by Amie Kaufman
The Lilac-thing reaches for his hand to draw him up to his feet. “You’re my father,” she says, kissing his cheek. “And I’m not done with you yet.”
LaRoux gapes at her for a long moment before a smile slides into place on his features—a deliberate sort of expression, as he chooses blindness over reality. “Oh, my darling.” LaRoux’s voice is muffled, and I’m half expecting his eyes to go black like Lilac’s—but they remain clear and blue. His own willingness to delude himself is all the control Lilac needs. “My heart. Yes. Let’s go.”
Lilac casts one more glance over her shoulder at Tarver, whose arm, the one not supporting him against the wall, is hanging oddly. He takes a lurching step forward, trying to speak, but without another word, the LaRoux heiress and the creature inside her mind turn away, leading her father toward the staircase and up into the destruction.
“Lilac!” Tarver’s scream is hoarse, and suddenly he’s running despite his injury, despite what must be a concussion making his steps falter. “Lilac—”
“Sir, no!” Jubilee’s abandoning her gun, turning to intercept Tarver and put her whole body in between him and the stairs Lilac is ascending. He collides with her hard enough to make her groan for breath, but she doesn’t fall—she wraps both arms around him and hauls back, boots skidding on the metal grille of the floor. “Help me!” she cries, and Flynn’s moving instantly to add his strength to hers in trying to prevent Tarver from following Lilac.
“Let go!” Tarver shouts, struggling, barely sparing a glance for the woman dragging him back. “Let go, let me—I have to—that’s an order, Lieutenant!” He’s stronger than she is, stronger than them both, half-mad with grief and fear and pain, and barely coherent.
She struggles with him, gasping for air and shouting in his ear. “You can’t save her—Tarver, the whisper will make sure she survives this crash, and you can’t save her if you’re dead!”
He roars some kind of reply and tears free of her grip for half a second—and then she’s swinging her arm, open palm catching him on the head and knocking him sidewise. Half-stunned, he staggers against the wall, where Flynn holds him, his own muscles rigid with the effort.
Lee’s eyes snap toward us, and like that look is a jolt of adrenaline, all the oxygen comes rushing back into my lungs. “Can you walk?”
I try, dizzy with confusion and shock, to draw myself up straighter. I nod, and feel Gideon start breathing again at my side. Abruptly I realize that the fingers of my good hand are tangled through his.
“I won’t do this again,” Tarver’s saying, still trying, half-conscious, to push Flynn away from him. “I won’t live without her again. I can’t. I can’t. Lee…please. Please, leave me here. Please, Lee…”
Jubilee glances back over her shoulder at him, and I can see the pain of seeing him like this etched in the tension along her spine. Then she’s moving, joining Flynn, slinging Tarver’s good arm over her shoulder. “Flynn?”
He seems to understand her at a glance and jerks his head toward the far end of the deck. “There have to be shuttles around here somewhere—we’ll never make it up to the ambassadors’ launch pads.”
I raise my voice to be heard over another shriek of metal, shouting, “Maintenance shuttles, they’re along the far wall.” The other side of this huge chamber is half the length of the ship away, barely visible in the dim shadows.
Flashes of memorized floor plans swim up in front of my eyes, too fragmented to be of any use. We were never supposed to spend more than a few minutes here, but I learned this entire deck anyway. Anyone can make a plan—what separates out the survivors is who bothers to prepare for the moment when things stop going according to plan. But the shock’s starting to fade and pain is radiating up my arm, and I can hear whispering voices in my ear, and my fear is too thick, too tangible, to see through.
“We have to go,” Jubilee’s roaring, still wrestling with Tarver. “We have to fall back, sir!”
“Gideon, get her moving,” Flynn shouts, from where he’s on the ex-soldier’s other side, still holding him back.
Gideon pulls me after him as he starts to run, and we both stumble as a wave travels the length of the floor, jolting us off our feet and sending us flying forward. We scramble upright, our hands still linked tightly, and as I glance behind, I see Tarver finally running, flanked by Flynn and Jubilee.
There’s a great, screaming sound above us that sets my nerves on fire, meeting with the agonizing bolts of pain shooting up from my burned hand, scrambling my brain until I can hardly remember how to run. With a deafening slam, one of the workstations bolted onto the walls above us rips away, hitting the floor just meters to our right.
I skid to a halt, so abruptly that Gideon loses his grip on my hand and staggers on a few steps without me as I drop to my knees. The fire in my hand is burning, my ears are ringing. Dimly I can hear his voice calling my name, muffled and fuzzy, as though I’m underwater. The far wall of the huge engine chamber swims out of focus as the ground quakes beneath me. This ship is falling out of the sky, and we’re never going to make it to the shuttles.
We watch, from behind the veil between worlds, piecing together what the others have found. The children are growing older, each choice they make drawing them closer together, binding their fates.
Our kin on the gray world cannot hear us, but we can hear them. They are torn between despair and hope, bringing us no closer to understanding these creatures. The others, held captive in the place where the thin spot first appeared, grow weak and tired. No one has come, either to end them or to release them, in many years.
There is one we can no longer see, no longer hear—the blue-eyed man has locked it away so tightly we feel only the dimmest sense that it still exists.
Perhaps it will find us the answers we seek.
THE FLOOR SHUDDERS BENEATH MY feet, and I stumble back from Sofia, still shouting her name. As she sways, dazed, I grab for her good hand to pull her upright.
Cormac looks back as he, Merendsen, and Jubilee run past us, and I wave him on, pointing at the corner where I’m praying the shuttles are docked. He dodges a falling banister that hits the deck in a shower of sparks, then shouts something unintelligible to the others.
With a shove I get Sofia moving, but she’s cradling her injured hand against her body, face deathly white. We tear across the open space of the engineering department, as I desperately try to keep watch for falling debris, and just as desperately try to pick a clear path through the twisted workstations, balconies, and gantries that litter our path. For a frantic moment I wonder if the hull’s even intact—but if it wasn’t, we’d know it. We’d be a little short of breath.
Flynn and Jubilee haul Tarver along ahead of us, and I’m clutching Sofia’s good hand in mine, trying to block out her cries of pain as I drag her around the smoking ruins of a console. At the last instant I spot the sparking wires snaking along the ground in our path, and I swing her away by the hand I’m holding, sending her stumbling once more.
She’s still barefoot, I realize—she had her shoes off to play the rumpled party guest if we were caught, and she must have dropped them during the shooting. Blood paints her right foot red, but I can’t stop to check if it’s serious. As we correct course and head for the docking corner once more the whole ship quivers, a shock wave running along the floor toward us. Sofia stumbles again, and I twist to catch her, but as her arms wrap around me I lose my footing, and next thing we’re down, slamming into the ground hard enough to drive the air from my lungs.
Is this what it was like for the fifty thousand who died on the Icarus?
I push to my elbows, dragging in a breath. The door to the docking port emerges from the gloom, the others nearly there, and just a few meters ahead of us.
Flynn looks back again, and his arm goes flying up, his mouth open in horror. I tip my head back in time to see one of the huge claws built to hold part of the engine in place coming straight at us. I scream my own warning, and Sofia and I wor
k as one—she tucks in against me as I wrap my arms around her, rolling hard to my left so we slam against a fallen desk, lying on its side. The claw slams into it an instant later, but though it crumples, it’s just high enough that its edge protects us. The desk’s displays short-circuit, spewing sparks down on top of us.
As I glance up, the desk starts to bend in half, and I throw myself over Sofia, pressing her into the ground as the wreckage pins us into the gap between it and the floor, as if we’re in a tiny metal tent. She cries out, and I realize her injured hand is trapped between us—the whites of her eyes are showing, and I brace against the metal grille of the floor, shoving as hard as I can to try and shift the weight off of us.
Then two strong hands are grabbing me under my arms, and Jubilee’s there, gritting her teeth as she pulls us free of the pile. I keep Sofia pinned against me, and we scramble the last few meters on hands and knees, falling through the open shuttle door, where Flynn’s waiting to help us through it. Chase is running back to Merendsen’s side now, holding him back as the shuttle doors close—she’s talking in his ear, but I can’t hear what she’s saying over the noise of the Daedalus falling apart around us.
“Jubilee,” Flynn shouts from up by the cockpit, “unless you want me flying this thing, you’d better get up here!”
Jubilee spares one more agonized look for Merendsen, and then she’s scrambling free to run for the pilot’s seat. “Right.”
Sofia and I lie tangled together on the floor as the engine pitch rises, and with a soft rumble, the shuttle breaks free of the Daedalus. Sofia’s breath is coming in soft moans, but slowly she’s falling silent, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a good sign. When I force my eyes open, the first thing I see is her hand—blistered red from where her plas-pistol exploded, wounds weeping a glistening fluid.
When I lift my head to look past her, Merendsen’s bracing himself against a chair, eyes closed as Flynn works to pop his shoulder back in with a grunt of effort. Somehow, Cormac looks as put-together as he did at the start of the evening, tux still perfect, one curl falling down over his forehead. By contrast, Merendsen’s missing the jacket he tore up for Lilac, his white shirt bloodstained.
“Brace,” Jubilee shouts from the pilot’s seat, and Merendsen doesn’t even react—Flynn shoves him back against the wall, ignoring his wince of pain, and straps him into the seat. He grabs at another chair to steady himself, and I hunker down next to Sofia. I brace my feet against the bottom of a row of seats as the shuttle banks sharp left, tilting at a forty-five-degree angle, engine screaming a protest.
“There’re shuttles all over the place, and debris coming free,” Jubilee warns us. “Keep hold of something, I’m getting clear of the field.”
We all hold our places as she does, and I curl my arm over Sofia where we lie together, closing my eyes. I start to count silently, trying to distract myself as we swoop and dive, my stomach surging up into my throat, the frame of the shuttle itself quivering under the tension. I reach one hundred and twenty-seven before we level out, and Jubilee punches the autopilot commands, peeling out of her chair. “Should be safe to move,” she says, eyes going first to Flynn and then to Tarver, who’s staring now out his window, his whole body sagging in his harness.
“Please,” he’s whispering. “Please, no.”
As one we’re scrambling from our seats to the windows lining one side of the shuttle.
I can think of a dozen things he might have been pleading for, but one glance is enough to tell me that none of them are coming true.
The Daedalus is falling.
Sheering in on an angle, she’s disintegrating in the sky, sections the size of skyscrapers wrenching away from her hull to plummet toward the city below. She’s impossibly huge, and yet my mind keeps seeing a model ship breaking into pieces, as if the enormity of what’s happening can’t be real.
The first chunks of debris are hitting the city below, now, and all the breath leaves my body as I watch one cut a swath four blocks wide through the suburbs of Corinth, cartwheeling in to land and cutting through apartment complexes like a knife through butter. Flames bloom far below us, black clouds of smoke obscuring the ruins. The next piece falls, metal gleaming in the light for an instant before it’s buried in flame and smoke.
I’m watching thousands of people die, and when the bulk of the Daedalus hits, I’m going to watch hundreds of thousands of people die. I can say the words to myself, but though they circle in my head in a horrified chant, I can’t understand it. Corinth is invincible. Corinth is always there. Corinth will always be there.
Corinth is burning.
“Please, no,” Tarver’s whispering again beside me, resting his forehead against the window, tears streaming down his cheeks as the Daedalus screams down toward the city.
It’s like watching a stone land in water—debris goes flying up in the wake of the huge ruin of a ship, whole buildings disintegrating, sending up showers of dust and smoke, twisted metal and flames.
Corinth is burning.
I spin away from the window, and Sofia comes with me. She throws her arms around me, and I pull her in close, burying my face in her hair, and I breathe in her warmth, her life, trying desperately to block out the images of the dying city I can see even with my eyes closed. For this moment we’re not the Knave and the con artist, and there’s no artifice when she pulls me close. When I lift my head, Flynn has his arms around Jubilee, and she’s whispering something in his ear that only has him squeezing her tighter.
And Tarver Merendsen’s alone, still watching at the window, white as a sheet in his bloodstained shirt, as though he’s watching his own execution.
And in that moment, whatever I held against him, whatever part of me blamed him for taking my brother’s place—that part dissolves into nothing. This is a man Simon would have wanted for Lilac. I see that now.
He loves her. Watching the death and destruction below, knowing the creature capable of this has stolen her from him, I know he does.
“Tarver.” My voice is hoarse, and I don’t bother trying to clear my throat. I think my cheeks are wet as well, and they should be. My world is bleeding below us.
He turns his head slowly, and his gaze is haunted.
“We’re not done yet,” I say quietly.
Still leaning against me, Sofia lifts her head. “Damn straight we’re not,” she says, steel in her voice, daring anyone to contradict her.
Nobody does.
“We need to find somewhere to land,” Jubilee says, moving past us to check the autopilot. Beyond her, I see another cluster of debris disappear into the thick cloud of smoke now covering the swath of destruction in the north of the city. “This shuttle was only meant for maintenance, and supply runs to the ship—it’s not fueled to stay up here for long.”
“Where should we be aiming for? Where’s safe? We have no idea if Lilac can find us,” Flynn says quietly, running one hand through his curls and finally looking something less than put-together.
I look across at Jubilee—soldier or not these days, she’s got her soldier’s face on now, gazing at the four of us with no hint of her feelings showing. “Stone-faced Chase,” they used to call her on Avon. I read that in her file. It’s still impressive, in person. And perhaps it’s because I’m staring at her, thinking about the soldier that still lives inside her, that the idea comes. But suddenly, I know where we should go. “I have a place.”
Four heads turn toward me.
“I know a woman, her name’s Kumiko. She’s ex-military.”
“Can we trust her?” Finally, Jubilee speaks.
Sofia asked me that same question about Mae, and I can feel her eyes on me. This time, I swallow hard. “I don’t know. I can’t promise. But you and Merendsen are ex-military, that’ll mean something to her. And she was posted on Avon. She knows what LaRoux’s capable of. I’ve dealt with her before, as the Knave. She trusts him, as much as she trusts anyone. Her place has security, it’s practically a fortress. And she’
ll have a medical kit.” I’m trying not to look at Sofia’s hand, at her face where a piece of the plas-pistol cut her chin.
“We can’t stay up here.” Sofia sounds exhausted, and when I wrap my arm around her, she simply leans in against me, head on my shoulder. “We have to use the—the confusion to land.”
The confusion. The hundreds of thousands of lives that were just snuffed out, right below us. The millions of people who just lost a child, or a parent, or a partner. There’s nothing we could call it that would do it justice, and the crack in her voice tells me how close she is to breaking. I’m no better, myself.
Jubilee looks across at Flynn, then meets Sofia’s eyes—she doesn’t try for Merendsen, who’s leaning forward now, his head in his hands. Then, slowly, she nods. “Give me the coordinates.”
We land on the roof of Kumiko’s complex, and as the shuttle settles on the painted X of the landing pad, half a dozen guns appear in the windows of the stairwell, trained on us.
“Are we going to get a chance to introduce ourselves before we’re shot?” Flynn asks, eyeing them through a window. The view is only dimly visible in the glow of the shuttle’s emergency lighting.
“We’ll get a chance,” I say. “They’d have fired on our underside while we were landing, if that’s what Kumiko intended.”
“Comforting,” Flynn mutters.
“Good thing she didn’t,” Merendsen says, joining him at the window. “This is a maintenance shuttle, no armor.”
We’ve only got Jubilee’s weapon between us, and Sofia’s plas-pistol is long gone. I’ve shoved my hacking kit into my pockets and strapped it against my body under my clothes. If I’ve completely misjudged this, and I’m going to be locked up somewhere, I’ll have my weapons of choice. Assuming Kumiko’s people don’t just shoot me.
I raise my hands into clear view and make my way down the shuttle steps, Jubilee covering me from the doorway with her pistol.
A stocky figure appears in the doorway leading up from below, carrying an emergency lantern, lifting it high in one hand to illuminate the landing pad. She’s clad in black with a kerchief tied over her face, and if we’re short on weapons, Kumiko certainly isn’t. She’s carrying a gun as thick as her forearm, and she jerks the barrel to signal that I should halt a few steps from the shuttle. “You can stay right there, thanks.”
