Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel Read online

  It’s only a few minutes from LaRoux Industries Headquarters that they hit a traffic jam—Mae throws me an image of the protest causing it, but I don’t bother trying to read the signs. Finally, finally, something’s going my way. All my projected routes have narrowed to one now, and lungs straining as I run down the sidewalk—subtlety be damned—I fight my way through the crowd.

  Mae’s speaking in my ear again, and I know what she’s going to say. “Honey, I can’t come in there with you. They’ll pick up on the signal.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to,” I say, ducking around a crowd of tourists taking pictures of the huge silver lambda that adorns the front of the building. “You’ve done more than enough already.”

  “If you’re not out in a few hours…” She trails off, because really, what’s she going to do?

  “Then you can have my stuff,” I finish, then break off my transmission before she can try to talk me out of what I already know is a terrible idea.

  My visual feed cuts out a moment later, but I know I’ve beaten Dimples and her escort by a couple of minutes. I make for the door and the stairwell we escaped through the other day. My skin’s crawling at the thought of coming back here, heart still thumping from my run, but I’ll be feeling much worse if this girl vanishes off the face of the planet because these guys were after me.

  The jammer I stuck on the door lock to delay the guards chasing us is long gone, but the signals it transmitted to my data banks aren’t. I have only to connect the chip for half a second before all the keys light up green, and the door clicks open. Keeping my back to the wall of the stairwell once I’m inside, I ease the door shut and then slide sideways until I can glance up, up through the endlessly spiraling stairs of the emergency fire exit. While there are no guards that I can see, the security cameras here are on a closed system, and without hard access to that system, I can’t turn them off. I need a way up that isn’t monitored.

  I shut my eyes for a moment, feeling the phantom ache in my shoulders already. But it’s all too easy, with my eyes shut, to see everything they could do to Dimples if I don’t get to her in time.

  I jam the lock on the door leading to the lobby one floor down, and slip inside. Cavernous and echoing, the space isn’t empty like the stairwell—I have to ease by in the shadows as the night-shift security guard watches the latest episode of some holodrama on his palm pad. The elevators are each under their own spotlight, illuminated like big neon TRY AGAIN SOMEWHERE ELSE signs. But I know one access point that won’t be lit up like a holiday tree: the service elevator.

  I’ve barely made it around the corner when I hear voices—one telling the security guard to take his break, then another ordering, “Bring her through.” I wait, hoping against hope that they’ll give me the floor they’re heading to, but no luck. Silence, as they wait for their ride up.

  I hold my position until I hear the elevator doors close out in the lobby, then get to work. The elevators require a security key to operate after hours, one I can’t replicate digitally—this one’s a combination of a physical key with a digital signature. So instead I tear open my backpack and pull out my crowbar—wondering briefly what a normal person keeps in a backpack, if not equipment for breaking and entering—and start prying the doors open.

  I keep my face averted from the camera once I’m inside, and knock the panel next to it aside so I can grab at the lip of the wall and clamber up out of the elevator, onto its top. I rip the cord from the camera and stick my own transmitter in its place—and suddenly I’m in, the whole lobby and elevator security system at my command. It’s the work of a moment to relay it to my headset, but I know I’m going to lose Dimples as soon as she and her new friends step out of their elevator.

  I can see the one elevator in use, and the display beside the door: 20. The same floor we were on the other day. My heart sinks, but my body’s already moving. I pull out my magnetic grips, sling my bag back over my shoulders, and start to climb.

  My shoulders start to protest and ache after the fifth floor, but I push the pain aside, focusing on the video feed I’ve got. They’re going to get there—and, picturing the giant rift frame in the holosuite, I’m pretty sure I know where “there” is—long before I can. I just have to hope they’re questioning her before…

  My thoughts grind to a halt before they can arrive at the conclusion of that thought.

  Just. Keep. Climbing.

  A scientist with narrow lips and a stoop in his shoulders is retuning the cage around the thin spot. He has forgotten to disconnect its power source. The thin spot remains silent, giving no warning. He is one of the people who hurt the stillness in order to learn about it.

  The cables spark and scream as he pulls them free, flooding his body with electricity. He is dead before he hits the ground, and as the other scientists come running, the thin spot is quiet and satisfied.

  The other scientists are quiet and sad even after the dead one has been taken away. They normally talk and laugh as they prod at the thin spot in the universe, but now they are silent. The silence is heavy and thick.

  So we make them a new scientist just like the dead one. If they are pleased, maybe they will stop hurting us.

  THE MEN FROM LAROUX INDUSTRIES have been very, very well trained. They stay just on the plausible deniability side of torture. They don’t touch me, except to jab a needle into the back of my shoulder—drugs to make me more pliable, maybe, or to sedate me. My skin crawls as I try not to think about some foreign substance coursing through my system, doing God knows what to my mind. They don’t feed me, don’t bring me water. They don’t utter threats, but their gazes say what their mouths don’t—that I’m alive only because they haven’t decided to kill me yet. They don’t waste time telling me what will happen if I don’t give them what they want, because they know that nothing they can say will be worse than the things my imagination conjures.

  My throat is like sandpaper, thirst starting to make my head throb in time with my heartbeat. It’s been hours—at least, I think it has. The holosuite, without programming, is a barren, white nothingness. Only the security cameras and projectors punctuate the vaulted white ceiling, and the cameras are dark—not a single one glows. They’ve shut off surveillance in this room. They don’t bother to turn on most of the lights, choosing instead to use only one set, leaving the rest of the room shrouded. It gives the impression of infinite space—and yet here I am, in this chair they’ve brought in for me, unable to move.

  The metal ring, the one that had started to glow right before everyone’s eyes went blank, is silent and dark. But I feel its presence just beyond the circle of light like a towering monster, some terrible creature lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to be left alone so it can strike. I know why they’ve brought me here—if I don’t tell them what they want, they’ll use that ring, and the creatures Flynn talked about in his broadcast, and take whatever they want from my mind.

  Whenever my eyes close for more than a breath, one of them rams the toe of his boot against a chair leg, sending vibrations screaming up through my body and setting my bruised, aching bones on fire. It’s all I can do not to groan, but I refuse to give them the satisfaction of seeing me in pain.

  “You must be getting tired.” It’s the big guy, the one who threw me onto the bed, the one I’d been planning to shoot. His voice sounds almost sympathetic. “Just give us something we can use to track him down, and this will all be over, I promise.”

  Almost sympathetic.

  “I swear to you,” I whisper, not bothering to conceal the weariness in my voice, “I’ve told you everything I know. I have no idea how to find him. I was a hostage, nothing more.”

  At first I’d tried to get information out of them—overconfident stooges like these often give away more than they realize, because they’re so focused on extracting what they want. I did learn that it’s the Knave they want, not Gideon. And they’ve been after him for some time.

  I’m positive the Knave has worked wi
th them in the past—I can only assume that he’s gone rogue now and is no longer taking orders from LRI, or perhaps he simply knows too much and LaRoux wants him erased. These men aren’t aware of my identity, as far as I can tell—and they don’t know I’m from Avon. If I hadn’t chosen Gideon to be my unwitting partner in escaping LRI Headquarters, I wouldn’t even be here.

  They don’t know I was at LaRoux Industries to try to kill Roderick LaRoux.

  I stop myself before I can lean forward and let my head droop. Slumped body language is a sign of defeat, and if these guys know anything about nonverbal communication at all, they’ll take it as a sign to push even harder. I fight to keep my eyes wide to signal fear, but moving from face to face; too much direct eye contact suggests you’re hiding something and trying to counteract the natural tendency to look away. I need to be scared—because innocent bystander Alexis would be terrified—but I can’t look guilty.

  But the truth is that even if I told them what really happened, even if I gave them his name and the icon on my computer I used to send that desperate distress signal, they wouldn’t have anything they could use to track him down. I doubt “Gideon” is the hacker’s real name, and even if it were, one first name on a planet of twenty billion people wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.

  So why don’t you just give it to them?

  I swallow hard as the man sighs, straightening up and moving away to speak to one of his partners in a low voice. I want to strain to listen, but I can’t make myself focus. It’s all I can do to remember the story I gave them well enough to stick to it.

  Ordinarily, I’d know what happens next. With no witnesses and no record of this interrogation, they’d take me someplace quiet and have me killed, and I’d simply vanish. If it were any other company, any other organization—I’d die. But this is LaRoux Industries, and the things they could do to me are far, far worse.

  I can see my father’s face in the gloom, exhaustion making the shadows swim and wriggle into familiar patterns before my eyes. I can see him in the moments before he turned and walked into the barracks on Avon—I can see his pupils dilate, swallowing the clear blue of his irises, I can hear his voice go cold, I can see his muscles seize up and propel him away from me. It’s always that moment that I relive, not the explosion itself. I see my father’s soul vanish again and again. I see the moment he died, seconds before he was blown to pieces.

  I force my terror down away from my heart, force myself to breathe. Panic will only make me slip. My eyes search the perimeter of the room, difficult to make out past the lights blinding me. I know what’s through a couple of these doors, from the floor plan I memorized. But I’m betting I can’t use the same escape route twice, even if I could get past these guys. Even if, after hours of sitting here, I could manage to run faster than my captors.

  Maybe if I were braver, I could do it. Maybe if there was any part of myself worth saving, beyond the need for vengeance. But…I don’t want to die. I can’t die. Not when I’m so, so close to reaching Roderick LaRoux.

  One of the men—the one who fought me—pauses abruptly, signaling for the others to quiet. He presses one finger to his ear, and I realize someone’s giving him orders through a micro-earpiece. “Yes, sir,” he says, spine stiffening even though whoever he’s speaking to can’t see him. “I understand, sir.” There’s a long pause, in which the man listens. Then he nods to one of the others and gestures back into the shadows, in the direction of the ring. “Yes. Yes—understood. Thank you, monsieur.”

  My body stiffens. Only one man’s arrogant enough to resurrect a dead language just to come up with a unique title for himself. This man’s orders are coming directly from Roderick LaRoux.

  “It’s your lucky night, sweetheart,” the man says, pulling off his earpiece. “I’ve heard it doesn’t hurt a bit, and you don’t even know it’s happening. You just—pop,” he says, miming a tiny explosion with his fingers by his temple, “and you’re gone, replaced by something much easier to deal with. This is a much more humane way to get answers. Though much less fun.”

  No. God, no. I can feel the ring’s vibrations through the floor, traveling up the chair legs, as the machinery begins to turn on. I can feel the floor moving the way the ground moved beneath me when my father turned himself into a bomb.

  The man who was speaking to me replaces his comms device with something else, another bit of electronics that hooks over his ear. “Suit up,” he orders the others, who dutifully outfit themselves with similar devices with the air of workers donning their helmets or surgeons pulling on gloves.

  As the men turn their attention to the metal ring dominating the middle of the room, I try to look around, try to see if there’s any way out. The exits will be locked, and even if I could get them open, I’d never make it there before they grabbed me. They’re too far for me to grab a weapon off them without them noticing me getting up from the chair. I’m rooted here, just as surely as if they’d bound me to it.

  I’m staring so hard through the gloom that at first, I don’t register when something changes. A tiny light comes on in the darkness, a single green LED that winks once, twice, then steadies. I stare at it blankly, reminded absurdly for a moment of the will-o’-the-wisps back on Avon. And then, all at once, in the same instant that my interrogator turns to come back toward me, I realize what it is.

  One of the cameras just turned itself on.

  I jerk my gaze away, shutting my eyes so they can’t see where I was looking. I don’t even care that they jolt my chair again to prevent me from resting. It’s a foolish hope, a wild hope—for all I know, it could be LaRoux, turning them on so he could watch what’s about to happen.

  “I have permission to make you an offer,” says the leader of the men, watching my face. “If you know of some way to contact the young man you encountered at LRI Headquarters, and if you can convince him to meet you at a specific time and place, we’ll let you go.”

  That brings me up short, the adrenaline surge in my body flatlining. “Let me go?” I whisper, caught off guard. “No—it’s a trick.” The words come out before I can remember the role I’m supposed to be playing. They’ve planned this perfectly, waiting until I know what’s coming, what will happen to me, to give me this way out. Alexis should’ve jumped at the chance.

  Nobody would blame her for that, if she were real. She’d be scared, and alone, and she’d take any way out. But I should be better than that. I should be fighting. I hate that for an instant, I was more Alexis than Sofia.

  He shakes his head. “No tricks. We have no quarrel with you. We can even promise you that the boy will not be harmed. He’s just the next rung on this ladder, and we’ll get to him one way or another. Work with us and you’ll both survive.”

  The next rung on the ladder to the Knave. My heart pounds in my ears, so loud I can barely think. LaRoux Industries’ security thugs can have the Knave—all the better, as far as I’m concerned. Let them destroy each other. All I want is the man at the top. I lick my lips with a dry tongue, trying to buy myself even a couple more seconds to think.

  Beyond the man, I can see the camera’s LED. It flashes twice as I look at it. Then three times in rapid succession. Then five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen…

  Prime numbers.

  I swallow down a sob of relief and try to make it sound like capitulation. “Okay,” I gasp. “Okay, I’ll tell you how to find him.” All eyes turn toward me—the perfect distraction. Please, Gideon. Please let that be you. Tell me it’s a signal, that you got my message, that you understood, because I’m running out of lies to give them.

  All I need is just one more.

  The man has some of us moved, and he uses a ship traveling through the stillness to do it, and for an instant we’re so close to home we can feel the others just a whisper away.

  The world is opened to us just enough for us to reach out and discover that this place, unlike the place where the first thin spot appeared, has many others like the man w
ith the blue eyes. It is the perfect place to learn. To understand. To decide whether their existence is worth knowing or if they should be condemned to darkness.

  We find a little girl in the slums, and from her we discover dreams. She dreams of beautiful things, and in the way of children, she is not afraid of us. She calls us friend. We show her the ocean she longs to see. She lets us ride through her dreams the way we let ships ride through the stillness faster than light.

  All around her on this world is darkness and pain, but in her dreams is beauty. She is worth watching. Worth learning. But then one day she’s gone, and we’re alone.

  IT’S INCREDIBLY CRAMPED IN THE air vents. I can’t even crawl on my hands and knees—I’m forced to wriggle along using my elbows, which slows me down and means I have to calculate every move before I make it. It’s pitch-black as well—if I hadn’t thought to grab my night-eyes on the way out, I’d be screwed right now. Pulled down, the goggles cast everything in an eerie green tint that overlays my fear with a momentary spark of anticipation. Sensory memory is a powerful thing, and usually when the world looks green like this, I’m hip-deep in some kind of crime. This is the kind of place where I cut my teeth—and filled my bank account. This is how I created the Knave, working every hour of the day to learn what I needed to find LaRoux’s secrets.

  The most valuable servers are kept completely isolated from the outside, no hypernet connection to send my electronic spies down. The only way to access them is to physically break in and attach my equipment. But on a hack like that I’ve usually got a lot more time, a lot more equipment, and—most importantly—a fully formed plan.

  This better work, Dimples. I’ve only got one idea.