This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(52)

The soldier I’ve come to know never would have done this, and yet her hands are smearing my family’s blood on the stone. “Don’t check out,” I tell her. “You have to stay with me. I can’t drag you to safety or they’ll find us both.”

“You should have let him have me.” Her voice is empty and aching.

“It wasn’t you.” I have to force the words out. “It was the Fury.” It wasn’t her. My own thoughts repeat it, over and over, unwilling to face what I’ve seen. Wanting it to somehow reduce my pain.

“I don’t remember anything.” Her voice breaks, and as she curls in on herself she’s still shaking, but this is different. It’s not the trembling that came with the dilated eyes or the jerky movements. This is shock, and my arms move haltingly to wrap around her and keep her from sliding back into the water. Suddenly I’m not holding Captain Lee Chase, but a terrified girl who wants to press her way into the stone around us and stay there forever. “I killed your people. You should—you should kill me yourself, why aren’t you?”

“Because it wasn’t you.” I’m repeating the words in her ear, desperately trying to make it true for both of us.

“You can’t know that!” Her whisper is fierce. “Stop it, Flynn, you can’t—just stop it.” Her fingers wind into my shirt, at first to push me away, but her resistance crumbles, and she lets me pull her in close until she’s clinging to me, shoulders shaking as she weeps against my chest.

Hot tears track down my cheeks too, and my throat closes as I swallow hard, fighting for composure. I wish that for one moment I could forget what’s happened and hold her and let the contact between us heal us both. But I can’t. Even her scent has changed; her hair smells like gunmetal.

My heart wants me to wrap my arms around her. My heart wants her to suffer for what she’s done.

Her shivering worsens, and as if in answer, my body starts to shake as well. I reach up and feel around in the netting until my fingers close over a warming pouch; I activate the seal, then press it between our bodies to slowly heat up.

Now and then the murmur of a distant voice carries through the water and stone to our ears. It’s not until there’s been silence for some time that Jubilee speaks.

“What do we do now?” It’s barely a whisper.

I want to have an answer. My heart slams against my ribs, tempting me to panic, to give in to grief and fear and exhaustion. Now that I’m still, my abused lungs ache. “I don’t know.”

“The LaRoux Industries chip,” she says, eyes staring in the dark. “When I picked it up on that island, it was the same feeling—the same taste in my mouth—”

The same unseeing, dilated pupils I saw in the cavern. I squeeze her before she can start shaking again, trying to keep fear from joining my grief in overwhelming me. I cannot think, now, about the possibility that a corporation is responsible for the madness plaguing my home.

“I have to get to the base,” Jubilee says with a sudden, hollow urgency, as though reciting steps in a manual. “I have to report…. I have to tell them.”

My head jerks up. “Jubilee, you can’t. They ship soldiers off Avon when—” When they turn into murderers. My lips refuse to make the words real.

She blinks at me, haunted. “It’s protocol. It’s all I know.”

“Listen to me.” I grab at her shoulder, gripping it tight, until her eyes focus once more on mine. “You’re all I have now. You’re the only one who can help me stop whatever’s happening to my home. I can’t be on the base, looking for answers, but you can.”

“I can’t—oh, God.” Her eyes glaze, and I know she’s not seeing me anymore. She sees blood, and bodies, and the barrel of a gun pointed between her eyes. “I can’t.”

“You can,” I snap, my voice quiet and fierce.

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’re Jubilee Chase,” I murmur. “Not whatever the darkness makes you.”

The gentle swaying of the dangling flashlight makes the hollows of her features shift and change, making it impossible to read her face until she looks up at me again. She gives a shudder, then nods. My breath comes a little easier, seeing finally a flicker of the girl I know in there, a flicker of the soldier I’ve put all my hopes on.

“Take me back,” she whispers.

We switch off the flashlight and slip into the frigid water once more, leaving my sister’s hiding place cold and empty behind us.

The boy who’s not supposed to be in her dreams is lying next to her on the hood of a hovercar on the outskirts of town, a blanket binding them together. The boy has pink hair this time, though when she runs her fingers through it, it changes in response to her touch, growing longer, falling in gentle curls over his temples.

They’re looking up at the sky.

“That one we’ll call the huntress,” says the boy, laughter behind his voice. “See, there’s her gun, and that nebula is her hair, and this cluster is that line she gets between her eyes when she’s yelling at me.”

“Shut up, I do not.”

“Your turn.”

The girl watches the sky, but it’s empty. The only constellations on Avon are the ones they imagine.