Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(99)
“Jubilee, stop.” My own body’s demanding that I act, fear and worry making me want to leap out of hiding and take off after them. “There’s no way we’re going to catch up with them. They could be hours ahead of us, and we don’t even know what path they’re taking.”
“We can’t let them attempt to save Lilac.” Sanjana grimaces as she prods at her broken ribs with her good hand.
Jubilee’s brows rise a little as she shoots the scientist a sidelong glance. “You don’t let Merendsen do anything. He does what he wants and you either help him or you get out of his way.”
“Look,” I break in quickly as Sanjana opens her mouth to retort, “we don’t know where they are, but we do know where they’re going.” I swallow hard, trying to banish the tangle of guilt and pain and fear choking my voice. “And I know a way to get to the Daedalus without having to fight our way past every husk in the city. We might be able to beat them there if we go down into the undercity.”
Jubilee’s eyes snap toward mine. “Down? Into the slums?” Her face tightens. “It’ll be chaos down there. Too many people to have evacuated…There’ll be looting, rioting.”
“Which means that down there, in the chaos, we’ll be that much harder for any husks to spot. We can blend in. The elevators won’t work without power, but we can climb down the maintenance shafts, travel below, then come back up inside the LaRoux Industries compound.”
I’m speaking quickly, and it takes the others a few seconds to absorb the plan, glancing round at each other. Sanjana speaks first, clearing her throat. “I can’t climb anywhere,” she says, her tone brooking no argument as she lifts the arm with the dead prosthesis. “Not until I get this thing repaired. You’ll have to leave me here.” Flynn starts to argue, and Jubilee a second afterward, but Sanjana cuts through the debate. “This is bigger than any one of us. I can’t argue that it’s bigger than Lilac and not apply the same logic to myself.”
Jubilee exhales audibly, raking her fingers through her hair. “We’ll signal Mori—an ally—as soon as we find a working radio. She and her guys will come get you.”
“I won’t be going anywhere,” Sanjana replies, with a shaky smile. “Just make sure you get there in time. Make it count.”
“We will.”
“And then?” There’s an apology in her gaze for asking the question, but she doesn’t waver. “When you reach the rift—when you reach Lilac—what then?”
Jubilee’s gaze creeps across toward Flynn, and the air fills with the words no one wants to say aloud. Eventually, I’m the one who draws breath. “We’ve got a day to figure out some other way. If by the time we reach the Daedalus we still don’t…” I let that breath out, shaky. “Then we destroy the conduit.”
The gray world is full of anger and pain, the two sides of this war both so colored by hatred that each is the same shade of darkness as the other. They are so similar, longing for peace, for justice, for quiet, and yet they kill each other as though they seek death, not life.
As our keeper forces us to greater and greater acts of destruction, we…I…do what little I can to find balance. I cannot stop a father from strapping explosives to his chest, but I can reach inside the green-eyed boy and plant the idea to move just far away enough that the blast will not kill him. I cannot shield the girl with the dimpled smile from the grief of losing her father, but I can help her sleep, help her decide to keep breathing each day.
And I cannot save the girl with the beautiful dreams, the girl I once knew on another world, in another life, from all that is to come. But I can keep her safe from the others. And I can find faith in her dreams.
I GRAB THE BROKEN LIP of a chunk of concrete, overtired muscles protesting all the way from my knuckles to my shoulders as I haul myself up, scrambling for purchase before I hook a leg over the edge and begin the controlled slide down.
I’ve seen disasters on the lower levels before, building collapses or fires threatening to spread through a whole quarter, but those times always brought out the best in people: whole families banding together to rescue trapped strangers, neighbors forming bucket chains to fight the fires. This is a different world, desolation as far as the eye can see, whole sectors of brightly lit, bustling Corinth simply wiped from existence. This world isn’t safe, and somewhere out there in it, Tarver’s alone.
He can’t have had much of a head start, no more than an hour, before I saw he was gone, plus the extra quarter hour it took me to rig my lapscreen to emit the shield frequency to protect me from Lilac. I’m not even sure how long it’ll work. I have to catch up with him, and fast.
I can guess at which direction he’s moving—most of my options are blocked, so I’m hoping he’s taking the path of least resistance, the one that will get him to LaRoux Headquarters as quickly as possible. My surroundings are mostly silent; emergency sirens occasionally wail in the distance, but no more firefighting drones zip overhead. Every so often, sections of buildings collapse with no warning, the crashes earsplitting, the echoes rumbling across the landscape.
Huge chunks of debris ripped through this block and the next when the ship fell, shearing straight through the buildings, turning everything above head height to rubble—on the ground floors, some of the doorways are still intact, offering glimpses inside, their upper stories spilling out into the street. They were apartments and offices, mostly, and clothes lie strewn across broken tables and chairs, electronics turned to so much recyc and wiring. Then there are the bundles I thought at first were clothes—the crumpled bodies, silent where they fell.