This Shattered World (30 page)

Lilac grins, an expression I never would’ve expected from her. “Well said,” she says approvingly. “I see we’re all experts here at seeming to be what we’re not.”

Except me,
says a tiny, seething thread inside my mind.
I’m only exactly what I ever was.

I expect Merendsen to go into a detailed explanation, relaying what I told him. Instead, he cuts straight to the point.

“From everything Lee’s told me,” he tells the girl on the screen, “I think you were right.”

“Whispers?” Her face in the glow of her monitor is ghost-pale.

Merendsen nods. “And they’re getting stronger. People here are going mad, like the researchers in the station did, but much quicker.”

Lilac’s eyes close, the features so suited to laughter and frivolity now bearing signs of a deep, biting grief. “I knew it,” she murmurs. “I told you I could feel—”

“I believe you,” Tarver interrupts her, and though he doesn’t look back at us, I know he’s unwilling to share the whole story behind their cryptic conversation. “I’m not about to make that mistake again.”

Lilac’s eyes fly open then, refocusing on her screen. “Are your friends okay? Have they…Are you okay?” She’s addressing me and Flynn directly now. There’s such a shift in her voice, her compassion so clear, her expression transformed. Somehow she knows what we’re going through. But how? It’s her own father’s company; what could it have possibly done to her?

My voice tangles with uncertainty. “I—I’m not sure.”

Merendsen speaks up again. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll help them.”

“Tarver, you know you can’t stay there for long. I’ll try to find out what I can, but if what’s happening there is connected to the whispers, then your poking around will only draw the wrong kind of attention. They’re watching us constantly as it is; it’ll only get worse.”

Who’s watching?
Her father?
But their conversation is moving lightning quick, and I don’t have time to analyze that before they’re moving on.

“I know. I’ve only got two days here before I’m due off-world with the report. But Lee and Cormac are looking for a facility LRI might have here, somewhere out in no-man’s-land. It’s not the first time they’ve used another corporation’s territory in secret, so they’ve had practice burying the records.”

“Patron.” Lilac’s face is grim, her eyes glued to her monitor as though trying to read the minute details of Merendsen’s face.

He nods. “But this one would have been moved recently from one location to another, and that’s got to leave a paper trail somewhere. Can you look into that?”

“I’ll try to get into my father’s files. He’s changed his passwords, but I can…” She hesitates. “I’ll talk to the Knave.”

Merendsen grimaces. “Are you sure? We keep feeding him more information, trusting him with more of our secrets.”

Lilac shakes her head. “Come on, Tarver. He taught us how to protect ourselves, keep our lives private. Without him we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We have to trust him.”

Merendsen grumbles wordlessly, the sound approaching a growl, but he nods.

I clear my throat. “The Knave?” I can hear the dubiousness in my voice. It’s one thing to bring in Merendsen and to let him bring in his fiancée. But this is rapidly spiraling out of my control.

“The Knave of Hearts,” says Lilac. “A hacker based somewhere on Corinth. Don’t worry, Captain. He can be trusted.”

Merendsen’s eyes are still on the screen, and when he speaks his voice is soft. He misses her. “I’m sorry to bring you into it, Lilac. We may not be able to call again. It’s hard enough setting up a completely secure line under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t those.”

“I’ll get word through somehow,” she says confidently.

Hackers, socialites with hidden tech skills—it’s all too much. “This is ridiculous,” I burst out, earning stares from everyone. “Sir.” I shift my gaze to Merendsen. “I expected you to help me bring this up the chain of command. It’s what I should’ve done in the first place.” I can feel Flynn’s eyes on me.

“You can’t.” Lilac’s voice cracks whip-like from the speakers, stopping me cold.

“I appreciate you wanting to help, Miss LaRoux.” Speaking to her, this creature from a world entirely separate from mine, feels strange. “But if I take this to General Macintosh, he’ll have the power to actually do something.”

Lilac LaRoux doesn’t answer immediately. I half expect Merendsen to take over and fight this battle for her, but instead he waits, watching the girl on the screen. Finally, she tilts her head to one side and speaks. “The planet we crashed on, Captain, was not what the reports later said it was. By the time Tarver and I were rescued, we had discovered a mountain of evidence implicating my father’s company in a conspiracy that would have ruined him.”

My mouth goes dry, and I find myself looking for Flynn, who has finally pulled his gaze up off the floor. “So why not go public with it?”

“Because he destroyed it.”

“No one can destroy
all
the evidence of a conspiracy like that,” Flynn argues, and I know he’s thinking of the LaRoux Industries ident chip I found in the swamp.

“No, not the evidence—Mr. Cormac, he destroyed the
planet
.”

The silence pours in to follow her words. I can feel Flynn’s panic matching my own, a thickening of the air that makes it hard to breathe. My gaze pulls toward him, and I find him staring hollow-eyed at the screen. My heart squeezes, a low painful wrench.

“We let him bury it,” Lilac murmurs, closing her eyes. “We thought that…well, we thought the story ended there. We knew he’d taken whispers from the rift, but we didn’t think any were still alive until a few months ago.”

“Whispers?” I interject.

Merendsen shifts, clearing his throat in such a way that forestalls any answer to my question, and I realize he’s afraid to discuss it over the computer, despite their security measures. “It’s not your fault, Lilac,” he says quietly. “Now we know.”

“He can’t destroy Avon.” Flynn’s voice is hoarse, torn from his throat with an effort that makes his shoulders quiver. “There are people here. Not just colonists—soldiers, civilian personnel, corporation representatives. It’d be mass murder.”

But Lilac LaRoux is listening with a weary grief in the slope of her lips, the drawn brows. “You don’t know my father.”

I’m still struggling to digest what Lilac LaRoux has just told us. It means there’s nowhere to go. If we tip our hand, even if we start to win this secret struggle behind the war, the moment LaRoux begins to suspect he’s losing control of Avon, he could destroy it, and all the lives it harbors. Me. Commander Towers. Molly. Flynn.

We’re all alone.

“Your only hope is to find proof.” Lilac LaRoux is all business again, that grief tucked away where no one can see it. She’s far better than I ever was, Stone-faced Chase or no. “You find proof of what’s going on there, and you find a way to go public with it, tell everyone who will listen about what my father is doing—that’s your protection. He can’t destroy anything if the galaxy is watching.”

Then, eyes drifting away, no doubt searching for me in her picture, she raises her voice again. “Mr. Cormac, Captain, you’re not alone. You hear me? I’m going to help. Just hang in there.” Neither of us expected the daughter of Roderick LaRoux to care that people were dying on Avon, much less offer us help or compassion.

“And Captain—” Lilac’s still talking, pulling my attention back. “If my father’s experiments are involved, then you can’t trust anything. Trust Flynn, trust yourself, but trust what you feel, not what you see. They can do things—put pictures in your head, make you see things, hear things, that aren’t there. Trust what you feel.”

I take a step back, not knowing how to respond.
Trust what you feel.
I manage not to look at Flynn again, but I can feel his eyes on me.

Merendsen saves me having to reply. “We should get off the line, just in case.”

Lilac nods. “Of course.” No pleas to stay or coy demands that he spend more time talking to her. She’s calm, quiet, competent. For a wild moment I think she’d make a good soldier—and then I have to dismiss the thought for sheer ridiculousness. “I’ll see what I can get by tomorrow and send it your way.”

Merendsen exhales audibly, the sense of urgency fading. I can’t see his face, but I can tell he’s gazing at his fiancée on the screen, having run out of words.

Her eyes soften. “Be careful, Tarver,” she says simply. “Come back to me.”

“I promise.” He lifts a hand, fingertips brushing the screen—and after half a second, hers lifts as well. As though they’re reaching across the intervening light-years, palm to palm. I look away, not wanting to intrude on this intimacy. There’s silence for a few heartbeats, and then the light cuts out abruptly as the picture vanishes. I look up to see the words
SESSION TERMINATED
flashing along the bottom of the screen.

Merendsen leans back, inhaling briskly. It’s a few seconds before he turns, swiveling in the chair to look at me. “Well,” he says heavily. “That’s my girl. Still don’t understand why I want to marry her?”

I have to swallow to find my voice. “I was wrong, sir. I’m sorry.”

He grins at me. “She’s used to it. And so am I, now. Or at least I’m getting more used to it. It’s not easy listening to people dismiss her as a fashion-obsessed idiot, but it’s what’s best, and it keeps anyone from thinking she’s hiding anything.”

“What
is
she hiding?” Flynn speaks up, making me jump. For a moment I’d almost forgotten there was anyone else in the room besides Merendsen and the image of his fiancée on the screen.

Merendsen shakes his head. “It’s all a bit—I can’t tell you everything. You’re going to have to trust me on that. There are some things we can’t tell anyone. But I can tell you a little. Enough.”

We settle in, Merendsen in the computer chair, me on the top of my clothes trunk, Flynn on the end of the bed. Merendsen’s struggling, searching for a place to start. His fingers fumble with each other, a nervous gesture I’ve never seen from him before—not out in the field, not even when he got called up for his first medals and had to accept them in front of the entire company.

It hits me that we’re the first people he’s
ever
considered telling whatever it is he and Lilac LaRoux are hiding. Whatever was worth destroying an entire planet to conceal.

“Do you remember the crash of the
Icarus
eight months ago?”

Merendsen launches into the strangest story I’ve ever heard—a shipwreck with two survivors, a planet terraformed but with flora and fauna twisted, voices on the wind, visions everywhere. He tells it briefly, matter-of-fact and confident, but even so it’s difficult to believe. A planet terraformed in secret, no settlers, no record of it in the government’s permits. But he’s not done.

“We found creatures there. Beings. Different from anything we have here.”

“Here…on Avon?” Flynn’s sounding as dubious as I feel.

“Here in this universe.” Merendsen hesitates, then plows ahead. “LaRoux Industries opened a rift on that planet, a gateway between this dimension and another. Like the ones ships use to travel through hyperspace, but this one was permanently jammed open, and there were sentient creatures living there. LaRoux’s scientists pulled these beings through and trapped them.”

“Beings?” I can’t conceal my skepticism. He sounds like the rookies we get here on Avon, all too willing to believe the locals’ wild tales of wisps in the swamp.

Merendsen flashes me a grim smile. “You don’t know the half of it. I don’t know what they were, not really. Lilac and I called them the whispers.”

“Why do you think this has anything to do with Avon?” Flynn’s voice is taut. “There are too many people here—someone would have noticed if there were creatures on this planet.”

“Not if LaRoux were concealing them in a secret, moving facility,” Merendsen replies, raising an eyebrow at Flynn. “The whispers could do things we couldn’t begin to understand. They changed the planet we crashed on in the years they spent there. They sped up its plant growth, altered the animals originally seeded there.”

My eyes snap to Flynn, who stands suddenly stricken as he stares at my former captain. He and I only met because he was there that night in Molly’s, pumping soldiers for information about how the facility in the swamp might be connected with Avon’s stunted terraforming progress. The arguments that had sounded so insane to me at the time—his conspiracy theories that Avon’s owning corporations were slowing down its development on
purpose
—come rushing back in a flood that sends a chill down my spine.

The tang of sudden anger prompts me to lurch to my feet. “If you’re right, how can we hope to fight these things?”

Merendsen’s eyebrows shoot up. “Fight them? Lee, they’re not the enemy. They’re LaRoux’s victims as much as Avon’s citizens are. The whispers were never hostile toward us—in fact, they helped us. But they’re not like us, they don’t see us the way we see each other, as individuals, unique. They don’t really understand death. They’re all connected.” His eyes flick toward the window, avoiding mine.

I can sense him avoiding the truth, picking up on a dozen tiny clues: the way he won’t meet my gaze; the twitch of his hand as he stops himself from running it through his hair; the short, casual sentences that belie the importance of what he’s saying.

“Sir, what aren’t you telling us?”

He glances up, eyes falling first on me, then on Flynn. He’s silent for a time, then sits up straighter. “Something happened there that…changed us. Changed me, specifically.”

“An experience like that would change anyone.” Flynn’s voice is dry.

“I mean really changed,” says Merendsen quietly. “I can sense them sometimes—they’re a part of me still. Distant, and quiet, but there. And they’ve been getting louder.”

My body wants to shiver, to scan Merendsen’s features and try to find some evidence of what he’s telling us. I’m slow to sit back down, my anger on Avon’s behalf—on Flynn’s behalf—draining away. “What are you saying? That you’re not…you anymore?”