This Shattered World (Starbound #2)(97)
“Okay?” Flynn’s voice is stiff. “Okay to shoot you, you mean.”
My heart tightens. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I can feel his anger and frustration radiating through the darkness, and part of me longs to reach out for him. If our positions were reversed, I don’t think I’d be able to listen to this either. But it has to be said. “Yes,” I whisper. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Then I can’t promise you that,” he says tightly. “And don’t ask me again, Jubilee.”
“You can’t afford not to! This isn’t about us, this is everyone, all of my people and all of yours. This is worth dying for, Flynn, this chance to save Avon. We can’t afford to let anyone stop us. Even if that someone ends up being me.”
Flynn doesn’t answer in words. Instead he reaches behind his back to pull his stolen Gleidel from his waistband. Then there’s a loud thud as he tosses the gun into the bottom of the boat.
“Flynn, you can’t—”
“I’m going in there,” he says, as fierce as he’s ever been. “But I’m not shooting you, no matter what happens.”
I want to argue, I want to tell him he’s being sentimental and foolish, that this is what I was trying to avoid when I stopped him that night in the back room of Molly’s. That choosing me over everything else is weakness. A few weeks ago, that’s exactly what Captain Lee Chase would’ve told him. But I can hear the strength in his voice, and in the choice he’s making. Because it’s not that he’s choosing me, a girl he met less than a month ago—he’s choosing a world in which no one has to die.
I want that world to be real. I want it so badly my pulse quickens, the air sharpens. Captain Lee Chase never goes anywhere unarmed; it’s against her nature. My hand’s gripping my Gleidel so tightly I’m half afraid my skin’s going to fuse with the metal.
Lee doesn’t leave her gun behind—but maybe Jubilee could.
I exhale slowly, easing my Gleidel out of its holster. It fits so easily in my hand, its cold weight so comforting, so familiar. I swallow, then toss it down with Flynn’s.
When I lift my eyes again, Flynn is no more than a silhouette. He moves toward me, taking hold of my arm and pulling me in against him. He doesn’t speak. Our brief time together, the extraordinary circumstances that made us allies—there aren’t any words to give it shape. He could tell me he loves me, but he doesn’t know me the way a lover would; he knows the shape of me, though, the curve of my heart, as I know his. He could tell me he doesn’t want to lose me, but we’re both already lost, and only the tether between us keeps us from drifting out into the black.
I hear him draw a quick, shaking breath, and then his mouth finds mine. His kiss is fierce, his fingers splaying across my back, pressing me close. His lips this time ask for nothing, no demand for fire or for possession, nothing like the way he tasted in the back room of Molly’s, turning my bones to ash. He’s just kissing me, holding me, searing me into his memory. I lean into him, making his arms tighten around me in response, and we stand there, the water quiet around our ankles, as though all of Avon is holding its breath.
When we let each other go, we don’t speak. Instead Flynn braces his foot against the edge of the boat and shoves, sending it drifting back out so anyone who finds it won’t know where we are. I watch it cut through the mist until the fog closes back up around it and it’s gone.
She’s had this dream before, too. This one starts with fire, but she’s not afraid. It sweeps through the shop like it’s alive, but when it reaches her, it feels like nothing more than a summer breeze, pleasant and warm. She can control the fire, she can make it go where she wants, and she can keep it from consuming a single mote of dust in her mother’s shop.
She tells the flames to pull back, to return to being a merrily crackling fire on the hearth. But this time the fire doesn’t listen.
The girl tries again, and again nothing changes; the fire flares instead, and this time it burns her hands. She feels no pain in the dream, but she’s afraid. She knows she has to run, but the fire is all around her now, and there’s nowhere to go.
Her only choice is to let the fire take her.
THERE’S NO WAY BACK NOW. I know that as the boat vanishes. For an instant my heart tugs me after it—a place to hide, to hold Jubilee and be held. I can still feel her against me, and I cling to that warmth, pushing from my mind the possibility that I’ve kissed her for the last time.
I turn toward the seemingly empty muddy island before us. “How do you find something you can’t see?” I keep my voice low—out in the swamps I can still hear the subtle sounds that tell me there are Fianna hunting for us.
She squints toward the center of the island. “We know it’s there. Now that we understand what we’re looking for, maybe we can bypass whatever the whispers are doing to our heads to conceal it.”
I scan the flat expanse of mud. “All right,” I murmur. “Come on, let’s see you.” I pull up the memory of the facility I saw. I’m looking for straight lines on a landscape that’s all curves. Walls, corners, a chain-link fence. There’s a dizzying compulsion to look away, and I narrow my gaze and try again.
It’s only when Jubilee grabs my chin and turns my face toward the center of the island that I realize I’d turned away after all. She has a sympathetic grimace, and we link hands to keep ourselves from moving apart. Our fingers wind tightly together as we edge forward, pausing every step to check we’re still moving toward the center.