Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(59)
No problem, Dimples. No problem at all.
We keep our hands linked as we slip through the door, the space between my shoulder blades twitching with the discomfort of turning my back on all that security. She uses her grip to drag me to a halt when I’m about to stride away down the corridor, instead pulling me a few steps in, and then leaving me to skip back and press her ear to the door, listening for pursuit. After a few seconds, she nods. “Hold still,” she says, stepping in close to reach up and start pulling my tie undone with one hand, unfastening the top buttons of my shirt with the other.
“Is now really the time?” I hesitate as soon as the joke is out of my mouth—I might have her agreement, but I know I don’t have her forgiveness yet.
But she flashes me a small smile and pulls out a tube of lipstick from her purse, reapplying it carefully, then pulling me down so she can press her lips to my collar, leaving a crimson smudge there. She steps back to give me another once-over, then tugs at one side of my shirt until it’s untucked from my waistband.
Next it’s on to her own preparations. She musses her hair, running her fingers through her curls until they’re sitting askew, then leans down to unfasten her towering heels, stepping out of them and hooking her fingers through the straps to carry them. If anyone finds us, they won’t be that confused about what we were doing, looking like this.
When she looks back up at me, she’s steel once more, nothing but determination in her gaze. “Let’s go. The clock’s running.”
The blue-eyed man comes to the thin spots only rarely now, and never again does he bring the little girl with the delighted laugh that so transformed his face. But the same pieces of sound and color that flooded the stillness flood the thin spot, and through them we can see more of this universe. We struggle to learn much from their words and letters and messages, but the images speak, carry ghosts of the hearts behind them.
It takes us years, but we find the blue-eyed man and his daughter, and we discover that she is not such a little thing anymore. We have learned, over the years of our captivity, the name for the look on the man’s face that so fascinated us. And now her face bears it too, but for someone else, a boy her age. She is in love for the first time, and we feel it as if we are in love for the first time too.
The blue-eyed man holds a hatred in his heart for the boy, and as time moves forward, all the future possibilities for the boy his daughter loves narrow into one: he will die, and her heart will break.
What we cannot see is what will happen to her heart after.
THE ROARING IN MY EARS won’t stop, even as the plush carpeting in the corridor swallows up the sounds of my stumbling steps alongside Gideon’s. The small handbag at my side feels as though it’s made of lead, the weight of the unfired gun inside it heavier than any physical burden could be.
I was in the room with him. My mind won’t let the words fade. I was in the room with Roderick LaRoux and I didn’t kill him.
But the faint shimmer surrounding the dais guaranteed the presence of a security field, and with Gideon at my side I never would’ve gotten close enough for my one shot to have a chance of hitting its target. The security team was right there. For a moment I lost myself, and if Gideon hadn’t grabbed my arm, I think I might have tried anyway. I might have wasted my one shot.
Though I know the smart thing was to walk away and wait for a better moment, I can’t help feeling like I should’ve found a way around it. I’m running through a list of a thousand things I should’ve done—convinced Gideon that we needed to disable security shipwide to decrease our chances of being caught, gotten him to remove the field for me. Rushed the dais when the room’s attention was on the daughter and her fiancé. Anything would’ve done, especially since I wouldn’t have needed to stay under the radar any longer. This was supposed to be a one-way trip.
And instead I just stood there, the Knave’s hand on my elbow, his lips by my ear, while Roderick LaRoux and his whole happy family stood up there and smiled. It’s all I can do not to scream—or cry—or throw up.
The corridor leading to the exhibit and the elevators beyond is dark, the carpet the decadent red that would’ve been the style when the Icarus made her doomed maiden voyage. My bare feet make no sound, and even Gideon’s footfalls are nearly silent. The muffled music and laughter from the ballroom fall away as we move. Rooms open up on either side of us, re-creations of what the Icarus once looked like to show how her passengers lived before they died. To the right, a simulation of the observation deck; to the left, a series of cabins and common rooms from various levels of the ship, from the staff’s quarters up through the military personnel deck, on through to first class. Beside each is a sign informing Daedalus visitors that by donning their “Icarus Experience” glasses, they can view what these rooms looked like after the crash.
Without, I suspect, the dead bodies.
I swallow hard, wrapping my arms across my chest to stop myself from shivering.
Gideon glances at me and his hands fly to his lapels. “Are you cold?” he whispers, his voice shattering the silence—and the spell holding me.
“No,” I murmur, forcing myself to sound calm. He lets his hands fall. “Let’s get down to engineering.” I brush past him, trying desperately to organize my thoughts.
Gideon still believes we’re both here to find the rift, sabotage LaRoux’s plans. Let him think so—maybe I can still use him after all. To access the computer he’ll need to bypass security, and perhaps I can get him to take out the security field protecting the dais as well. Or else I can trip an alarm while he’s doing his thing, and while security’s busy chasing him, I can loop back around to the ballroom.