Their Fractured Light

by Amie Kaufman

  “You’re earlier than I’d anticipated.” The voice belongs to Roderick LaRoux, and this time Tarver’s hands are rock steady as he swings his gun around to train it on Lilac’s father.

  “Where is she?” he demands, taking a few steps forward.

  He’s forced to stop, however, as a number of people in the courtyard turn to face him with a subtle—but very noticeable—threatening air. They’re not guards—most of them are too slight, too well dressed, or too old for that role. And it’s only after I’ve scanned their faces and found some of them hauntingly familiar that I realize who they are: senators from the Galactic Council. I’ve seen them on the HV, in the newsfeeds.

  And every one of them has the black eyes and blank faces of the whisper’s husks.

  “I don’t imagine you want to shoot a dozen elected officials just to get to me,” LaRoux says, and though he’s trying to sound calm, amused, even, I can see something’s wrong. His suit, normally so impeccably tailored, is frayed at the cuffs, and marred by spots of ash and dust. His white hair is in disarray around his temples. His eyes sweep to the side to rest on Sofia, and the amusement in his gaze hardens. “You again. You’re the one who tried to hurt my girl.”

  Sofia doesn’t bother to hide the hatred in her own expression, but her voice is even. “No. I tried to hurt you.”

  “So shortsighted,” LaRoux replies, and if it weren’t for the setting, the blank-eyed senators and their staff, the guns trained on LaRoux, the shuttles whirring to life behind him, it’d sound like he was scolding a schoolchild. “Killing me would do nothing but brand you all murderers. Even if you destroyed every person standing here, enough good senators are already on their way back to their planets.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I demand. How many times did I tell Sofia that nothing would be solved by killing one person? Right now, it’s sounding like a better idea than it did before. “You already have more power than anyone in history. What more could you possibly want?”

  “I want peace!” LaRoux’s voice is sharp and quick.

  Half a dozen senators turn in unison, as if on some inaudible command, to begin piling into the other orbital shuttlecraft. The third, smaller craft is just a transport, not designed to break the atmosphere—LaRoux isn’t leaving Corinth. Not yet.

  “Peace,” he repeats, regaining control of his voice, pitching it just loud enough to be heard over the shuttle engines. “You children, you have no understanding of loss. Of the tragedy of war, the innocents who get caught in the exchanges of pointless violence.”

  “We have no understanding of loss?” Jubilee gives a sharp bark of laughter. “There’s not one person here who hasn’t lost someone to the pointless exchange of violence, LaRoux. You think age is necessary to learn pain?” Her gun doesn’t waver as she moves forward, ranging to the side so that between them she and Tarver have him covered.

  LaRoux barely notices.

  “Their brothers,” she says, tilting her head toward Tarver, and toward me. “His sister.” Flynn, not far from Jubilee’s side, exhales, his spine straightening. Jubilee swallows. “My parents.”

  “My father,” Sofia whispers, making me long to reach out to her.

  “And my wife,” replies LaRoux, his voice cold. “Lilac’s mother.”

  Tarver shakes his head. “Lilac’s mother died in a shuttlecraft accident on Paradisa. When she was seven. She told me.”

  LaRoux slips his hands into his pockets, legs braced as his head dips for a moment. “She did die in a shuttlecraft. But it wasn’t on Paradisa. And it wasn’t an accident.” His gaze flicks up, the line of his mouth grim with a pain as real as any of ours. “I was visiting one of my research stations on a LaRoux Industries planet, and she’d come with me. Riots broke out—rebels protesting God knows what—and I had my people put her on a shuttle back to the spaceport to keep her safe. The shuttle was sabotaged.”

  Jubilee’s shifting her grip on her gun. “What planet?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “What planet?”

  “Verona. It was—it was Verona.”

  Jubilee lets out a curse, voice strangled, gun dropping for a fraction of a second before her training steadies her and she clamps down on the shock and confusion in her expression.

  “You never told Lilac?” Tarver’s not wavering even an inch.

  “Why would I?” LaRoux’s eyes shift toward him. “Why would I hurt her, give her reason to hate anybody? Lilac is kind, and generous, and innocent—the truth would only cause her pain. An accident—you can let that go. Why would I ever tell her that her mother was murdered by the very people I was trying to help?”

  “Help?” Jubilee grinds out.

  It’s Flynn who has to take over, his partner’s anger too thick for her to speak through. He takes one of the same slow, careful breaths I recognize from the Avon Broadcast before he speaks. “Your ‘help,’ sir, has led to countless deaths on Avon. Your experiments, the Fury, the return of a rebellion that we would’ve easily, instantly given up in exchange for the tiniest bit of humanity—”

  “Avon.” LaRoux’s lip curls a little. “Avon’s nothing. A few thousand people. Yes, I built a rift on Avon, moved the entities there from Verona. You can’t tell me it would have been better to leave them in a place where millions, instead of hundreds, would die?”

  “Why did anyone have to die?” Sofia blurts, eyes reddening, the blood rushing to her face.

  “To save billions,” LaRoux snaps. “I discovered these creatures, found out what they could do, if only I could harness them. If a fraction of us have to fall in order to elevate the rest? It’s a sacrifice, and a horrible one. Most people could never bring themselves to make that choice. Most people don’t have the vision—most people aren’t strong enough to weigh life against life. But imagine a golden era, a time of absolute peace—imagine no murder, no sabotage, no pain. No grief. Imagine—imagine never having to lose a loved one ever again.” For the first time, LaRoux’s voice falters, cracking.

  “It’s not for you to choose what sacrifice is worthwhile, who should die,” says Tarver. “You might have tried to keep Lilac by lying about her mother, but you lost her when you murdered Simon Marchant.”

  LaRoux’s eyes flicker toward me, and I realize his nonchalance on the Daedalus was at least partly an act—there’s guilt in his gaze. He knows exactly who I am. “I—Simon Marchant was a mistake. I intended for him to be sent away. I didn’t expect…His death was an unforeseen side effect.”

  Side effect. The words burn through my brain, wiping out everything else. I can’t move, can’t speak, an anger and grief I thought I’d put behind me surging up like a tide. It’s not until I feel a touch on my hand that I realize I’ve closed my eyes; I know before I open them that it’s Sofia, her fingertips brushing against my palm, opening my fist, interlocking her fingers with mine.

  “Enough.” Tarver’s voice is quiet, almost gentle if not for the hint of ice behind it. “Where is Lilac?”

  “She’s safe.” LaRoux’s gaze meets that of his onetime future son-in-law. The piercing blue of his eyes is all the more intense in the morning light, and the look he directs at Tarver is just a little too wild, a little too fierce. “She’s happy. That ought to be enough for you, if you truly love her.”

  For a moment, everyone is silent, shocked. I find myself staring at LaRoux, searching his face for signs of the self-delusional madman inside. For him to believe that his daughter’s change of heart, her sudden willingness to go along with his plans, stemmed from anything other than the whisper taking control of her…He’s insane.

  “Happy?” Tarver’s still cold, calm. Ruthless. “She’s one of them. The creature in the rift, that’s what stood at your side, smiling at you, calling you ‘Daddy.’ You say you never wanted Lilac to hate, but that’s all she is now—the thing inside her is nothing more than hate. And you’re what she hates more than anything in the universe.”

  LaRoux’s eyes widen even as his brows draw togeth
er, and he takes a step back toward the transport behind him. The handful of husks still remaining draw closer around him, clearly ready to shield him if Tarver’s finger tightens on the trigger.

  “You’re wrong,” LaRoux snaps, baring his teeth in a rictus that might have once been a smile. “You just can’t stand that she chose me. She’s just the first—the whole galaxy will learn to love me as she does now, again, the way she’s supposed to.”

  Tarver shakes his head, just a tiny movement. “The tragedy is that she did. She did love you. Despite everything you did to her, to Simon, to me, to Avon, to the galaxy—you were her father, and she loved you. She took a bullet for you. She’s perhaps the only person, the last person, in this existence to care for you at all.” Tarver pauses for the span of a breath, and then slowly the gun lowers, to dangle at his side. “And you sold her soul to play house for just a little bit longer.”

  LaRoux’s lips open like he has to gulp for air. “No,” he retorts, gasping. “No. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. She loves me. She knows what I’m doing is right, and just. She’s my girl. Mine.” The husks move in to surround him, and as he struggles, it becomes clear he’s not the one controlling them after all. They drag him back toward the shuttle, their jostling dislodging the device over his ear so that it clatters to the pavement at their feet. LaRoux doesn’t even seem to notice; his wide, staring eyes are fixed on Tarver right up until the husks close in around him and bear him back into the craft, where the door hisses closed after them.

  The engines kick in, LaRoux’s transport and the other orbital shuttle lifting up off the ground. Jubilee shakes free of whatever spell of anger and fear kept her still, and darts forward, raising her gun—only to have Tarver grab at her arm, jerking the barrel down again.

  “We have to stop him,” Jubilee gasps, furious, tearing her arm away from her former commanding officer.

  “We will.” Tarver’s voice is finally showing his strain, shaking now as he watches the shuttles lift higher, jets starting to turn in preparation to fly away. “But he’s right—his death would stop nothing. Too many senators are already on their way back to their planets with the rift blueprints.”

  I move away from Sofia’s side in silence, striding over to the spot where LaRoux stood so I can retrieve the device that shielded him from the whisper’s influence—for all the good it did him. The whisper didn’t need to touch his mind in order to make it snap like a twig. But for the rest of us—if I can figure out a way to replicate the technology here, then it might give us a fighting chance against the whisper.

  “We can’t do nothing,” Sofia breaks in. I look over to find her face wet, but there’s so much to read in her expression that I can’t tell if her tears are from rage or grief or fear or all of those combined.

  “I know.” Tarver watches the shuttles kick into gear—one angles up, toward the upper atmosphere, as the other bolts off over the city. He eases his gun back into its holster, and I see now that his knuckles are white from gripping it so hard, that he’s forcing himself to let go finger by finger. “We can’t stop them. We have to go to her—to Lilac. And I know where she is.”

  “Where?”

  “Where all the husks are going—where it all started.” He lets his breath out slowly. “The Daedalus.”

  The green-eyed boy is on the run, hiding from those who would take him from the gray world to live among other children of war. His sister’s execution years ago has filled him with a certainty we envy, and as soldiers close in around him at the edge of town, we gather all our strength and reach out across the darkness.

  Our pale light flashes amongst the reeds, and the soldiers veer off to investigate it, leaving the green-eyed boy free to run the other way. He turns and comes face-to-face with the girl with the dimpled smile, who has just stepped out of her house.

  They used to be friends, long ago, before rebellion tore them apart. Now they stare at each other, silent, until the distant sound of a dog barking startles the green-eyed boy and he takes off into the night.

  Later the soldiers will ask the girl what she saw, and she will stare at them with wide, gray eyes, and say, “Nothing.”

  TARVER’S MOVING BEFORE THE REST of us have time to recover. By the time we follow him back into the LaRoux mansion, he’s in the kitchen, tossing supplies onto the counter—bread, peanut butter, cheese, pieces of fruit.

  I hesitate, glancing at the others. If LaRoux was clearly mad, half-incoherent as those things dragged him back onto the shuttle, then Tarver…He’s not that far behind. He’s got a recently dislocated shoulder held together with strapping tape and painkillers, he hasn’t slept, and the more time passes, the less emotional he seems. He ought to be breaking down—the girl he loves is quite possibly gone forever, and a monster is wearing her face while she destroys humanity as we know it. And yet he’s calmly rummaging through the pantry for supplies.

  Jubilee’s the one who moves, finally, taking a cautious step toward her former captain. “Sir,” she says softly. “We need to take a break.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not.” Jubilee’s voice is tense, wire-thin. She sounds like I feel—on a razor’s edge. “And neither is anyone else.”

  “And I’m going to need some time to look at this thing,” Gideon breaks in, LaRoux’s earpiece in his hand. “Without its protection we might as well go in waving a white flag.”

  Tarver ignores Gideon, gesturing to the food. “Eat,” he says, tilting his head. “There’s no time to sleep, but eat something and that’ll keep us going.”

  “I know that, I learned that from you.” Jubilee pauses, watching Tarver—then, gritting her teeth, she leans forward and shoves him, hard, into the edge of the refrigerator. “Sir. You have to stop! You have to take a breath.”

  “I can’t!” he replies, voice cracking, the veneer of calm slipping for just one, vital instant, in which I can see the anguish behind it. “I can’t, Lee. If I stop, if I think, I’ll—it’s Lilac. I can’t think. I can’t stop. I can’t lose her. You don’t know what—” He shudders, pushing Jubilee away and staggering a step. “We just need to move.” He gets his balance and starts for the hallway, and the entryway beyond.

  Jubilee’s right. We can’t storm the wreck of the Daedalus with no idea what we’ll find. The place will be crawling with husks, and even if it weren’t, the thing in Lilac’s body could kill us all without breaking a sweat. She only let us live this long to see us suffer, but if we become a genuine threat…But I know this panic of his, I know this desperate focus. Logic won’t reach him. He can’t let it reach him, because if he does, it’ll break him.

  I summon the dismissive tone of voice I know I’ll need. “So you’re really that eager to kill the love of your life?”

  Tarver skids to a halt—I catch the look Jubilee throws me, her brows shooting up, eyes flashing with an intense are-you-completely-bloody-insane kind of look. When Tarver turns, I find myself taking a step back from the force of his gaze. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s your plan, right?” I swallow. “We already know you can’t talk her out of this, you tried that on the Daedalus. LaRoux’s certainly not going to help you—he’s clearly lost whatever marbles he had left. And if Gideon can’t replicate that tech, there’s nothing to stop the whisper from taking us over. We’ve got no other ideas, nothing else up our sleeves. I’m just surprised you’re so anxious to get there and kill her.”

  For a moment, Tarver’s right hand twitches by his hip. I grew up on Avon, surrounded by soldiers with that same instinct, the same fight-or-flight responses. And I know, because I saw, that the safety’s off his gun. But despite the hammering of my heart, my fear isn’t of him. He may be half-mad with grief and panic, and I may have only known him for a day, but it only took me about ten minutes to know who this man was. And he’s not going to hurt me, no matter how badly he needs to find someone to blame.

  Still, my breath catches.

  Then he sags, turning and staggering
back until he hits the wall, eliciting a grunt of pain as it jars his shoulder. He drops, sliding against the wall until he’s sitting on the marble, elbows on his knees and fists balled against his eyes.

  Jubilee’s eyes go from Tarver to me, and this time that look says something altogether different. She nods, and though it’s the smallest of gestures, it’s like that tiny grain of respect gives my lungs permission to work again. She and Flynn cross toward the foyer, joining Tarver on the floor. I run a shaky hand through my hair, trying to fight the urge to look back at Gideon. I can feel him watching me. I took his hand out there as LaRoux spoke, finding myself unable to watch that flood of anger and despair across his features—but now there’s distance again.

  If none of this were happening, if he were just a hacker and I were just a con artist…would anything be different? Would we be any more able to trust each other?

  He moves past me, gathering up some of the food Tarver pulled out, and heads over to join the others. I follow, sinking down onto the floor. I’m expecting cold marble, but instead I discover that the floors are heated—a luxury I never even knew existed. For a wild moment I want to lie down, face against the warm stone, and sleep. Gideon’s already pulling tools out of his bag, tiny screwdrivers and wire strippers, disassembling the earpiece bit by bit.

  “We destroy the rift.” Tarver’s ignoring Jubilee’s not-so-subtle attempts to shove a granola bar into his hand.

  Flynn’s voice is musing. “He was telling the truth about that much, in his announcement—the rift machinery is what connects this world with the whispers’ world. They live in hyperspace, and if we destroy that connection, we destroy the whisper.”

  Tarver nods. “It worked the first time around, and it worked on Avon.”