Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

And the machinery containing it—the cage—is gone.

  For several long seconds we all simply watch it, trying to force our exhausted brains into action one more time, trying to understand what to do next. Then the frame of the Daedalus gives a shuddering groan, and it’s as if we’re startled back to life.

  Tarver climbs to his feet, stumbling two steps forward, as if he’s going to walk straight into the rift. But he stops short, simply staring at it as the light plays over his haunted face.

  There’s a figure crumpled at the base of the rift, and gingerly it pushes up to its feet, sending up a cloud of dust that settles slowly back to earth once more.

  White dust clings to the hem of her black dress, and her hair’s half undone, falling down her back. She’s no longer flawless—she’s splendidly, gloriously, imperfectly human.

  It’s Lilac.

  She’s shivering as if with sudden cold, dust turning her red hair the color of ash. Only the steady warmth of Sofia’s hand in mine tells me I’m not dreaming or hallucinating. Lilac’s eyes rake the room, darting from person to person, but it’s who she doesn’t look at that stands out—she’ll look anywhere but at the ex-soldier by the fallen chandelier, whose eyes won’t leave her face.

  No one speaks, too afraid of what her response might be—no one wants to break the spell, the hope, that her mind is her own again. In the silence there are a million possibilities, and for this brief instant she can be just Lilac again, even if the next brings all of it crashing down again.

  Finally, she’s the one to shatter the quiet. “Somebody say something,” she murmurs. “Please?”

  “Oh my God, it’s her.” That’s Jubilee, who comes lurching to her feet and breaks into an unsteady jog toward the girl in the rubble, Flynn a step behind her.

  Lilac’s blue eyes, round and haunted, flick toward her. She swallows, fearful, and for a moment I can feel her uncertainty like my own. How does a girl begin to apologize for attempting to destroy mankind? But before she can speak, Jubilee, unhesitating, throws herself at her friend, pulling her into a hug and squeezing free a laugh that’s only slightly hysterical with exhaustion and release, and Flynn’s arms wrap around the both of them.

  My legs finally obey orders, and I begin to scramble down the other side of the pile of broken marble we’d been sheltering behind, Sofia’s hand still in mine.

  Lilac, her arms still tangled around Jubilee, lifts her head and looks our way. She sees me first, and I recognize the flicker that crosses her face—it’s the ghost of Simon that she sees in me, and her smile softens. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  Her eyes meet Sofia’s, and something passes between the two of them—recognition, memory, understanding, forgiveness, all in an instant.

  But still she hasn’t looked at Tarver, who’s motionless, rooted to the spot where he stood as Lilac came back through the dimensional portal. Her eyes fix somewhere past Jubilee’s shoulder, every line of her body tense, as if fighting some invisible force trying to drag her face toward him.

  Jubilee glances toward her old captain, then gives Lilac’s arm a squeeze and she and Flynn release her, stepping back.

  “Lilac—” Tarver doesn’t get any further, and if I hadn’t seen his lips move, I wouldn’t have recognized the hoarse, heartsick voice as his. He takes a few stumbling steps toward her, but halts a pace or two away.

  Lilac crumples at the sound of his voice—her eyes are wet, lips trembling, hands twisting in the grimy fabric of her dress. She shuts her eyes and sends tears streaking down her cheek, turning toward Tarver in a rush. “I’m so sorry,” she blurts, voice rising with emotion, words running together and spilling out in a torrent. “I couldn’t stop her—stop it—I could see it all, hear every word, and I couldn’t…it was like the things I said to you on the Icarus, only a thousand times worse, a million times worse, because I could feel it too, her hatred. God, Tarver—none of it was—”

  “You think I care about any of that?” Tarver cuts through the torrent, and if her voice is bright and rich and throbbing with emotion and anguish, his is low and quiet. Only the hoarseness of it, the visible effort in the lines of his shoulders, his legs, as he holds himself still, shows what’s going on below it all.

  Lilac’s left breathing hard, the flood of words stemmed for now, and though I can only see her profile, I can see the rest of what she’s left unsaid written plainly across her face—so plainly I feel my own cheeks heating, and Sofia’s fingers tighten through mine as she draws in against me.

  “I held on.” Lilac swallows, her eyes on Tarver’s. Her voice is very quiet now, barely more than a whisper. “So I could come back to you.”

  I can’t tell which one of them breaks first—but suddenly she’s moving forward, and Tarver’s striding toward her, and then he’s holding her so tightly her feet leave the ground, and her arms go around his neck, and their lips meet and stay there. The longing and desperation and healing in that kiss keeps spreading, like the warm glow of the rift behind them and the creatures just beyond the portal sending their fractured light cascading through the ruined ballroom, bathing all of us in gold.

  It’s sometime later that Jubilee clears her throat. “Well, I don’t know about any of you, but I’m starving. I think there’s some crackers and peanut butter left, if our gear didn’t get pulverized.”

  “Uh…” I glance back toward the rift, and toward the single silhouetted shape that is Tarver and Lilac, still locked together. “What about them?”

  Jubilee snorts, her voice dry as she replies, “I’m pretty sure we’re just distant blurry shapes to them now.”

  We get no retort from the couple, and for a moment I think maybe they didn’t even hear her—and then Tarver unwinds one arm from the small of Lilac’s back so he can lift his hand in a particularly rude gesture at Jubilee that makes her break into laughter.

  As Flynn and Jubilee climb across the rubble to pull their packs out from underneath a chunk of debris, Sofia and I draw slowly together. The silence between us is different, now, filled with all the things that passed wordlessly between us in the instant before we jumped into the rift.

  The choice she made, to leave the gun at her feet and trust hope instead, has left her flushed and breathless. Slowly, hesitantly, her lips curve into the smile I love so much—the lop-sided, one-dimpled smile that tells me she’s not wearing any mask, not playing any game. This smile is just her, and it’s for me.

  “I feel different,” she whispers, still glowing gold in the rift’s light.

  “You’re not,” I whisper in reply. “You’re exactly the girl I always knew you were.”

  She softens in reply, reaching up to curl her arms around my neck, and just as I’m thinking Tarver and Lilac picked exactly the best way to celebrate, the moment’s broken by a shout from Jubilee.

  All four of us whirl around, but there’s no danger here—Kumiko Mori’s there, embracing Jubilee, and Mae and Sanjana are climbing past her into the ruined ballroom. All three of them are filthy, showing signs of the fight outside, but they all wear exhausted smiles.

  “The husks are down,” Sanjana says. “They collapsed, and now some of them are starting to wake up. We knew you must have…” She trails off, staring at the new rift, uncaged and golden.

  I look past her to meet Mae’s gaze, and drink in her smile. Even after I brought danger to her door, to her family, she came to help me. I never knew the Knave had anyone who’d do that for him. Then again, I don’t think she did it for the Knave. I think she did it for me.

  A noise from the edge of the room makes us pause, and we exchange confused glances—then a faint moan echoes through the sudden silence. Lilac breaks away from Tarver, her gaze suddenly anguished—and it’s not until she’s running toward the source of the sound that I even remember that there was a seventh person with us before the rift exploded.

  Monsieur LaRoux.

  By the time the rest of us reach Lilac’s side, she’s crouched on the dusty, cracked floor, one hand hal
f-out toward the man curled a meter away. His white hair is gray with dust from the explosion, the grime on his lined face cut through with swaths left by tears on his cheeks. He’s got his arms wrapped around himself, wedged into a corner of debris, watery blue eyes fixed some distance past his daughter’s face.

  “Daddy?” Lilac whispers, voice shaking, tentative. “Daddy…it’s me. It’s Lilac.”

  But the LaRoux Industries titan doesn’t even seem to hear her, his eyes never wavering. He’s murmuring under his breath, and only as he exhales and the words rise in volume for an instant can I make out what he’s saying. “…and we’ll all be happy again…”

  I glance at Sofia, whose face is grim. She has every bit as much reason to hate this man as I do, and yet I see my own heart mirrored there in her expression. When I look at the tiny shadow of a man huddled on the floor, it’s hard to find that hatred anymore, the bitter-edged determination that’s driven me on since Simon’s death. I look down at him and feel nothing—I look down at him and feel…pity.

  Flynn draws my attention with a soft intake of breath, and when I lift my head, he’s pointing at the rift behind me. I twist, heart rate spiking as my exhausted body tries to ready itself for…something. There’s a gold mist, silken and ethereal, slowly creeping out from the rift in strands that grow stronger and brighter by the moment.

  “What is that?” Tarver whispers, from where he crouches.

  “It’s them,” Lilac replies, just as softly. “They’re going to leave the barriers down. We have…a lot to learn from them. And they want to know us, to learn from us what it means to be human.”

  “I think,” Flynn murmurs, “that they just had their first lesson.”

  “What do we do with him now?” Jubilee asks, hesitant, looking down at Roderick LaRoux.

  “I don’t think there’s anything left to do to him now.” Lilac’s grief is visible, and for an instant I’m back in the LaRoux mansion courtyard, listening to Tarver speak to her father. She’s perhaps the only person, the last person, in this existence to care for you at all.

  “What do we do with ourselves now?” Sofia’s voice is quiet, but near enough to my ear that it resonates through my bones.

  Lilac dashes her hand across her eyes and straightens, exhaling as Tarver’s arm curls around her waist. “Now…” she starts, eyes shifting to sweep across the rest of us. “Now, we rebuild.”

  We are whole again.

  We are the weary ones who waited, forgotten, for a pair of shipwrecked lovers to set us free. We are the angry ones who fought, all too eager to bring pain to those who brought pain to us. We are the strong ones who loved, and were loved, discovering hope in stolen dreams and in the clasp of fingers made to interlock.

  And we are the darkest ones, who lived in agony and in rage, and found that even in silence and darkness there is always a spark.

  We are, and will always be, what we choose.

  WITH A FAINT CLUNK, THE door to Gideon’s new den shuts behind me. He’s sprawled on the mattress on the floor that serves as a couch, and looks up to flash a smile at me—or at the armful of takeout I’ve got with me, sending the smells of coriander and coconut milk and lime wafting through the air.

  “Mrs. Phan made her first batch of laksa,” I announce, crossing the room to flop onto the mattress next to him.

  In the three weeks since the crash of the Daedalus, Gideon’s managed to put together a reasonably respectable den. He’s satisfied with the security of his hypernet lines, and this time there’s a fridge for food that doesn’t come in foil packets. I’d planned on getting my own place, knowing Gideon’s almost religious obsession with anonymity, but before I could even raise the issue, he’d programmed a security code for me. He had to rewrite his whole system to make it possible for there to be more than one entry password, but there it was, waiting for me. Along with a row of skylights letting in actual light, through a clever series of mirrors leading up shafts to the surface above the undercity.

  Gideon digs in, practically ripping the bag open in his eagerness to get to the soup inside. “Good call, Dimples,” he says, already reaching for the chopsticks and spoons. “They’ll be celebrating her reopening from here to the next sector.”

  The streets outside in the undercity are still strewn with debris, still harboring displaced folks with nowhere else to go, still draped with mourning banners of black, white, blue, and gray, but more sectors have power every day. One by one, businesses are coming back to life, families are finding each other, and the community is taking its first, shaky steps toward normalcy.

  I thought about seeing what shape Kristina’s penthouse suite was in, but the truth is, this is where I want to be. With the people hit hardest by all that’s happened. People like me and Gideon.

  Though a series of monitors and hard drives were Gideon’s first purchases for the new den, he hasn’t found a console chair he likes yet. I’ve got the sneaking suspicion, though, that he’s putting off finding a chair because sitting on the mattress means there’s room for me beside him. Bowl in one hand, he wraps the other around me and pulls me in close against his side.

  “Did they start yet?” I ask, reaching over with my chopsticks to snag a mouthful of noodles out of his bowl. His main monitor, connected to a feed he jacked into from the central grid, shows an aerial view of a seething crowd gathered by the Daedalus crash site, secured now with structural supports and construction scaffolding as they rebuild those layers of the city. He’s got the skylights shuttered, so the monitor colors are bright and sharp.

  “A few minutes ago, I think. Muñoz is speechifying.…Here, I’ll unmute it.” He flicks his fingers at the monitor, and suddenly the dull roar of the crowd and the president’s voice come through the speaker system.

  “‘We are not alone.’” The camera drone circles in closer to President Muñoz, who stands behind a lectern, gazing out at the crowd as her words ring out. “Words mankind has imagined hearing for centuries, ever since the first ancient peoples looked up at the stars and made them gods. I stand here today in front of our answer—we are not, we have never been, alone.” Behind her is the rift, its golden glow visible even in the bright noonday sun. With the doorway between universes permanently open, the whispers—officially named the Collective—have been slowly exploring our world outside the confines of LaRoux’s machinery. They’ve been met with suspicion, with anger, with curiosity, with reverence—and, mostly, with hope. Thanks to their aid, the reconstruction of the city after the crash has gone twice as fast as we could have done it on our own.

  President Muñoz takes a beat, eyes scanning the faces of the crowd. “Now we know that intelligence, empathy, and curiosity are not only human traits. We have much to teach, and much to learn. We will enrich each other’s lives as we build a foundation of trust, and hope. I know many among us have questions, or even fears—I know many find that, especially in light of our terrible losses, trust does not come easily. That is why I have created a new position, one voice to speak for the Collective, and to the Collective. In light of all that has happened, some of you may find this decision surprising. But our new ambassador is eloquent and poised, and remains the only human being ever to join, however briefly, with the Collective on the other side of the rift. And no one has reason to work harder toward peace and reconstruction. Please join me in congratulating Ambassador LaRoux.”

  The president steps back, to make way for the new ambassador to join her at the podium.

  “There she is!” I squeal, poking at Gideon’s leg with my chopsticks. “Holy cow, look at that dress. Jeez, she wasn’t kidding.”

  “I still like yours better,” Gideon says around a mouthful of noodles. “The one with the lights and the fringe.”

  “The one that got shredded and full of holes because I was wearing it during a spaceship crash?” I eye him sidelong. “I think there’s more dress missing than there.”

  “Why do you think I like it?”

  I stab at his knee again with
my chopsticks. “Shush, I want to hear.”

  As the president swears Lilac in to her new position, the camera drone pans across the delegations from each planet. My eyes are trying to find the Celtic knot and single star of Avon’s crest, but it’s Flynn’s face that jumps out of the crowd at me first. I grab at Gideon’s arm, but he’s already grinning. Jubilee’s sitting next to Flynn, and the sunrise-peach color of her dress is beautiful in the sunlight. I don’t think it’d be noticeable if you weren’t looking for it, but I can see Flynn’s got his eyes on her, rather than on the dais up by the rift.

  As President Muñoz shakes Lilac’s hand and retreats to one of the seats on the dais, Lilac steps up to the microphones.

  A few days ago, when all six of us gathered in Flynn’s hotel room for dinner, Lilac spent most of it ashen-faced in the corner, writing on and tearing up note cards, as Tarver warned the rest of us not to bring up her upcoming speech at the swearing-in ceremony.

  You’d never know it to look at her now, though. The smile most people know from cosmetics billboards and style magazines doesn’t waver—her hands are steady. She’s wearing green, a billowing dress cut in a fashion several years old, but it’s beautiful on her. Tarver’s face is distant, his eyes on her as the breeze ripples the fabric.

  “My father,” Lilac begins, her voice echoing as it bounces back from speakers spread throughout the crowd, “is a brilliant man. Growing up, I believed he could do no wrong. I imagined him like one of the ancient gods the president spoke of, fit company for the stars.

  Her eyes scan the crowd as she pauses to take a breath. “But the stars aren’t gods, and neither was my father. What he was—what he is—is human. Everything he did, every path he took, he believed was right. His mistake wasn’t a lust for power or fame or riches; it wasn’t hubris and arrogance; it wasn’t even the subjugation of an entire species.”

  Behind her the rift’s glow wavers, a few filaments of gold whispering through it, curling through Lilac’s hair and settling around the dais. The Collective, too, is listening to what she has to say.