by Amie Kaufman
Tarver nods. “It worked the first time around, and it worked on Avon.”
“She could have destroyed us, or taken us over, on the Daedalus.” My voice sounds tired even to my own ears. “Why didn’t she?”
Tarver’s expression twitches as he shoves Jubilee’s hand away. “She—it—wanted us to suffer. Wanted me to suffer. Can’t suffer if we’re dead, or if we have no minds left to feel it.”
Jubilee gives up, tossing the granola bar on the ground and leaning back against the wall. “Even if we could get to the rift before she squashes us—and that’s a big ‘if’—I’m not so sure destroying the rift would work this time around. I’ve seen these things, seen what a person is like when a whisper’s controlling them.” Her eyes are on Flynn’s, her voice low. “Lilac’s…different. With the others, the husks, the people being controlled—they’re like marionettes, all empty shells being made to dance.”
“And with Lilac…she’s real. Like she’s actually become this creature.” Flynn’s nodding. “Bringing down the Daedalus, tossing Tarver like a rag doll…That’s not normal.”
“Is any of this normal?” Gideon’s voice is dry.
“Point.”
My mind feels sluggish, turning over thoughts at half speed. There’s something I know, something I remember, that’s vital…but I can’t find it. I clear my throat. “Why Lilac?”
Tarver’s head lifts. “What?”
I glance at him, but he seems to have forgiven me for accusing him of wanting to kill Lilac. I chew at my lip, trying to sort out my thoughts. “Why her? I mean, it’s LaRoux the whisper hates, isn’t it? Why not take him over? He’s the one with the power, the influence, the ability to make the senators and their staffs go back and build rifts all across the galaxy—and it needs those, if it’s going to punish the whole of humanity, not just us. Why take Lilac, behind the scenes?”
“To…watch him, to hurt him from the outside?” Gideon’s thoughtful too, eyes flicking up from his study of LaRoux’s device to meet my gaze briefly. “To take away the thing he cares about the most?”
“Except she’s pretending to be the real Lilac, at least enough that he’s managed to make himself believe it.” I rub at my temple with my fingertips. I’m not even sure anymore what day it is—was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that I was dancing with Gideon in the ballroom of the Daedalus? “There has to be some reason why Lilac is special, why it didn’t take over LaRoux, or one of the scientists working with it, once it could get free. Some reason why the whisper’s chosen her, needs her.”
No one has an answer for that, exhausted silence punctuated only by the faint crinkle of wrappers here and there, as we try to choke food down throats dry with fear and weariness.
“We lost my canteen.” Tarver’s the one who breaks the silence, hoarse. All heads swivel toward him, but he doesn’t look up. “On Elysium, where Lilac and I were stranded. That’s what the scientists who died there called the planet, did you know? It was an ancient name for a place in the afterlife, where heroes went. After what happened to the researchers there, they thought it was appropriate. Anyway, we lost my canteen in a rock fall. We needed it badly, to filter water, to carry water. The next day, we found a perfect replica, right in the middle of our path.”
“You never mentioned that in your debriefing interview,” Gideon says. When Tarver’s gaze snaps toward him, he flinches, realizing that he’s not meant to have seen that footage.
But Tarver just shakes his head, bowing it once more. “They created a new one out of nothing, the whispers. And then—” His voice breaks, and I see his knuckles whiten as he grips handfuls of his hair, mastering himself. “Lilac was killed.”
Stunned silence sweeps across us, every gaze locked on him now.
Jubilee speaks in a whisper. “If Lilac was killed, then who…what…”
“Days after I buried her,” he says, toneless, “they brought her back to me. I don’t know how—I don’t want to know how. But it was her, it was my Lilac. Her thoughts, her voice, her memories. Her heart.”
“That’s impossible.” Jubilee’s face is drawn, confused. She only ever knew Lilac after the Icarus crash, and I know what she’s thinking—I can’t help but think it myself. Did any of us ever know the real Lilac? Except…my gaze creeps back toward Gideon. He knew her as a child, growing up. And he never seemed to notice there was anything different about her.
Tarver glances at Jubilee, his own gaze troubled. “She’s had a connection to them ever since. She can sense them. After the rift on Avon was destroyed, she could feel this last whisper, alone in this last rift, reaching out to her in her mind. And though the whispers we met on Elysium were peaceful, we learned after Avon that her father had made the others twisted, angry. Dangerous.”
Jubilee’s still staring at Tarver, something like accusation in her gaze. “You told us the whisper was affecting her, that we needed to destroy the rift that we thought we’d find on the Daedalus. Why not tell us the whole truth?”
“Because no one can know,” Tarver blurts, frustration in the snap of his voice. “She’d become part of the experiment, something to be studied. She’d be kept safe somewhere in a facility, away from me, away from anything resembling a real life.” He closes his eyes. “I guess that’s all over now.”
“So…” My mind’s spinning, trying to make sense of all this. “If Lilac isn’t human, not really—”
“She is.” Tarver’s quick to interrupt. “She’s real, she’s alive, she’s human. She’s Lilac. She’s just…”
“Just a little bit different,” I finish for him, trying to make my voice conciliatory. “I didn’t mean she wasn’t real. But if she’s not—if her body is something created by the whispers, created by that energy from their side of the rift…”
“Then that’s why the whisper needed her.” Gideon’s reached the same conclusion I have. “If she’s made of the same energy they are, no wonder the whisper could take her over so completely. Like slipping on a glove made to your exact measurements.”
Jubilee grimaces. “Then it doesn’t seem likely that the same tactics that worked on Avon and Elysium are going to work here. We have no idea what we’re dealing with.”
“We need to know more about the rift.” Flynn crumples up his granola bar wrapper and tosses it aside. “Gideon?”
Gideon’s shaking his head. “LRI doesn’t keep any of its classified or proprietary documents on servers connected to the hypernet. No company would, it’d be an invitation for someone like me to walk on in. I’d have to go to LRI Headquarters itself, and…”
“And it’s basically a pile of rubble, infested with whisper-controlled husks.” Flynn mutters a curse.
I find my voice. “I…I think I might know someone who can help us.”
“Go on,” Gideon says, stripping another piece of wire and laying it in the pile of parts he’s pulling together for our makeshift shields against the whisper’s influence. He can’t make up six earpieces, so he’s jury-rigging a couple of palm pads to emit the same field as LaRoux’s device—right now they’re both in pieces, their insides spilling out like entrails.
“She’s the contact I made within LaRoux Industries who was willing to leak me information. She’s the one who told me the rift technology is the same as the new hyperspace engines. That’s why we thought LaRoux had moved the rift to the Daedalus. I was at LRI Headquarters a couple weeks back to meet her, but—it’s a long story, but that’s the day I met Gideon, and the day we found out about the rift at LRI. A riot broke out, and she went back underground.”
“Can you trust her?” Gideon’s voice is soft and his gaze steady—looking back at him, I can see the bitterness there. Trust. Such a simple thing. Such an impossible thing.
I swallow. “I don’t know. She could very well be dead, for all I know, or they might have caught her when they came after me. But if she’s still out there…if she was debating whether to help then, maybe she’d be willing now. She’s our best chan
ce of finding out how to destroy the rift and set Lilac free. I’ll need your help, though, to track her down. The address I had for her doesn’t work anymore. She burned it when she—the time you came to get me.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rao.” I press my palms against the floor as Gideon starts moving already, setting aside LaRoux’s device so he can pull out a palm pad and get to work, searching every available network for the name. I swallow, continuing to explain. “Her name is Dr. Rao, and she’s with the theoretical res—”
“Rao.” The interruption is soft, but jolts me silent—Tarver hasn’t said a word since he told us about Lilac’s death, and the whispers who brought her back to him. He lifts his head, reddened eyes fixed on me. “Did you say Rao?”
“Yes, Dr. Rao.”
“Dr. Sanjana Rao?”
My stomach lurches. “What—how do you know that name?”
Tarver’s eyes close, and for a moment he almost looks peaceful, resigned. Then he gives a short, sharp laugh, eyes opening again. “What short memories everyone has. Patron was only three years ago.”
Jubilee’s breath catches in a gasp. “I knew I’d heard that name before—she was one of the researchers on Patron. One of the VeriCorp scientists you helped escape from raiders, the whole reason you were given that medal and sent to the Icarus on that press tour in the first place.”
Tarver nods, leaning forward so he can rest his elbows on his knees. He looks tired, older, with none of the easy charm and boyish good looks that made him such a media darling. “Except she wasn’t working for VeriCorp, and it wasn’t raiders who attacked them. That was all a cover.”
“She was working for LaRoux Industries,” I whisper.
Tarver’s eyes flick toward me for the briefest instant and then jerk away. “Yes. And she was on a secret project then, I barely understood it. Sofia’s right—she’s the one person in the galaxy who might actually have the answers we need.”
“Found her,” says Gideon, voice tinged with triumph. But his quick smile falters, his eyes on the palm pad’s screen, as whatever he’s found registers. “She’s…she was hurt when the Daedalus hit, she’s checked into a trauma center. Inside the crash site.”
The crash site, several kilometers of destruction, every inch crawling with husks. Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of them by now—and if Lilac’s whisper decides we’re a threat, we’ll be no match for their sheer numbers.
The urge to lie down returns, that longing to just let the warm marble claim me almost overpowering. I can see my thoughts mirrored in the faces around me—even Jubilee, the notorious Captain Chase, looks like she’d rather drop.
But then I meet Gideon’s gaze, and those hazel-green eyes lock onto mine, and for a moment our mistrust is set aside, and we’re simply together. Just one piece of me, the smallest kernel, calms, and I can breathe. Then his mouth twitches, and he winks. It’s enough.
I move, pulling myself up inch by inch, and that brings the others to life. They rise, coming to their feet, checking the charges on their guns, scrubbing at their faces with their hands as if they can wipe away the tiredness. One by one, they glance at me. So I suck in a deep breath and nod toward the door. “Let’s go.”
We have been waiting for so long, here in the place where the blue-eyed man first found us. The researchers all vanished long ago, but not before their minds crumbled, leaving us in an empty building filled only with the ghosts of madmen. We wait, growing weary, growing weak.
Then the silence is shattered, a great tearing in the sky that breaks the very stars—a ship appears where before there was only the remnant of the blue-eyed man’s experiments.
The ship is falling, and we are too weak to stop it. It carries thousands of souls, any one of whom could free us from this hell—and they will all die.
And then, a flash of light. A glimpse of something familiar. Blue eyes, and a face that once laughed while washed in the glow of the rift. A soldier with her whose soul is still somewhere in that garden, clutching that book of poems.
We have just enough strength to nudge their escape pod so that it skims through the atmosphere safely, just enough strength to watch as they take their first shaking steps on the surface of this world.
We have just enough strength to hope.
THOUGH THE STREETS ARE ABANDONED, we stay close as we make our way toward the crash site and the trauma center whose records tell us that they have Dr. Sanjana Rao. I’m betting that, tactically, it’d be better for either Jubilee or Tarver to scout on ahead for potential threats, but neither one suggests it. They both have their guns drawn, though, and Tarver and Flynn are each wearing one of my cobbled-together shields, tucked inside their military-supplied vests. In theory, if the rest of us stay close to them, within their range, we’ll be shielded from the whisper. I’m praying I duplicated the field in LaRoux’s device correctly, and they’re broadcasting the little electrical pulses we need to scramble any attempts by the whisper to take us over. On the upside, if I’m wrong, there’s every chance I’ll never know about it.
Every pocket in the vest Kumiko’s people gave me is crammed with tools and equipment, and tucked inside it is the slim aluminized bag I took with me to the Daedalus under my suit jacket. I wanted to make sure none of my equipment could be damaged by anything magnetic on the ship if we ended up taking a cross-country route to the rift.
All our attempts to reach Sanjana by phone, by net, have come up empty. We can’t tell if it’s because the networks are still crammed, or if it’s because she’s too injured to reply, or if it’s because she’s not even there, and the records are wrong. Everything, including the hastily erected trauma centers to deal with crash victims, is in chaos—and we can’t afford to wait for her to reply. Without more information about how to destroy the rift, we’re flying blind. I’ve sent her a package of information that’ll download to her account if she gets a connection—coordinates for the center we’re heading to in the hopes of finding her, schematics for my homemade whisper shields, and small details that can only have come from Tarver, as a sign she’s dealing with allies. I pray she gets it, pray she trusts it. Pray she’s even still alive.
I keep scanning my companions each time I get a little prickle of the hairs on the back of my neck, but the shields seem to be working. Then again, would I even know if it happened, unless I was looking directly into their eyes? Not for the first time, I wish I had Sofia’s insight. She’d have some body language shortcut to tell instantly if one of our group was about to turn.
But she looks just as scared as I feel.
We stick to the smaller streets, forced to take long detours around sections of the upper city that have caved in and crushed the mid-city below. At first we see others only in the distance, too far away to tell if they’re survivors or husks. But as the smell of burning chemicals grows stronger, as the ash in the air thickens and our path becomes more and more littered with debris, more dead bodies sprawled where they fell, it becomes obvious: the only people other than us still moving around this close to the crash aren’t people at all anymore.
“That’s the fifth one we’ve seen taking this exact path,” Sofia whispers, breaking a long silence as we take cover against the side of a ruined bank headquarters and watch a shuffling husk move across the street. Even the sirens are quiet now. The only noises are the occasional, far distant rumble of some part of the city caving in and crumbling into the space below.
“They’re sweeping the city,” Jubilee says in a low voice. “This pattern, I recognize it.”
She’s looking at Tarver, who’s watching, grim-faced, and it takes me a long moment to figure out why. “Lilac learned it from me,” he says quietly. “Standard search grid.”
“She’s looking for us,” I murmur, as the husk—a middle-aged man, balding and clad in a worn business suit, someone you’d never look at twice—vanishes around the corner.
“Hopefully she won’t be able to see us with the shields,” Sofia says,
straightening out of her crouch. “We’ve got to move quietly. One or two, we can deal with. But if we run into a group of them…” She swallows but doesn’t finish the sentence.
She doesn’t have to. It’s all too easy to imagine what a big enough group of these shambling, empty-eyed things could do to us. Soldiers who feel no pain, and no remorse at causing pain.
Up the street is a trio of police hovers settled on the pavement in a blockade formation, just in front of a line of temporary barriers. The crash perimeter. In theory, no one but rescue personnel is allowed through—the sign propped against one of the cars states, in big block letters, NO ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT, and another warns, STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY. Despite the emptiness of the city, it’s still a shock to see this setup abandoned. There ought to be police officers and city officials barring the way.
Instead there’s no one.
We cross the perimeter one by one, swinging our legs over the cement barriers. Though we’re still too far away to see the wreck, my eyes pick out a dizzying emptiness in the distance where there ought to be skyscrapers. With a city that stretches across almost an entire planet, there’s no recognizable skyline—and yet my memory knows there should be something there, that it’s like the world’s been wiped clean just beyond the horizon.
A metallic clang shatters the quiet, making me jump so violently that I bang into one of the barriers, stifling an oath. Both soldiers have their weapons out, eyes scanning the alleyway where the sound came from. They move together without even seeming to communicate a plan—one glance, a nod, and then Jubilee’s circling around wide to the mouth of the alley, shoulders pressing back against the brick, as Tarver crouches low, using the cover of the parked hovercars to remain unseen as he takes the other side. The rest of us move to follow, and as Tarver and Jubilee move on down the alley, we take up positions by its mouth.
Another, quieter clang, alerts us all to the source of the sound—there’s someone inside one of the dumpsters at the end of the alley. Tarver tilts his head at Jubilee, who silently steps around behind it as he shifts his grip on his gun to free one hand. I glance over my shoulder, neck prickling, to see a figure a block away pause—turn—and start moving toward us. Swallowing the urge to call out alarm, I reach out to touch Sofia’s elbow so she’ll follow my line of sight. Flynn catches the movement, and after he casts a quick, fearful glance back at me, we all ease into the mouth of the alley, hoping that noise hasn’t drawn more attention. Tarver’s shield will protect him and Jubilee, and Sofia and I stay close to Flynn and his.
