Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel

by Amie Kaufman

  The sound that comes from Gideon’s throat, tangled and full of pain, is what unfreezes me. My voice comes back. “You—you son of a bitch, you piece of…” This time I have no problem lifting the gun, holding it steady, thumbing the safety aside.

  Time slows. I hear Gideon shout my name, feel the air shift as he turns to lunge for me. I see Tarver moving, instincts razor sharp, reaching for Lilac. I see his fingers miss her arm by a breath as Lilac whirls toward her father, hair flaring out like a flame. I see her face, the panic there, her heart in her eyes, and despite everything, despite my finger tightening on the trigger, despite my hatred and despair and pain, I find myself wondering if that was the look on my own face in the moments just before my father blew up the barracks.

  Then my hand explodes into fire, the fragments of the plas-pistol slicing my chin, my shoulder, peppering the wall behind me. The force of the gunshot knocks me over, and when I try to lift my head it’s like I’m drunk, my ears ringing, my movements slow and too fluid, muscles like putty. LaRoux staggers and my heart sings—but he’s staggering because Lilac pushed him aside, and it’s Lilac’s voice I hear crying out pain, and it’s Lilac’s blood spattered against the display behind her, and it’s Lilac who drops to the floor. It’s Lilac.

  “You could have brought her back.” The blue-eyed man knows I can hear him, cut off in my prison of steel and electricity. “You could have brought back my Rose, but you let her rot because you hate me.”

  When he comes, he sends away the scientists studying my existence. Sometimes months pass without a visit, and sometimes he comes every day, but his hatred for me, for my kind…that never changes.

  “You don’t know what hate is yet,” the man whispers, his words a promise. He turns his back on my prison.

  Hate. If hate is what he wishes…then hate is what he will get.

  MY EARS ARE RINGING, THE sound of the gunshot bouncing around inside my head and blinding me. My momentum as I lunge for Sofia sends me sprawling to the ground, and it’s not until I realize she’s moaning, half screaming, that I shake away the fog and crawl toward her.

  Her hand is covered in burns where the plas-pistol exploded, and she’s bleeding from cuts on her neck and shoulders where the fragments caught her. There are a dozen reasons why these weapons are banned, the least of which is that they outfox even state-of-the-art security systems—the main reason is that you’ve got a greater chance of killing yourself when it goes off than of actually hitting your target.

  I gather Sofia up into my arms, panic shooting through my system and washing away everything else—my anger that she’d been planning this, my fear about what will happen to her when she’s arrested, the bitterness lingering on my tongue after speaking to Lilac LaRoux. I pull Sofia against my chest, and she doesn’t resist, pain overcoming everything else she feels toward me right now. She’s swallowing hard, choking against the need to cry out, cradling her wounded hand against her chest.

  “Shh, it’s okay,” I murmur, my lips against her hair. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

  Cormac drops to his knees on her other side, his horror all over his face, in his voice. “Oh God, Sof.”

  As if the sound of his voice opened the floodgates, suddenly other sounds start to register. Voices shouting, someone gasping, a roaring surge of whispers on the still air. I lift my head, expecting to see LaRoux on the floor, and find him bent over someone else, speaking frantically.

  “Darling,” he’s saying, that too-cultured voice choked with emotion. “Look at me—it’s Daddy, look at me.”

  Tarver’s ripping the lining out of his tuxedo jacket, his face white, jaw set and determined. He eases the figure on the floor up—it’s Lilac—so that her head rests in his lap. “It’s just her shoulder,” he’s saying in a shaking voice, starting to bind the wound with the strips of silk. “She’ll be fine, it’s just—”

  LaRoux snaps something back at him, face transformed in that instant by such fury, such hatred, that I can’t tell what he’s saying.

  Tarver, however, remains calm, meeting that icy-blue stare with his own. “You want her to bleed to death?”

  Jubilee’s beside him, pulling off her belt and handing it over to help strap the makeshift bandages in place, fixing LaRoux with a look that seems like it should do to him what the bullet didn’t.

  LaRoux draws in a shuddering breath, reaching for Lilac’s hand and cradling it between his own, drawing it up to press it to his lips. “Hang on, darling girl.”

  Sofia stirs in my arms, voice shaky with pain as she mumbles. “She wasn’t supposed to…Why, why did she do that? I never meant to—”

  “Because he’s her father,” Flynn says softly. “Because she loves him, and you were trying to kill him.”

  “He’s a monster,” whispers Sofia, struggling to sit up on her own power, some of the shock from her injury starting to ebb.

  “And he’s her father,” Flynn replies.

  Sofia’s face crumples, tears spilling out to mingle with the blood on her chin. I’ve read her background now. I know what happened to her own father. And I know how many voices were calling him a monster in the wake of his death. What it must be like to love someone, despite whatever they might have done. I tighten my arms around her.

  “I’m here,” I whisper.

  Lilac stirs, and it’s enough to jerk both men’s attention back to her, as Tarver finishes binding off her shoulder with the silk lining of his jacket. “Tarver…” she mumbles, and I see the way her father’s face tightens, the look of loathing on his face as his eyes dart up toward his future son-in-law.

  “There’s my girl,” Tarver replies, oblivious to—or ignoring—the look he gets from LaRoux. He smiles, bending his head to brush his lips against her forehead. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Are you lying to me again?” Her voice is so quiet I can barely hear it.

  A sound, like a laugh but without much humor, escapes Tarver’s lips. “Not this time,” he answers. “I promise. Lee, call for a medic, we can’t move her.”

  Jubilee rises to her feet, jogging over to the commpoint on the wall. But Lilac’s stirring.

  “I feel…” Her voice trails off, and for a horrible moment I think she’s dead, that Tarver missed something, that she was hurt somewhere else. But then she speaks, and her voice has changed, and something in it makes my entire body freeze. “Angry.”

  As if in response, the whispering, surging voices on the air cease all at once, leaving us in utter silence. My mouth floods again with the taste of blood, and despite my arms tightening around Sofia, my muscles start to quiver, like I’ve been climbing for an hour and my body’s too exhausted to fight.

  Tarver’s calm shatters. “Lilac—Lilac, look at me. Look at me, beautiful, don’t—” His gaze snaps up to meet LaRoux’s. “Do something!” he shouts.

  “I don’t understand,” LaRoux’s saying slowly, stupidly, staring at whatever’s happening to Lilac, something we can’t see.

  “She’s different,” Tarver snaps. “That’s what we’ve been hiding from you. She’s connected to them, and she knows that you’ve still got them held captive in the last rift here. They want her, don’t you get it? They’ve been trying to get inside her head for the past year. You have to shut down the rift, send the whispers back. Now.”

  “I told you, there is no rift up here on the Daedalus,” replies LaRoux, his face white. “There’s only one of the creatures left at all, it couldn’t possibly—”

  “It’s killing her! If it’s down on Corinth, then make the call!”

  “There is simply no way—” LaRoux’s voice catches and chokes. “It cannot be reaching her…”

  “Hush.” It’s Lilac’s voice again, but under control, no longer confused and whispery and hurt. She reaches out, wounded shoulder and all, to gently push Tarver’s arm away from her so she can sit up. “I’m fine.”

  Tarver’s silent, and LaRoux too, as though that gentle command were a magic spell robbing both
men of their voices.

  “What a strange thing,” says Lilac, rotating her injured shoulder slowly, not even seeming to notice when the movement causes a fresh flow of blood that trickles from beneath the makeshift bandage. “Pain is so different from what I’d imagined.”

  Fingers of ice creep down my spine, fear trickling in before I can even figure out why I’m afraid. I give Sofia a squeeze, and as though she can read my thoughts, she struggles to get her feet beneath her and together we stagger up to stand side by side.

  Lilac, spotting the movement, lifts her head to look at us. But instead of the bright, sky-blue eyes so like her father’s, I see only blackness, like empty holes.

  Tarver’s just looking at Lilac, and for the first time I see him, really see him, how he looks at her. I’ve been so busy hating him for replacing my brother that I never noticed.…His heart is written clear across his features, and the agony reflected there as he looks at Lilac makes my own heart ache in response.

  “Lilac,” he whispers. “My girl.”

  Lilac’s black eyes swing over toward him, and though her face remains neutral, almost empty, her voice carries a cold so intense my skin crawls. “I know you.”

  Tarver shivers, drawing up on his knees so he can reach out and take Lilac’s arms, gazing intently at her. “Lilac, I know you’re in there somewhere. You can fight this. You are stronger than this. Please—please. Please.”

  Lilac gazes back at him for a long moment before a ripple travels through her features and she sags a little, like a marionette whose strings are being cut. Her eyes flick up to fix on her fiancé’s face. “T-Tarver?”

  Tarver’s breath catches and he leans closer, eyes scanning hers, searching for some flicker of the girl who used to be there. “Lilac.”

  The girl gives a sob and leans forward, pressing her lips to his, a desperate sort of kiss. For a moment, no one else moves, the whole room narrowing to just the two of them, Tarver’s hand coming up to touch her cheek, her movements as she leans into the kiss harder.

  Then she pulls back abruptly, opening her eyes—her black eyes—and giving a brief, mirthless laugh. “You’re so easy.” She lifts one hand, and like she’d brush aside a fly, she shoves him back—and the force of the blow sends the soldier flying, to strike the far wall with a sickening thud.

  She rises to her feet, not even flinching when Lee Chase instantly swings her weapon around to point at her. “You murdered my brethren,” says Lilac—or the thing that used to be Lilac, still staring at Merendsen. “To save your own skin—to save this skin,” she adds, gesturing with some distaste to her own body, “you killed them all.”

  “They wanted…they asked.…” Tarver’s groaning, dragging himself up from the floor—his eyes aren’t focusing right, and I know he’s only barely conscious.

  “You’re lying. No one asks for death.” Lilac glances around, head tilting as though to get a better look at each of us. “Though maybe you will, before the end.”

  “Don’t move.” Jubilee’s sighting down her gun at Lilac, her every muscle tense, her body poised. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you take a single step.”

  “No—Lee—” Tarver’s got one hand against the wall as he drags himself to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s still in there. Hold your fire.”

  The barrel of the gun dips, an automatic response to what was clearly an order. “Dammit, sir…” She shifts her grip on the gun, torn, the instinct to obey him warring with the instinct to protect him.

  “If you shoot my daughter,” Monsieur LaRoux says to Jubilee, cold—but visibly struggling for control—“I will personally see you executed.”

  “It’s all right,” says the creature inside Lilac, smiling at Jubilee. “I was the first, I am the oldest, and now I am the last of my kind here. I don’t need to move to kill your captain.”

  In the distance comes a great, low cry—like the moan of an immense beast, echoing through the ship. It isn’t until half a second later, when the floor shudders beneath us and Sofia and I go staggering back against the wall, that I realize what it was. The sound of immensely thick metal tearing like tissue paper.

  Flynn rises to his feet unsteadily and steps up next to Jubilee, his movements slow. “We’ve met your kind before,” he says slowly, his voice soothing, calm—I can detect only the faintest hints of the terror that must be there, the same terror that’s making Sofia shake at my side. “We know what’s been done to you, and we mean you no harm. Please let us talk. You can clearly destroy us anytime you want to, but do that and we’ll never be able to talk to each other. You lose nothing by waiting, by hearing us out. Destroy us now and that door closes.”

  He’s even better than he was in the Avon Broadcast—I’d surrender, given half a chance. But the Lilac creature just looks at him blankly, unaffected by his plea. “I was going to crush him,” she comments, glancing over at Tarver, leaning hard against the wall. “But this is far better. Let him die knowing he couldn’t save her. Let him die the way he should have died—falling in a tomb of twisted metal and fire.”

  The words ring in the air, punctuated by the distant creaks and groans of whatever’s happening to the ship, and for a long moment I can’t understand what the creature means. Metal and fire…falling… Then, suddenly, my knees buckle. “You can’t—” My voice comes out hoarse with fear, choked with disuse.

  Sofia reaches the same conclusion I do. “Oh God,” she whispers.

  Lilac is going to bring down the Daedalus.

  How the others back on the gray world fare, I will never know. Whether my kin on the other side of the rift can see me, sense me, I cannot tell. All I know is the blue-eyed man, and the link of hatred between us.

  He talks to me often, of his wife, of his young daughter, of his work. He has begun work on a pair of ships that will use our universe to move even faster through theirs, and he delights in sharing with me all the successes in his life, certain they will cause me pain.

  I wish I had brought his wife back to him, for then I could use her to free myself from this prison. Marked by our touch, she would be vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. I could take from him the thing he loves most all over again, and smile at him with her lips until his mind crumbles.

  I could tell him that his new technology risks tearing a hole into our world. I could tell him that to toy with the fabric of the universe is to risk destruction. I could tell him his new ships are doomed.

  But I have no mouth with which to speak. And I will wait.

  ANOTHER SHUDDER TEARS THROUGH THE ship, throwing me against Gideon. I don’t protest the arms around me—hell, my arms go around him too—because in this moment, I don’t care.

  I don’t care about the Knave, I don’t care about his connection to the LaRoux family, I don’t care that I work alone and I don’t commit and I don’t fall in love and I don’t become attached. We’re standing on a ship that’s falling from the sky and if these are my last moments alive I’ll spend them with my arms around Gideon.

  “Crash this ship and you die too,” Flynn breaks in, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of destruction all around us.

  “Please.” Lilac’s lips curve to a faint smile. My skin crawls at the sight—it’d be easier, better, if she looked and acted nothing like herself. But I’ve seen that smile a dozen times in magazines and in HV interviews, and if it weren’t for the terrible darkness in her eyes, I’d think nothing was different. This is nothing like what I saw with my father, who lost everything of himself right before he walked into that barracks. This…thing, whatever it is, is still Lilac. And yet it isn’t. Lilac’s smile widens. “I’m tearing a ship apart without lifting a finger. You think the crash will kill me?”

  “Then think about the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people in the district below. They never did anything to you or your kind, and you’ll kill them all when this ship hits. Do that and you’re no better than LaRoux.”

  Lilac’s smile widens a little, an
d she casts her glance to the side. I’d almost forgotten about LaRoux, that realization jolting through me—I’d almost forgotten about him. He’s still on his knees, where he’d been crouching after his daughter was shot. He looks up at her, face haggard and lined, the blue eyes seeming almost watery, weak, compared to the deepest black of Lilac’s gaze.

  “True,” she replies, still looking at LaRoux, her expression a sick combination of loathing and love. “I am, I suppose, what my father made me.” She stoops a little so that she can lay a hand against LaRoux’s cheek, a tender gesture that makes me shudder. “But you are wrong, when you say I’m no better than he is.”

  Flynn doesn’t answer, and I know why. He spent a lifetime surrounded by people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to logic, to compassion, to reason. He knows madness when he hears it.

  Lilac waits, and when no reply comes, her smile drains away, leaving something full of steel and fire behind. “Roderick LaRoux is a creature who defines himself by power. And I…I am better than him in every way.”

  The ship shudders again, in time with an explosion that makes my body seize, panic and adrenaline sweeping through and dimming the pain in my hand. Every muscle’s screaming at me to run. But run where? To get to the shuttles we’d have to go toward the sounds of destruction—if there even are shuttles anymore.

  Lilac looks back down at her father and smiles. “Daddy,” she says softly. “You’ll come with me, right?”

  Roderick LaRoux’s lips part, gazing up at the thing that isn’t really his daughter anymore—and, like a switch has been flipped, his face changes. The tension in his shoulders drains, his lips cracking into a tremulous smile. I see him will himself into believing it, with the same conviction that helped him believe the creature in the rift could never hurt his Lilac. “You forgive me,” he whispers. “For Simon, for the Icarus—you forgive me?”