Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(74)
But she’s not listening. In fact, she’s staring past me at the doorway of the shuttle. “Captain?” Kumiko’s voice has dropped, uncertain, softer now. “Captain Chase?” She reaches up to pull her kerchief down, revealing the lower half of her face.
Jubilee Chase walks slowly down the steps to stand by my side, her gun lowering. I hold still, silently willing Kumiko not to freak out and start firing.
But it turns out I don’t need to worry, because Kumiko’s just staring at Jubilee like she’s seen a ghost, shaking her head slowly.
And Jubilee just stares right back. “Corporal Mori? What the hell are you doing here?”
We watch them grow. The three of us are alone, and we do not know if the others can see what we see, but we press on with our mission, seek the answer to our question.
The girl whose dreams so fascinated us is a soldier now, and though she is younger than the others and smaller, she trains harder than any of them. Already she’s showing the steel that will draw her so to the poet. A change of a few symbols on a military document flying through our universe sends her to serve with him.
They will become friends. She will learn what she needs from him, but his path is not with her. She will stay here, with us, on the gray world.
And we will protect her.
I WAKE FROM DREAMS OF fire and pain, lurching upright with a strangled noise, heart pounding. Someone’s there immediately, a warm hand on my shoulder, a voice in my ear, quiet, urging me to lie back down.
“Gideon?” I croak, trying to blink away dreams and sleep.
“He’s fine, he’s with Mori and Jubilee.” I blink again and suddenly Flynn’s face swims into focus. “Stay put, Sof, you’re going to be groggy for a while still.”
I let him push me back down onto what seems to be a military cot, and take a shaking breath. I can’t feel my hand, and after a stab of fear I look down—it’s still there, just swathed in a cocoon of bandages and numb from the shoulder down. We’re in a large, dim room, the light casting oddly against bare cement walls. There are a few people here and there, whose faces I don’t recognize; they’re huddled together, expressions drawn and fearful, some faces tearstained, some wooden. A couple of them are hunched over a palm pad, trying—and failing, it seems from their frustration—to find a signal.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
“Mori’s base. Kumiko Mori. Gideon’s friend. She also happened to serve on Avon with Jubilee.”
I stare at him, trying to make my mind work through the thick, impenetrable fog cocooning my thoughts. “Just happened to…?”
“She’s a Fury soldier,” he replies, voice quiet. “She and the others here are all soldiers who were once on Avon and reassigned after the whispers there made them snap. From what she tells me, they’ve been gathering here, doing exactly what we’ve been doing—trying to figure out how to take LaRoux down.”
None of the overhead lights are on—all I can see are a couple LED flashlights and an emergency lantern.
“Why…What’s with all the…” But I can’t remember the words I need, can’t make my lips shape them.
Flynn follows my gaze to the emergency lantern on a packing crate next to my cot. His eyes flick back toward mine. “How much do you remember? We had to put you under to treat your hand. We didn’t have a choice, you kept—” He swallows, his face grim and eyes a little wild. “We had to knock you out.”
I swallow, my voice raw and shredded like I’ve been shouting. Or screaming. I shut my eyes, taking a deep breath. “I remember the Daedalus.”
Flynn finds the fingers of my good hand and wraps his around them, squeezing. “The impact knocked out power for kilometers, at least. Communications are down, HV networks, everything. Gideon can’t even get to the hypernet, though that’s what he and Mori are trying to do now.”
“What about…” But my voice sticks when my memory conjures up the image of the LaRoux heiress, smiling at us with those black eyes. I can’t even make myself say her name. “L-L-LaRoux? What about LaRoux?”
“We don’t know. We don’t know much of anything yet.”
I suck in another breath and then try to sit up again, pushing Flynn’s arm away when he moves to stop me. “Flynn, I tried to—” My voice cracks. “LaRoux was standing right there. I couldn’t let him live. I couldn’t—”
“Shh, I know.” Flynn looks older, more than he should after only one year. The green eyes are the same, and the dark wavy hair. And yet, he seems somehow more real than he was before, solid, warm—and the pain in his gaze, the sympathy, is as deep as it ever was. “I know, Sof.”
“This is my fault,” I whisper, too numb and too groggy to cry. “If I hadn’t—”
“None of that,” Flynn interjects. “From what we got out of Tarver, this has been a long time coming. That whisper’s been trying to reach Lilac ever since she and Tarver were stranded on that planet together. I think the pain just interrupted her concentration—it would’ve gotten her eventually anyway.”
But it wouldn’t have been onboard the Daedalus. The thousands of people, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands by now—they would be alive if I hadn’t tried to murder Roderick LaRoux.