Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(103)

Everything is coated in a fine layer of debris the size of sand grains, a mix of ash and fragments of cement that crunches underfoot. People have armed themselves against looters with whatever they can find—we pass a young woman gripping a chunk of cement in her hands who watches us with frightened eyes until we turn the corner.

I try to imagine myself as she sees me—a threat, capable of robbing her of her home, or her life.

You’re leading others to Lilac, knowing they’re going to kill her. Doesn’t that make you exactly what she sees?

I shove that voice away, telling myself that it’s because some other idea will come to us, some way around what’s looming ahead, some alternative. Sanjana’s final warning was crystal clear.

We have one shot to stop this.

I’m still shaking from the climb down, bile and adrenaline bitter in my mouth. The elevators to the undercity don’t work without electricity, forcing us to descend via a ladder in the elevator’s maintenance shaft. Many, many times higher than the elevator shaft I climbed with Gideon—and without him next to me, without his harness supporting me. And then I was climbing up, out of danger.

He was right to say that climbing down is much, much worse.

I clear my throat, trying to banish my fears. It ought to be ridiculous that climbing down a ladder still frightened me when only a few kilometers away, an interdimensional being is slowly and methodically destroying the world—but reason plays no part in fear. Maybe it’s just that this is a fear I recognize, a fear I can digest. The other thing—I can’t wrap my mind around it.

It takes hours to cover ground that would take no time at all in the clearer streets above—or would have, before the crash. Jubilee finds a working radio after spotting someone in military gear—turns out he’s not a soldier, but once Jubilee makes it clear she’s not going to arrest him for theft of government property, he lets her send a distress call to Mori to come pick up Sanjana. Mori’s voice crackles and surges, her worry audible, but she promises to find the scientist. It’s clear, even through the distortion, that she’d rather be with us, heading into danger.

Jubilee gives the guy with the radio less choice about handing over the Gleidel he’d stolen, and even though it’s only one weapon between the three of us, it’s something.

Closer to the crash site, most of the upper- and middle-city levels have been destroyed, but underneath, sections of the undercity are almost completely intact. Ahead, a shaft of light illuminates the spot where an upper-city skyscraper has fallen, and chunks have broken through the supports meant to separate the layers of construction. As we draw nearer, I can see up into the ruined city above—it’s only a block away from my old penthouse.

It feels like years ago that I was sitting on the couch, patching up Gideon’s arm and ordering drinks from the SmartWaiter.

“You’re sure this is going to work?” Jubilee speaks without looking at me, her gaze too busy scanning our surroundings. I can understand why she’s nervous—there are too many people, too many bodies crowding here and there, to track everyone. We look too competent, I’m sure, to be an easy-looking target for opportunistic thugs taking advantage of the chaos, but that doesn’t mean some desperate gang won’t still attack. And that’s assuming—hoping, really—that the whisper’s reach doesn’t extend down here, and that there aren’t any of Lilac’s mind-controlled husks roaming the slums. We’ve got the shield Gideon left us, shoved deep in my inside pocket, and we left the other with Sanjana, but it’s the same below as it was above—if they see us, she won’t need mind control to hurt us.

“When I was trying to find a way inside LaRoux Industries,” I say, ill-fitting boots crunching on the layer of fine dust littering the pavement, “I must’ve mapped every physical entry point to the compound a dozen times over.”

“And you can reach LRI Headquarters from the slums?” Jubilee’s tone is dubious at best.

“You can get anywhere from the slums,” I answer. “If you know how.”

“Better trust her,” Flynn notes, sounding amused. “Sof can get inside anywhere.”

Jubilee hesitates—after all, we don’t have time to try another route if mine doesn’t work—but only for a split second before nodding and picking up the pace. “It’ll be total chaos as the day goes on,” she warns, as though the disorder now is only inconvenient. “It’ll be like it was on Verona when the rebellion broke out.” She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, but she sounds as though she’s speaking about something that happened only yesterday. Her mouth is set tight, her hand resting on the new gun at her hip. “Stay close.”

My eyes keep picking out familiar features—a man of just the right height, or a flash of sandy-colored hair, or a flash of indigo fabric that matches his backpack—but it’s never Gideon I’m seeing, only fragments of memory. If he and Tarver have run into the husks above by now, then it’s possible they’re somewhere down here too, trying to bypass Lilac’s army the same way we are.

But I can barely keep Jubilee and Flynn within line of sight with the jostling and milling of the frightened crowds—Gideon and Tarver could walk by ten meters away and we’d never see them.

Abruptly a hand closes on my arm and jerks me back, my lips forming a half scream before I can stop it. I’m whirled around to see a middle-aged woman with a curtain of dried blood down one side of her face—her pupils are dilated, and for a moment I’m certain it’s one of Lilac’s husks. But the woman’s eyes search my face vaguely, and I realize: she has a concussion. She must’ve been struck by a piece of debris.