Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  “Maybe nothing,” Sanjana replies. “But it could kill him, too. It could drive him mad. It could erase every memory and thought he’s ever had. It’s impossible to predict.”

  My mouth’s gone dry. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I know the reason that we don’t dare attempt this is that if something goes wrong, it could give Lilac even more power; it could lead to the destruction of this world as we know it, the destruction of humanity. But here, now, all I can process is that attempting it might destroy the boy sitting a few feet away, fidgeting with a stack of paper so that he doesn’t have to look at me.

  I can’t take my eyes off him, though his face is still angled down and away, where I can’t see what’s going on inside him. No, I want to say. Not in a million years. It’s too dangerous. It’s asking too much. I don’t care if he’s the Knave, I don’t care if there’s no one else. I won’t let him.

  Sanjana breaks the silence, clearing her throat. “I’m going to try to get some sleep,” she says, and when I look up, I see her gaze swing between the two of us. She holds out her good hand to forestall Gideon as he starts to offer help, adding, “I’m okay. I’m not running any marathons anytime soon, but a few cracked ribs won’t stop me from finding a place to pass out.” She offers up a weak smile and slowly makes her way back out of the shop.

  I stare down at Gideon, able to see only the fall of his hair, face shadowed and angled away, until I can’t stand it anymore. I shove away from the pillar at my back and drop to the floor beside him. “You can’t do this,” I blurt, voice cracking with exhaustion.

  His eyes flick up, expression unreadable—not because there’s no emotion there, but because his features are so conflicted I can’t tell one flicker of thought from another. “It’s only a theory,” he replies softly. “Useless, unless we figure out a way to make sure nothing goes wrong. We can’t risk making Lilac strong enough to wipe us out, or cut us off.”

  I swallow, trying to soothe my dry throat, leaning to the side until I come up against the wall with a thump. My eyes close, as though by shutting him out I might shut out everything else, too.

  “How’s your hand?” Gideon asks in a low voice.

  Startled, I open my eyes and look down, where the bandage on my hand is grubby and half-stripped away after our near escape in the streets. I used it to grab him, when Tarver and I pulled him free of the husks, and I didn’t feel a thing. I flex my fingers, a dull ache throbbing through where the burns had been, the only reminder of the choice I made on the Daedalus. The exploding plas-pistol could’ve easily killed me, and instead, Mori’s dermal regenerator’s left me without so much as a scratch.

  “Better,” I whisper.

  The quiet, punctuated only by the faint sound of Tarver shifting in his sleep in the next room, settles in like a tangling vine—the longer it grows between us, the harder it is to break through it. I want to say something, but I don’t know what—that I’m sorry, except I’m not, because he was deceiving me too, as I was deceiving him. Gideon and I were a house of cards, nothing more. We were always going to fall apart eventually.

  I shouldn’t mourn the loss of something that never existed. And yet, sitting here in the dark, fighting the urge to turn toward him and reach for him and throw myself into his arms and tell him—tell him anything, everything, whatever I can—it’s taking all the strength I have.

  My self-control crumbles a little and I find my head turning, my eyes seeking his profile—but he’s already looking at me, his eyes glinting in the glow of the flare. He reaches toward me and I hold my breath. His fingertips touch my cheek, tracing a curve down toward my jaw and then lingering there, as though loath to pull away.

  “Was any of it real?” he whispers.

  And I don’t know if he’s really asking for truth or only echoing my own words back at me.

  My head tilts a fraction, in spite of myself, unable to resist leaning into his touch. “I don’t know.”

  Gideon’s breath catches, and there’s just enough light from the flare for me to see his lips hint at a smile. “I don’t believe you.”

  My heart’s pounding, aching—the only thing worse than sitting here, unmoving, would be to crumble and lean into him and feel him recoil. Or to pull away myself. I want to kiss him, to wrap myself up in him, but everything I feel for him is so confused that even that instinct might be a lie.

  “Gideon, this plan…” But I don’t know what I want to say, and my words peter out.

  Gideon pauses, breath catching as he considers his reply. When he does speak, it’s in a whisper. “If it were you—”

  “If it were me,” I break in, forgetting to whisper, “I wouldn’t do it.” In truth, I have no idea what I would do in his place, but I don’t know any other way to convince him not to pursue this. “I wouldn’t risk madness, risk…losing myself, for a plan that could end the world anyway. It’s stupid, and reckless, and however much you like doing stupid and reckless things, you could be risking yourself for nothing. I can’t sit here and watch you decide to do that.”

  Gideon waits, one eyebrow lifting a little until the quiet settles back in after my speech. “You done?”

  The outburst has left me breathless—I’m tired enough that my emotions are far too close to the surface. I slump back against the wall, running a hand through my hair.

  When I glance at him, expecting annoyance—instead I see him smiling, just the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement. “What I started to say,” he murmurs, “was that if it were you in there, in that wreck…if you were the one whose life, or soul, or self were at stake, and I had to choose between you and the entire universe? I’d be halfway there already. I wouldn’t even stop to think.”

  I can’t answer—I can’t form a single thought. He’s stolen my breath, my words, left me with just a dim roaring in my ears. I can’t breathe, feeling like the ground’s opening up beneath me, ready to swallow me, and I’m not even sure I care. “Gideon—”

  “My brother felt that way about her. I’m not ready to give up on either of them yet.” He reaches out again, but his fingers halt an inch away from my face. They hover there, and I can feel the pull of him, feel it like a physical force drawing me toward him. I lean in toward his touch just as he lets his hand fall and pushes to his feet. “Get some sleep,” he whispers, before ducking back out again.

  The sound of crunching debris wakes me, and it’s not until I drag myself out of the jewelry store rubble that I see the pale, thin light of dawn streaming through the opening of the arcade. It was still daylight when we came inside—I must’ve been asleep for twelve hours. My neck muscles spasm as if in recognition of that, protesting my bed of cold marble and debris.

  Flynn and Jubilee are awake and moving around, their footsteps making the noise that woke me. Spotting me in the archway, Flynn flashes me a smile and then tosses one of the apples from the LaRoux estate’s kitchen my way. “Morning,” he greets me, managing to elicit a smile from me in return.

  “Is it really morning?” I mumble, catching the apple with difficulty, my reflexes still trying to shake off sleep.

  “It’s really morning.” That’s Sanjana, sitting on the other side of the hall, eating her own breakfast of a banana and something out of a pouch with the LaRoux lambda seal on it, no doubt taken from work. “You slept?”

  “Like a coma patient.” I bite into the apple, my taste buds jolting at its flavor—it’s then that I discover I’m ravenous, as though now that my body’s gotten some sleep, it’s tackling the other problems on the list one by one.

  I can’t bring myself to sit, devouring the apple as I circle the small area in the arcade that’s free of fallen beams. I crouch, peering into the alcove where Flynn and Jubilee had vanished yesterday, finding it empty. I straighten, casting my eyes around again. “Guys…” I swallow my mouthful of apple. “Where’s Gideon?”

  Sanjana looks up from her banana. “He wasn’t in there with you?” Her head tilts toward the store where I spent the night.


  “No.” A flicker of alarm starts at the base of my spine. “Where’s Tarver?”

  Jubilee glances at Flynn, who shakes his head. “I just thought…” She glances at the entryway and the soft morning light beyond. “I thought he went to get some air.”

  I keep scanning the arcade, even though I know one more look isn’t going to make either of them materialize out of thin air…and then realization washes over me. “His gear,” I gasp, dropping the apple.

  “What?” Jubilee turns, standing in the doorway.

  “Gideon’s gear. His goggles, his drives, his lapscreen…they’re gone.”

  Sanjana gives a wordless exclamation. “The shields…” She points to where two of them sit, repaired, one atop the other by the door—hers and Flynn’s. The one Tarver had been using is missing.

  I glance from her to Flynn, and to the soldier by the door. Jubilee’s eyes meet mine for a long moment, and then I find my feet flying toward the hallway. I push past her into the street, calling Gideon’s name and Tarver’s—she and Flynn join in the search, and though we have to stop shouting for them to avoid attracting husks, we fan out to cover the entire block, building by building. It’s not until we end up back at the arcade to see Sanjana’s ashen face in the entryway that my feet stop moving. “The printouts of the programming language are missing,” she whispers.

  Gideon and Tarver are gone.

  “We have to go after them.” Jubilee’s voice is urgent, her feet carrying her straight to her pack so she can start shoving supplies back into it, ready to move out.

  “Jubilee, stop.” My own body’s demanding that I act, fear and worry making me want to leap out of hiding and take off after them. “There’s no way we’re going to catch up with them. They could be hours ahead of us, and we don’t even know what path they’re taking.”

  “We can’t let them attempt to save Lilac.” Sanjana grimaces as she prods at her broken ribs with her good hand.

  Jubilee’s brows rise a little as she shoots the scientist a sidelong glance. “You don’t let Merendsen do anything. He does what he wants and you either help him or you get out of his way.”

  “Look,” I break in quickly as Sanjana opens her mouth to retort, “we don’t know where they are, but we do know where they’re going.” I swallow hard, trying to banish the tangle of guilt and pain and fear choking my voice. “And I know a way to get to the Daedalus without having to fight our way past every husk in the city. We might be able to beat them there if we go down into the undercity.”

  Jubilee’s eyes snap toward mine. “Down? Into the slums?” Her face tightens. “It’ll be chaos down there. Too many people to have evacuated…There’ll be looting, rioting.”

  “Which means that down there, in the chaos, we’ll be that much harder for any husks to spot. We can blend in. The elevators won’t work without power, but we can climb down the maintenance shafts, travel below, then come back up inside the LaRoux Industries compound.”

  I’m speaking quickly, and it takes the others a few seconds to absorb the plan, glancing round at each other. Sanjana speaks first, clearing her throat. “I can’t climb anywhere,” she says, her tone brooking no argument as she lifts the arm with the dead prosthesis. “Not until I get this thing repaired. You’ll have to leave me here.” Flynn starts to argue, and Jubilee a second afterward, but Sanjana cuts through the debate. “This is bigger than any one of us. I can’t argue that it’s bigger than Lilac and not apply the same logic to myself.”

  Jubilee exhales audibly, raking her fingers through her hair. “We’ll signal Mori—an ally—as soon as we find a working radio. She and her guys will come get you.”

  “I won’t be going anywhere,” Sanjana replies, with a shaky smile. “Just make sure you get there in time. Make it count.”

  “We will.”

  “And then?” There’s an apology in her gaze for asking the question, but she doesn’t waver. “When you reach the rift—when you reach Lilac—what then?”

  Jubilee’s gaze creeps across toward Flynn, and the air fills with the words no one wants to say aloud. Eventually, I’m the one who draws breath. “We’ve got a day to figure out some other way. If by the time we reach the Daedalus we still don’t…” I let that breath out, shaky. “Then we destroy the conduit.”

  The gray world is full of anger and pain, the two sides of this war both so colored by hatred that each is the same shade of darkness as the other. They are so similar, longing for peace, for justice, for quiet, and yet they kill each other as though they seek death, not life.

  As our keeper forces us to greater and greater acts of destruction, we…I…do what little I can to find balance. I cannot stop a father from strapping explosives to his chest, but I can reach inside the green-eyed boy and plant the idea to move just far away enough that the blast will not kill him. I cannot shield the girl with the dimpled smile from the grief of losing her father, but I can help her sleep, help her decide to keep breathing each day.

  And I cannot save the girl with the beautiful dreams, the girl I once knew on another world, in another life, from all that is to come. But I can keep her safe from the others. And I can find faith in her dreams.

  I GRAB THE BROKEN LIP of a chunk of concrete, overtired muscles protesting all the way from my knuckles to my shoulders as I haul myself up, scrambling for purchase before I hook a leg over the edge and begin the controlled slide down.

  I’ve seen disasters on the lower levels before, building collapses or fires threatening to spread through a whole quarter, but those times always brought out the best in people: whole families banding together to rescue trapped strangers, neighbors forming bucket chains to fight the fires. This is a different world, desolation as far as the eye can see, whole sectors of brightly lit, bustling Corinth simply wiped from existence. This world isn’t safe, and somewhere out there in it, Tarver’s alone.

  He can’t have had much of a head start, no more than an hour, before I saw he was gone, plus the extra quarter hour it took me to rig my lapscreen to emit the shield frequency to protect me from Lilac. I’m not even sure how long it’ll work. I have to catch up with him, and fast.

  I can guess at which direction he’s moving—most of my options are blocked, so I’m hoping he’s taking the path of least resistance, the one that will get him to LaRoux Headquarters as quickly as possible. My surroundings are mostly silent; emergency sirens occasionally wail in the distance, but no more firefighting drones zip overhead. Every so often, sections of buildings collapse with no warning, the crashes earsplitting, the echoes rumbling across the landscape.

  Huge chunks of debris ripped through this block and the next when the ship fell, shearing straight through the buildings, turning everything above head height to rubble—on the ground floors, some of the doorways are still intact, offering glimpses inside, their upper stories spilling out into the street. They were apartments and offices, mostly, and clothes lie strewn across broken tables and chairs, electronics turned to so much recyc and wiring. Then there are the bundles I thought at first were clothes—the crumpled bodies, silent where they fell.

  I pause to adjust my pack, then make my way through the broken lower level of a law firm, reception desks and ornamental plants crushed beneath piles of rubble. It’s half-dark in here, and I place my feet carefully to keep my footfalls silent, avoid the telltale crunch of debris. I can see light on the far side, and I’m hoping there’s an open section of road if I can get across there.

  I climb over a fallen girder blocking a doorway, easing my head through the gap to check what’s on the other side. In a blur of movement, something comes swinging toward me. I duck, my torso hitting the girder and knocking the wind out of me. The iron bar—because that’s what it is—smashes against the doorframe with a clang. I throw myself back into the room I came from, scrambling across the rubble with no thought for the noise, my blood roaring in my ears, my body alive with electricity.

  There’s a figure in the doorway, vaulting
the girder to come after me in one smooth movement, lifting the bar again. I roll to the side, jamming myself under a broken desk that will give me a moment’s shelter, kicking at the far side of it to smash an exit point. I’m too broad for it, but I drive one boot into the splintered desk over and over, desperately trying to escape before the iron bar comes swinging down again.

  Except it doesn’t.

  “Gideon?” Tarver’s crouching beside the desk, the bar in one hand. “What the hell are you doing? I nearly killed you.”

  “I noticed,” I murmur, letting my head drop back to hit the rubble beneath me with a thump.

  “Quick, we made too much noise.” He’s instantly businesslike, offering me a hand to haul me out from under the desk. “They’ll be here in a minute.”

  I don’t have to ask who. Instead, I follow him as he climbs up another girder, grabbing for a beam across the ceiling and almost silently scrambling until he’s above eye level, sitting on a broken ledge. I climb onto his perch, and he lifts a finger to his lips, turning his gaze down. Just a few seconds later, the first of the husks come moving through the space we left, slowly searching for whatever made the noise.

  We sit jammed in place, side by side, for a full ten minutes as they move through the building. There must be a hundred of them, methodically combing through wreckage and climbing past each other. They’re not efficient or particularly creative, but they’re relentless. And as if I need a reminder of the fragility of our situation, my temporary lapscreen shield dies as we sit there, leaving me dependent on Tarver’s once more. Only once the last has been gone for a couple of minutes does Tarver speak in a low voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “What the hell do you think I’m doing here, Merendsen? I heard there was a sudden drop in property prices in this area, I wanted to check out some places I saw advertised.” I snort. “I’m here to help.”