Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  “You’re here to help me.” His look is flat, disbelieving. Face smudged with dirt, gaze tired, he couldn’t be further from the guy I saw climb onto the dais alongside Lilac in the ballroom of the Daedalus. I have to find a way in, and quickly, or I’ll lose him all over again. What would Sofia do?

  And in the instant I ask the question, I know the answer. She’d tell the truth. Why is it that I’m so sure of that, yet I can’t trust that she’s ever told me the truth? I draw a slow breath. “It’s not for you. I’m here to help Lilac. And Simon. This is what he would have wanted for her, and I’ve realized that she never changed at all from the girl I knew as a kid. I needed people to blame, and she was one of them, but we should have been grieving for Simon together. This is what he would have wanted, and I’m the one that’s left to do it.”

  Merendsen meets my eyes, and after a long moment, he nods, as if I’ve passed a test. “Then let’s go.”

  Within a couple of minutes we’re slowly making our way through the desolate landscape once more. Merendsen’s climbing ahead of me, looking utterly at ease in black fatigues. He’s lacking only his gun—killed by the EMP—to look the perfect soldier. Though his shoulder must still be aching after he dislocated it on the Daedalus, he’s moving more quickly than most healthy people could.

  He looks at home amidst the ruins of Corinth, as if the destruction around us is an outward manifestation of the pain inside him. Though I’m dressed the same outwardly, I’m out of my element and I know it.

  The physicality of our fight to cross the burning city doesn’t bother me—the climbs and scrambles are no worse than some of my onsite hacks—but I’m used to silent, sterile places, not bloodstained sidewalks and chunks of buildings lying across my path. I’m used to security teams I can track, not silent husks, single-mindedly dissecting the city in a slow, methodical search grid. As we work our way through the wreckage, a part of my mind is preoccupied—taking what I learned from Sanjana’s printouts, turning that information over and over in my head. I’m still grappling with even understanding the programming of the rift, let alone closing it down without empowering the whisper to end the world. And I’m on a countdown that’s elapsing far too fast.

  We climb through a restaurant that was inhabited when the debris hit—food’s scattered everywhere, and blood’s pooled underneath one slab of fallen wall, congealing a dark red after so many hours. Fires are still burning as we make our way toward the center of the destruction, the acrid smell of entire city blocks laid to waste getting inside my nose, making my eyes water. We’re seeing parts of the Daedalus herself now, enormous chunks of metal half melted by reentry and impact.

  Tarver pauses for a moment atop a broken wall, surveying the landscape below us—the twisted shards of metal, the broken escape pods. Eventually, when it’s clear he’s not going to move on, I speak. “Merendsen?”

  He blinks, looking across at me like he had no idea I was there at all, then shakes his head. “I’ve seen this before,” he murmurs, turning his gaze back out to the ruined city.

  “This…here?” With a whisper involved, a vision doesn’t seem out of the question.

  He shakes his head again. “A dead ship,” he says softly. “I never thought I’d see something like the wreck of the Icarus again. And here I am, heading into its heart once more.” His mouth forms a dark hint of a smile. “You watched my interrogation footage. But I lied about what happened at the wreck.”

  “What really happened?”

  His smile curves a few degrees further. “Lilac saved my life is what happened. And we found a path that led us out. The wreck of the Icarus was our turning point.” Then he’s moving again, carefully sliding down the slope made out of a crazily leaning wall. I slither after him, landing with a grunt.

  He speaks again when we hit the bottom and find level ground. “Lilac never let herself feel for anyone again, after Simon. Not until Elysium. Not until she thought her father would never know. A part of her died when Simon did, Gideon. You should know that.” The words are a gift—the only sort of thank-you he can offer me right now. I understand that.

  “I do,” I say, and I know now that it’s true. That I should have known it all along—Simon was a dreamer, but he was never a fool. He wouldn’t have given his heart to someone who could say farewell to him without a backward glance. It took me until I was fourteen to find a way into the military databases and find out exactly how he died.

  It was a friendly-fire incident—another terrified recruit, jumping at shadows, who turned his gun on Simon by mistake. He turned it on himself just a few weeks later.

  But every time I’ve thought of Simon dying alone on the battlefield, every time I’ve thought of his fear and confusion, all that blame belonged squarely at the feet of Monsieur LaRoux. Never Lilac.

  “She told me about him.” Merendsen’s voice is quiet. “If she’d known you still needed her support, I know—”

  “I know that too.” We pause, navigating our way around a crack in the road, jumping across a gap that offers a view clear down to the levels below, where fires rage, sending up black smoke. “There was nothing she could do. After Simon died, my parents split. My father couldn’t take what LaRoux did to us. My mother swallowed it, because she was a businesswoman, and making an enemy of Monsieur LaRoux simply wasn’t something she could do, not without the sort of revenge that would ruin her. So they went their separate ways.”

  “What about you?” The glance Tarver shoots me might have belonged to Simon—quiet, measuring me up.

  “I took off. I couldn’t deal with my father’s grief, I couldn’t watch my mother’s betrayal. I was down in the slums by the time I was twelve.”

  “And that’s where you learned hacking?”

  “That’s where I learned the dirty tricks. I already knew a lot of it. Simon taught me.”

  “He taught her, too. The skill with electronics she learned from him saved her life—both our lives.”

  We’re silent as we make our way along the edge of an open section of road, both watchful, but for a time, it’s as if my brother’s the third member of our party, walking silently beside us. It shouldn’t be easier to think about him than about Sofia. I don’t want to imagine her face when she realizes we’re gone. I owe her nothing, after the way she lied to me. But as I walk through my burning city beside a man who’ll risk the entire human race to save the girl he loves, I know that ‘should’ means nothing, when it comes to my heart. I hope she turns and runs—I hope she finds a place to hide from what’s coming. Somehow, I know she won’t.

  I’m torn from my thoughts when Tarver grabs my arm, yanking me back into a ruined storefront. I follow his gesture, sinking to a crouch behind the remains of the wall, and immediately I register the reason for his urgency. The low rumble of a heavy vehicle is making its way up the street behind us, and with the city as it is, there’s no reason to assume the folks we’ll meet will be friendly. Tarver finds a metal rod and hefts it in both hands silently, and I pick up a chunk of concrete from the pile of rubble at my feet.

  The engine turns out to belong to a delivery truck, with a woman behind the wheel, and four guys sitting on the open flatbed. It’s on sturdy hover cushions, suspended a couple of feet above the ground, where it’ll miss most of the debris. All five of them have the eerie, black-eyed stillness of husks. Their heads turn in slow, constant arcs as they scan their surroundings. Judging by their clothing, I’d say they’re the warehouse workers and office staff of the firm whose logo is on the doors of the cabin. “This is not good news,” I murmur, watching them as they slowly cruise past. “If they can drive, they can cover ground far more quickly than we can.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Tarver replies in a low voice, and I turn my head to follow his gaze. A slow procession of husks is rounding the corner. There are dozens—no, hundreds—of others, some on foot, others in cars, moving toward the heart of the crash site. All of them with that fluid, unnatural gait. All of them with empty
faces and black eyes. There must be a thousand of them between us and Lilac.

  Oh, hell, Sofia. This is bad.

  And it is. The possessed are everywhere. We scale the ruins of buildings, we climb through the rubble and run across the dangerous, open spaces of the streets. Our hands bleed from grabbing at broken edges, our eyes sting from the dust, and our throats burn from the smoke we can’t help but inhale as we work. The sounds the city makes as the ruins settle help to mask the sound of Lilac’s black-eyed, loose-limbed army. There are thousands of them now, and every route we try is blocked.

  Tarver is single-minded and unflinching. As dusk begins to fall, I’m afraid of what he might do if we can’t find a way through soon. Eventually, when we stumble across a burst water pipe, I convince him to halt for a few minutes, and we crouch by it in the shadows, drinking from our cupped hands.

  He’s the one to break our silence, gazing out at the ruins beyond our temporary shelter. “The whispers saved her, on Elysium. They did it willingly, gave her the last of their energy. Enough to make her real, permanent.”

  “That’s an incredible gift.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “The ultimate gift,” he agrees, gazing down at his cupped hands, letting the water trickle slowly through his fingers. “In the instant it happened, Lilac said that she was a part of them, for the briefest moment. That they could see her, all of her…all the good, all the bad, and that they felt she was worth saving. This creature is the same species. How could it do such a thing? How could it harbor such hate?”

  “Humans are all one species,” I reply. “But we’re all different. Perhaps, under harsh enough circumstances, any of us might be driven to do the unimaginable.”

  And there she is—Sofia—appearing in my mind’s eye right on cue, that plas-pistol in her hand. Under the right circumstances, any of us might be driven.…I’m beginning to understand, Dimples. Pity I’m probably not going to live to tell you so.

  Tarver pushes to his feet. “We should get moving.”

  I rise beside him, my knees and back screaming in protest. “This isn’t working. They’re multiplying by the hour—they’re going to spot us again, and we won’t make it out if they chase us.”

  Tarver’s face is grim. “Then we fight.”

  I can’t help it—I stare at him, trying to tell if he’s making some wildly inappropriate joke. “There are thousands of them. The best fighter in the world wouldn’t last five minutes, and we don’t even have real weapons. We need another way through.”

  “You have an idea?” His voice is rough, his face filthy, but his eyes are burning when he looks across at me.

  “We have to go down. Use one of these fissures, one of the old elevator shafts maybe. Get into the undercity, use the cover of the slums and hide in plain sight among the people there. Down there, I can get my hands on more equipment. There’s only so much I can do in my head, and I have to have the calculations finished for this program before we get there.”

  “We’ll waste time,” he snaps, and I can see it in every line of his body—he wants to walk straight through the silent armies between us and Lilac, his desperation to get to her driving everything else from his mind.

  “You want to get there, or die trying?” I snap my reply, and that gets his attention. “Because if we stay up here, that’s what’s going to happen. We have to go down. We can get close, that way, and hole up until she’s not expecting us anymore. We’ll be ready to climb up into the middle of LaRoux Headquarters by first light. This is what helps Lilac—this is what gives us a chance to reach her. Fighting our way through is impossible. It can’t be done.”

  He’s strung taut, hands laced together behind his head as he gazes out over the ruins, knuckles white with the force of his grip. Then he curses, dropping abruptly into a crouch, arms curling around his head. As though he’s trying to physically hold himself together for her.

  I dig deep, make my voice hard. “Time’s wasting. Let’s go.”

  The others are so focused on the tasks our keeper sets us that they do not sense the rage building on its own, deep in the swamps. They are so focused on the place filled with soldiers that they do not see the madness simmering underneath the shield of rock and mud that conceals the green-eyed boy’s home.

  I can see what this madman will do, and it will shatter the green-eyed boy’s heart. I have so little strength that I cannot stop the madman or touch anyone near him. My only hope is to reach out to the girl whose dreams I have shared, whose mind is as familiar to me as anything in this world. She will stop this horror—she must.

  It is not until I am watching through her eyes as she stumbles upon the bloody massacre that I understand I am too late. It is her own horror that drives me from her mind once more—the last thing I see through her eyes is the face of the green-eyed boy, full of shock and betrayal and a grief so deep that the pain in the girl’s heart is a torture more painful than any our keeper could have inflicted upon me.

  Forgive me.

  THE UNDERCITY IS IN CHAOS. Without electricity everything is in shadow, a false midnight blanketing the slums. There are no smells from street food vendors, no music from performers in the distance. The lanterns are dark, strings of them fallen into the streets and crushed underfoot.

  But here, the horror of what’s happened to Corinth is all too real.

  Everything is coated in a fine layer of debris the size of sand grains, a mix of ash and fragments of cement that crunches underfoot. People have armed themselves against looters with whatever they can find—we pass a young woman gripping a chunk of cement in her hands who watches us with frightened eyes until we turn the corner.

  I try to imagine myself as she sees me—a threat, capable of robbing her of her home, or her life.

  You’re leading others to Lilac, knowing they’re going to kill her. Doesn’t that make you exactly what she sees?

  I shove that voice away, telling myself that it’s because some other idea will come to us, some way around what’s looming ahead, some alternative. Sanjana’s final warning was crystal clear.

  We have one shot to stop this.

  I’m still shaking from the climb down, bile and adrenaline bitter in my mouth. The elevators to the undercity don’t work without electricity, forcing us to descend via a ladder in the elevator’s maintenance shaft. Many, many times higher than the elevator shaft I climbed with Gideon—and without him next to me, without his harness supporting me. And then I was climbing up, out of danger.

  He was right to say that climbing down is much, much worse.

  I clear my throat, trying to banish my fears. It ought to be ridiculous that climbing down a ladder still frightened me when only a few kilometers away, an interdimensional being is slowly and methodically destroying the world—but reason plays no part in fear. Maybe it’s just that this is a fear I recognize, a fear I can digest. The other thing—I can’t wrap my mind around it.

  It takes hours to cover ground that would take no time at all in the clearer streets above—or would have, before the crash. Jubilee finds a working radio after spotting someone in military gear—turns out he’s not a soldier, but once Jubilee makes it clear she’s not going to arrest him for theft of government property, he lets her send a distress call to Mori to come pick up Sanjana. Mori’s voice crackles and surges, her worry audible, but she promises to find the scientist. It’s clear, even through the distortion, that she’d rather be with us, heading into danger.

  Jubilee gives the guy with the radio less choice about handing over the Gleidel he’d stolen, and even though it’s only one weapon between the three of us, it’s something.

  Closer to the crash site, most of the upper- and middle-city levels have been destroyed, but underneath, sections of the undercity are almost completely intact. Ahead, a shaft of light illuminates the spot where an upper-city skyscraper has fallen, and chunks have broken through the supports meant to separate the layers of construction. As we draw nearer, I can see up into the ruined
city above—it’s only a block away from my old penthouse.

  It feels like years ago that I was sitting on the couch, patching up Gideon’s arm and ordering drinks from the SmartWaiter.

  “You’re sure this is going to work?” Jubilee speaks without looking at me, her gaze too busy scanning our surroundings. I can understand why she’s nervous—there are too many people, too many bodies crowding here and there, to track everyone. We look too competent, I’m sure, to be an easy-looking target for opportunistic thugs taking advantage of the chaos, but that doesn’t mean some desperate gang won’t still attack. And that’s assuming—hoping, really—that the whisper’s reach doesn’t extend down here, and that there aren’t any of Lilac’s mind-controlled husks roaming the slums. We’ve got the shield Gideon left us, shoved deep in my inside pocket, and we left the other with Sanjana, but it’s the same below as it was above—if they see us, she won’t need mind control to hurt us.

  “When I was trying to find a way inside LaRoux Industries,” I say, ill-fitting boots crunching on the layer of fine dust littering the pavement, “I must’ve mapped every physical entry point to the compound a dozen times over.”

  “And you can reach LRI Headquarters from the slums?” Jubilee’s tone is dubious at best.

  “You can get anywhere from the slums,” I answer. “If you know how.”

  “Better trust her,” Flynn notes, sounding amused. “Sof can get inside anywhere.”

  Jubilee hesitates—after all, we don’t have time to try another route if mine doesn’t work—but only for a split second before nodding and picking up the pace. “It’ll be total chaos as the day goes on,” she warns, as though the disorder now is only inconvenient. “It’ll be like it was on Verona when the rebellion broke out.” She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, but she sounds as though she’s speaking about something that happened only yesterday. Her mouth is set tight, her hand resting on the new gun at her hip. “Stay close.”