by Amie Kaufman
“No,” cries the girl. “I’m sorry. Please, don’t go.”
But the green-eyed boy has turned to ash, and she can’t touch him for fear he’ll shatter, and even the shape of who he was will be lost.
“Flynn—come back to me.”
MERENDSEN PRODUCES A HANDHELD DEVICE from his pocket and presses a couple of switches, moving slowly around the confines of my room to check for bugs. He never had tech like that when I knew him. It’s only once we’re certain we won’t be overheard that he gestures for me to start up my computer. I’m acutely aware of both guys watching me as I type away at the console sunk into my desk.
I know Merendsen’s monitoring my efforts to secure this end of the channel—making sure there aren’t any keytrackers or recorders running and that the military call log software gets bypassed properly—but I can’t figure out why Flynn’s so intent. Though I can’t see him standing behind me, I feel his stare like a red-hot laser, burning into the back of my neck. Flynn won’t know anything about computers. He’s probably never used one; there certainly aren’t any comscreens with hypernet connections handed out to the rebels in the swamps. But his eyes stay on me anyway.
I shift uncomfortably, fingers fumbling and forcing me to backspace before I can summon Merendsen with a jerk of my chin. He inspects the screen, then bends down over my shoulder to key in Lilac LaRoux’s address. We’ve got the lights low in the hopes anyone passing by will think I’m grabbing some much-needed rest. Merendsen straightens and I get to my feet as the call starts connecting, letting him take the chair instead. Lilac LaRoux has no reason to talk to me—best let her fiancé handle this. I drift backward, clasping my hands behind me.
“Let’s hope she’s awake,” Merendsen murmurs, voice quickening. Anticipation, I think. He’s eager to see her, his whole body angling toward the screen. I glance over at Flynn, but his eyes are fixed on the monitor, his jaw clenched and his shoulders tense.
I sigh. “I just hope she’s not at one of her famous parties with a dozen of her chattiest friends.”
Merendsen exhales a laugh, speaking with a smile in his voice. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
Before I can ask him to elaborate, the call connects and the picture pops up. There’s a woman in the image—a girl my age, maybe younger. For a moment I don’t recognize her without the hair, the makeup, the glitzy dresses and jewelry. I find myself staring, trying to connect this sleepy-eyed, fuzzy-haired girl with the heiress to the LaRoux fortune. She’s pretty—beautiful, even—but nothing like the creature I think of when I think “Lilac LaRoux.”
“Tarver,” she mumbles, stifling a yawn and rubbing a bit of sleep out of the corner of her eye. She’s clearly been woken up; she’s wearing a silk robe over whatever she was sleeping in.
“Hi, beautiful.” His voice is soft in a way I’ve never heard from him before. “Am I off the hook for running out yet?”
She wakes up a little more, a smile lighting her features as she leans a little closer to the screen’s camera. “Tarver!” she repeats, more alert now. Her smile grows wry, amusement coloring her face. “Have any of the nasty swamp people shot at you yet?”
I have to stifle a protest, swallowing it down. It’s clear Lilac LaRoux can’t see me or Flynn standing in the background.
But Merendsen just snickers, as if she was joking. “No, but it’s still early days. How are things at home?”
“Good. I haven’t had a chance to try the bathtub yet.” Lilac’s leaning closer still, one hand appearing as she lifts it to trace the neckline of her robe. Coy, flirtatious, her movements graceful enough to make me strangely envious of that skill. I look at Flynn again, but this time he’s staring at the floor, keeping his eyes averted from the girl on the screen.
“Someone’s got to test out the new plumbing, make sure it all works.” Merendsen’s amused, his voice low and private.
“Do you have a little time? I could bring the comscreen with me. Show you how much I wish you were here.” Her finger pulls the neckline of her robe open a little.
I see just enough skin to realize she’s not wearing anything under it before I jerk my eyes away and stare intently at the ceiling. Too late, I get why Flynn’s watching the floor with such dedication.
“Oh, come on.” Tarver groans. “I said I was sorry for leaving, do you have to torture me? And, uh”—his voice turns a bit sheepish—“Lee’s here, so you might want to…” He trails off and glances over his shoulder at me.
Dammit, Merendsen. I clear my throat and step forward, into the light cast by the screen.
Lilac gives a startled squawk, grabbing her robe closed up under her chin. “Tarver!” she gasps. “Why didn’t you say someone was there? Who the hell is this?” Her face is burning with embarrassment.
“This is Lee.” I can tell Merendsen’s aiming for bland, but he’s not hiding his amusement very well. “Don’t worry, I’m sure she was staring at the wall. She’s very discreet and she doesn’t believe in romance.”
I pull my eyes away from the girl on the screen, trying to offer her a little of her dignity to cling to. “The ceiling, sir,” I correct him.
There’s silence from the computer while Lilac stares at the picture on her own screen. Then, in a low, careful voice, she asks, “Lee is a woman?”
I have to choke back a sound of surprise. Merendsen didn’t tell his fiancée he was flying to the next system for a girl? I know it’s because he doesn’t see me like that—to him, he flew for a day and a half for one of his soldiers. I’d do the same for mine. But to Lilac LaRoux…
“I’ve never really noticed,” Merendsen replies, carefully not looking in my direction. “Lee’s friend is here too. Lilac, can you get us a secure line?”
She sobers, and all traces of the wounded, sulky bride-to-be vanish. She nods curtly. “Give me two seconds.”
And then she’s busy, typing away—doing as I did, not trusting the eye-tracker interface. She gets up, reaching for something behind the screen that we can’t see. It sounds like she’s flipping switches. I can’t understand what she’s doing. Whatever it is, it’s far more advanced than anything I did at my end. Merendsen couldn’t have taught her that.
Finally, Lilac settles back in her chair with a small device that, when she turns it on, sends a wave of static through the picture. It evens out after she starts making tiny adjustments to a dial on the device. Some kind of dampening field. I find my gaze creeping over toward Merendsen, wondering why they have such a need for secrecy.
“Okay, go.” It’s a completely different girl than the coy, flirty creature there a moment before. This Lilac is all business.
“This is Flynn Cormac,” Merendsen says, prompting Flynn to step forward into the light. “One of the rebels here.”
I half expect a dramatic exclamation from flighty Lilac LaRoux, some shallow declaration about how ridiculous he looks with his bleached hair. Instead she leans forward, inspecting him in her screen. “Goodness,” she says mildly. “This is one of the infamous Fianna? He isn’t exactly what I might have expected.”
Flynn speaks up, deadpan. “That’s why it works so well. It’s better if you don’t actually look infamous.” It’s an imitation of his usual humor, but there’s something different about it. A note that’s missing I didn’t know I’d learned to recognize until it was gone.
Lilac grins, an expression I never would’ve expected from her. “Well said,” she says approvingly. “I see we’re all experts here at seeming to be what we’re not.”
Except me, says a tiny, seething thread inside my mind. I’m only exactly what I ever was.
I expect Merendsen to go into a detailed explanation, relaying what I told him. Instead, he cuts straight to the point.
“From everything Lee’s told me,” he tells the girl on the screen, “I think you were right.”
“Whispers?” Her face in the glow of her monitor is ghost-pale.
Merendsen nods. “And they’re getting stronger. P
eople here are going mad, like the researchers in the station did, but much quicker.”
Lilac’s eyes close, the features so suited to laughter and frivolity now bearing signs of a deep, biting grief. “I knew it,” she murmurs. “I told you I could feel—”
“I believe you,” Tarver interrupts her, and though he doesn’t look back at us, I know he’s unwilling to share the whole story behind their cryptic conversation. “I’m not about to make that mistake again.”
Lilac’s eyes fly open then, refocusing on her screen. “Are your friends okay? Have they…Are you okay?” She’s addressing me and Flynn directly now. There’s such a shift in her voice, her compassion so clear, her expression transformed. Somehow she knows what we’re going through. But how? It’s her own father’s company; what could it have possibly done to her?
My voice tangles with uncertainty. “I—I’m not sure.”
Merendsen speaks up again. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll help them.”
“Tarver, you know you can’t stay there for long. I’ll try to find out what I can, but if what’s happening there is connected to the whispers, then your poking around will only draw the wrong kind of attention. They’re watching us constantly as it is; it’ll only get worse.”
Who’s watching? Her father? But their conversation is moving lightning quick, and I don’t have time to analyze that before they’re moving on.
“I know. I’ve only got two days here before I’m due off-world with the report. But Lee and Cormac are looking for a facility LRI might have here, somewhere out in no-man’s-land. It’s not the first time they’ve used another corporation’s territory in secret, so they’ve had practice burying the records.”
“Patron.” Lilac’s face is grim, her eyes glued to her monitor as though trying to read the minute details of Merendsen’s face.
He nods. “But this one would have been moved recently from one location to another, and that’s got to leave a paper trail somewhere. Can you look into that?”
“I’ll try to get into my father’s files. He’s changed his passwords, but I can…” She hesitates. “I’ll talk to the Knave.”
Merendsen grimaces. “Are you sure? We keep feeding him more information, trusting him with more of our secrets.”
Lilac shakes her head. “Come on, Tarver. He taught us how to protect ourselves, keep our lives private. Without him we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We have to trust him.”
Merendsen grumbles wordlessly, the sound approaching a growl, but he nods.
I clear my throat. “The Knave?” I can hear the dubiousness in my voice. It’s one thing to bring in Merendsen and to let him bring in his fiancée. But this is rapidly spiraling out of my control.
“The Knave of Hearts,” says Lilac. “A hacker based somewhere on Corinth. Don’t worry, Captain. He can be trusted.”
Merendsen’s eyes are still on the screen, and when he speaks his voice is soft. He misses her. “I’m sorry to bring you into it, Lilac. We may not be able to call again. It’s hard enough setting up a completely secure line under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t those.”
“I’ll get word through somehow,” she says confidently.
Hackers, socialites with hidden tech skills—it’s all too much. “This is ridiculous,” I burst out, earning stares from everyone. “Sir.” I shift my gaze to Merendsen. “I expected you to help me bring this up the chain of command. It’s what I should’ve done in the first place.” I can feel Flynn’s eyes on me.
“You can’t.” Lilac’s voice cracks whip-like from the speakers, stopping me cold.
“I appreciate you wanting to help, Miss LaRoux.” Speaking to her, this creature from a world entirely separate from mine, feels strange. “But if I take this to General Macintosh, he’ll have the power to actually do something.”
Lilac LaRoux doesn’t answer immediately. I half expect Merendsen to take over and fight this battle for her, but instead he waits, watching the girl on the screen. Finally, she tilts her head to one side and speaks. “The planet we crashed on, Captain, was not what the reports later said it was. By the time Tarver and I were rescued, we had discovered a mountain of evidence implicating my father’s company in a conspiracy that would have ruined him.”
My mouth goes dry, and I find myself looking for Flynn, who has finally pulled his gaze up off the floor. “So why not go public with it?”
“Because he destroyed it.”
“No one can destroy all the evidence of a conspiracy like that,” Flynn argues, and I know he’s thinking of the LaRoux Industries ident chip I found in the swamp.
“No, not the evidence—Mr. Cormac, he destroyed the planet.”
The silence pours in to follow her words. I can feel Flynn’s panic matching my own, a thickening of the air that makes it hard to breathe. My gaze pulls toward him, and I find him staring hollow-eyed at the screen. My heart squeezes, a low painful wrench.
“We let him bury it,” Lilac murmurs, closing her eyes. “We thought that…well, we thought the story ended there. We knew he’d taken whispers from the rift, but we didn’t think any were still alive until a few months ago.”
“Whispers?” I interject.
Merendsen shifts, clearing his throat in such a way that forestalls any answer to my question, and I realize he’s afraid to discuss it over the computer, despite their security measures. “It’s not your fault, Lilac,” he says quietly. “Now we know.”
“He can’t destroy Avon.” Flynn’s voice is hoarse, torn from his throat with an effort that makes his shoulders quiver. “There are people here. Not just colonists—soldiers, civilian personnel, corporation representatives. It’d be mass murder.”
But Lilac LaRoux is listening with a weary grief in the slope of her lips, the drawn brows. “You don’t know my father.”
I’m still struggling to digest what Lilac LaRoux has just told us. It means there’s nowhere to go. If we tip our hand, even if we start to win this secret struggle behind the war, the moment LaRoux begins to suspect he’s losing control of Avon, he could destroy it, and all the lives it harbors. Me. Commander Towers. Molly. Flynn.
We’re all alone.
“Your only hope is to find proof.” Lilac LaRoux is all business again, that grief tucked away where no one can see it. She’s far better than I ever was, Stone-faced Chase or no. “You find proof of what’s going on there, and you find a way to go public with it, tell everyone who will listen about what my father is doing—that’s your protection. He can’t destroy anything if the galaxy is watching.”
Then, eyes drifting away, no doubt searching for me in her picture, she raises her voice again. “Mr. Cormac, Captain, you’re not alone. You hear me? I’m going to help. Just hang in there.” Neither of us expected the daughter of Roderick LaRoux to care that people were dying on Avon, much less offer us help or compassion.
“And Captain—” Lilac’s still talking, pulling my attention back. “If my father’s experiments are involved, then you can’t trust anything. Trust Flynn, trust yourself, but trust what you feel, not what you see. They can do things—put pictures in your head, make you see things, hear things, that aren’t there. Trust what you feel.”
I take a step back, not knowing how to respond. Trust what you feel. I manage not to look at Flynn again, but I can feel his eyes on me.
Merendsen saves me having to reply. “We should get off the line, just in case.”
Lilac nods. “Of course.” No pleas to stay or coy demands that he spend more time talking to her. She’s calm, quiet, competent. For a wild moment I think she’d make a good soldier—and then I have to dismiss the thought for sheer ridiculousness. “I’ll see what I can get by tomorrow and send it your way.”
Merendsen exhales audibly, the sense of urgency fading. I can’t see his face, but I can tell he’s gazing at his fiancée on the screen, having run out of words.
Her eyes soften. “Be careful, Tarver,” she says simply. “Come back to me.”
&
nbsp; “I promise.” He lifts a hand, fingertips brushing the screen—and after half a second, hers lifts as well. As though they’re reaching across the intervening light-years, palm to palm. I look away, not wanting to intrude on this intimacy. There’s silence for a few heartbeats, and then the light cuts out abruptly as the picture vanishes. I look up to see the words SESSION TERMINATED flashing along the bottom of the screen.
Merendsen leans back, inhaling briskly. It’s a few seconds before he turns, swiveling in the chair to look at me. “Well,” he says heavily. “That’s my girl. Still don’t understand why I want to marry her?”
I have to swallow to find my voice. “I was wrong, sir. I’m sorry.”
He grins at me. “She’s used to it. And so am I, now. Or at least I’m getting more used to it. It’s not easy listening to people dismiss her as a fashion-obsessed idiot, but it’s what’s best, and it keeps anyone from thinking she’s hiding anything.”
“What is she hiding?” Flynn speaks up, making me jump. For a moment I’d almost forgotten there was anyone else in the room besides Merendsen and the image of his fiancée on the screen.
Merendsen shakes his head. “It’s all a bit—I can’t tell you everything. You’re going to have to trust me on that. There are some things we can’t tell anyone. But I can tell you a little. Enough.”
We settle in, Merendsen in the computer chair, me on the top of my clothes trunk, Flynn on the end of the bed. Merendsen’s struggling, searching for a place to start. His fingers fumble with each other, a nervous gesture I’ve never seen from him before—not out in the field, not even when he got called up for his first medals and had to accept them in front of the entire company.
It hits me that we’re the first people he’s ever considered telling whatever it is he and Lilac LaRoux are hiding. Whatever was worth destroying an entire planet to conceal.
“Do you remember the crash of the Icarus eight months ago?”
Merendsen launches into the strangest story I’ve ever heard—a shipwreck with two survivors, a planet terraformed but with flora and fauna twisted, voices on the wind, visions everywhere. He tells it briefly, matter-of-fact and confident, but even so it’s difficult to believe. A planet terraformed in secret, no settlers, no record of it in the government’s permits. But he’s not done.