, she—that outpost—started all of this. Tarver never would’ve been on the Icarus in the first place if that operation hadn’t landed him on a publicity tour to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about the military”
“Full circle,” Sanjana murmurs.
“The EMP, though.” Tarver’s insistent, cutting through the discussion with a grimace, as though they’re discussing his failings rather than his heroism. “It did work. And those people—they’re alive? They’re not hurt?”
“They should be fine,” Sanjana replies. “Theoretically, they’ll wake up with not much more than a bad headache. And whatever injuries they’d already sustained, of course—wait, where are you going?”
Tarver’s moving before Sanjana can finish, reaching out for her satchel. “How many of these things do you have left?” he asks urgently.
“Two more—why?”
“This is how we save Lilac.” Tarver pulls out one of the grenades, a spherical object the size of a tangerine. His eyes flick up toward Sanjana. “The whisper has her, too. She’s the one doing all this—or rather, the whisper’s forcing her to do all this.”
“Tarver—I know. I saw her.” Sanjana reaches out with her good hand, resting it on Tarver’s arm to stop him from getting up. “She’s at LRI Headquarters. Tarver…”
“We use one of them to get through the husks to where she is, then we use the other one on her—free her—then destroy the rift.”
But Sanjana’s shaking her head, pain written clearly across her features. “Tarver, stop—no. Those others, they’re just being controlled. Like puppets, or androids all running on the same programming. Lilac…” She swallows, some of that pain shifting into fear. “Lilac is different. I saw her, just before I got out. She’s not being controlled, some mindless shell.…She is that entity. I saw what she could do. I don’t know how it’s possible, or why it is, but she’s different, and that entity is wearing her like a costume. I don’t think that EMP will have any more effect on her than it would on you or me. That thing’s a part of her.”
Tarver’s eyes stay on her for a long, tense moment, his hand tightening around the grenade. Then he lets it fall back into her satchel, shoulders sagging as he sinks back down onto the cracked floor. “What about the shields? If we got one of those close enough to her, for long enough…?”
I shake my head. “They’re less powerful than the EMP. No chance.”
The silence rings for a heartbeat or two until I find my voice, clearing my throat. “We know why she’s different,” I say quietly. When Tarver says nothing, I relay the story to Sanjana that he told us—of how Lilac died, and came back, and brought with her some connection to the other side of the rift th
at’s been inexorably drawing her back toward the whispers.
“And now,” Sofia adds when I’ve finished, “LaRoux’s sending representatives back to every planet with plans to build more rifts, like the one on Avon, and the one here. We think that she’s letting him think he’s still running the show, that he’s not the risk. He’s losing his mind, and she can drive him over the edge anytime she wants. Once he’s put everything in place, she’ll be able to spread the whispers like an infection until every person in the galaxy is one of those empty shells. Unless we figure out a way to stop her.”
“On Avon, we destroyed the rift.” Flynn’s voice is troubled. “And that stopped the whispers, too. We were hoping you’d know enough about this rift to tell us how to destroy it.”
“We were hoping,” Sofia adds, “that you’d be willing to help us. Since you were almost willing to help me once before.”
“Help…” Sanjana’s brow furrows deeper, but then her eyes widen. “You’re Alexis? You’re the one I was going to meet, the day of the riots at LRI Headquarters?”
“Yes, except that it’s actually Sofia,” Sofia replies. “I was worried they’d caught you, when they turned up at my apartment.…Thanks for trying to warn me.”
“I’m glad you’re safe, I never knew.…” Sanjana shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can help you, but I’ll try. How did you destroy the other rifts?”
“I don’t think LaRoux had figured out yet how to build shields like the ones we’re using, when we were on Avon.” Jubilee’s quick to answer. “There was a self-destruct mechanism built in, I assume so he could terminate the project if things got out of hand. He wouldn’t need that now, though.”
“No,” Sanjana agrees. “I doubt there’s a self-destruct switch this time. He won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Tarver takes longer to answer. “I don’t entirely know,” he says finally. “I jumped into the rift with Lilac. I thought it would kill me, to be honest, but I thought there was a chance it would save her. I think it was the whispers themselves that destroyed the rift.”