Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  “I know.”

  And his voice is so small, so tired, that I relent—or perhaps it’s just that if we fight about this, I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. “Gideon, why are you here?”

  “It’s good to be somewhere familiar, even if it’s just for a few minutes.” His answer is so low, I barely catch it. “Somewhere with a good memory attached to it, something I want to think about. I needed it, tonight. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Tonight. Quite possibly our last night in the universe as we know it, is what he means. Quite probably our last night. I fight to ignore my thumping heartbeat, try to harden my thoughts again. We’re not on the same side. If he does this, he risks losing himself to madness, and he risks cutting us off from hyperspace forever—and I’m not sure which one scares me more. I can’t answer, not with my throat this tight. And even if I could, I’m not sure I could listen to myself speak the truth: I needed it too.

  The silence stretches for a few seconds, and then Gideon’s hands come out of his pockets and he pushes away from the wall. “Sofia—” he starts, taking a step toward me.

  I’m moving before I have time to think, dropping the flashlight and reaching for the gun tucked into my waistband. He stops moving when he sees it; the flashlight’s beam comes to rest against the wall, reflecting just enough light that I can see his face. The confusion there, as he halts a few steps away from me.

  “Stop.” My voice is a lot stronger than I thought it would be. “You made your choice. You’re with Tarver. I’m with the others. We want different things.” Don’t come near me, because I don’t know how much of this I can stand.

  “Except we don’t,” replies Gideon softly, watching me rather than the gun, whose safety is still on. I can’t even point it at him, not really. The barrel hovers somewhere in between, not quite lowering, not quite lifting to aim at him. “You don’t want Lilac dead any more than we want the universe destroyed.”

  “You don’t hear how that sounds?” I burst out, shifting my grip on the gun. “One life versus the entire universe? Tarver I understand, he’s—of course he’s choosing her. But you…Why are you with him? Why did you leave, why not talk to me?”

  Gideon’s silent for a few seconds, making me wish I hadn’t dropped the flashlight, making it harder to see his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me before you tried to assassinate Roderick LaRoux?”

  The blow of that is a dull ache, his words just one more burden settling on top of the grief and guilt already making my knees buckle. I shift my weight, boot scraping whisper-like against the dusty floor. “Just go,” I manage. “I should make you come back with me, should make you take us to Tarver so we can stop him. But just—just go.”

  Gideon’s weight shifts too, but he stops himself before taking another step toward me. “It’s because I have faith,” he says slowly. “In Tarver, in Lilac. In the fact that my brother loved her, because she was—is—worth it, worth dying for.” He swallows. “I told you already. It’s because if you were the one in there instead of her, there isn’t a force in the universe that would stop me going after you.”

  I shake my head, throat too tight for me to speak. My face is heating, flushing with anger, with frustration, with all the things I told myself I’d say to Gideon if I could—and he’s standing here in front of me, and I still can’t say a word of it.

  “It’s because there has to be a way for this to work,” he continues, his eyes scanning my face. “Because it’s impossible, any way you look at it, and I refuse to accept that this is how it ends.”

  I take a shuddering breath, the barrel of the gun still wavering between us. “Are you still talking about Lilac?”

  His mouth curves, the smile so sad it feels like my whole body’s ripping in two. “You’re the expert,” he murmurs. “You tell me.”

  “We can’t trust each other,” I whisper. “You can’t love someone you don’t trust. You’ll never know if I’m playing you, and I’ll never know if you’re still the Knave, toying with me.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” Gideon snaps, shoving a hand through his hair in frustration. “I wanted to come back to a place before you and I learned the truth about each other. Odds are we’ll all be dead, or worse, tomorrow. We’ll never know if we could’ve learned to trust each other.”

  “Whether you could’ve loved the real me.” My eyes burn, the weight of everything I wanted to say to him pressing in on my throat, making it impossible to speak.

  “You think I don’t know the real you?” Gideon’s eyes widen, and there’s pain there. I didn’t expect that.

  In the dim light, he looks so tired; so changed, in his pilfered military gear, so different from the cocky guy in an LRI shirt who winked at me across the holosuite. I can see his breath stirring the dust in the air, making it dance in the beam from the flashlight. It quickens as I watch him, until I can almost hear a waltz, each particle of dust twirling to the ghost of that old song.

  “The hell with it,” I blurt, the gun clattering to the floor from fingers no longer obeying my commands. “I don’t care.” I move forward, closing the distance between us and reaching for him. My fingers curl around the edges of his jacket, tug him in close—he’s already moving, ducking his head, lips parting to meet mine. One hand slides around my waist, pulling me in against him, as the other tangles in my hair, his palm hot against my cheek.

  We stumble backward until my shoulder blades hit the wall. Someone’s foot connects with the flashlight, sending it and its beam skittering wildly off into the dark. My hands are shaking as they peel his jacket away, as my fingertips curl against his shoulders, as the muscle beneath his T-shirt shifts and tenses in response to my touch. His mouth finds my jawline, my throat, the hollow behind my ear; the air goes out of me in a gasp.

  “Sofia,” he mumbles against my skin, hips pressing against mine, arm tightening around my waist. “I always knew you.”

  All the things I wanted to say…I’m sorry. I should’ve told you. I wanted to tell you. I don’t care about the Knave. The thoughts come in fragments, too confused to speak aloud, too difficult and too numerous to track. I let you down. I let you hurt me. I’d take all of it back, and I’d do it all again.

  “God help me,” I breathe, the words falling out of me like dust and debris, crashing in my own ears and bringing the world to a grinding halt. All I can hear is Gideon breathing, his skin hot against my skin, his body hard against mine. I struggle to breathe, the air rushing into my lungs like it’s trying to drown me. “I do trust you.”

  I have never seen her face, the girl with the beautiful dreams, only the inside of her mind. But now, through the eyes of the boy who loves her, I can see she is beautiful. I can feel the others trying to push past me, to seek more destruction, for destruction is all they know. But I cannot stop looking at her. I wish that I could look at her forever.

  She lets me take her hand, our fingers interlocking the way she and the green-eyed boy have let their hearts interlock—separate but inseparable. In this moment I find I envy them their individuality, their uniqueness, the beauty of being able to touch like this. In this moment I envy the green-eyed boy that he will always be able to touch her like this.

  In this moment I decide that they must live, that they must show the others all there is to learn from humankind.

  “Jubilee Chase,” I whisper through the green-eyed boy’s lips, “I wish…”

  ALL I CAN FEEL IS her body against mine, the heat of her skin through the fabric of her shirt, the catch of her breath hot against my neck.

  All I can hear are her words echoing around the silence of the abandoned arcade. Whether you could have loved the real me. I do trust you.

  The two of us are the only spots of warmth in this world of darkness, and I want more than anything to have the words to make her see the truth. That though she’s played me almost every moment I’ve known her, I do know her.

  My heart’s been pounding since the moment she walked into the arcade,
and I want to abandon myself to her—to this—even though I know that loving her and trusting her are two different things.

  I can’t trust her.

  And yet I do.

  Oh, hell.

  My arms tighten around her of their own accord, and she surges in against me, lips parting as we lose ourselves in each other, try desperately to close the distance between us we both wish wasn’t there. My jacket hits the floor with a thud, pockets full of gear rattling, and with a kick I send it off into the dark. Her hands slide up inside my T-shirt, finding skin, and my brain starts to shut down higher function so I can concentrate on getting her shirt off without breaking the kiss for more than a couple of seconds.

  But one thought persists, ricocheting around inside my skull, demanding to be heard.

  Did she mean what she said?

  I trusted her on the Daedalus, and she was playing me every second. She kissed me then, and when I held her, I thought she was sincere in the promise she made to abandon revenge. I couldn’t bear it if she was just taking her best, last chance to soften me up, change my mind.

  Perhaps she needs to make peace, the night before it all comes undone. Perhaps she needs to speak her truth. Perhaps it is truth.

  “Sofia, I have to—” I murmur the words against the skin of her shoulder, half my mind busy mentally mapping the distance to our old nest of blankets.

  “Hmm?” She’s distracted, that one syllable dragging out into a moan I want to hear again. Then she’s dragging my shirt off and planting both hands against my chest so she can push away from the wall, walk me back toward the nest. Great minds, Dimples.

  “Never mind,” I whisper. She feels so right in my arms, she fits, and yet some small part of me still can’t tell if all she wants to do is pull me away from Tarver’s side, make sure Lilac dies like Sanjana says she must. I know it would hurt her to manipulate me like that, but for stakes as high as these…could I blame her?

  “Say it, whatever it is,” she murmurs, as my back hits the wall by our nest, and she comes to rest flush against me.

  “I have to do it.” I whisper the words, even as some small version of myself howls in the back of my brain to shut up. “I won’t leave Tarver to face her alone.”

  “I know,” she whispers in reply, and when I bow my head, she presses her forehead to mine. “After everything that was done to the whisper, maybe that’s what drove it so mad in the end. Being alone.”

  The wistful sadness in her voice calls up an answering pang deep in my own chest. We both know what it is to be alone. I reach up to smooth back her hair, careful to keep my fingers from catching in the snarls the last few days have left there. “They’re not inherently evil. If they were, Lilac wouldn’t be here at all. She’d still be dead on that planet they crashed on.”

  “I know,” she replies, turning her face away so she can rest her head on my shoulder. “Jubilee knew one of them as a child, the same one that helped her and Flynn on Avon. We turned this one into the monster that’s taken over Lilac.”

  “LaRoux did this to it.” Just as LaRoux hurt Sofia, twisted the girl in my arms into someone capable of murder. Just as he twisted me into someone who could justify hunting her, terrifying her. The thought sits right there before me—which species is more dangerous, truly?

  My mind throws up the passing thought I had at Mae’s…just a few days ago, though it feels like a lifetime. Now, I voice it out loud. “I wondered once if the whispers could see all our data, everything we send through the hypernet. And what they think of it, if they can. What they think of us.”

  “Our data,” she echoes. “You mean…”

  “Everything we send. From our parking tickets, to our poetry.”

  “If I could see all of that,” she says quietly, into the dark, “all our anger, the things we say to one another, I wouldn’t think much of us.”

  I let my knees bend, and she comes with me as my back slides down the wall, and I sink to sit on our nest of blankets. We sit there together in the near dark, limbs tangled together, pressed close, as though the contact alone will save us.

  “There has to be another way to stop her, Gideon,” she whispers.

  Here, holding her, looking at her face, her eyes, the curve of her mouth where the flashlight outlines it, I want to believe that loving her means I can trust her; that her I trust you meant something. Because if it was true—if she could feel that, after the ways he twisted her—then it would mean everything. But the uncertainty is there like the tiniest of splinters, worming its way deeper and deeper into my heart, carving a path for doubt to take hold like an infection. There’s no other way, and if this is her attempt to distract me from my choice, my path with Tarver, I can’t let her talk me out of it.

  She leans forward, tilting her face up, and I give in and let my lips find hers rather than search for words. This much, at least, is true. This warmth, this need—whatever else has come and gone between us, and whatever else may come, this moment is true.

  It would be such a leap, and in the end, neither of us is very good at remembering how to trust. At least alone, she with her plan and I with mine, there’s a chance one of us might be right.

  So instead of making a new plan, instead of taking our leap, we ease down into the blankets, my heart hurting every moment, to say our good-byes in the only way we both can trust. Without any words at all.

  We feel the loss of our kin on the gray world as keenly as we felt the loss of the first of our kind to die. We try to understand death, to understand how a thing can cease to be. Learning about the uniqueness of these creatures only deepens our confusion, for how can something so rare and so precious exist one moment and vanish the next?

  We have only one of our kind left in their world, the one we cannot see. But because of the boy who lives in the hypernet pathways, we know the final prison is somewhere on the world at the heart of the galaxy. We must bring the six to this place, to find our last emissary and send it home so we can learn, finally, whether we can coexist with these strange, brief creatures who live and die without letting uncertainty destroy them.

  The others, their paths all lead to this spot—all but the girl with the dimpled smile. We must bring her there somehow, twist her thread closer to the rest.

  We learn that the boy wrapped in wires and data is searching for someone he believes can lead him to the blue-eyed man. We will nudge him onto the girl’s trail instead…and he will drive her here to us.

  THE DARKNESS AS I CREEP with Jubilee and Flynn from the abandoned restaurant is absolute, and I’m forced to move with agonizing slowness. Unwilling to risk drawing attention with flashlights, we’re picking out each step by feel, navigating the debris-littered streets of the undercity based on my memory alone. What I wouldn’t give for Gideon’s knowledge of this place—I was never truly at home here, but he knows these streets like the back of his hand.

  I left him while he was still asleep, making my way back to the others and praying they wouldn’t notice how long I’d been gone. As I lay there through the rest of the night, wishing for sleep that never came, my head was still ringing with the things we said to one another, and the things we didn’t. With images of black-eyed husks, and planets plunged into isolation. Of a whisper twisted and tortured until it became a weapon—of the moment I realized the same thing had happened to me. Even now, I can’t stop shivering, and it’s not from the bone-deep chill settling into the streets at the bottom of Corinth.

  Jubilee’s hand on my arm signals a halt, and I jerk my thoughts back to the present. It’s still a few hours until dawn, and the electrical grid has yet to be restored after the Daedalus crash. I’ve been figuring out where we are based on landmarks I could touch, and gut intuition when that failed, but now…even Jubilee and Flynn, strangers to this part of Corinth, recognize the thing looming out of the darkness.

  A maintenance shaft.

  The climb leaves me breathless and shaking, but I’m still on my feet when we emerge into the apocalyptic la
ndscape of the upper city. I’ve spent so much of the past few days afraid that I’m not sure my body processes fear the same way anymore.

  The light pollution from other sectors of Corinth paints the skies a dark, ruddy orange, and I’m able to pick out the buildings much more easily—or where the buildings had been. Nothing looks right—where there ought to be skyscrapers I see only empty space, and where there should be the broad, green expanse of a park is a massive, hulking structure I’ve never seen. For a moment, I’m not sure I led us the right way, until I see the expanse of the LaRoux Industries courtyard below us, the color of its bright green grass leached away by the gloom.

  We’re here. And that structure is no building at all.

  The Daedalus wreck squats on the landscape like a vast, hulking beast. Its metal skin has been peeled back in long, jagged gashes, exposing wires and spilling conduits like viscera onto the ground. Twisted metal supports two meters thick have been torn free like splinters of bone, stretching toward the sky. Smoke still rises here and there, as though the creature isn’t fully dead yet, as though it’s still breathing its last, labored gasps that steam in the predawn air. It’s half-sunk into the ground, as if the concrete and steel supports below gave it no more resistance than water would—like at any moment it might rise up again, out of the depths.

  It’s impossible to connect this dark, monstrous leviathan full of jagged metal and burnt chemicals with the glittering ballroom my memory conjures up when I think of the word Daedalus. Everything that happened there—coming face-to-face with LaRoux, discovering who Gideon was, the missing rift, seeing Flynn again, shooting Lilac LaRoux—it all feels like it happened to someone else, a lifetime ago. And the idea that any of us, that anyone at all, was ever inside this thing, the carcass of the great orbital ship, seems insane.

  The idea that people are inside it still, crushed on impact or choked to death by the vacuum of space rushing inside the great rents down the ship’s side…it’s unthinkable.