Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(96)

I want him to know that the only reason I didn’t tell him about my plan to murder Roderick LaRoux is that I knew he’d try to talk me out of it, and that, somewhere deep in my heart, I knew he’d succeed. I want him to know that I wish he had. I want so badly to trust him enough for that. And yet my lips won’t move, my voice won’t come.

When I manage to lift my head again, the doorway is empty, and I can hear his voice, low, mingling with the scientist’s.

Tarver and I are alone. He’s been on autopilot since the crash, chasing one distant glimmer of hope after another. It doesn’t take an expert to read the emptiness in his face now. I have no idea if he even knows I’m still here, if he’s aware enough of his surroundings to register me.

Then he speaks, voice rusty. “The first time I lost her,” he says, “I was going to kill myself.”

I swallow, unsure whether he thinks he’s talking to himself—until his head lifts and his eyes flicker over toward my face.

“I don’t know how I carried on. I don’t know what kept me from pulling that trigger.” He leans back slowly against the wall until he can tilt his chin and look up at the ceiling. “I don’t care, now.”

My heart tightens, making it difficult to breathe. There’s always a certain amount of guilt involved, doing what I do—using people always leaves wreckage in its wake, for me and for them. But it’s never been anything like this, a crushing, suffocating weight forcing its way deeper and deeper inside me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I never meant to—” My mind replays the moment Lilac fell, like a photo looping over and over. “I’m sorry.”

Tarver lifts a hand to wipe it over his face, as though he can wipe away his reaction to my voice. “It’s not your fault.”

“I shot—”

“Maybe you shortened the fuse,” he interrupts, looking back down and across at me. “But the blast was already coming.”

It shouldn’t make me feel better—and yet, in some horrible way, it does. I take another breath, but I can’t think of anything to say.

“The past year…” Tarver shakes his head. “She’s still Lilac—she was always still Lilac. But she’s been different, too. She could feel them, the whispers, no matter how far away we went. She has dreams. She wakes up in the middle of the night crying. She’ll drift off sometimes, having conversations with people who aren’t…” He gives his head another shake, swallowing. “I think they were always coming for her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He glances at me again, the helplessness in his gaze so at odds with the smiling, commanding presence he has in all his HV interviews and photo shoots. “The beings we met on Elysium wouldn’t do this. I wouldn’t say they were good—I’m not sure they even had a concept of ‘good.’ But they weren’t evil—they weren’t cruel. There was a sense of fairness to them, I suppose. That thing that took Lilac, when she kissed me…” His face ripples, then tightens. “That thing was cruel.”

I can’t think of anything to say, so we sit in silence for a time, saying nothing, not watching each other from our opposite edges of the room. There’s an odd comfort in being here, with someone as bruised and hurt as I am. For once, I’m not more broken than the world around me, and it’s horrible and healing all at once.

“You were right,” Tarver says softly, interrupting the quiet after a while. “We should get some rest while we can.”

“I’ll leave you alone.” I press my palm to the ground, ready to get to my feet and find my own corner of the ruins to sleep in.

“No.” Tarver’s voice is quick, and though he doesn’t look at me, I know he can see me out of the corner of his eye. “Stay.”

I hesitate, tired enough that my ears are ringing each time he speaks. My weary thoughts pull out a memory, and I find myself thinking of Flynn, and of the time he spent hiding in our house on Avon when he was on the run. I remember falling asleep, finally, after so many nights spent lying awake—I could feel him, somehow, in the room that had belonged to my father. The tiny shifts in the air, the inaudible noises, the imperceptible hints of another life in that empty space.

“Okay,” I whisper.

Eventually he leans his head back again to rest against the wall, and sometime after that, he shifts to lie down, head on one arm. I wait until his breathing lengthens before getting slowly, quietly to my feet and slipping through the archway to join Gideon and Sanjana.

“Even if we knew it would work,” Sanjana’s saying, voice low but intent, “even if we knew you couldn’t accidentally tear the rift open…the risk to you is far too great.”

My boot scrapes against the debris, making both of them jump, heads craning up to look at me. “What risk to him?” I ask, not bothering to apologize for my eavesdropping.

Gideon lets his breath out in a sigh that echoes off the broken walls. “It’s nothing.” He’s got stacks of papers covered in text that he’s reading by the light of the flare—Sanjana’s programming printouts. I can’t remember the last time I saw something printed out on paper—her foresight is enough to make my head spin. If she’d brought the information on disc, or on a palm pad, we’d have no way of looking at it now, after the EMP.