This Shattered World
Page 83
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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.
The air shimmers before me, and I let myself close my eyes for just a second, pain creeping in at my temples. My whole body’s starting to protest, shoulders aching where the harness cut into them, gut still settling after our wild ride. I wait until the pain dims a couple of degrees.
Don’t trust what you see, Lilac LaRoux said. I dredge up the memory of the facility again. Then I open my eyes and there’s a chain-link fence a foot in front of me.
I jerk to a stop, and a second later Jubilee walks face-first into it. It clangs and rattles, shedding droplets of condensed fog in a glittering shower. We both freeze, waiting for a sound in the swamp behind us or a shout from within the compound. Seconds tick by, and as though we’ve turned a key, the rest of the fence slowly materializes, and a clump of prefab buildings behind it. The shimmering’s gone, and the air in front of us is clear.
“Son of a—” Jubilee swallows down her protest, lifting a hand to swipe the water from her face. “Stopped just in time, but you couldn’t warn me?” But her mouth’s quirking, and despite everything, I want to snicker.
I take a step back, trying to follow the perimeter of the fence in the darkness. “That tower—is it a security checkpoint?” I point to a low, squat blackness some distance away.
Jubilee shakes her head, eyes lifted. “It’s a communications tower—see the satellite dishes? But they’ll have an alarm system there too, and there are floodlights on every fence post. We go near that tower and get spotted, they’ll light this place up like a parade route and we’ll have nowhere to run.”
“I could try to make a hole up here, then, the way we do on your base to sneak in.”
Jubilee just rolls her eyes at me. She drops my hand and takes three steps back, staring up at the fence, which has to be at least four meters high. Then she runs at it, using her momentum to clamber to the top in seconds, swinging a leg over and leaning down to wink. “Hurry up, then. Need a hand?” Faced with a task she knows, she’s every inch the soldier, grinning and self-assured. I would have hated her for it such a short time ago, but now her smile’s familiar.
My grin matches hers as I climb up after her, and for a moment it’s like being with my friends when we were kids, seeing who could scale the highest spire of rock. We get only a few seconds to revel in our small victory. Then there’s a sharp whistle out in the fog, and my heart leaps. “That’s the alert,” I say, translating the Fianna’s signal for her. “They’ve found our boat.”
Jubilee’s smile vanishes, and once more we’re fighting for our lives. “Let’s go.”
The facility seems to be almost empty, at least from the outside. Once we see a figure in night vision goggles disappearing around the corner of a building, but though we crouch and wait, the guard doesn’t return.
Keeping to the shadows, we make for the nearest door to the main building, only to find it locked tight. If this were a normal facility it’d be print-coded with the latest security—but print-coding would leave a record of the people who’ve accessed the place. Instead the handles are the low-tech kind, requiring manual keys. I feel around the door frame, but we’re not lucky enough for someone to have stashed a key somewhere. Instead we’re forced to make our way along the wall, testing the windows until we find one that Jubilee’s able to pop open with a dull thunk of her elbow against the frame.
The small room we climb into is empty but for a few supply cabinets; we’ve entered through some kind of storeroom. When we slip out into the hallway, muddy footprints mark the floor, telling us people were here recently. Beyond the room is a series of hallways, but a faint trail of dirt shows which path is most traversed. Jubilee takes point down the corridor, and I move silently after her, ears straining for any sign of life. My heart’s beating too fast, and I can feel a corresponding pulse in my head. There’s no sign of the wisp; our guide, for better or for worse, is gone.
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.
The air shimmers before me, and I let myself close my eyes for just a second, pain creeping in at my temples. My whole body’s starting to protest, shoulders aching where the harness cut into them, gut still settling after our wild ride. I wait until the pain dims a couple of degrees.
Don’t trust what you see, Lilac LaRoux said. I dredge up the memory of the facility again. Then I open my eyes and there’s a chain-link fence a foot in front of me.
I jerk to a stop, and a second later Jubilee walks face-first into it. It clangs and rattles, shedding droplets of condensed fog in a glittering shower. We both freeze, waiting for a sound in the swamp behind us or a shout from within the compound. Seconds tick by, and as though we’ve turned a key, the rest of the fence slowly materializes, and a clump of prefab buildings behind it. The shimmering’s gone, and the air in front of us is clear.
“Son of a—” Jubilee swallows down her protest, lifting a hand to swipe the water from her face. “Stopped just in time, but you couldn’t warn me?” But her mouth’s quirking, and despite everything, I want to snicker.
I take a step back, trying to follow the perimeter of the fence in the darkness. “That tower—is it a security checkpoint?” I point to a low, squat blackness some distance away.
Jubilee shakes her head, eyes lifted. “It’s a communications tower—see the satellite dishes? But they’ll have an alarm system there too, and there are floodlights on every fence post. We go near that tower and get spotted, they’ll light this place up like a parade route and we’ll have nowhere to run.”
“I could try to make a hole up here, then, the way we do on your base to sneak in.”
Jubilee just rolls her eyes at me. She drops my hand and takes three steps back, staring up at the fence, which has to be at least four meters high. Then she runs at it, using her momentum to clamber to the top in seconds, swinging a leg over and leaning down to wink. “Hurry up, then. Need a hand?” Faced with a task she knows, she’s every inch the soldier, grinning and self-assured. I would have hated her for it such a short time ago, but now her smile’s familiar.
My grin matches hers as I climb up after her, and for a moment it’s like being with my friends when we were kids, seeing who could scale the highest spire of rock. We get only a few seconds to revel in our small victory. Then there’s a sharp whistle out in the fog, and my heart leaps. “That’s the alert,” I say, translating the Fianna’s signal for her. “They’ve found our boat.”
Jubilee’s smile vanishes, and once more we’re fighting for our lives. “Let’s go.”
The facility seems to be almost empty, at least from the outside. Once we see a figure in night vision goggles disappearing around the corner of a building, but though we crouch and wait, the guard doesn’t return.
Keeping to the shadows, we make for the nearest door to the main building, only to find it locked tight. If this were a normal facility it’d be print-coded with the latest security—but print-coding would leave a record of the people who’ve accessed the place. Instead the handles are the low-tech kind, requiring manual keys. I feel around the door frame, but we’re not lucky enough for someone to have stashed a key somewhere. Instead we’re forced to make our way along the wall, testing the windows until we find one that Jubilee’s able to pop open with a dull thunk of her elbow against the frame.
The small room we climb into is empty but for a few supply cabinets; we’ve entered through some kind of storeroom. When we slip out into the hallway, muddy footprints mark the floor, telling us people were here recently. Beyond the room is a series of hallways, but a faint trail of dirt shows which path is most traversed. Jubilee takes point down the corridor, and I move silently after her, ears straining for any sign of life. My heart’s beating too fast, and I can feel a corresponding pulse in my head. There’s no sign of the wisp; our guide, for better or for worse, is gone.
