by Amie Kaufman
“Forced,” I echo. “By LaRoux?”
“He told us that if we complied he would send us home. Only after he moved us here from the place you call Verona did we realize his deception, but by then he had learned how to cause us great pain.”
“He’s torturing you.” My stomach roils, sickened, hatred surging for the man I’ve only ever seen in holovids and news feeds.
Flynn nods. “Each time he punishes us the others grow further apart, more and more different. They are lost, alone. And their agony infects your kind; it is what drives them mad.”
“And you? Why are you different?”
“Because I remember you, Jubilee Chase.”
“I’m not special,” I snap. “I’m no more important than anyone else.”
“You’re the most important thing in this universe. You; this vessel; the people of this planet; lovers, warriors, artists, leaders, dreams more numerous than stars. Each mind unique, each thought created for an instant and then broken apart to form new ones. You don’t understand the unbearable beauty of being you.”
My eyes burn, and though I try to reach for detachment, the barrier of stone that saw me through the years since my parents’ deaths, my voice shakes when I speak. “We can still feel alone.”
The whisper gazes back at me through Flynn’s eyes. I feel hollow, as hollow as that stare; and yet there’s a knot of sympathy smoldering in the back of my mind. Perhaps I can’t understand the agony of true isolation; but right now, looking at Flynn, inches from me but infinitely far away, I feel like I can imagine it.
“You wished to be an explorer,” the creature says, still holding my gaze. “You wished to explore the seas and the stars. You dreamed of it so brightly.” Behind him, the white room is changing. Blue and green unfurl from the walls, spilling across the floor, enveloping me. Seaweeds and corals sprout like flowers, and a million kinds of fish, each one a different color, dart here and there.
I gasp, but I can breathe this ocean like I breathe the air.
“You once called me friend,” says the whisper.
“You—you were there.” A thousand memories come flooding back to me. “In November—with me.”
The vision of the ocean fades, the fish becoming ghosts of themselves, still swimming toward something in the moment they vanish. But the memory remains, and with it, the memory of a dream, long ago forgotten and buried beneath my grief. But no less real.
“I have wronged you,” the whisper says quietly, and though his expression shows no shame, he speaks slowly, each word heavy with regret. “Mine are not the actions of a friend. I stole from you.”
“My dreams.” I’m still clinging to the ocean, the memory of the dream enveloping me, something I haven’t experienced since before my parents were killed.
“I thought I was helping you, sparing you from reliving the pain of your parents’ deaths in your dreams. I thought I was easing your pain. But even your painful dreams are beautiful, Jubilee Chase, and I had no right to take them from you. They changed, as you grew, and there was healing in them. You needed them, and I took them from you.”
“All these years, you’ve been—intercepting my dreams? Taking them for your own? Why?”
“Because through them I could feel less alone.” Flynn sighs, tilting his head back and looking up at the dome of the whisper’s prison. “The others believe there is no hope for your kind, that the bursts of violence they cause, your Fury, it means nothing. But I’ve felt your grief, your loss. And though your species is capable of horrors, it’s capable of beauty, too. To end it now would be no better than taking your dreams away; to bring death robs your species of the chance to heal.”
I reach up to dash my hand angrily over my cheeks, hating that I feel for this wretched creature wearing Flynn’s face, hating that I can no longer fight without feeling. Hating that now I wonder if I ever did. “I want Flynn back,” I say, voice cracking. “If you can see my heart, then you know I need him.”
“Your bond with this vessel is why I chose him.”
“Stop calling him a vessel,” I burst out, anger sparking tears in my eyes all over again. “He’s a person. He’s smart, and kind, and braver than you could ever understand, and you’ve gone in and taken him away like it’s nothing.”
“Are you in love with this vess—this person?”
I gape at him, caught off guard. The absurdity of the question here, in the bowels of a secret research facility, conversing with a creature from another universe, is so striking that I have to fight the hysterical impulse to laugh. But his eyes are so grave, so serious, that the urge fades and I’m left looking at him, my heart tight and painful.
“I—I don’t know,” I whisper. I remember the shape of his heart and mine, and his kiss at the water’s edge. “But I wanted the chance to find out.”
Flynn’s eyes flicker. He’s here now, the creature had said. I swallow, wishing I could shout at him, wanting to beg him to come back to me.
“I do not know how to leave him without destroying his mind. But if you destroyed my connection, our connection, with him…perhaps then he would be left whole.”
“Destroyed,” I echo stupidly. “You mean—”
“I want you to kill us, Jubilee Chase.”
The words knock the air from my lungs, leaving me unable to reply until I’ve gasped a few breaths.
The creature inside Flynn watches me, searching for a sign of my reaction. “I do not wish to become like the others, to fall into violence and despair, into pain. We aren’t built for it. We can’t stand it.”
“And you think we can?” I choke back a sob. “Life is pain. We’re all in pain, all the time.”
“There are other things this universe has to offer,” says the creature. “Light. Life. Touch. Sensation. The way you are all made of the same pieces, the same fragments of stardust, and yet you are all so different, all so alone.”
“You think being alone is a good thing?”
“For us it’s agony,” he says simply. “For you, there is strength in individuality. We admire it. But we were not made to emulate it.”
I gaze back at him, trying to see traces of the creature inside Flynn as he bows his head. But all I can see are Flynn’s cheekbones, his mouth, his hair tumbling over his brow. There’s nothing about him that speaks of the passenger inside him except for the emptiness in his eyes. I bite my lip, mind turning over. “Are you sure?” I say softly. “Maybe there’s some way to set you free, to let you go so you can…” But my voice gives out. I can see the creature’s answer in Flynn’s features.
“Our keeper’s mistake was in creating a prison powered by our own energy. We are a part of it.” Flynn takes a step toward me. “Destroy the machinery holding this place together and you will destroy us with it. And without our interference, forced to keep this world secret, always hidden, you can broadcast your story to the stars. Begin your healing, perhaps. Prove your species deserves life.”
“But all those things you said were good about this universe. The things you could experience. Light and—and touch…” My voice gives out.
Flynn’s shaking his head slowly. “We have no desire to live without hope of returning home. I wish…to rest.”
“All right,” I whisper. “I’ll help you.”
Flynn beckons me closer and we kneel together on the blinding white floor. He shows me the nearly invisible seam in the floor and the faint outline of a human hand—a scanner, meant to unlock the control panel beneath.
“It merely requires a hand,” he tells me. “Anyone’s hand; a deft way of keeping us, we who cannot touch anything. We’ve tried to lead others here before, but our keeper seems to take pleasure in our failures.”
“Lead others…” But before I can ask, realization courses through me. “The will-o’-the-wisps.” The locals were right. The wisps were leading them somewhere.
“The others tried for years,” the whisper continues. “But when I realized that what I wanted was different, I—I was afraid.”
“Of dying alone.” The whisper, behind Flynn’s face, meets my eyes. “Of dying without meeting you.”
I gaze back, my heart thumping with grief—for me, for Flynn, for this lost creature huddled inside him. Before I can speak, a ripple runs through Flynn’s features, making me jump.
“You must hurry,” the whisper gasps. “The others will not stay quiet for long; I cannot hold them.”
I gulp back a sob and fit my hand to the indentation, trying not to flinch at the tingle of current that courses through me in response. The scanner beeps and flashes green, causing a section of the floor to rise upward, up and up, until there’s an eight-foot column of circuitry and wires towering over me. Destroy this and the whispers die.
I can feel the whole thing humming with power, so strong it sets my teeth on edge, makes my hair lift as though a lightning bolt were about to strike. It won’t be hard to overload it all, with that much power coursing through it.
Flynn staggers, but catches himself before he can fall. His voice is a rasp, but for now, he has control. “When it is done, you must go and stop what is happening outside.”
“Outside?”
“Your people, his people; this prison has become a battlefield.”
The bottom falls out of my stomach. We knew the Fianna were close behind us when we found the facility, but the military must have been tracking us too. Two armies, converging; there’ll be a battle raging above, fueled by deaths that mean nothing, no chance of realizing they should all be on the same side against a sadistic madman worlds away. It’ll be a bloodbath.
This creature, who claims it cannot understand death—its compassion has robbed me of breath. With that realization comes another, and I swallow hard. “It was you,” I whisper. “You took me over the night of the massacre, not the others. You brought me there to the caves.”
“This vessel—this person—his pain is yours; you share it the way my kind shares everything. You would grieve for those deaths as he would. But I brought you there too late to stop it.”
I was there to save them. Even through its anger and its pain, this creature whose kindred sent my friends mad one by one had tried to save Flynn grief.
The whisper waits patiently until I look back up, then speaks. “I have answered your questions. Will you grant me something in return?”
“What is it?” My voice cracks.
“May I…touch you?”
I blink, eyes snapping up to meet his. “Uh—excuse me?”
“We cannot experience physical sensation in our world, and in this universe we have been always alone.” Flynn’s face looks so young.
I swallow. “Okay. Okay, sure.”
Flynn’s hand slides forward, reaching for mine. I let him take it, his fingertips grazing my skin as he turns my hand over. His knuckle brushes across my palm—his eyes are fixed on our hands, wonder transforming his features.
“In our world,” he whispers, “we are always together, completely, utterly. We are all a part of each other.” He exhales slowly, his breath puffing warm and gentle across our hands. “But it means we never know how precious it is to be able to do this, to be apart and then come together.” He weaves his fingers through mine.
I half expected his hand to be clammy, or to tingle to the touch. But his skin is warm, and familiar, and our fingers interlock as though our hands were designed to do it.
A droplet splashes onto the back of my hand, and my gaze snaps up. Flynn’s eyes are wet, and as I watch, another tear slips free and tracks halfway down his cheek before dropping away. “Thank you,” he whispers. “Jubilee Chase, I wish—”
His voice cuts out abruptly as his fingers tighten convulsively around mine. His eyes snap back up. This time I can see the panic there, an almost-human desperation reaching out through those blank, black eyes.
I cannot hold off the others forever.
“Wait!” I cry, my heart pounding with sudden fear. “Just—just hold on. Please, there has to be a way to…”
To save you.
There’s only a flicker of grief—of true despair—on his features before blankness sweeps across them. The change in Flynn, inhabited by my November ghost, had been so gradual that I almost hadn’t noticed how unlike the other whispers he was. But this coldness, this blankness—it calls up an answering chill from the pit of my stomach. My November ghost is gone.
It takes the Flynn-thing only seconds to focus on my face, a jolt running through me. I left the gun on the floor; it rests between us, and he sees it too. The instant I move, he will too—I’ll only have one shot.
One shot.
I wrench my hand from his and throw myself forward as both of us dive for the gun. My hand wraps around the grip as I hit the floor and roll, certain I’m going to feel the creature’s inhuman grip crushing my ankle or my windpipe at any moment. The air grows thick with whispering voices calling to me, visions of loved ones long dead flickering in front of my eyes as my mouth floods with the taste of copper. I blink frantically as I come back up on my knees, dizzy and blinded by the false messages the creatures are sending my mind. I swing the gun around, drawing one breath, time slowing to a crawl. Then I let out the breath and fire.
A circuit board among the machinery explodes into fragments, sending a shock wave of electricity through the wiring. The entire room flickers wildly, the core of machinery flashing through the dark like a strobe. The whisper, inches away from grabbing me, suddenly drops to the floor with a scream. I can see Flynn’s dilated eyes fixed on mine, lips parted in pain.
The power crackles and surges, building to a roar that sends me crashing to the ground. I crane my head, trying to see Flynn—trying to see the creature inside him, the creature that’s dying—but I can see only his outline silhouetted by the sparks and surges. I shout, but I can’t hear my own voice over the roar. I reach for Flynn, trying to drag myself upright, but just as I’m about to take his hand, the entire core blows with a force that sends us both flying, and the room goes black.
The girl reaches out her hand. The stars are so close she can graze them with her fingertips, but each time she touches one, it shatters into a thousand pieces. The girl hangs suspended, her hair floating in Avon’s currents, water and darkness and space no harder to breathe than air, and searches for the November ghost. She knows it’s here, hidden—and she must ask why it left, why it abandoned her in the moment she needed dreams most.
She pushes through the broken stars, which shatter and fall around her like curtains of rain, vanishing into the bottomless waters, down into the heart of Avon.
THIS FEELS LIKE THE TIME Sean shoved me off the top of the lookout rock when we were eleven. Every bone in my body aches, pain lancing along my ribs as I inhale. I grope my way toward consciousness, white lights exploding against my closed eyelids.
Then there’s something touching my fingers—it’s another hand, squeezing mine. “Flynn?” Jubilee’s voice is ragged. I open my eyes to find myself in a dimly lit room with a domed roof. What light there is comes from the hallway outside. I squeeze her hand in return and hear her gasp a sob as I concentrate on breathing, and wait to understand.
Between one blink and the next, I remember the passengers in my mind, and the conversations between myself and Jubilee that I watched through a gauzy veil, too slow and stupid to remember how to reach out and speak my own thoughts. I remember the wrench of separation, and what it was to die, and my breath catches in my throat.
I blink again, and as I manage to focus my gaze, our eyes meet. For an instant I see it all in her eyes as she looks back at me—the pain of bearing witness, the last vestiges of her fear. Her sadness. Her hand shakes as she reaches out to touch my face, to see the way her touch affects me; her relief swells, and when I try to smile at her, a weak fragment of a thing, she lets out a harsh, wrenching sound, head dropping.
She stays that way for a heartbeat, letting out a breath. When she lifts her head again, I see her soldier’s mask slide back into place, despite the tears still wet on her cheeks. But there’s something different about that shield now, a warmth I can’t identify until she looks at me once more, and I realize her heart is still in her eyes. “Can you move?” She’s speaking as she climbs to her feet, taking my hand to pull me with her. “There are monitors everywhere—LaRoux will know what we’ve done.”
“The comms tower.” I stagger upright, keeping hold of her hand. “Like Lilac said, a galaxy of witnesses, so he can’t destroy Avon. So he can’t silence us.”
“The military and the Fianna are out there.” She shakes her head, gasping the words as she shoves the gun she took from the whisper into her holster.
“A broadcast is the only way to keep Avon safe.” I squeeze her hand, knowing what I’m asking. The odds that both of us will make it through the chaos of open war unscathed are almost impossible. “If I can make our people hear me too, maybe we can end this.”
Jubilee gazes back at me for a long moment, then tightens her hand in mine. “Then let’s go.”
The facility is chaotic. Mercenaries freed from their trances stagger from room to corridor, trying to understand where they are and why. Scientists and researchers in white coats lie still where they fell, though I can’t tell if they’re dead or unconscious. Perhaps it’s LaRoux’s last fail-safe, part of whatever he did to their brains, a way to make sure they couldn’t talk.
We work our way up staircases and through hallways, climbing to the surface. We’re just two more bodies in the chaos, and I keep my head down, hand wrapped tight around Jubilee’s as we race down the hallway. With every step my energy’s returning, hope surging through me. The fight’s not over yet. My head’s clear, my lungs are working more easily. By the time we reach the door to the compound, I feel better than I have since we climbed onto the shuttle to head for the spaceport. I feel alive. Now all we have to do is stay that way.
Outside it’s still dark, dawn at least an hour away. There’s a faint light to the east, enough to make out the silhouettes of people running everywhere. This facility, hidden until now, has become a battlefield. We stare out of the open doorway until, with a low cry of warning, Jubilee yanks at my arm to pull me down to the floor. Half an instant later, a laser ricochets off the metal door frame inches from where I’d been standing.
