Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(88)

He shivers. “She just stopped. Like something flipped a switch. Stopped, then turned around and started walking back that way.” He lifts his chin, pointing back in the direction of the Daedalus. “When I tried to stop her, to ask what she was doing, it was like she didn’t even know me—she looked at me and her eyes were…” He closes his own eyes, as though he might be able to shut out the memory of his wife’s empty gaze. “She grabbed me and started dragging me with her, but I pulled free and…”

“And hid here,” Sofia finishes for him. She glances at me, eyes meeting mine—and in that moment, I know exactly what she’s thinking. He’s not fit enough to keep up with us, and with everything hinging on our success, we can’t afford to slow down. But he could turn into one of those husks if he steps outside the protective field of my jury-rigged whisper shields, and if Lilac can’t sense us through our scrambling fields, she’ll certainly be able to access what he knows about us.

My eyes rake the alley, and Chuck himself, as I try to figure out how he’s managed to hold off the whisper’s influence for so long—then my eyes fall on the dumpster. Its thick metal walls might serve to protect him the way our electromagnetic devices do.

“You have to get back inside.” I’m reaching for the guy’s arm even as the others turn to look at me. “It’s the safest place to hide, we can give you supplies. You have to stay in there or you’ll end up like your wife.”

Chuck’s trying to shake my hand off, not understanding what I’m telling him in his relief at finding other survivors. I open my mouth to explain further, but before I can speak, movement beyond catches my eye.

There’s a hand coming over the edge of the wall in the shadows at the end of the alley. The fingertips grope, creeping along the cement until they find purchase in a crack; it’s not until they curl and tighten that I realize one of them is bent oddly, twisted, and not moving like the others. A head and shoulders appear, becoming a figure dragging itself over the edge of the wall.

I lurch to my feet, one hand reaching out instinctively to grab for Sofia and pull her with me as I stagger back. The others see it almost instantly—Flynn reaches for Chuck, Jubilee trains her gun on the figure creeping over the wall, Tarver spits a curse and swings his weapon over toward the mouth of the alley—and we break into a run.

I’m craning my neck back to watch as the figure slides over the edge of the wall and drops into a heap on the pavement. The figure in the shadows grows arms again, and legs, and I can see its profile, head turning toward us as we burst back out into the sunlight. I collide with someone just in front of me—the others have stopped. It’s all I can do not to shout at them, Run, run, for the love of…

And then I see why they’re not running.

The street outside the alley is filled with husks.

There are dozens upon dozens of them, ranging as far as I can see. Most of them would seem perfectly normal if not for the slack faces and the empty black holes where their eyes should be—but some of them have obvious injuries, like the one at the back of the alley with the broken finger. A girl, no older than eleven or twelve, stands only a few feet away, a shallow scrape across her arm standing crimson against her pale yellow sundress; a man some distance back, tall enough to see over the sea of faces, stares at us from only one black eye, the other crusted shut with blood from a head wound.

“No,” whispers Chuck, shrinking back against Flynn, who’s still gripping his arm. “No, no, no, nooo.” His whisper turns to a moan, and he rips his arm away from Flynn’s grasp.

“Wait—” Flynn’s lunging after him. “Don’t!”

But the man’s withdrawing, back down the alley, toward his dumpster, out of shield range of the altered palm pad inside Flynn’s vest. But while it might have protected him from the whisper’s psychic reach, the dumpster’s not going to do anything against the husks. Others have joined the solitary shadow at the back of the alley, and they descend on Chuck from behind. He starts to climb back into his hiding spot, but the husks grab hold of him, dozens of fingers twining into his clothes, his hair, dragging him away from the dumpster, which screeches an inch away from the wall as he clings to its edge. Then he’s gone, pulled down into their midst.

“Damn it!” Jubilee’s got her weapon aimed at them, and I can see her focus flicking with each little twitch of the gun barrel. She doesn’t know where to aim, much less where to shoot. These are innocents. No different from Kumiko and her soldiers on Avon, broken by the invasion of their minds. One of the figures helping to pin Chuck down is tiny—a child.

The moment seems to stretch into an eternity; we should be running. We should leave Chuck to his fate, let his choice to hide play out, continue our attempts to reach Dr. Rao. But all of us can hear him screaming for someone named Alisha—his wife, no doubt. I can’t tell if he’s calling out to her because he’s thinking of her, in these last moments, or if he’s screaming her name because she’s one of his assailants.

I’m holding onto Sofia so tightly I have to be hurting her, but she says nothing, her body shaking where she’s pressed against me.

Tarver breaks first, taking one step down the alley, swearing. But before he can move any further, the screaming stops. My heart lurches in the sudden silence, broken by five sets of panicked breathing. He’s dead—they killed him. They killed him.