This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(104)

It’s like someone’s punched me in the stomach. I can’t breathe, I can’t see—my vision blurs, my hands lose feeling. I gasp for air.

Flynn isn’t done. He’s watching me curiously, as though he’s a scientist observing a particularly fascinating chemical reaction. “You’ve felt our touch before, when we were first learning to understand your kind. When you were young and malleable. This has made you different. This has made your mind stronger. Your soul stronger. We remember you.” He pauses, hesitation briefly so human, so familiar, that I ache. “I remember you.”

“I wasn’t imagining it all.” The fragments of memory refuse to coalesce, leaving me with pieces of truth, too fractured to help me now. “There were whispers on Verona; I thought they were ghosts. I remember….” I swallow a sudden, dizzying sweep of grief. “Then it was the Fury that caused the riots there. You made those people kill my parents?”

“Death does not exist for us. How could we have understood, then, what our keeper was forcing us to do?” His jaw is squaring now, black gaze locked on me.

“Forced,” I echo. “By LaRoux?”

“He told us that if we complied he would send us home. Only after he moved us here from the place you call Verona did we realize his deception, but by then he had learned how to cause us great pain.”

“He’s torturing you.” My stomach roils, sickened, hatred surging for the man I’ve only ever seen in holovids and news feeds.

Flynn nods. “Each time he punishes us the others grow further apart, more and more different. They are lost, alone. And their agony infects your kind; it is what drives them mad.”

“And you? Why are you different?”

“Because I remember you, Jubilee Chase.”

“I’m not special,” I snap. “I’m no more important than anyone else.”

“You’re the most important thing in this universe. You; this vessel; the people of this planet; lovers, warriors, artists, leaders, dreams more numerous than stars. Each mind unique, each thought created for an instant and then broken apart to form new ones. You don’t understand the unbearable beauty of being you.”

My eyes burn, and though I try to reach for detachment, the barrier of stone that saw me through the years since my parents’ deaths, my voice shakes when I speak. “We can still feel alone.”

The whisper gazes back at me through Flynn’s eyes. I feel hollow, as hollow as that stare; and yet there’s a knot of sympathy smoldering in the back of my mind. Perhaps I can’t understand the agony of true isolation; but right now, looking at Flynn, inches from me but infinitely far away, I feel like I can imagine it.

“You wished to be an explorer,” the creature says, still holding my gaze. “You wished to explore the seas and the stars. You dreamed of it so brightly.” Behind him, the white room is changing. Blue and green unfurl from the walls, spilling across the floor, enveloping me. Seaweeds and corals sprout like flowers, and a million kinds of fish, each one a different color, dart here and there.

I gasp, but I can breathe this ocean like I breathe the air.

“You once called me friend,” says the whisper.

“You—you were there.” A thousand memories come flooding back to me. “In November—with me.”

The vision of the ocean fades, the fish becoming ghosts of themselves, still swimming toward something in the moment they vanish. But the memory remains, and with it, the memory of a dream, long ago forgotten and buried beneath my grief. But no less real.

“I have wronged you,” the whisper says quietly, and though his expression shows no shame, he speaks slowly, each word heavy with regret. “Mine are not the actions of a friend. I stole from you.”

“My dreams.” I’m still clinging to the ocean, the memory of the dream enveloping me, something I haven’t experienced since before my parents were killed.

“I thought I was helping you, sparing you from reliving the pain of your parents’ deaths in your dreams. I thought I was easing your pain. But even your painful dreams are beautiful, Jubilee Chase, and I had no right to take them from you. They changed, as you grew, and there was healing in them. You needed them, and I took them from you.”

“All these years, you’ve been—intercepting my dreams? Taking them for your own? Why?”

“Because through them I could feel less alone.” Flynn sighs, tilting his head back and looking up at the dome of the whisper’s prison. “The others believe there is no hope for your kind, that the bursts of violence they cause, your Fury, it means nothing. But I’ve felt your grief, your loss. And though your species is capable of horrors, it’s capable of beauty, too. To end it now would be no better than taking your dreams away; to bring death robs your species of the chance to heal.”

I reach up to dash my hand angrily over my cheeks, hating that I feel for this wretched creature wearing Flynn’s face, hating that I can no longer fight without feeling. Hating that now I wonder if I ever did. “I want Flynn back,” I say, voice cracking. “If you can see my heart, then you know I need him.”

“Your bond with this vessel is why I chose him.”

“Stop calling him a vessel,” I burst out, anger sparking tears in my eyes all over again. “He’s a person. He’s smart, and kind, and braver than you could ever understand, and you’ve gone in and taken him away like it’s nothing.”