by Amie Kaufman
The muddy smell of swamp seeps in to overtake the filtered air of the facility, carrying with it the acrid stench of burning from laser and gunfire. Somewhere on the other side of our building I can hear McBride roaring like a man possessed, bellowing orders. Through the crack in the doorway, I see Pól and Liam O’Mara dash past, faces visible for an instant in a flash of light as half a dozen Gleidels go off at once. My heart clenches, but neither of them stumbles.
Jubilee’s face lights in a flash of laser-fire. Her eyes are wide, gaze scanning the battlefield like she’s trying to find openings or search for patterns. “This is suicide,” she breathes.
I scan the chaos as her soldiers gain ground against my Fianna, breaching the fence here and there and pinning them against the building we’re hiding in. I trace the line of the fence until I reach the comms tower, studying it through the muted light. There’s a door at the base, but it’s closed, and for all I know it’s locked. There’s a maintenance ladder running up the outside of the building, though; rusted, rickety, but it looks like I could climb it, maybe.
“We have to try.” I flinch as one of the Fianna goes down with a scream. I don’t recognize the voice, but my gut clenches at the sound. “Can you get me to the tower? If you can hold them off, I think I can still stop this.” The guns are roaring outside, lasers screaming and lighting up the compound in quick flashes. More every second, louder every minute. I glance at Jubilee as her eyes sweep across the battle, taking stock of all that’s happening. I can see her mind working, trying to figure out how fast we can run, whether we’ve got any chance of making it before someone shoots us. She draws in two long, slow breaths, easing her gun out of its holster. I hope her aim is good enough to avoid killing anybody—neither of these armies is our enemy anymore. Then she nods, saying nothing, but there’s determination in her gaze.
Sheltering behind the cover of the doorway, I reach for her to tug her in closer, until we’re a hand’s breadth apart. Beyond, I can hear the shriek of Gleidels and the crack of the Fianna’s ancient weaponry—then the ground beneath our feet shudders with the force of an explosion. Heart thumping, I look across at Jubilee, and despite the low light, I can see the lines of her face—her lips, her cheekbones, the swoop of her lashes. “Hey,” I murmur. I don’t know what I want to say, but I have to say it before we walk onto a battlefield, into the path of two armies that both want us dead.
“Hey,” she whispers back, close enough that I can see the tiny shifts in her eyes as she studies me. She’s tracing out the lines of my face, just as I’m drinking in hers, memorizing her features. “Flynn—I’m glad you ruined me.”
Her voice stabs my heart, because I recognize that tone. I’ve heard it before. “Don’t start with the good-byes,” I say. Her lips twitch in a tiny smile, and I drink it in. My voice shrinks to a breath as I remember what she said when I was only a passenger in my own body, when the whisper asked if she loved me. “I want us to have the chance to find out, too.”
She recognizes her own words echoing back to her, and her lips quiver, her eyes fixed on mine.
I brace my shaking hands against the floor. “Ready?”
She nods, gaze swinging away to lock on the comms tower. “Ready.”
We burst from the doorway and run.
The girl pushes through the last of the stars, scattering them into glittering dust that settles on her skin and glimmers as it sinks through the water. All that’s left is darkness, and there’s no sign of the November ghost.
The green-eyed boy reaches out and touches her cheek, his movements slow and deliberate in weightlessness, in water. The light from above filters down through the water, dim and green, illuminating his face.
Then he looks up—and when the girl follows his gaze, she sees something shining, up above water, glimmering just out of reach. She gasps, and swims for the surface.
WE SPRINT THROUGH THE PREDAWN GLOOM, making straight for the comms tower, ducking low as bullets fly over our heads. We don’t bother to dodge or weave; there’s so much gunfire in the air, it’d be pointless. Trying desperately not to slip on the marshy ground, I strain my eyes in the darkness, but the world is full of shadowy silhouettes—soldiers repositioning themselves and trying to gain ground, the Fianna darting in and out of the battle to move wounded.
We reach the comms tower, and I smash into the door an instant before Flynn. We flatten ourselves into the shelter of the door frame, and he grabs at the handle, twisting and yanking it with white-knuckled urgency. It doesn’t give.
Flynn lowers his head to shout in my ear. “We have to climb!” He grabs at the rusted maintenance ladder to the right of the door and ducks out of the doorway a beat ahead of me to start climbing. My muscles scream a protest as I follow, grabbing the rungs to pull myself up after him.
Four or five meters up, something invisible slams my shoulder against the tower. I try to force my hands to grip the ladder harder before I’m knocked free, but only my left hand tightens. There’s a spatter of blood on the cement wall that wasn’t there before, and I stare at it, uncomprehending. My right hand’s letting go, fingers unpeeling from the bar in slow motion. I feel nothing, no pain, only confusion when I realize I’m falling.
I hit the ground, the impact driving the air from my lungs just before the pain explodes, screaming up my right arm to my shoulder, down my elbow, fire erupting inside my veins.
Her November ghost is waiting for her when she reaches the surface. It lights the way for her as she climbs back into the boat and stands there, dripping, strands of stardust in her hair. She can’t wait any longer, words tumbling out of her.
Where have you been?
The November ghost is no more than a whisper, but when the girl closes her eyes, she can hear it:
Looking for you.
I’M SCRAMBLING, BULLETS PINGING OFF the ladder around me, when suddenly Jubilee’s not below me anymore. I nearly lose my grip, grabbing for a rung as I twist to see where she’s gone, fear singing through me.
She’s on the ground. Oh God, she’s on the ground. And even in the dark, even in the mud, I can see she’s been hit, blood flowering out across her arm.
“Jubilee!” My scream is hoarse, barely audible even to me over the gunfire. My muscles start moving, sending me sliding and stumbling back down the ladder; I can’t see anything other than her body.
Then she lifts her head, and my heart nearly gives out with relief. She starts to move, getting her left elbow underneath her, then falling back into the mud once more. It takes me a long moment to even realize her mouth is moving, and I can’t hear what she says as she stares up at me, but I can read the word on her lips. Go.
I hang from the framework, helpless—hope above me, my heart on the ground below. Then she screams at me again, and this time I can hear her shout. “GO!” I can see what the effort costs her.
So I do the only thing I can. I force my arms and legs to move against the frantic orders my heart wants to issue, and I scramble up, grabbing each handhold and hauling, muddy feet sliding off rungs and finding new purchase. There’s a window at the top—it serves as a lookout tower too, perhaps—and I turn my face away and smash my fist against the pane. It shatters, and I smash out the pieces, making a hole I can scramble through, landing in a muddy heap on the floor of the empty tower.
I don’t waste a second, pushing up to my knees, trying to keep my head below the line of the windows. I’m surrounded by a bewildering array of broadcast equipment, a thousand times more complex than the simple radio gear we use in the caves. And yet it’s not completely alien. Something about the controls is familiar.
I close my eyes, trying to ignore the tug of my heart back down to where Jubilee lies, trying to tune out the sound below and send my focus back. Back before the last planetary review, the last rebellion, back to a time when home meant a roof, a bed of my own. I can’t remember my mother’s face, but I can see her hands still, curled around a transmitter. They took away hypernet communications techn
ology during the rebellion, but now I watch the memory unfold, kneeling on the floor of the tower. I see her hand holding the transmitter, her fingers reaching across to depress a button so the display leaped to life. And I remember.
I grab the receiver, fingers running over the buttons until I find the sequence I need to transmit my broadcast to the galaxy. There’s a row of switches labeled EXTERIOR LIGHTS, and I flip them, the courtyard suddenly dazzlingly bright—the figures below freeze, half blinded, stumbling and ducking for cover. The shooting starts to die away.
Next to the light switches are those for the loudspeakers, and I flip those too. The speakers above me awaken with a crackle. Now I’m transmitting to my people and Jubilee’s in the compound below, as well as to every corner of the galaxy.
I hold down the button on the side of the transmitter and start to speak. “My name is Flynn Cormac.”
Below, I see a couple of heads snap up at the sound of my voice, or maybe at my name—I can’t tell whether the silhouettes are soldiers or Fianna. “This is a transmission for the people of Avon, and for all those beyond Avon who can hear me. I’m the third generation of my family from this planet. We’ve been locked in conflict for years now. Fighting for the right to be heard, fighting for the right to live, just because our planet hasn’t passed review yet. And the soldiers here have been fighting too, for order, for peace. Terrible things have happened to all of us. Good men and women have died, and the people of Avon have been driven to turn on each other.” I’m forced to stop, swallowing so hard the lump in my throat hurts, as I think of Fergal’s tiny body and unseeing eyes, and of the madness and grief that drove McBride to kill him. “Desperation has led my own people to the murder of innocents because they can no longer imagine a future without war.”
There are so many things I want to say—I want to talk about the whispers, the way LaRoux isolated them, tortured them, forced them to evolve into individuals they were never meant to be, so they could never go back. I wish I knew how to share their grief with the galaxy, but I don’t know how much time I have. “I’m broadcasting from a secret facility LaRoux Industries has had here for years. LaRoux himself has been keeping beings on Avon, creatures completely different from us. Whispers from another universe with the power to control thoughts. He’s used them to slow down our terraforming, to block our transmissions so no one could hear us calling for help. Until LaRoux is brought to justice, we’re not safe. None of us are.”
I see figures huddled wherever there’s shelter, ready to resume fighting in an instant—but for now, they listen. I clear my throat, force my voice to sound strong.
“We need you to watch us. We need you to ask about us, and care about us, and remember your colonies were once young too. We need your protection, and we need you to know that if anything happens to Avon, it was LaRoux, not an accident. Don’t let him hide the evidence of what he’s done. We’re asking you and trusting you to bear witness for us.” I suck in a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “Thank you. Message ends.”
I bow my head, and my hand’s trembling, gripping the mic so tightly I can’t seem to make my fingers unwind. Below me the silence echoes. But if just one person’s finger slips on a trigger, a single gunshot will end all hope of peace.
I flick the switches that will end the transmission across the planet and the galaxy, but I leave the loudspeaker in place, lifting the transmitter one more time. “I’m going to come down now. It’s time to talk.”
And finally, I let the mic go. There are stairs leading down inside the tower, and my legs are shaking as I descend, my footsteps the only sound. Jubilee’s at the bottom of these stairs. Badly injured, certainly. Perhaps dead by now. My mind is numb, my heartbeat leaden. My fingers fumble with the lock from the inside until I can open the door and step out into the open.
“Mr. Cormac.” The voice rings out from the swamp, and I know it—Commander Towers herself. I crane my neck until I see her, approaching the fence, which was torn to pieces in the battle. Some of the Fianna are melting out of the swamp as well, revealing their battle plan, clearly intending to flank the military in the darkness. It might even have worked.
Though they hang back in the shadows of the buildings, crouching low and keeping out of sight, I can see a hundred of the Fianna at least, the whites of their eyes showing against the mud camouflaging their faces. Plenty of guns still trained on me. “Stop,” I call. “We need to tend to our wounded, and talk.”
Our wounded. I can see Jubilee just a few meters away, slumped unmoving in the mud. Every muscle in my body wants to run to her, to throw myself down at her side. Suicide, she’d called it, the plan to run across the battle to reach the tower. She got me my chance to stop this war; I can’t risk shattering this fragile balance and let that sacrifice be for nothing.
“Please,” I whisper, and though it carries toward the soldiers in the silence, my eyes are on Jubilee.
“Flynn.” My heart surges up into my throat. It’s Sean. One side of his face is bloody where a laser clipped his ear, and my heart shrinks to see him looking so warlike. Our eyes lock, and despite the distance, I know what’s in his gaze. Blood and betrayal, Fergal’s ghost and Sean’s cutting grief standing between us. “What did that mean? That we turned to the murder of innocents?”
There’s no forgiveness in his tone, but the fact that he’s talking to me at all—the fact that he listened—makes my heart race. It’s the smallest glimmer of hope, like electricity running through me. But before I can respond, a flicker of horror runs through Sean’s features and he takes a step back, turning to find McBride some distance behind him. Sean’s eyes drop to the Gleidel in McBride’s hand, and as their eyes meet, something cracks in my heart.
“You’ve been lied to, all of you.” I harden my voice, make myself stand straighter, moving forward past Jubilee. It’s torture not looking back at her, and I force myself to keep my gaze up, to finish this. I can still see the desperation on her face, the pain, as she stared up at me. Go. “You’ve been manipulated into breaking the ceasefire by a madman.”
McBride’s shaking, the gun at his side trembling with suppressed rage. “No one is going to take the word of a traitor like you.” He’s beyond reason now—I can see it in his jerky movements, hear it in his voice.
“Nobody needs to believe me. They can see it themselves. Hand over your gun, McBride. We’ll check the readout and see how many shots it fired that night.” Because I know, and he knows, that if he refuses to let us see the data on his Gleidel, he’s announcing his own guilt.
A ripple of confusion runs through the crowd, and I cling to that—it means some of them do doubt him. Some of them want to believe me.
McBride’s eyes bore into mine, all the hatred and disgust he’s been trying to hide for years burning openly now. “Avon will rise from the ashes of this war, and you were always too weak to be the spark, Cormac. Doyle and the others couldn’t fight, but they could still serve our cause. They were kindling for the flames, and that was an honor.” His lips creep into a stiff rictus of a smile. “You can still serve, too.”
In slow motion I see his arm start to lift, and a vision of the next thirty seconds plays out in my mind. I see him drop me to the ground, I see the gunfire start up on each side once again. I see bodies crumple.
Then Sean’s beside him, grabbing at his arm, forcing the Gleidel down again with a grunt of effort. He knocks McBride off balance, but only for a moment; McBride is bigger, stronger, more experienced. He wrenches the Gleidel free of Sean’s grip, twisting an arm around his neck and pulling him in close to act as a shield, gun at his temple.
“Someday,” McBride hisses, “you’ll understand why I—”
The shriek of a laser rips the air, and my heart stops; the whole world stops. But it’s McBride, not Sean, who drops to his knees. He’s dead before he hits the ground, a neat, round hole smoking in the center of his forehead.
Sean falls, dragged down by the arm around his neck, but he rolls free, co
ughing, to come up on all fours.
Hundreds of guns lift, and the world holds its breath. Then I realize where the shot came from. I turn to see Jubilee on her knees, holding her gun in her left hand, her right arm hanging uselessly. I run back to her, my world narrowing to this one moment, everything else falling away as I drop to the mud at her side. She’s alive. Bloodied, trembling, leaning into me as I wrap an arm around her, but alive.
And for all her reputation, all her ruthlessness, I realize I’ve never seen Jubilee kill anyone before.
I hear her draw a slow, steadying breath beside me. “Anyone else want to start a war today?”
Just the touch of her skin on mine sends warmth and strength flooding through me. It’s all we can have, right now, but it’s enough. I lift my head. “We need to talk. All of us, Fianna and soldiers. Let us show you the truth of what’s been happening here.”
I see the murmurs run up and down the group of my people, and I suddenly, painfully, want them to be that again, to call myself one of them. But I can’t order them to take me back. They’ll choose it, if they’re willing to trust me one more time.
Sean climbs slowly to his feet, bowing his head as the muffled conference travels in from the edges of the group of fighters to reach him. He glances at the gun he dropped when McBride grabbed him, but he doesn’t reach for it. Instead, our eyes meet as he walks toward me, out into the light.
“Flynn.” Jubilee breathes my name, and I turn my head to follow her gaze.
Out in the swamp, the soldiers are still standing, and now they’re lowering their weapons. Commander Towers is walking in to join us.
