This Shattered World (41 page)

“That won’t be proof enough,” says Jubilee with a grimace. “They try to stop it, but head down below street level in Corinth and you can get anything on the black market. A raider ship could outfit themselves with old LRI ident chips with enough credits; LaRoux could easily say these were stolen, especially since they’re so antiquated.”

The man at my feet gives a tiny groan, and I glance at him before saying, “What about the computers? There has to be something incriminating there.”

“They’ll be encrypted, for sure.” Jubilee turns back to me, drawn by the signs that the scientist is coming to. “Unless we have someone with the password.”

At my feet, the white-coated man moans again, rolling over onto his back and lifting one hand to claw at the air, as though he can grab something and pull himself closer to consciousness. Jubilee’s at my side so fast I barely see her move, but I reach for her shoulder before she can grab him. “Let me,” I murmur, and she scowls her acquiescence, muttering under her breath. The guy on the floor flinches at her tone and opens his eyes.

I look down at him. “Took a fall there, friend. What’s your name?”

“Carmody.” He’s still confused. “Dr. Terrence Carmody. Who are you?”

“I’m the one who wants to talk to you,” I say quietly. “She’s the one who wants to break your legs. Let’s start with the talking.” I keep my eyes on his, gazes locked. Now that the adrenaline of breaking into the facility is starting to recede, my body feels leaden. I focus, reaching down inside to pull up a version of me I barely remember. Confident, imposing myself on others by sheer will. I can do this.

“We know what you’re doing here,” I start, and panic flickers across his face. “You’re going to tell us everything about LaRoux Industries, and where you’re hiding the creatures he’s using.”

“Please,” the man gasps, stuttering. “I-I’m just a researcher. I don’t know anything, I swear.”

“Your password, then,” Jubilee interrupts, her voice quick with tension. “For the computers.”

The man swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing frantically. “I’m only cleared for this level—I’ll give it to you, but it’s just climate data, it’s only what you see here. I don’t know what you’re talking about, with LaRoux Industries.” He looks too terrified to be lying.

I meet Jubilee’s eyes; I can tell from the tension in her gaze that she believes him too. But even if he doesn’t know about the whispers, maybe he can still help us find proof of LaRoux Industries’ involvement here.

I open my mouth to press him for more, but I’m cut off by a long, low blast of sound from speakers set up in the ceiling. The blood rushes in my ears, every ounce of adrenaline flooding back in and leaving a metallic taste in my mouth. The alarm is followed by a man’s voice, quick and urgent.

“Attention all nonessential personnel: facility security has been compromised. Repeat: facility security has been compromised.”

The girl is home again, in a shop, in a city called November, on a planet named Verona. Her mother is calling her and her father is washing his hands and his arms in the kitchen sink. The girl runs to her cave, the nest she’s built under the shop’s counter, and folds herself inside.

The green-eyed boy is there, somehow, though the space is only big enough for the girl. “You keep coming back here,” he whispers, a terrible sadness in his voice. “After all these years.”

“I was safe here,” the girl whispers back.

“What’s the real reason?” asks the boy, and when he looks at her, she knows she can’t lie.

“Here,” says the girl, “I’m not alone.”

The boy takes her hand, and the girl notices the way their fingers interlock, as if they were meant to fit that way. “I thought you were supposed to be brave.”

“I’m not brave enough to die alone.”

I GESTURE AT THE RESEARCHER
, warning him to be silent without a word, but he’s too busy trying to cram himself in under one of the consoles, as though that might hide him from whatever punishment we have in mind for failing to help us. I inch toward the door and press my ear to it—I can’t hear anything, no sounds of rushing security guards, nothing that sounds like a response to the alarm, which has gone silent again now. It’s as though the place is abandoned.

A whispering rises all around me, as though I’m standing in a windstorm—but the air is utterly still. And I know what it is. Swallowing the metallic taste of blood in my mouth, I only have time for a glance down at my hands, searching for the palsied shakes that I know are coming. Except my hands are steady, but for the faint tremor of panic.

Before I can process what’s happening, a groan from behind me shatters my heart.
Oh God, no.

I whirl to find Flynn leaning with one hand braced against the console, his face white, gaze fixed on the floor. “Jubilee—” He gasps my name as though it’s with his last breath.

I throw myself back, reaching for Flynn, as though his touch might banish the sudden razor-edge of fear slicing down my spine. “Talk to me!”

But he can’t answer; he sags back against the wall, and for an instant his head lifts enough for me to see his gaze, his dilated eyes, the terror as he fights the thing that’s happening to him.

“No—no, I can’t—” My heart snaps, and with it the fear holding me hostage, and I stagger half a step toward him.

It was supposed to be me.

I swallow my fear. “We’re getting out of here, now.” Whispers be damned—Avon’s fate be damned. I cannot watch Flynn’s soul, his heart, vanish in front of me.

“Actually, you’re not.” I’d almost forgotten the researcher—Dr. Carmody—cowering on the floor. I turn to snap at him, and freeze.

He’s got a weapon aimed at me; he must have had it hidden underneath the console. I should have been watching, I should have tied him up. I should have had Flynn…I choke, unable to focus on the man’s gun. All I can see is Flynn, half-curled against the console, trying to fight the whispers.

“Fine!” I snap at Carmody, lifting my hands. “Arrest me, shoot me, I don’t care. Just let me help him—” I take a step toward Flynn, but Carmody thumbs the switch on the side of the gun. Its whine as it charges rings in my ears, and I stop again.

“You can’t help him,” replies Carmody, sparing only a glance for Flynn before pinning his gaze back on me. “He’s already gone.”

I open my mouth, trying to find words to deny what he’s said. But before I can, Flynn’s moving. He’s quick, so quick my eyes can barely follow him. He slips behind Carmody, grabbing his arm and jerking it up. The gun fires; not a Gleidel, this one leaves a smoking hole in the ceiling and sends plastene shards raining down onto the floor. Before I can take a step to help him, Flynn’s other hand wraps around the back of Carmody’s neck and slams his head down into the console with a sickening crack. He doesn’t pause, but slams the researcher down again, and again, and again, until blood coats the controls and I cry out, still rooted to the spot.

Flynn, only his profile visible to me, releases the dead man and lets the body slump to the floor.

It’s all happened in the space of a few heartbeats, so quickly I haven’t drawn breath. Spots swimming in front of my eyes, I gasp for air. “F-Flynn?”

It takes an eternity for him to turn around, in which I imagine him a thousand times with his usual smile, his cocky air, the depth of his green eyes. He’ll be standing there as though nothing has changed; he’ll tell me he learned self-defense from me; he’ll turn around and look at me and he’ll be whole.

But instead he stands a few feet away, his face empty, the green eyes seared into my memory gone. In their place is nothing more than black glass, reflecting my own face back at me.

“No,” he says in a calm, collected voice. There are flecks of Carmody’s blood on his neck and chin. “Not anymore.”

I stand there, unable to move, unable to breathe as he stoops, collecting the gun from Carmody’s lax hand. He inspects it, not bothering to keep an eye on me. When he looks up, there’s nothing in his face but blank serenity.

“It was supposed to be me,” I whisper.

“We need you,” says the thing in Flynn’s mind. “We feel you are the better choice.”

My legs tremble—with anger, with fear, with exhaustion—and I reach out for the wall for support. “What does LaRoux want with me?”

The Flynn-thing regards me flatly. “You are speaking of the one who binds us?” His head tilts slowly to one side, in a mockery of thoughtful interest, until it stops at an odd, unnatural angle. “We are not acting under his orders anymore.”

My throat tangles with a brief, insane flicker of hope at those words—but then my heart plummets as the barrel of the gun swings over to point at me.

“We are not acting under
anyone’s
orders anymore. We have seen what humanity is: beyond salvage.” There’s no violence, no hatred in his voice; the calm there is more terrifying than if he came at me screaming and spewing threats. He gestures with the gun toward the door, nudging Carmody’s body aside with one foot to clear his path. “And you will be the one to set us free.”

My hand closes on empty space as it reaches automatically for the gun that isn’t there anymore. I take a step back toward the door, not taking my eyes off of Flynn. Off of what used to be Flynn.

Don’t think, don’t crumble. Just keep moving.

“You don’t understand,” I say as his eyes follow me. “We want to stop LaRoux too. We’re not like him.”

“You are all like him.”

I grasp for the handle behind me, but don’t turn it yet. The creature keeps his distance, too smart to come close enough for me to think about wresting the gun from him. Flynn, I could probably disarm and disable. But after seeing what he did to Carmody…No human can move that fast.

“Lilac said you helped them,” I murmur, shooting a quick glance at the hallway through the window in the door. It’s empty, as it was before.

Flynn’s blank expression doesn’t shift. “We know this one you speak of. She was with us in the darkness for a time.”

With us?
But I seize on that recognition, speaking quickly, trying to moderate my voice the way Flynn would. If only he were here, with his passion and his diplomacy; I’m only good for fighting. “Then you know her. You know she’s not like her father. Neither am I—neither is Flynn.” My voice chokes on his name.

“All patterns of data contain anomalies.” Flynn halts, though the gun doesn’t move. “Continue walking.”

I ignore his order. “Why lead us here?” I think of the light in the swamp, the green glow that looked so much like the November ghost in my dimmest memories. “Why not just force the scientists, force LaRoux, to let you go?”

“Our keeper never comes near enough for us to take him. These others, he has operated upon and made it difficult for us to inhabit their minds with any precision.” Flynn nudges Carmody’s body again, this time to roll him over onto his stomach. Beneath the mess of blood and hair, just below his ear, is a tiny scar, too straight and precise to have been from an accident.

I swallow down my nausea, jerking my eyes away from the bits of skull protruding from Carmody’s head.

He doesn’t flinch. “Before we were brought here, we existed as pieces of a single entity, part of one mind. Our keeper has learned that to be sundered from each other is the worst kind of agony we can know. When we displease him, he puts us into the dark place.” The whisper’s face, Flynn’s face, shows me nothing. No fear, no hatred, not even the flicker of remembered pain. “He will not do so again after we are free.”

It’s getting harder to breathe, my chest tightening with a kind of panic I haven’t felt in years, not since my first time in combat. No way out. No way through. I close my eyes for half a breath, focusing on the air moving through my lungs.

“Why should I help you?” I have to fight to speak my next words. “You’ve taken away the one thing I had left. You’ve taken him—”

“Because he is still in here. Because if you set us free, we will return him to you. And we will save you, and this planet, for last.”

My heart starts again with a lurch that makes my eyes water. But the rest of the creature’s words ring in my ears. “What do you mean, ‘save us for last’?” I whisper. “What will you do when you’re free?”

“We will start with our keeper,” the whisper replies, dead-eyed and soft. “We will give him the same pain he has given us. We will take his family from him, and all he knows, and every soul who has ever touched him. And then we will spread this death, as your kind has spread, and we shall make him the last of your species. And then, once he has realized the thing he has done—then we will leave him, howling, in the dark.”

My eyes blur, stinging with tears of horror and grief. “No,” I whisper. My voice shakes, but behind the tremor there’s iron, and I can feel its strength as I straighten. “No, I won’t help you. Shoot me if you want, but I’m not setting you monsters free.”

Flynn merely looks at me, mouth lax, eyes empty. He looks like a mannequin, like a doll of himself, and my heart tries to claw its way out of my chest. “All right,” he says calmly.

And turns the gun on himself, pressing the barrel to the underside of his chin.