Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel Read online

  Then in a shaking voice, I dictate my message.

  “Hi, babe.” I swallow, watching the letters pop up on the screen as the computer reads my voice. “No need to come over tonight after all. My father and some of his friends stopped by, so I’m going to go out to dinner with them. I’ll see you this weekend though—we’re still on for the park where we met last time, right? I’m dying to see you. Love, Alice.”

  “Wait,” Roving Eyes says, his voice sharpening. “Let me read it before you send it.”

  I hold my breath. I’ve tried every hint I can think of: mentioning my father, who Gideon knows is dead; telling him who has me by mentioning the holopark at LRI Headquarters; using a name from the same work of fiction from which his boss—the Knave of Hearts—takes his nom de guerre. I pray it’s enough. I pray he’s checking that inbox regularly. I pray—

  The man grunts. “Fine. Send it and let’s go.”

  I force my eyes to blink regularly for the screen’s eye-trackers, when all I want to do is squeeze them shut, to block out everything like an animal hiding its head in the sand. The message swishes off with a chime. At least if they end up killing me, someone might know. Someone, somewhere, will know what happened to me.

  “Move!” shouts the man, when I sit frozen in the desk chair.

  My gaze sweeps the apartment as I jerk to my feet, looking for something, anything I can use. Once they get me out of the apartment, my odds of getting out of this alive dwindle to almost nothing. Just think. Just breathe. Then a jolt flashes through me—my plas-pistol is still in my handbag from the day I was at LRI. It’s in my closet. “My shoes are in my bedroom,” I say, my voice shaking more violently now that I know what I have to do. Now that I know I have to try to fight. “In my closet.”

  “You don’t need shoes,” he snaps, impatient—I’m running out of ways to stall him. He knows I’m trying to stall him.

  “You don’t think manhandling a barefoot girl through the lobby will look suspicious?” I gasp for air, trying to regulate my voice—trying to sound like I’m calm.

  “Fine.” The man’s getting angrier by the second. But he steps aside so that he can follow me into the bedroom, his companion heading out to the living room. “Make it quick. First pair you find.”

  I nod, dropping to one knee in the closet, blessing the fact that I’ve been just tossing stuff onto the floor—the bags and shoes and items of clothing are all jumbled together. I keep one foot under me so I can move when I need to. My hands are shaking so much I almost can’t work the clasp of my handbag, and when I do, the plas-pistol falls out onto the floor. I catch my breath, grabbing at it with one hand and using the other to toss a scarf over it, making sure it’s not visible from where the man’s standing.

  The plastene pistol is beyond illegal—its sole purpose is to beat the cutting-edge security nets that test for energy signatures, for metal alloys, for anything that might betray the presence of a weapon. It fires an old-fashioned bullet, it’s nearly impossible to aim straight, and it’s only good for one shot—firing it makes the chamber melt, and half the time it explodes upon firing, seriously injuring its user.

  But I got it inside LRI Headquarters without causing so much as a blip on their state-of-the-art security scanners. After all, even though I didn’t plan on meeting LaRoux himself there yet, I might’ve gotten lucky—and I’d regret it forever if I was unprepared. An ordinary weapon, even a low-tech military gun like the Gleidels they used on Avon, would’ve brought every security guard in the place down on my head. But this little beauty of a weapon is my constant companion.

  Now, I curl my hand around it so tightly my arm cramps, sending fire shooting up my shoulder. The pain cuts through my fear, a white-hot ribbon of clarity steadying my thoughts. My mind runs through the steps, over and over, rehearsing them like a recipe, like one of my memorized floor plans.

  Shift weight. Turn. Aim for his chest. Fire. Grab his gun. Wait for the others to come through. Fire. Use bed for cover. Fire. Fire. Run.

  “Time’s up, we’re leaving now,” orders the man, his voice rising in volume as he comes toward me.

  Shift weight. Turn. Aim for his chest.…

  Tears obscure my vision, but I know where he is; I can hear his voice, feel his presence. I whirl, and my eyes focus for a tiny, strange instant on the droplets of water that fly from my wet hair to spatter against his shirt. He’s close. Too close.

  I gasp—he sees the gun—I swing it toward him—he shouts—something explodes, and I see fire. His arms wrap around me, hauling me back. He’s not dead. I missed, or else the gun didn’t fire, and what I heard was my own heartbeat, my own fear. He yanks me backward and I scream, fighting his grip wildly for a handful of seconds that stretch and twist and crush against my lungs. Then instinct returns and I jerk my head back, catching his chin with the back of my skull. I step down as hard as I can on his instep in my bare feet, making him howl. I drive my elbow back into the soft part of his torso. His grip loosens, and I see the plas-pistol, intact—I never did fire it—a few feet away. With a sobbing breath, I lunge for it only to feel a hand wrap around my arm and tear me back, making my shoulder scream. He throws me facedown on my bed, shoving my head into my sateen comforter so that it presses against my lips and my nose like a plastic bag, suffocating me. I try to lift my head, try to breathe, and try one more time to slip free, to reach for the gun, for my only chance. I graze it with the tips of my fingers.

  Then something hard slams into the back of my head and I slide to the floor, stunned, vision clouding. “Bitch,” mutters a voice high above me, far away. It’s the last thing I hear.

  The young man, who is not quite so young anymore, is holding something in his arms. “We can’t stay here,” the young man says to the thing. “Rose was already miserable with no one to talk to, and I can’t imagine you’ll be happy here either. I’ll leave some of the staff here, people I trust not to talk.”

  The man waits a few moments, as though expecting the thing to talk back. “I know you won’t remember this, but I wanted you to see it.” He draws closer to the thin spot, until its blue light falls upon the thing in his arms. The little thing has eyes as blue as his, and wisps of peach-colored hair, and it blinks at the thin spot and yawns.

  “Well, Lilac?” the man murmurs to the little thing. “What do you think? You’re the third person in all the galaxy to meet them.”

  The thin spot flashes, and the little thing laughs with such delight that the agony dims for just a moment. The man’s face has changed—the guilt is gone, and the terrible gleam in his eyes when he runs his experiments. Instead his features are soft, showing something new.

  Something we want to learn.

  We will watch.

  We will wait.

  I’M THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT SOME KHAO PHAT. On one hand, it would involve getting off my butt—but on the other, when I checked the street cams before, Mama Samorn was behind the wok, and that means there’ll be some fine cooking coming up.

  I’m in my den, chair folded around my body, wall of screens spread out before me. There’s something comforting about their symphony of soft chimes and whirs and beeps—it’s the sound of home. On the screens to my right, I can see my bots spidering all over the forums I host. Conspiracy theorists are a nervy bunch, but sift through enough of what they say, and occasionally you find a grain of something to work with. My friend Mae—or at least, she’s closer than anyone else to being my friend—is my general for those. She has an amazing knack for dropping a comment here, an idea there, sending them scurrying toward whatever we want investigated.

  Straight in front of me is my tracking program for Antje Towers, and that’s what has my attention right now. She resigned her commission and vanished from Avon after the broadcast, with a paper-thin story about going off the grid, retiring to a pastoral colony. Enough death, she said.

  Not enough for me, Commander Towers. When they went into the hidden facility after the broadcast, every hint of LaRoux’s
presence was gone. That cleansing happened on her watch, and she looked the other way. I know she’ll have the dirt I need—the public testimony, if I have to choke it out of her myself—to expose LaRoux for what he really is. She’s been running and hiding for a year, now, switching IDs every few weeks—she’s been Lucy Palmer, Taya Astin, Anya Griffin, Natalie Harmon.…The list goes on and on. She’s always jumping to somewhere new, leaving me with ghost trails, and occasional reports of a blonde switching to a new ship, a different planet. From what I’ve dug up from their databases, even LaRoux Industries doesn’t know where she is—which makes her perfect for my purposes. LRI keeps such close tabs on its employees that I can’t even get close to any of them. But Towers—she’s not under the umbrella of LaRoux’s protection anymore.

  Her trail went cold when she hit Corinth months ago, and more than ever, my pulse is pounding with the urgency of finding her. I’ve had a thousand imagined conversations with her, hurled a thousand accusations her way. If I can find her, maybe I’ll learn more about what Alexis and I saw at LaRoux Headquarters.

  All these years of single-minded focus have led me here, to this. If I can find her, I’ll be able to drag all LaRoux’s crimes into the light. Not like Flynn Cormac did, but publicly, irrefutably—with Towers, I can prove enough of what he’s done to ruin him.

  I’m starting again with Towers’s arrival at Corinth—under a fake name, of course—and preparing to comb through the arrivals records for that date again, when off to my left I hear the soft rippling chime I assigned to the mailbox I left for Alexis. Huh. Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again, Dimples.

  I lift my left hand, clad in a half-finger sensor glove, to point at the screen, then beckon. The sensors beep at me obediently as they switch the displays, flipping my main screen away to the left, and throwing up Alexis’s message in front of me. I’d pretend I wasn’t grinning, but there’s nobody here to know.

  Hi babe,

  No need to come over tonight after all. My father and some of his friends stopped by, so I’m going to go out to dinner with them. I’ll see you this weekend though—we’re still on for the park where we met last time, right? I’m dying to see you.

  Love, Alice

  My grin dies, crumbles to dust, and blows away on a cold, cold wind as I stare at the message. Oh, hell. But I don’t have time to dwell, because I’m already yanking down a keyboard, fingers flying over it to trace back her message and bring her cameras to life as I voice my other instructions. “Command: Scan the message on screen forty-nine. Check for security breach. Make sure no bugs got in with it.”

  The ping takes only a few seconds, and I force myself to slow my breathing, close my eyes for a moment, so I’m ready when two soft chimes announce the security check result, and success with the camera.

  “Security intact,” the system promises me. And then the cameras blossom to life, delivering half a dozen sharp images of her apartment to my screens, and my oh-so-calm breath jams in my throat.

  There’s a brute of a man standing over her in a bedroom, and as I watch she tries to drag herself up onto her elbows, then collapses once more. The gorilla reaches down and helps her up by grabbing a handful of her hair—she whimpers, clearly groggy, and I find my hand lifting, like I can reach through the screen and stop him.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asks, her voice catching with a sob that could be real, or could be one of her tricks—though given the situation, it has to be at least partway genuine. She’s given me the warning I need, though—they’re going to move her. While part of me is taking a deep breath—whatever they’re planning to do to her, that means there’s time before they do it—the rest of me is filling with dread. Because if they need to move her first, it’s probably going to be messy.

  I speak again as I flex my legs, the movement instructing my chair to straighten up and release me. “Command: Open a voice channel to Mae.”

  Seconds later, Mae’s cheery voice is flooding my headset. She always sounds like she was just sitting there, wishing you’d call. “Why, hello there, Handsome! What’s the special occasion?”

  “I need backup.”

  The shake in my voice is enough to stop her in her tracks, and the laughter drops away. “Emergency?”

  “The worst,” I say quietly. “I’m sending you an address. I’ve got LaRoux security forces removing an ally of mine. I’m going after her, I need eyes.”

  She sucks in an audible breath. “Honey, you’re not ready for this. We don’t have half the files we need to—”

  The gorilla pulls Alexis to her feet, steadying her by the shoulders as she sways, trying to blink her way back to consciousness.

  I peel off my gloves, scrabbling through the pile of clothes on my bed to dig out my boots. “So that’s why I need to get her back with minimal contact. Find me security cameras, public access cameras, traffic cameras in the vicinity of my current feed. I need to see where they go.”

  “And how the hell am I going to figure out which one’s them?” Mae asks, though I can see from the displays she’s throwing up on my right-hand screen that she’s already on it, as I pull on my boots and tie them with shaking hands.

  “Look for—”

  She finishes the sentence for me. “Anything with a LaRoux badge, got it.”

  On-screen, the gorilla’s speaking to Alexis again. “We’re going somewhere we won’t be disturbed. You can tell us exactly what you were doing when you came calling, and why your friend was there.”

  “My friend?” She sniffs, lifting a tearstained face, giving him the full force of her big eyes and running mascara. She’s trying, even now, to protect my identity—or maybe just to protect her own. “I don’t know anything about the guy I was with, I promise. We didn’t go together. He took me hostage.”

  Easy there, Dimples. Definitely not trying to protect me. I find one of my reversible T-shirts, with a LaRoux Industries logo on one side, black on the other. I flip it black side out and haul it on over my head, followed by my climbing harness. It’ll attract attention, but if I end up needing it to reach Alexis in time, I don’t want to be fumbling with straps—and I’ve seen plenty weirder fashion on the streets of Corinth. Then I’m digging through a nest of wires to find what I—usually laughingly—call my crime bag, and slide my lapscreen in beside the supplies already there. I shove my night-eye goggles on top of my head and jam an earpiece into my ear, and running a wire from it to my screen, I’m ready. “I’m going mobile, Mae. Lock the signal down as tight as you can for me.”

  I hate the idea of broadcasting our conversation, but we don’t have time to rig up anything more elegant. Alexis doesn’t have time.

  “Done,” Mae says, her voice crisp in my ear. “I see the car they’re using, I’m ready for them.”

  “Careful, there’ll be traps.” But she already knows that—LRI brings a whole new meaning to system security. I press my face against the iris-cam at the door and shove my thumb against the scanner, and my door releases with a hiss.

  Mae laughs, though she doesn’t sound amused anymore. “Please. I know what I’m doing, kid.”

  I bolt out into the alleyway outside just as Dimples and her friends leave Kristina’s apartment.

  With a ping from Mae, my headset throws a transparent projection of the camera feeds up in front of me, the audio streaming directly into my ear as I hurry down the alleyway and out into the broader street beyond. It’s lined with stalls and shouting hawkers, roofed over by the next level of housing above us.

  Alexis is speaking as she’s bundled into a car, and I’m smelling Mama Samorn’s rice as I run past the stalls, focusing on the voice in my ear as my worlds jumble together. “What, you think because he picked me for his safety shield he decided to tell me his master plan?” Alexis’s voice is still shaking. “If you want to know why he was there, why don’t you find him and ask?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re doing,” the gorilla replies, as the camera angle switches to one inside th
e car, mounted by the driver’s head. “And you’re going to help.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” Alexis wails, drawing her knees up to her chest. The way her gaze darts around, I think she’s wondering if she can kick one of them in the guts, then lunge for the door. But it’s some kind of stretch limo, and she’s got three of them in the back with her. It’s not going to happen.

  “In our experience, people often know more than they think,” he says calmly, as Mae overlays the footage with a GPS, showing the car’s movement. “Especially when they’re properly motivated to turn their minds to the question.”

  Man, this guy would be a blast at a party.

  They head out of the fancy sector where her borrowed apartment was, and my headset throws up projected routes as I push through the shinkansen barriers in the wake of a couple of laborers, cramming onto the last carriage of the bullet train right before the doors shut.

  “Honey, I think…” Mae’s voice trails off.

  “Yeah, I know,” I mutter. They’re in a LaRoux Industries–branded car, wearing LaRoux Industries uniforms. This is how arrogant these people are—but more, this is how powerful they are. That they can do this in broad daylight, knowing nobody will stop them or ask them their business.

  There was still a faint hope they’d head somewhere off-campus to do their dirty work, but four out of five routes our program is projecting say the same thing: they’re taking her to LaRoux’s headquarters. His fortress.

  Alexis doesn’t give them a thing, spending most of the car trip in silence, responding to their occasional questions with sniffs and half sentences and pleas. The signal flickers and cuts out occasionally as I switch from the bullet train to an inter-level elevator, cramming in with a bunch of bodies as we rocket up to the wealthier levels. The air grows clearer and the buildings grow taller, fancier—down in the slums, every street’s roofed over, with level upon level stacked on top of each other. Every time they make a turn, my computer updates my routes—at this rate there’s no way I can intercept them, only trail after them.