Their Fractured Light
Page 51

Fingers of ice creep down my spine, fear trickling in before I can even figure out why I’m afraid. I give Sofia a squeeze, and as though she can read my thoughts, she struggles to get her feet beneath her and together we stagger up to stand side by side.
Lilac, spotting the movement, lifts her head to look at us. But instead of the bright, sky-blue eyes so like her father’s, I see only blackness, like empty holes.
Tarver’s just looking at Lilac, and for the first time I see him, really see him, how he looks at her. I’ve been so busy hating him for replacing my brother that I never noticed.…His heart is written clear across his features, and the agony reflected there as he looks at Lilac makes my own heart ache in response.
“Lilac,” he whispers. “My girl.”
Lilac’s black eyes swing over toward him, and though her face remains neutral, almost empty, her voice carries a cold so intense my skin crawls. “I know you.”
Tarver shivers, drawing up on his knees so he can reach out and take Lilac’s arms, gazing intently at her. “Lilac, I know you’re in there somewhere. You can fight this. You are stronger than this. Please—please. Please.”
Lilac gazes back at him for a long moment before a ripple travels through her features and she sags a little, like a marionette whose strings are being cut. Her eyes flick up to fix on her fiancé’s face. “T-Tarver?”
Tarver’s breath catches and he leans closer, eyes scanning hers, searching for some flicker of the girl who used to be there. “Lilac.”
The girl gives a sob and leans forward, pressing her lips to his, a desperate sort of kiss. For a moment, no one else moves, the whole room narrowing to just the two of them, Tarver’s hand coming up to touch her cheek, her movements as she leans into the kiss harder.
Then she pulls back abruptly, opening her eyes—her black eyes—and giving a brief, mirthless laugh. “You’re so easy.” She lifts one hand, and like she’d brush aside a fly, she shoves him back—and the force of the blow sends the soldier flying, to strike the far wall with a sickening thud.
She rises to her feet, not even flinching when Lee Chase instantly swings her weapon around to point at her. “You murdered my brethren,” says Lilac—or the thing that used to be Lilac, still staring at Merendsen. “To save your own skin—to save this skin,” she adds, gesturing with some distaste to her own body, “you killed them all.”
“They wanted…they asked.…” Tarver’s groaning, dragging himself up from the floor—his eyes aren’t focusing right, and I know he’s only barely conscious.
“You’re lying. No one asks for death.” Lilac glances around, head tilting as though to get a better look at each of us. “Though maybe you will, before the end.”
“Don’t move.” Jubilee’s sighting down her gun at Lilac, her every muscle tense, her body poised. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you take a single step.”
“No—Lee—” Tarver’s got one hand against the wall as he drags himself to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s still in there. Hold your fire.”
The barrel of the gun dips, an automatic response to what was clearly an order. “Dammit, sir…” She shifts her grip on the gun, torn, the instinct to obey him warring with the instinct to protect him.
“If you shoot my daughter,” Monsieur LaRoux says to Jubilee, cold—but visibly struggling for control—“I will personally see you executed.”
“It’s all right,” says the creature inside Lilac, smiling at Jubilee. “I was the first, I am the oldest, and now I am the last of my kind here. I don’t need to move to kill your captain.”
In the distance comes a great, low cry—like the moan of an immense beast, echoing through the ship. It isn’t until half a second later, when the floor shudders beneath us and Sofia and I go staggering back against the wall, that I realize what it was. The sound of immensely thick metal tearing like tissue paper.
Flynn rises to his feet unsteadily and steps up next to Jubilee, his movements slow. “We’ve met your kind before,” he says slowly, his voice soothing, calm—I can detect only the faintest hints of the terror that must be there, the same terror that’s making Sofia shake at my side. “We know what’s been done to you, and we mean you no harm. Please let us talk. You can clearly destroy us anytime you want to, but do that and we’ll never be able to talk to each other. You lose nothing by waiting, by hearing us out. Destroy us now and that door closes.”
He’s even better than he was in the Avon Broadcast—I’d surrender, given half a chance. But the Lilac creature just looks at him blankly, unaffected by his plea. “I was going to crush him,” she comments, glancing over at Tarver, leaning hard against the wall. “But this is far better. Let him die knowing he couldn’t save her. Let him die the way he should have died—falling in a tomb of twisted metal and fire.”
The words ring in the air, punctuated by the distant creaks and groans of whatever’s happening to the ship, and for a long moment I can’t understand what the creature means. Metal and fire…falling… Then, suddenly, my knees buckle. “You can’t—” My voice comes out hoarse with fear, choked with disuse.
Sofia reaches the same conclusion I do. “Oh God,” she whispers.
Lilac is going to bring down the Daedalus.
How the others back on the gray world fare, I will never know. Whether my kin on the other side of the rift can see me, sense me, I cannot tell. All I know is the blue-eyed man, and the link of hatred between us.
He talks to me often, of his wife, of his young daughter, of his work. He has begun work on a pair of ships that will use our universe to move even faster through theirs, and he delights in sharing with me all the successes in his life, certain they will cause me pain.
I wish I had brought his wife back to him, for then I could use her to free myself from this prison. Marked by our touch, she would be vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. I could take from him the thing he loves most all over again, and smile at him with her lips until his mind crumbles.
I could tell him that his new technology risks tearing a hole into our world. I could tell him that to toy with the fabric of the universe is to risk destruction. I could tell him his new ships are doomed.
But I have no mouth with which to speak. And I will wait.
ANOTHER SHUDDER TEARS THROUGH THE ship, throwing me against Gideon. I don’t protest the arms around me—hell, my arms go around him too—because in this moment, I don’t care.
I don’t care about the Knave, I don’t care about his connection to the LaRoux family, I don’t care that I work alone and I don’t commit and I don’t fall in love and I don’t become attached. We’re standing on a ship that’s falling from the sky and if these are my last moments alive I’ll spend them with my arms around Gideon.
“Crash this ship and you die too,” Flynn breaks in, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of destruction all around us.
“Please.” Lilac’s lips curve to a faint smile. My skin crawls at the sight—it’d be easier, better, if she looked and acted nothing like herself. But I’ve seen that smile a dozen times in magazines and in HV interviews, and if it weren’t for the terrible darkness in her eyes, I’d think nothing was different. This is nothing like what I saw with my father, who lost everything of himself right before he walked into that barracks. This…thing, whatever it is, is still Lilac. And yet it isn’t. Lilac’s smile widens. “I’m tearing a ship apart without lifting a finger. You think the crash will kill me?”