This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(79)

It all threatens to well back up, the tangle of things I’m too exhausted to face. There’s only one thing I know with absolute certainty, and as I whisper her name and lean in to her again, she lets me. Her hand leaves my chest and invites me in—she cups my cheek as our lips meet, drawing me away from the frantic heat and toward something slower, something quiet. Something real.

We both pause to breathe after a time, and she ducks her head. I kiss her temple and wait for her to speak.

“Sooner or later one of us will have to make a choice, and if we do this we’ll make the wrong one. We’re the only ones who can see what’s happening. They need us.” She turns to slip out of my arms, putting herself out of my reach—or me out of hers.

“Don’t you ever get tired of being needed?” Suddenly that’s all I am—tired, heartsick for my sister, my cousin, my friends. Worn down by McBride’s anger, Sofia’s grief, by my own helplessness. I want refuge. I want Jubilee.

“Not until this moment.” She’s stricken, but she stands there by the door, and she doesn’t reach out to me. Everything in me aches, but I don’t reach out to her either. Because she’s right.

“Go.” It takes everything in me to let her leave. For the sake of people who’d shoot me on sight. Who think she’s a murderer and I’m a traitor.

She doesn’t speak, standing and staring at me for two long, slow breaths. Then her hand fumbles for the door handle, wrenching it open so she can stumble out into the night. The door bangs shut behind her so hard it misses the latch, shuddering open again with its momentum.

I slam my palm against the wall, feeling the sting of it, the pain shooting up all the way to my shoulder. As the door eases back open, I can see her walking away. I watch her as she passes under the floodlights.

Just before the door swings closed, I think I see her catch her step, start to slow. Then the gap I’m watching through is gone, and with a click, we’re both alone.

The girl is waiting. She’s at a spaceport she’s never seen before, orbiting a planet she doesn’t recognize. All she has are the clothes she’s wearing, but she’s glued to the viewport, heart jumping with each new ship that eases into the docking bays. She’s certain she’ll recognize hers when she sees it.

A man comes to find her, to tell her that the exploration vessel she’s been hired on is ready to depart. He escorts her to the right docking bay, where a small but sleek ship waits for her. The viewports are glimmering gold-and-green, and through them she catches glimpses of people—a child with dark hair, a sullen teenager with a fake ident, an older woman she doesn’t recognize.

Her escort, who is also somehow the captain too, gestures toward the gangplank.

“Well?”

Somewhere, deep, deep in her thoughts, something stirs—the certainty that this never happened, that it couldn’t be happening now. This isn’t how her life will go. It’ll be dark, and cold, and likely very short; and the glittering lights of the spaceliner were never for her.

“I can’t,” she whispers, the words wrenching at her soul. The captain turns toward her, and she can see her own heartache reflected in his green, green eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

I DON’T REMEMBER THE WALK back to my quarters. But abruptly I’m there, my head still spinning, skin tingling. It’s easy enough to run myself through the motions as I get ready for bed, my routine ground into me through years of being too tired at the end of the day to do anything else. I can’t let myself think, can’t let myself dwell on the fiery adrenaline surging through me. I can’t let myself replay what happened with Flynn.

I can’t let myself continue to fall for a boy who represents everything I’ve been fighting against since I was eight years old.

But since I can’t actually stop myself from doing any of those things, at least I can stop myself from touching him ever again.

I’m not on duty the next day until mid-morning, but I wake at sunrise anyway, the habit too well ingrained to set aside. There’s no word from Merendsen about our next move, giving me no outlet for the need to act, to keep my thoughts away from dangerous territory. I should be giving my body as much time to recover as I can before I’m out on the fences again. It’s cold, wet, hard work out there; the rebels are invisible in the swamp, the bullets coming from nowhere. They keep too close to the base for us to call in an airstrike, but too far for us to pick them off from behind our fortifications. We’re forced down low, and the mud oozes inside my combat suit, itching like mad once it dries, and I smell like a swamp no matter how hard I scrub afterward. When we follow them farther into the swamps they vanish into nowhere, drawing us onto unsafe ground like will-o’-the-wisps.

It’s hours before I’m on duty, but my skin’s crawling for action, and every time I sit still—every time I close my eyes—Flynn’s there.

One true thing, he said, his lips finding a hidden spot behind my jaw. This is real.

I throw on the fatigues I was wearing yesterday, wrinkled and untidy—but laundry is the last priority on the base right now, and no one’s about to judge me for looking disheveled while going for a run. Hesitating only briefly, I buckle on my holster and my Gleidel. Awkward to jog with, but this is the wrong time to go anywhere on Avon unarmed. I choose my running shoes over my regulation boots and duck out into the misty, cold dawn. With Avon’s overcast skies sunrise is slow to take, as though the light itself is slowed down, oozing over the landscape gradually. It’s still dark, but I can see the fog lit overhead as the diffuse sunlight peeks through.