This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(38)

“Oh, Jubilee.” My resolve shatters, and my hand slides toward hers. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t look up either, watching my fingers curling through hers. “Hearts and souls and how they break? That’s all Avon teaches anyone.”

But words won’t do.

It’s wrong, and stupid, and a million other things that flicker through my thoughts. My hand moves anyway, drawing her closer so I can trace my fingertips down her temple and along her cheekbone. A weight carried deep in my heart shifts when my fingers register the softness of her skin, still flushed warm with sleep; it’s a truth I couldn’t dare admit to myself, not when I first saw her at Molly’s, not when I treated her wounds, not when we spoke in the quiet of the Fianna’s caves. But if it’s all headed for an end anyway—if tomorrow is to bring war, and death, and chaos—then this truth, right here, is all I have. All either of us has.

She doesn’t move until my fingers reach her jawline; abruptly she lifts a hand, fingertips connecting with my wrist as though to pull it away. But she doesn’t. Her touch on my wrist is so warm, her heart beating so quickly that I can feel the flutter of her pulse in the contact of her thumb on my skin. She freezes there, watching me with those eyes. I can see her struggle despite the dim light; I feel it like my own. Because it is my own. Trodaire. Fianna. Fighters, both of us—tired of fighting.

“I do know you,” I whisper, and hear her breath catch in the darkness.

I lean forward, tilting my face toward hers, the warmth of her pulling me closer. She shifts too, chin lifting—tiny movements, little invitations and questions, each of us hesitant. But then my lips graze hers, and for an instant, everything else fades away into the rain and the quiet.

Then her hand at my wrist tightens and she’s shoving me back. “Get out,” she murmurs, those eyes suddenly shuttered. Only the flush remains, shifting toward anger, away from…away from me.

“What?” I resist her for a beat too long, trying to pull my scattered thoughts back into place.

“Cormac, go. Now.”

“Jubilee—”

Her other hand comes up, and it turns out she’s still gripping the gun, pushing the barrel into my chest and cutting off my words. Her hair’s mussed, and in her T-shirt she looks nothing like Stone-faced Chase, but her grip on the Gleidel doesn’t waver. “I said get out.”

I ease away slowly, keeping my hands where she can see them, and rise to my feet. “Please, Jubilee. We have to talk about what to do, for the ceasefire, for Avon.” I know what else I should say: I’m sorry. But I’m not. I’m confused as hell, but I can’t apologize; this is the first thing I’ve felt sure about in months.

“We?” She keeps the gun up, a barrier between us. “We don’t do anything. You go home, Cormac, and I stay here. There’s nothing more for you to do here. Go, and let me do my job.” Her voice is utterly cold, making it hard to imagine there was ever a spark of heat in her response to my touch.

I back up a step toward the window. “Don’t do this. I need your help. Together we have a chance to stop this.”

She’s in control now, a soldier from head to toe. “If you wanted a collaborator from my side, you should have picked someone else to kidnap. I don’t work with rebels. Just go, Cormac.” She swallows hard. “Please.”

That last word is an appeal, not an order, and that’s what defeats me. “Clear skies,” I whisper. A refusal to surrender hope. A wish for the impossible.

She watches as I turn for the window, and when I glance back before climbing out through it, she’s still holding the gun steady.

The girl is dreaming about the first time she flew. There are dozens of other orphans from the war on the shuttle with her, but most of them are from Oscar and Sierra, and she doesn’t know them. Some are crying with fear, others are talking to combat it, and a few of them are laughing.

The launch silences most of the children, the shuttle engines roaring. It isn’t until they break through Verona’s atmosphere and the engines quiet a little that the girl hears the other children again, all gasping now, exclaiming at the way their arms and legs are floating up, with nothing but their harnesses to hold them in their seats.

The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.

But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can’t find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.

She closes the shade over the window.

I KEEP THE GLEIDEL TRAINED on the window for a full minute after he’s gone. I don’t know why—I’m not going to shoot him, and we both know it. Maybe it’s just a reminder. Of what I am, of what he is. Of how things are supposed to be between us. We were only ever supposed to see each other across the barrel of a gun.

My heart is racing like I’m in the middle of a scramble drill, its beat wild and thumping painfully in my chest. How dare he—how could he be so stupid as to come back, and so soon after the incident in town? I may not have given a description to the commander, but there was a whole bar full of soldiers that night who would stand a good chance of recognizing him if they saw him again.