This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(37)
I feel like something’s pressing down on my chest and preventing me from taking a proper breath. I can’t imagine a single city that size, let alone half a dozen of them on fire.
She waits for me to respond, and when I don’t, she gives a quick, tight shake of her head. “There are reasons behind every rule, whether you see them or not. Perhaps some of them are too harsh—that’s not my call to make. But if you could spare one child the loss of her parents by swearing an oath, by upholding the law no matter what it took…” She swallows. “Wouldn’t you?”
To hear a trodaire speaking of justice, of protecting people—it makes my head ache. McBride would say she was lying. Sean would say she was blind. Watching her in the meager light from the window, I don’t know what I would say, except that there’s a pain in her words as deep as ours. She’s silent, and as I watch, her features are returning to that neutral composure everyone else is so used to seeing. But an awful certainty is starting to solidify in my thoughts. “Where are you from, Jubilee? Your homeworld?”
She takes a while to answer, and when she does, her voice is oddly detached. “I’m from Verona. I grew up in a city called November.”
For a long while, the only sounds are the background noises of the base: shuttles taking off and landing in the distance, people moving to and fro, the faint strains of music coming from one of the barracks.
I’m beginning to understand this soldier a little, the fierceness there, the rage underneath that stony exterior. My sister would have loved her.
Well, no, I correct myself. Orla would’ve wanted her strung up as an example to the other trodairí.
But if Jubilee had been born one of us, Orla would’ve been her best friend.
I glance once more at the photograph on her nightstand. I don’t even have a picture of my sister—I have only the blurry-edged memory of her laugh, her dark braid over her shoulder. Little things, like the way she tied her boots; and big, horrible things, like the look on her face when she said good-bye to me the day before her execution. It’s not enough. It won’t ever be enough.
Jubilee’s watching me as the silence stretches out between us, until finally she breaks it. “I didn’t tell them anything about you.” She sounds halfway queasy about it, irritated and confused, but I believe her.
I’m trying to cling to the anger and desperation that brought me here, but it’s growing harder to believe that Jubilee’s the enemy, even one held at bay by a grudging truce. “Why didn’t you?”
Her eyes dart toward mine, a brief glimmer of the lamp outside reflected there before she looks away sharply. “I don’t know.” Her fingers twist around the sheets, betraying the conflict behind her calm voice. “Because if your people listened to you, there might not be insurgents laying booby traps on our patrol routes. Because if you were arrested, maybe more of them would start.”
I want to put my hand over hers and ease that white-knuckled grip. My eloquence fails me; there aren’t words for the impossible strangeness of this, sitting on a soldier’s bed in the middle of the night, wishing I could touch her. But I just look at her hand, fixing my eyes there, not trusting myself to look at her face.
Strangely enough, my voice is steady when I speak. “That’s what scares me about dying. Knowing what will happen here afterward.” Her hand tightens, and I breathe out. The words come from somewhere deep and hidden—not even Sean has heard them before. “And I think I will die, sooner than I want to.”
She’s quiet so long, I begin to think she didn’t hear me. When she does speak, it’s a murmur. “So will I.”
I lift my head to find her watching me, her brown eyes intent on my face. The half-hidden empathy in her gaze ought to feel strange, coming from my enemy; the only strangeness is that it doesn’t. “Why doesn’t this Fury touch you?” I find myself asking. “Where are your dreams?”
Her eyes fall, tension seeping back in along her shoulders. A muscle in her jaw twitches before she speaks. “I don’t dream.”
“But you said everyone gets the Fury dreams sooner or later.”
“I don’t dream, Cormac. At all. Not once since—since my parents were killed on Verona. The doctors on the training base ran all kinds of tests on me, certain I just didn’t remember my dreams, but their machines proved I simply don’t.”
“Everybody dreams, Jubilee. You’d go mad if you didn’t.”
“Some of the soldiers have a theory.” Her voice is too light, and the smile she tugs into place doesn’t reach her eyes. “They think the reason I don’t dream is the same as the reason the Fury can’t take me. They mean it as a joke, but it’s as good a theory as any. They say I have no soul. That this place can’t break me because I have no heart to break.”
She’s only lit by the outside lamp that shines in through her broken window, but I can make out the shape of her face, her high cheekbones and the way her lips press together as she works to keep her composure. “Well now,” I murmur. “You know that’s not true. And I know that’s not true.”
She doesn’t answer right away, and she drops her eyes to the blanket, where our hands are inches apart. In the silence, I can hear the rain on the roof above us finally starting to die out. “You can’t know it’s not true,” she whispers, refusing to look at me. “What do you know of souls and hearts and how they break here? You don’t know me at all.”