Their Fractured Light

by Amie Kaufman

  “Any portal between dimensions would have to be highly unstable,” Sanjana says quietly. “Adding your own energy and disrupting the field by leaping into it could have released the whispers contained inside, allowing them to destroy their own prison. But anything that unstable is unpredictable, and we have no way of knowing what changes LaRoux has made. It was the very first rift, after all. He’ll have learned more since it was built. If you were to try that again, you could end up doing exactly what the whisper wants, opening the way for more of its kind to come through.”

  “And I don’t think it would be survivable this time,” Tarver says, though there’s an edge to his voice that scares me—an edge that says failing to survive is an option for him, if that’s what it takes. “Whether it was having two of us to dispel the energy, or Lilac’s connection to them protecting me, I don’t know, though.”

  Sanjana blinks, then shakes her head. “It’s just a theory. I’m working blind here, without a net. I’ve only been able to work indirectly on the project, so my knowledge is limited.”

  “But you’ve thought of something,” Tarver insists. “I know that look.”

  Sanjana lets her breath out slowly. “Well…these entities, the whispers. They don’t belong here. They belong in their universe, what we refer to as hyperspace. Just as it takes huge amounts of energy for a ship to skip through hyperspace to travel between star systems, it takes a huge amount of energy to hold the whispers here. They’re constantly being pulled back toward their own universe, but the rift machinery—you’ve seen that, right? Looks exactly like a hyperspace engine, a giant ring, glows blue when it’s on?” She pauses, taking in the scattered nods around the circle. “The rift machinery is what holds them here, on our side. It creates the tiniest tear in the fabric separating our worlds, and keeps them inside. It’s an intensely intricate, delicate balance, governed by some of the most complicated programs anyone’s ever written. But, theoretically, if someone could rewrite the program to open the rift just a little wider, the forces pulling at them might pull the whisper back through the rift, into its own world. Leaving Lilac, physically, behind.”

  “Physically?” Tarver’s voice shakes a little. “What about mentally? What about her, her thoughts and memories?”

  Sanjana rubs at her temple, clearly uneasy. “I don’t know. She might be fine.”

  “She would be,” Tarver murmurs. “If anyone can survive it, she could. Can you do it? Program the rift to send it back?”

  Sanjana shakes her head, eyes widening a little. “Tarver—I’m not a programmer. I deal in theory, in physics—executing something like this is way, way beyond my experience. LaRoux’s got a team of the fifteen best programmers in the galaxy working constantly to tweak and perfect that machinery. I got printouts of some of the programming fragments before I escaped, but it’d take me years just to understand what I’m reading. It’s—it’s just a theory.”

  Tarver’s gaze, haunted now, stays trained on Sanjana’s face. It’s Sofia who speaks, and though she’s speaking to everyone, her eyes are on me. “We just happen to have one of the best programmers in the galaxy. Dr. Rao, meet the Knave of Hearts.”

  I feel everyone’s gazes shift toward me, but I’m still looking at Sofia, trying to read what little I can see of her face in the unsteady red glow of the emergency flare. Whether there’s bitterness in her voice when she uses my pseudonym, whether that same betrayal, that same disgust, haunts her eyes as she looks at me, I can’t tell. I’m not sure even she knows.

  “Can you do it?” Tarver’s attention, on me now, feels like a two-ton weight—now I get why Sanjana was so hesitant.

  “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I’d have to read those printouts, learn the language.…I might be able to. I don’t have my rig here, I barely have anything. It would be a long shot.”

  Tarver’s face shifts, the muscles in his jaw untensing. There’s a new energy to him as he reaches for Sanjana’s bag. I’m not sure he heard the words long shot at all. He searches for the printouts that’ll teach me what the hell I’m supposed to do. Despite Tarver’s newfound hope, Sanjana seems unconvinced. She opens her mouth to speak but pauses, uncertain.

  Sofia’s the one to break the quiet again, reading Sanjana’s discomfort like she’s a neon sign. “What is it?” she asks the scientist gently. “Just tell us.”

  Sanjana swallows. “I…I think it’s a bad idea to try it.”

  That brings Tarver up short. “Why?”

  Sanjana takes a deep breath. “Look, Tarver—I know this is impossible. I mean, God, if it were Ellie in there, if it was the one I loved, I’d do anything to save her. I just…”

  “Tell me.” Tarver’s hope is already dwindling, like flames dying back to embers, to wait to be rekindled again.

  “This balance, the forces involved in keeping the tear open just enough to hold them, but not enough to free them…you can’t imagine how delicate it is. Changing that balance could free Lilac, yes. But it could also give Lilac access to infinite power, make her invincible, unstoppable. It could bind her to the creature forever. They’d be irrevocably fused. There’d be nothing she couldn’t do, no harm she couldn’t inflict. And that’s not the worst-case scenario.”

  The silence is palpable as we each try and imagine something worse than an all-powerful whisper, hell-bent on revenge.

  Eventually Sanjana speaks again, gazing at her dead hand, and I can see how much she hates to say it. “Messing with the rift could give the whisper the power to cut us off from hyperspace completely. Just begin to imagine what that might mean.”

  My heart drops, and Sofia and I exchange a glance—we talked about this, the first time we admitted the existence of the whispers to each other. “We’d lose all interplanetary travel,” I say. “We’d be back to below light speed. It would take dozens of generations to get anywhere.”

  “We’d never be able to go home,” Flynn breathes, eyes flickering toward Jubilee.

  “Whole planets would die,” Sofia murmurs. “Every colony that’s still terraforming, that still relies on outside supplies.”

  “Hell,” I murmur. “Corinth relies on outside supplies. We have no farmland here, we don’t produce our own food, we import it.” It flashes before my eyes, like a movie in fast forward. The chaos wrought by the fall of the Daedalus would be nothing. We’d see riots, starvation. It would be the end of our world, literally.

  “And without access to hyperspace, we’d have no hypernet,” Sanjana points out, repeating the other warning I gave Sofia. “Our communications would be at light speed as well.”

  “So we’d have no way to even tell the other planets what happened,” Flynn finishes for her. “Everything would just go dark.”

  Sofia’s face pales under the smudges of dirt on her skin. “Could that be what she wants now? We assumed it was trying to do the same thing as LaRoux—that they both wanted a rift on every planet, and the only difference was who would be in control when they went live. What if the whisper’s trying to extend its reach so it can cut us off from its universe?”

  “So if we can’t destroy the rift, and we can’t try to send the whisper back to its universe, in case we cut ourselves off entirely…” Jubilee’s frustration speaks for all of us. “What other choice do we have?”

  Sanjana’s not looking at Tarver—instead she’s staring at her prosthesis, though it’s cold and still now. “Until now, the entities have always inhabited the rifts, sending their mental abilities outward to affect you, to affect those on Avon and Verona. Destroying those rifts, those conduits, destroyed the whispers too. But now, the entity is inhabiting Lilac. The rift isn’t the conduit anymore. She is.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  My heart’s already sinking, and Sofia’s face is white too, her eyes finding mine. The silence hangs, no one quite willing to grasp what the scientist is telling us. Jubilee’s question hangs in the air, and no one looks at Tarver.

  But he’s the one who finally answe
rs her. “She’s saying we have to kill Lilac.”

  Many long years have passed since the blue-eyed man came to me, but now he has come every day, wild-eyed and gaunt. “Where is she?” he asks, pacing circles around the rift, stopping just short of slamming his fists against the machinery. “The ship went down—God knows where. I know you can find her. You have to find her. Damn it, there has to be a way to…I won’t lose her too!”

  If I could speak I would tell him I sense nothing, because of the prison that holds me. If I cared to tell him anything at all.

  Then I do feel something: a surge of power so strong I sense it even through the total emptiness surrounding me. The final gasp of my brethren in the original thin spot—a flood of joy, release, gratitude so strong I almost forget my own despair. Until it fades, leaving me alone once more.

  No…not alone. I can still feel something, the remnant of what my brethren did. A vessel exists now, somewhere across the galaxy, a connection to my world. They brought something back. Someone.

  Her.

  I will stay still, and I will stay quiet.

  And I will wait for my chance.

  “NOT AN OPTION.” JUBILEE’S VOICE is sharp, and she lurches to her feet.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do,” Sanjana retorts, her own voice quickening. “But it’s the only answer I have.”

  “Find another one!” Jubilee’s shout echoes back from the shattered marble walls, leaving a quick, poignant silence behind.

  Sanjana takes a slow breath. “It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just decide the variables aren’t true, that the evidence isn’t what you want it to be—I can’t just invent ways to change physics, Captain.”

  I take advantage of that brief lull to rise to my feet, ignoring the swell of dizziness that comes with exhaustion. “We should get some rest.” I keep my voice even, warm. Listen to me, latch on to this voice. I’m on your side. It’s a voice that always worked on the soldiers on Avon, always worked to calm my contacts. And it only works as long as you keep talking, so they don’t realize I can’t possibly be on everyone’s side. “We can’t change what’s happened—and if she’s protecting the rift, then she won’t do anything to draw attention to it. We have time, and we need to give Gideon a chance to fix our shields before we risk being seen. We can afford to sleep on it. We have to sleep on it—we’re out on our feet.”

  Wearily, the others spread out a little, finding spaces in the various storefronts to stretch out. Jubilee tosses another flare from her pack to Gideon, then retreats to follow Flynn to the shadows near the rubble blocking the other end of the arcade. Gideon helps Sanjana to her feet, lending her some support as they duck inside a nearby jewelry store. I know Gideon wants to discuss this theoretical hack on the rift, where Tarver won’t hear, and won’t get his hopes up again. But Gideon lingers by the store’s archway after he’s got Sanjana settled, and I catch a flash of his eyes moving toward me before I drop my gaze. I can feel him watching me, feel the weight of all the things I wish I could say to him.

  He and I haven’t talked to each other since the Daedalus, not really. There’s been no time for it, no space for us to be alone. But I can see the shock in his eyes when he saw me pull out the plas-pistol as clear as if it were only five minutes ago, and each time I relive it something twists a little more deep inside me. I want to apologize and I want to defend myself—I want to tell him I’d choose him over revenge if I could do it again, and that I’d still fire at LaRoux again if I could—I want to trust him and I want him to leave and never look at me like this again. I want to rail at him for lying to me about the Knave and about growing up alongside the daughter of my enemy, to remind him that his side of the ledger has its fair share of deceit.

  I want him to know that the only reason I didn’t tell him about my plan to murder Roderick LaRoux is that I knew he’d try to talk me out of it, and that, somewhere deep in my heart, I knew he’d succeed. I want him to know that I wish he had. I want so badly to trust him enough for that. And yet my lips won’t move, my voice won’t come.

  When I manage to lift my head again, the doorway is empty, and I can hear his voice, low, mingling with the scientist’s.

  Tarver and I are alone. He’s been on autopilot since the crash, chasing one distant glimmer of hope after another. It doesn’t take an expert to read the emptiness in his face now. I have no idea if he even knows I’m still here, if he’s aware enough of his surroundings to register me.

  Then he speaks, voice rusty. “The first time I lost her,” he says, “I was going to kill myself.”

  I swallow, unsure whether he thinks he’s talking to himself—until his head lifts and his eyes flicker over toward my face.

  “I don’t know how I carried on. I don’t know what kept me from pulling that trigger.” He leans back slowly against the wall until he can tilt his chin and look up at the ceiling. “I don’t care, now.”

  My heart tightens, making it difficult to breathe. There’s always a certain amount of guilt involved, doing what I do—using people always leaves wreckage in its wake, for me and for them. But it’s never been anything like this, a crushing, suffocating weight forcing its way deeper and deeper inside me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I never meant to—” My mind replays the moment Lilac fell, like a photo looping over and over. “I’m sorry.”

  Tarver lifts a hand to wipe it over his face, as though he can wipe away his reaction to my voice. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I shot—”

  “Maybe you shortened the fuse,” he interrupts, looking back down and across at me. “But the blast was already coming.”

  It shouldn’t make me feel better—and yet, in some horrible way, it does. I take another breath, but I can’t think of anything to say.

  “The past year…” Tarver shakes his head. “She’s still Lilac—she was always still Lilac. But she’s been different, too. She could feel them, the whispers, no matter how far away we went. She has dreams. She wakes up in the middle of the night crying. She’ll drift off sometimes, having conversations with people who aren’t…” He gives his head another shake, swallowing. “I think they were always coming for her.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He glances at me again, the helplessness in his gaze so at odds with the smiling, commanding presence he has in all his HV interviews and photo shoots. “The beings we met on Elysium wouldn’t do this. I wouldn’t say they were good—I’m not sure they even had a concept of ‘good.’ But they weren’t evil—they weren’t cruel. There was a sense of fairness to them, I suppose. That thing that took Lilac, when she kissed me…” His face ripples, then tightens. “That thing was cruel.”

  I can’t think of anything to say, so we sit in silence for a time, saying nothing, not watching each other from our opposite edges of the room. There’s an odd comfort in being here, with someone as bruised and hurt as I am. For once, I’m not more broken than the world around me, and it’s horrible and healing all at once.

  “You were right,” Tarver says softly, interrupting the quiet after a while. “We should get some rest while we can.”

  “I’ll leave you alone.” I press my palm to the ground, ready to get to my feet and find my own corner of the ruins to sleep in.

  “No.” Tarver’s voice is quick, and though he doesn’t look at me, I know he can see me out of the corner of his eye. “Stay.”

  I hesitate, tired enough that my ears are ringing each time he speaks. My weary thoughts pull out a memory, and I find myself thinking of Flynn, and of the time he spent hiding in our house on Avon when he was on the run. I remember falling asleep, finally, after so many nights spent lying awake—I could feel him, somehow, in the room that had belonged to my father. The tiny shifts in the air, the inaudible noises, the imperceptible hints of another life in that empty space.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  Eventually he leans his head back again to rest against the wall, and sometime after that
, he shifts to lie down, head on one arm. I wait until his breathing lengthens before getting slowly, quietly to my feet and slipping through the archway to join Gideon and Sanjana.

  “Even if we knew it would work,” Sanjana’s saying, voice low but intent, “even if we knew you couldn’t accidentally tear the rift open…the risk to you is far too great.”

  My boot scrapes against the debris, making both of them jump, heads craning up to look at me. “What risk to him?” I ask, not bothering to apologize for my eavesdropping.

  Gideon lets his breath out in a sigh that echoes off the broken walls. “It’s nothing.” He’s got stacks of papers covered in text that he’s reading by the light of the flare—Sanjana’s programming printouts. I can’t remember the last time I saw something printed out on paper—her foresight is enough to make my head spin. If she’d brought the information on disc, or on a palm pad, we’d have no way of looking at it now, after the EMP.

  “It’s not nothing,” Sanjana argues, voice sharpening as she glances at Gideon, then back to me. “He’d have to actually be there, at the rift. It’s not on any kind of network. LaRoux’s far too smart to leave something like that accessible remotely. Gideon would have to write his virus and then deliver it personally, physically, plugging it directly into the rift machinery.”

  I lean back, letting the pillar behind me take some of my weight off my weary feet. “We’d be there too—we’d help him fight past the husks.”

  “That’s not the danger I’m talking about.” Sanjana scrubs a hand over her eyes, and I realize she’s as exhausted as the rest of us. “I’ve explained that the whispers manipulate neural energy, that that’s how they do what they do. The rift is the source of that power. Gideon would have to come in contact with that rift to access it, which risks flooding his mind with that power.”

  Gideon’s not looking at me, instead busy with organizing the printouts, leafing through them and neatening the stack of papers. I swallow. “What would that do to him?”