This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(108)

“Hey,” she whispers back, close enough that I can see the tiny shifts in her eyes as she studies me. She’s tracing out the lines of my face, just as I’m drinking in hers, memorizing her features. “Flynn—I’m glad you ruined me.”

Her voice stabs my heart, because I recognize that tone. I’ve heard it before. “Don’t start with the good-byes,” I say. Her lips twitch in a tiny smile, and I drink it in. My voice shrinks to a breath as I remember what she said when I was only a passenger in my own body, when the whisper asked if she loved me. “I want us to have the chance to find out, too.”

She recognizes her own words echoing back to her, and her lips quiver, her eyes fixed on mine.

I brace my shaking hands against the floor. “Ready?”

She nods, gaze swinging away to lock on the comms tower. “Ready.”

We burst from the doorway and run.

The girl pushes through the last of the stars, scattering them into glittering dust that settles on her skin and glimmers as it sinks through the water. All that’s left is darkness, and there’s no sign of the November ghost.

The green-eyed boy reaches out and touches her cheek, his movements slow and deliberate in weightlessness, in water. The light from above filters down through the water, dim and green, illuminating his face.

Then he looks up—and when the girl follows his gaze, she sees something shining, up above water, glimmering just out of reach. She gasps, and swims for the surface.

WE SPRINT THROUGH THE PREDAWN GLOOM, making straight for the comms tower, ducking low as bullets fly over our heads. We don’t bother to dodge or weave; there’s so much gunfire in the air, it’d be pointless. Trying desperately not to slip on the marshy ground, I strain my eyes in the darkness, but the world is full of shadowy silhouettes—soldiers repositioning themselves and trying to gain ground, the Fianna darting in and out of the battle to move wounded.

We reach the comms tower, and I smash into the door an instant before Flynn. We flatten ourselves into the shelter of the door frame, and he grabs at the handle, twisting and yanking it with white-knuckled urgency. It doesn’t give.

Flynn lowers his head to shout in my ear. “We have to climb!” He grabs at the rusted maintenance ladder to the right of the door and ducks out of the doorway a beat ahead of me to start climbing. My muscles scream a protest as I follow, grabbing the rungs to pull myself up after him.

Four or five meters up, something invisible slams my shoulder against the tower. I try to force my hands to grip the ladder harder before I’m knocked free, but only my left hand tightens. There’s a spatter of blood on the cement wall that wasn’t there before, and I stare at it, uncomprehending. My right hand’s letting go, fingers unpeeling from the bar in slow motion. I feel nothing, no pain, only confusion when I realize I’m falling.

I hit the ground, the impact driving the air from my lungs just before the pain explodes, screaming up my right arm to my shoulder, down my elbow, fire erupting inside my veins.

Her November ghost is waiting for her when she reaches the surface. It lights the way for her as she climbs back into the boat and stands there, dripping, strands of stardust in her hair. She can’t wait any longer, words tumbling out of her.

Where have you been?

The November ghost is no more than a whisper, but when the girl closes her eyes, she can hear it:

Looking for you.

I’M SCRAMBLING, BULLETS PINGING OFF the ladder around me, when suddenly Jubilee’s not below me anymore. I nearly lose my grip, grabbing for a rung as I twist to see where she’s gone, fear singing through me.

She’s on the ground. Oh God, she’s on the ground. And even in the dark, even in the mud, I can see she’s been hit, blood flowering out across her arm.

“Jubilee!” My scream is hoarse, barely audible even to me over the gunfire. My muscles start moving, sending me sliding and stumbling back down the ladder; I can’t see anything other than her body.

Then she lifts her head, and my heart nearly gives out with relief. She starts to move, getting her left elbow underneath her, then falling back into the mud once more. It takes me a long moment to even realize her mouth is moving, and I can’t hear what she says as she stares up at me, but I can read the word on her lips. Go.

I hang from the framework, helpless—hope above me, my heart on the ground below. Then she screams at me again, and this time I can hear her shout. “GO!” I can see what the effort costs her.

So I do the only thing I can. I force my arms and legs to move against the frantic orders my heart wants to issue, and I scramble up, grabbing each handhold and hauling, muddy feet sliding off rungs and finding new purchase. There’s a window at the top—it serves as a lookout tower too, perhaps—and I turn my face away and smash my fist against the pane. It shatters, and I smash out the pieces, making a hole I can scramble through, landing in a muddy heap on the floor of the empty tower.

I don’t waste a second, pushing up to my knees, trying to keep my head below the line of the windows. I’m surrounded by a bewildering array of broadcast equipment, a thousand times more complex than the simple radio gear we use in the caves. And yet it’s not completely alien. Something about the controls is familiar.

I close my eyes, trying to ignore the tug of my heart back down to where Jubilee lies, trying to tune out the sound below and send my focus back. Back before the last planetary review, the last rebellion, back to a time when home meant a roof, a bed of my own. I can’t remember my mother’s face, but I can see her hands still, curled around a transmitter. They took away hypernet communications technology during the rebellion, but now I watch the memory unfold, kneeling on the floor of the tower. I see her hand holding the transmitter, her fingers reaching across to depress a button so the display leaped to life. And I remember.