This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(102)

It’s been ten years, and every night the girl keeps searching for the November ghost. Sometimes she finds her mother or her father; sometimes the girl finds friends she recognizes, and enemies she doesn’t. She finds the green-eyed boy everywhere, and sometimes he helps her look.

She’s wandering the swamps of Avon now, alone, gliding on the water in an old, narrow boat. She’s searched the entire world and found nothing—no green-eyed boy, no people at all—and no November ghost. She looks up at Avon’s empty sky until the anguish is too much, and she drops back down into the bottom of the boat, resting her forehead against the wood.

Then something makes her lift her head.

In the water below she sees a million stars reflected, and the swamp becomes the sky, and her boat a ship. The stars are blinding, welcoming her, each one a tiny, dancing ball of light. All around her the swamp is illuminated.

MY MIND IS TOO WELL TRAINED. It keeps trying to find a way out, some tactic with which to disarm the creature, to gain the upper hand. Move more quickly around this corner, surprise him when he follows; duck inside that doorway, then slip out behind him when he passes.

But even if I could do it, even if I could wrest the gun from the thing that killed Carmody with its bare hands—what then? I can’t hold at gunpoint a creature willing to kill Flynn simply because he’s no longer useful. Even if I could point a gun at Flynn. Even if I could…

But he’s not Flynn anymore; the boy I knew is gone. There’s no warmth in his gaze, no life in his voice. It’s not him. Even if the creature was telling the truth, even if they could bring him back to me…could he forgive me for what I’m about to do? I clench my jaw. Keep it together, Jubilee.

I was never supposed to be the one on the outside of the mind control. That’s Flynn’s job. I hit things, I shoot things, I pass on the orders that are passed to me. He was supposed to be the one having to make this call, to kill me if I wasn’t coming back, to decide if I was a lost cause.

I can’t make this kind of choice alone. Flynn would never want me to sacrifice humanity to keep him alive for a few more years—or weeks, or days, I don’t know. Not even for Avon. But I cannot watch that thing pull the trigger; I can’t stand here and watch it blow Flynn away. I could more easily cut out my own heart. Flynn, what do I do?

The corridors ahead of us are empty. It isn’t until the thing controlling Flynn leads me to an elevator and I press the button that I glance back—and freeze.

Shuffling after us, filing out of the rooms and down the corridor, are the facility’s staff. Dozens of them, filling the hallway; some in the white coats of the lab techs, others in combat gear like mine. They’re silent, blank-faced, moving with a strange, disconnected gait, shoes dragging against the floor. Their slow, sluggish movements are so different from Flynn’s, hampered by the surgical procedure LaRoux used to prevent the whispers from being able to fully control them. And every single one has eyes like marbles.

The thing controlling Flynn motions me into the elevator when its doors open, and for the first time I move quickly, my spine prickling and skin itching with horror. I press my shoulder blades against the far wall of the elevator, turning in time to see the half-controlled facility workers come to a stop just inches away from the lip of the door. They say nothing, only continue to gaze at me while the elevator doors close between us.

The elevator descends, and then the whisper leads me through a security check manned by a still, blank form seated at the desk, with the same black-eyed stare as the sentries up above. Then he leads me to a second elevator; we go down again, down farther, down staircases and ramps, down into what feels like the heart of Avon. The farther I walk into the belly of this secret facility, the heavier the air presses in all around me.

Flynn doesn’t speak to me again.

We reach a door with another security pad, though this time there’s no one there to wave us through. This door is different from the others—it’s round, designed to dilate open. If it were a regular door I might be able to force it, but these are the kinds of doors they use on ships as fail-safes. Airtight, absolutely secure.

Flynn comes to a halt beside it and turns to me expectantly. Finally we’ve reached a place with no others, no witnesses. Nobody here but us. I wait, but Flynn does nothing, simply gazes evenly at me. I get the uneasy impression I could stand here forever waiting for him to speak and he would never crack. I clear my throat. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Open the door.”

“It needs a key, and I don’t have one.” My terror is dimming to a kind of dull numbness, my whole body aching with tension and grief.

“You are incorrect,” the Flynn-thing says coldly, the dilated pupils fixed on my face. “You have had a key all this time.”

I swallow, my eyes blurring. Hearing his voice is like a constant searing fire—knowing it’s not him in there, that he’s not speaking to me. “What? How could I—” But then I stop short, heart pounding in the silence. Because I do have a key. I have the ident chip we found the first time Flynn brought me here—I reach into my pocket to fish it out.

Though my skin crawls, I force myself to go nearer to the Flynn-thing to examine the security pad. There are numbers for a password, but also a small rectangular indentation on the bottom right. I press the ident chip into the slot, and it fits perfectly. The keys all light up green with a cheery beep, and then the door whooshes open.