Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(18)
Then something hard slams into the back of my head and I slide to the floor, stunned, vision clouding. “Bitch,” mutters a voice high above me, far away. It’s the last thing I hear.
The young man, who is not quite so young anymore, is holding something in his arms. “We can’t stay here,” the young man says to the thing. “Rose was already miserable with no one to talk to, and I can’t imagine you’ll be happy here either. I’ll leave some of the staff here, people I trust not to talk.”
The man waits a few moments, as though expecting the thing to talk back. “I know you won’t remember this, but I wanted you to see it.” He draws closer to the thin spot, until its blue light falls upon the thing in his arms. The little thing has eyes as blue as his, and wisps of peach-colored hair, and it blinks at the thin spot and yawns.
“Well, Lilac?” the man murmurs to the little thing. “What do you think? You’re the third person in all the galaxy to meet them.”
The thin spot flashes, and the little thing laughs with such delight that the agony dims for just a moment. The man’s face has changed—the guilt is gone, and the terrible gleam in his eyes when he runs his experiments. Instead his features are soft, showing something new.
Something we want to learn.
We will watch.
We will wait.
I’M THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT SOME KHAO PHAT. On one hand, it would involve getting off my butt—but on the other, when I checked the street cams before, Mama Samorn was behind the wok, and that means there’ll be some fine cooking coming up.
I’m in my den, chair folded around my body, wall of screens spread out before me. There’s something comforting about their symphony of soft chimes and whirs and beeps—it’s the sound of home. On the screens to my right, I can see my bots spidering all over the forums I host. Conspiracy theorists are a nervy bunch, but sift through enough of what they say, and occasionally you find a grain of something to work with. My friend Mae—or at least, she’s closer than anyone else to being my friend—is my general for those. She has an amazing knack for dropping a comment here, an idea there, sending them scurrying toward whatever we want investigated.
Straight in front of me is my tracking program for Antje Towers, and that’s what has my attention right now. She resigned her commission and vanished from Avon after the broadcast, with a paper-thin story about going off the grid, retiring to a pastoral colony. Enough death, she said.
Not enough for me, Commander Towers. When they went into the hidden facility after the broadcast, every hint of LaRoux’s presence was gone. That cleansing happened on her watch, and she looked the other way. I know she’ll have the dirt I need—the public testimony, if I have to choke it out of her myself—to expose LaRoux for what he really is. She’s been running and hiding for a year, now, switching IDs every few weeks—she’s been Lucy Palmer, Taya Astin, Anya Griffin, Natalie Harmon.…The list goes on and on. She’s always jumping to somewhere new, leaving me with ghost trails, and occasional reports of a blonde switching to a new ship, a different planet. From what I’ve dug up from their databases, even LaRoux Industries doesn’t know where she is—which makes her perfect for my purposes. LRI keeps such close tabs on its employees that I can’t even get close to any of them. But Towers—she’s not under the umbrella of LaRoux’s protection anymore.
Her trail went cold when she hit Corinth months ago, and more than ever, my pulse is pounding with the urgency of finding her. I’ve had a thousand imagined conversations with her, hurled a thousand accusations her way. If I can find her, maybe I’ll learn more about what Alexis and I saw at LaRoux Headquarters.
All these years of single-minded focus have led me here, to this. If I can find her, I’ll be able to drag all LaRoux’s crimes into the light. Not like Flynn Cormac did, but publicly, irrefutably—with Towers, I can prove enough of what he’s done to ruin him.
I’m starting again with Towers’s arrival at Corinth—under a fake name, of course—and preparing to comb through the arrivals records for that date again, when off to my left I hear the soft rippling chime I assigned to the mailbox I left for Alexis. Huh. Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again, Dimples.
I lift my left hand, clad in a half-finger sensor glove, to point at the screen, then beckon. The sensors beep at me obediently as they switch the displays, flipping my main screen away to the left, and throwing up Alexis’s message in front of me. I’d pretend I wasn’t grinning, but there’s nobody here to know.
Hi babe,
No need to come over tonight after all. My father and some of his friends stopped by, so I’m going to go out to dinner with them. I’ll see you this weekend though—we’re still on for the park where we met last time, right? I’m dying to see you.
Love, Alice
My grin dies, crumbles to dust, and blows away on a cold, cold wind as I stare at the message. Oh, hell. But I don’t have time to dwell, because I’m already yanking down a keyboard, fingers flying over it to trace back her message and bring her cameras to life as I voice my other instructions. “Command: Scan the message on screen forty-nine. Check for security breach. Make sure no bugs got in with it.”
The ping takes only a few seconds, and I force myself to slow my breathing, close my eyes for a moment, so I’m ready when two soft chimes announce the security check result, and success with the camera.