Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(110)
THE DARKNESS AS I CREEP with Jubilee and Flynn from the abandoned restaurant is absolute, and I’m forced to move with agonizing slowness. Unwilling to risk drawing attention with flashlights, we’re picking out each step by feel, navigating the debris-littered streets of the undercity based on my memory alone. What I wouldn’t give for Gideon’s knowledge of this place—I was never truly at home here, but he knows these streets like the back of his hand.
I left him while he was still asleep, making my way back to the others and praying they wouldn’t notice how long I’d been gone. As I lay there through the rest of the night, wishing for sleep that never came, my head was still ringing with the things we said to one another, and the things we didn’t. With images of black-eyed husks, and planets plunged into isolation. Of a whisper twisted and tortured until it became a weapon—of the moment I realized the same thing had happened to me. Even now, I can’t stop shivering, and it’s not from the bone-deep chill settling into the streets at the bottom of Corinth.
Jubilee’s hand on my arm signals a halt, and I jerk my thoughts back to the present. It’s still a few hours until dawn, and the electrical grid has yet to be restored after the Daedalus crash. I’ve been figuring out where we are based on landmarks I could touch, and gut intuition when that failed, but now…even Jubilee and Flynn, strangers to this part of Corinth, recognize the thing looming out of the darkness.
A maintenance shaft.
The climb leaves me breathless and shaking, but I’m still on my feet when we emerge into the apocalyptic landscape of the upper city. I’ve spent so much of the past few days afraid that I’m not sure my body processes fear the same way anymore.
The light pollution from other sectors of Corinth paints the skies a dark, ruddy orange, and I’m able to pick out the buildings much more easily—or where the buildings had been. Nothing looks right—where there ought to be skyscrapers I see only empty space, and where there should be the broad, green expanse of a park is a massive, hulking structure I’ve never seen. For a moment, I’m not sure I led us the right way, until I see the expanse of the LaRoux Industries courtyard below us, the color of its bright green grass leached away by the gloom.
We’re here. And that structure is no building at all.
The Daedalus wreck squats on the landscape like a vast, hulking beast. Its metal skin has been peeled back in long, jagged gashes, exposing wires and spilling conduits like viscera onto the ground. Twisted metal supports two meters thick have been torn free like splinters of bone, stretching toward the sky. Smoke still rises here and there, as though the creature isn’t fully dead yet, as though it’s still breathing its last, labored gasps that steam in the predawn air. It’s half-sunk into the ground, as if the concrete and steel supports below gave it no more resistance than water would—like at any moment it might rise up again, out of the depths.
It’s impossible to connect this dark, monstrous leviathan full of jagged metal and burnt chemicals with the glittering ballroom my memory conjures up when I think of the word Daedalus. Everything that happened there—coming face-to-face with LaRoux, discovering who Gideon was, the missing rift, seeing Flynn again, shooting Lilac LaRoux—it all feels like it happened to someone else, a lifetime ago. And the idea that any of us, that anyone at all, was ever inside this thing, the carcass of the great orbital ship, seems insane.
The idea that people are inside it still, crushed on impact or choked to death by the vacuum of space rushing inside the great rents down the ship’s side…it’s unthinkable.
We stand there in the shadow of the maintenance elevator, shrinking back against it as we stare at the immense thing sprawled before us. We’ve emerged at a level that once must have been a couple of floors above the courtyard, rubble stretching down from us in a steep slope. Even fearless Jubilee makes no move to descend, and when I glance back at my companions, I can see two sets of wide, glittering eyes scanning the wreck.
It’s with monumental effort that I swallow, trying to clear my dry throat and break the silence that has stretched the past hour as we traveled underground to reach this place unseen. “We should keep moving.”
I study the ground between us and the Daedalus, trying to pick out the smoothest course over the ruined terrain. The ground swims for a moment, moving before my eyes, and I try to blink away the tiredness, squeezing them shut. When I open them, it’s still moving, because it’s not the ground at all.
There are husks everywhere. Like insects pouring from a nest, they clamber over the broken landscape, thick between us and the gashes in the ship’s side that will let us inside the Daedalus. My knees nearly give as a wave of nausea pushes its way up my throat—if I thought fear was losing its hold on me, I was wrong.
My mind jumps to the shield Gideon built, tucked inside Flynn’s vest. It might protect us from becoming one of them, but it won’t protect us from being ripped apart. Not once they see us. Did Gideon and Tarver emerge from beneath the ground in the hours since I left him, to find this same sight before them?
“How the hell are we going to do this?” Jubilee murmurs, echoing my thoughts.
“We need a diversion.” Flynn’s voice is heavy, as exhausted and heartsick as I feel, at the sight of this impossible task. “I could—”
“No.” Her voice is a slamming door, cutting off the idea before it’s born.