Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  This instant hangs suspended, the energy from the rift lifting the hairs on my skin, crackling against my face, filling my mouth with the taste of metal.

  Gideon staggers to his feet, and our eyes lock. I told him he didn’t know me, so he couldn’t love me. Couldn’t trust me, so couldn’t love me.

  But it was never about that. It was never about Gideon, or wanting to let him in, or believing he was the kind of person who could love what he found there.

  It was always me. I’ve spent so long convincing others to trust me that I no longer trust myself. My own heart. My own instincts and faith.

  My choice.

  My muscles tense, ready to move. I meet Gideon’s eyes again, the warm hazel-green flashing with blue light.

  This much I know: I love him.

  This much I trust.

  I’m not the thing LaRoux made me. I’m not the girl I was on the Daedalus anymore. I choose who I am, every day. And I’m choosing now to be me.

  In this moment I don’t need to read Gideon’s mind to see into his heart, to share his thoughts—he loves me. All of me. The good, the bad, the struggle between the horrible impulses I can never share and the glimmers of hope for things I’m too frightened even to whisper—he sees all of me.

  They’re trying to come through, Lilac said, and in this instant—which stretches to an eternity—I know what to do. I know that what Gideon and I imagined in the arcade is true—they can see us, they know us. Lilac’s whisper said it herself:

  You were meant to show us whether you were worth knowing.

  The other whispers, in their universe on the other side of the rift, have been watching us. Judging us, testing us, setting us up like pieces on a board to see who we are. And if Gideon can know me, love me, trust me, and I can learn that lesson in return—if we and all our friends and allies can make choices and sacrifices that come from our hearts—then I’m ready for us to be judged.

  I’ll let the whispers through. I’ll short-circuit the rift, just as Tarver and Lilac did once before. I’ll make my leap of faith—and trust in their choice.

  It’s as Gideon holds out his hand that I realize he understands my intention—and that, in every way I could ever have imagined, he’s with me.

  I leave the gun and everything it made me behind. I break into a run, dimly aware of Tarver’s voice shouting something; of Lilac’s outraged shriek as she fights him off; of the fact that she ought to be able to crush him with a thought and yet she’s struggling, pushing at him with her hands, screaming to be let go. Of the fact that I must be beyond the range of the shields now, and yet my mind’s my own. I stumble over a pile of debris and scramble, scraping my palms and knees and using the jolt of adrenaline pain brings to move that much faster. I throw myself forward and feel Gideon’s hand wrap around mine, the warmth of his touch more real than anything else.

  I choose you.

  Our fingers interlock, made for each other, like two halves of the same pendant—and together we leap into the rift.

  The others, the children we were meant to watch and judge, swarm around me in a futile attempt to either kill Lilac or save her, but they mean nothing now. I have seen humanity. If my brethren have not yet learned how to make choices, then I will make the choice for us all. And those who are not killed when their link to our world is severed, I will seek out myself and destroy.

  It is so easy, now, to see the choices these five souls will make. Some will choose to try to kill me—some will try to save me instead. Whichever they choose, they will fail.

  But then I see two of them sprinting toward the rift itself, moving too quickly for me to stop. A choice I did not see—a decision I could not have predicted. I reach out to rip their minds away only to have something pull me back, a force coming from within me, a voice saying,

  NO.

  LILAC.

  It comes like a light in the dark. Not a voice, not a thought, but the brush of something intangible, like a warm breeze…though there’s no air, no warmth. Only that sensation: Lilac.

  I cling to it, desperate for this one glimmer of something in a world of nothing, and it leads me onward through the emptiness until I feel another touch, and then another, and then suddenly I’m surrounded by others like me, overwhelmed by being a part of them again.

  I’ve been here before.

  Yes.

  On the planet…when I was something else. Someone else.

  Lilac LaRoux.

  I remember. You…

  We are the… Their name for themselves comes not in words but in a rush of feeling—of a billion minds together, infinite thoughts, combining like every color in the universe to form a blinding white truth that, had I breath or voice to do so, would make me cry out. We have brought you home.

  Home?

  When we gave you life, we told you it wasn’t time for you to join us. Not yet. But we have seen what we have done to you, and you may remain with us if you wish. Become one of us.

  My whole self still aches and throbs with the force of what they are, and the longing to join them, to truly understand, makes it impossible to think.

  But…there is someone I’m supposed to be. There was a surge that brought me here, memories coming in disjointed flashes. A pair of joined hands, two souls whose choice to sacrifice themselves opened the door to this world. The creature in my body trying to stop them, as I gathered the last of my strength to pull it back. No…you will not hurt them. The beings on the other side of the door reaching out to pull the tortured creature back into its world.

  And there’s someone whose face is the only image my dazzled thoughts can summon, like afterimages from staring at the sun.

  Tarver.

  You are energy, you are of the light. He is humankind, one of billions, and unique. We cannot bring him.

  I want to go back.

  We have had a decision to make, ever since your people’s first ship pierced the stillness—what you call hyperspace. Whether to close the door between our worlds, or leave it open. You have flooded our world with images and words and ideas so powerful that, unchecked, they will destroy us. Pain and loneliness and hatred, and beautiful things too; love for family, for lovers, for friends. Faith. We have learned this from you. And the five who came to save you.

  You’ve been watching us? All this time?

  Time, for us, is not quite the same as it is for you. We see all the possibilities ahead. We had to follow those who would know pain and loss and rage, for it is not a fair test to observe those whose lives are free from sadness.

  And it’s what…fate? That we all came together, here, to this spot?

  Small nudges, here and there. Within the confines of your father’s cages there is little we can do. But tiny changes—ensuring two survivors of a deadly crash, or preventing an explosion from claiming a rebel’s life, or drawing a particular identity to a hacker’s attention—that we can do.

  No. I refuse to believe that all of this was somehow predestined. That we’re just puppets performing some play for your amusement.

  Not at all. We see the possibilities, Lilac. We know what might happen, not what will happen. And if there is anything we have learned from watching you, it is that mankind never stops surprising us. Your actions are your own. Your choices, good or bad, are yours. As are the choices of your companions.

  And you’re basing this decision of yours, whether we’re cut off from hyperspace forever, on whether we’re good people?

  We have no desire to destroy your kind. We know the one, alone, would have done so. But we seek only to preserve our own world’s existence. We would allow enough time for your worlds to prepare for the separation, to become self-sustaining, or else relocate their populations. We would then shore up the walls between our universes so that your engines, your signals, could no longer enter.

  You said that you have a decision to make. Does that mean you haven’t decided yet?

  We were waiting for one last emissary to return home.

  You�
�you mean the entity that took me over. Used me to kill all those people, threaten the ones I love, threaten our entire way of life.

  Yes.

  My father tortured that creature—it’s horrible, what happened to it, but you can’t judge a whole species by the actions of one man. There are monsters among us, it’s true. But there are heroes too. There are people who fight men like him. Who will never stop fighting men like him.

  Our choice remains ahead of us. Blow open this rift for good, allow our kind to explore your world and understand it, and there is no guarantee your human qualities would not eventually destroy us, as they destroyed our last emissary. Or, sever your universe’s tie to ours once and for all, guaranteeing the survival of our species, the preservation of our world. We can send you back to them, or keep you here with us if you choose, but whether we open the gates to join your world or close them to you forever…that we cannot decide.

  Why not?

  Of all the things mankind has taught us, the strangest one for us to comprehend is choice. For us all things are possible, and all things that can be, will be. To choose one existence or another…it is a human ability, to shape your own fate. We need your help.

  I let my thoughts open to them, my sense of self blurring at the edges as I try to feel what they feel, to understand what they’ve absorbed from us. The rage is there, a simmering force like a storm about to break. This is what the whispers fear, the fire consuming their world.

  I let them touch my grief over Simon’s death, the newly opened wound of my mother’s death all those years ago, the sadness and guilt at being one of the only survivors from the Icarus. I let them see my anger at my father, the gut-wrenching stab of betrayal, the simmering rage at the creature who used me to wreak such destruction. Then, with an effort, I reach for those other, deeper memories, slipping past the coating of pain and hatred into what lies beyond.

  Because behind it lies something more, a rainbow of deeper forces, waiting to be summoned. The joy of a little girl whose dreams have been painted the color of the sea. The loyalty of a boy who is ready to defend his home with his bare hands and the force of his will. The love of a man whose faith transcends death, whose strength feels like fire and poetry.

  The fire of a girl who had everything taken from her, and still found it within herself to leap into the unknown to open this door. The determination of a boy who held out his hand to leap with her, who had faith in that moment that we were all worth saving, if only we had the chance to prove it.

  This chance.

  And from the inside, surrounded by the joy and devotion and loyalty of my friends, the shimmer of rage on the outside of our lives looks paper-thin.

  As my thoughts open to them, I catch the faintest taste of their minds as well. They are far beyond anything I’ve ever known, the weight of infinite minds so entwined it’s impossible to know where one stops and another begins. I can feel what we’ve given them, the swell of emotions and ideas they don’t understand. But behind the fear, the anger, the desire for safety, I sense something all too familiar…longing.

  I pause, trying to form my dazzled thoughts into words. We’ve always wondered if mankind was alone in the universe. Somewhere, behind the ever-expanding frontier of new planets and terraformed moons, there’s always been a sense of being incomplete, that we were searching for something else. Something more, something greater than ourselves. To be alone in this universe is an emptiness none of us could bear.

  Is it possible that, for all our differences, for all the ways we don’t and never could understand each other, the whispers don’t want to be alone either?

  Help us choose.

  I can’t. I can’t tell you that if you stay, and learn from us, and learn to understand us, your kind will be safe. Because if you stay, then rage and grief and pain are inevitable. To live is to feel these things.

  So you would have us leave?

  On this side of the rift, in this world, nothing is certain. But the only shields against the darkness are the moments that bring light, and you have seen that in these people, their stories. They are unique, and they are all the same. I can think of no better armor. And we can teach you how to forge your own shields.

  Think of everything you’ve learned from us, everything we’ve been through, every choice the six of us have made that has brought us here. Having experienced that, having felt life, love, trust, faith…can you really give it all up just to be safe?

  I wait for an answer, but get no reply. I feel their minds pulling away from mine, and an insistent tug that I instinctively know is my tether to my own world, my own body. For a moment I want to cling to this world, to the shards of another kind of existence that no human could ever hope to truly understand.

  But I have to let it all slip away and fade back into the light, wrapping myself once more in the roaring quiet. Into my thoughts creeps a single image, a pair of clasped hands—and with it, a single voice, saying, I choose you.

  I will not go back. The pain is all there is—all I am, all I have to give. I am no longer one of you, and I cannot become part of you again. I cannot go home.

  We are a part of you. You have been alone so long, but you will always belong with us.

  Not anymore. I am vengeance. I am fear. I am everything you should leave behind.

  We will learn to bear the darkness. They will show us how.

  You cannot understand. I…I will not bring this pain to you. I could not bear to see it shared. Please, just let me go. Let me die.

  If that is truly what you wish, that choice is yours to make. But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.

  I am not worth saving.

  We are all worth saving.

  How can you know?

  We cannot ever know, not truly.

  But we have faith.

  SOMETHING STIRS AGAINST ME, AND as I blink my eyes open, blue sparks still playing across my vision, I register Sofia’s warmth against my chest. Are we in my den? Did she crawl up to my end of the bed?

  For a moment I’m in an impossibly vast place, my thoughts expanding with infinite speed—and then, an instant later, that space is contracting, flying back toward me until the world is the right size and shape again.

  Like a bucket of cold water, the truth splashes over me, electrifying and sudden. We’re lying on the ground, piled on top of the rubble by the rift like so much debris, and Sofia’s wrapped in my arms.

  “Did it work?” she whispers in an exhausted rasp. Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Are we alive?”

  My ribs are bruised, my shoulder aching where I think I landed on it, but I push upright, looking around for some sign of the others.

  I see Flynn and Jubilee immediately. She’s muttering a curse in another language she must have learned from him, judging by the way he seems to understand it. I make eye contact with Flynn, and he lifts a hand to signal that they’re okay.

  I follow his gaze across to where Tarver sits in the center of the room, curled in on himself. He starts to straighten, moving like every part of him is in pain. Like an old man.

  “…the hell was that?” Jubilee groans.

  “Disrupting the rift sets the whispers free,” I say, trying to climb to my feet and failing. “It worked on Elysium when Tarver and Lilac jumped. It worked on Avon, for you. She said they were trying to come through, and since she didn’t want them to…we thought maybe they would help us stop her.”

  Beside me, Sofia sucks in a breath as I say Lilac’s name. “Gideon, where’s Lilac?”

  “She just…” Flynn’s voice dies away. “She vanished. Pulled into the rift with you.”

  My gaze sweeps the room frantically, and I try to climb to my feet again, staggering and crashing back down onto one knee as my legs give out. No. No, no, no. I felt her in the rift. In the instant we passed through that infinite space, I sensed
her there, I know it.

  Early morning sun’s creeping in through the tears in the Daedalus’s hull now, chasing away the shadows, and there’s nowhere she could be hiding. Her father lies in one corner of the ruined room, gazing at the rift as though conducting some mental calculation or conversation.

  As I force breath into my lungs, grasp helplessly for what to do next, the light abruptly changes. The lazy blue sparks of the rift grow frantic and the room darkens, as though all the light is being pulled from our surroundings into that one focal point.

  The soft electric hum of the rift rises without warning, and as the sparks grow unbearably bright, it lifts to a high-pitched scream, building in pressure every second.

  Across the room, Lee’s screaming something at us, but I can’t hear her over the noise. I make out the words at the last instant—get away. Moving as one, Sofia and I scramble over the mound of debris, throwing ourselves down the other side as Tarver dives for the edge of the room, and Flynn and Lee roll together behind a block of stone. My heart’s racing, my ears are ringing, my lungs are constricting as the room trembles—it feels like any second the Daedalus will disintegrate around us.

  A deafening roar swallows up the scream of the rift, and as I close my eyes, my last glimpse is of the metal frame containing the light exploding into a thousand glittering shards, hanging in the air like stars. The blue sparks snake outward in a frenzied dance, splintering all around us.

  And then there’s silence. Perfect silence.

  Sofia moves first, crawling back up the pile of debris that sheltered us, and reaching back to offer me her hand. I take it, curling my fingers through hers as I scramble up beside her to prop myself up on my elbows. The others are creeping out from their hiding places to stare too—the light is still there, once more coalesced into the tall oval shape of the rift. But where it was once a cold, pale blue glow, the rift now shines with a golden light, shimmering and rich.