“Son of a…” It’s a girl’s voice, rough and irritated. Her boots are visible as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, and then she’s in view. She’s tall, with dark skin and eyes, only a few years older than me.
She’s in a security uniform, and though her stance is casual, her right arm is just inches from a holster on her thigh containing some sort of weapon. It’s not an LRI uniform—she’s one of the security officers with the visiting planetary delegations. The very ambassadors we came here to protect. Or at least, that Gideon came here to protect. She turns before I can see the crest on her jacket, looking back at the stairs, where her companion must still be.
“It’s not here,” she calls over her shoulder. “There’s nothing. You’d better call them and say it’s safe for her to come down here. They need to see this.”
My mind’s racing, confusion tangling with excuses. Is she here for the rift? For the engine? Will that matter, if she hauls us out from underneath the console? Already my instincts are kicking in, stringing together a story. My hair is mussed, Gideon’s askew. I can say we snuck away from the party. I can say engines do it for me, and I wanted an adventure in engineering.
“Done, I just buzzed him.” The guy up on the stairs speaks, and his voice goes straight through me, electrifying. I know that voice. Instantly, it summons a pair of laughing green eyes, a tumble of dark curls. That voice is home.
My body takes over without even an instant for me to think better of it, and I go scrambling out from underneath the console, tangled for a moment in my dress, bursting to my feet. “Flynn!”
He’s standing on the staircase, his mouth open, still as a statue—in his black suit, he couldn’t be further from the boy I grew up with, but at the same time, nothing about him has changed at all.
A click to my left snaps me out of it, and I realize the girl beside me has drawn her weapon.
That sound jerks Flynn out of his shock and sends him scrambling down the stairs. “No, no, don’t touch her!” He opens his arms and I throw myself into them, closing my eyes as he wraps me up tight. To my horror, I feel my eyes starting to burn with tears. This is what trust feels like—I’d thought I’d begun to find it with Gideon, but now that bond, battered and broken by his lies and mine, pales in comparison to this.
The girl speaks again, her tone dry. “I guess you’re sure, then.”
“I’m sure, a ghrá,” he tells her as he releases me. “This is Sofia. She’s the one who hid me, in town, when…” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She knows. I can see it in her eyes—who I am, my place in their story on Avon. My father.
“I had no idea you were here with the Avon delegation,” I say, fully aware that I’m babbling. “Oh God, Flynn, I can’t believe—you have no idea how much I—” I ease away from him to see the girl standing and watching the pair of us. Gideon’s crawled out from under the console—he doesn’t look pleased to see me in Flynn’s arms. Whereas Flynn’s girlfriend doesn’t look even remotely threatened.
Because that’s who she is. Though I left Avon before we had an official flag, I recognize the crest on her jacket: a Celtic knot around a single star. And now that I have context—not to mention Flynn beside me calling her my love—I recognize who she is. Captain Lee Chase, scourge of Avon. Protector of Avon, if you listen to Flynn’s version of it.
Flynn’s shaking his head. “I thought they were taking you to Paradisa. What the hell are you doing here?”
My breath tangles in my throat. I’m here to end Roderick LaRoux, my thoughts scream. But Flynn’s never been one for violence, and Gideon would try to stop me if he knew I still wanted LaRoux dead. So I swallow the tangle of emotions and say, instead, “I’m guessing we’re here for the same reason you are.”
Flynn’s gaze flickers over toward Gideon, brows lifting. “Who’s your friend?”
To anyone else, the rapid subject change would be a non sequitur. But I know why Flynn’s asking. “Someone with reason to believe the Avon Broadcast was true,” I say carefully.
“You trust him?” Flynn’s eyes go back to meet mine.
I have no answer for him. No, I don’t trust him. No, he’s the monster who terrorized me for the last year. No, and you can shove him out the nearest airlock. No, but he’s my only ally.
“We’re here together,” Gideon says, when my continued silence begins to stretch uncomfortably.
“We had reason to think LaRoux was planning something tonight for the gala.” I brush past the issue of trust, trying to ignore the way Flynn’s eyebrows shoot up at the word together. I glance at the girl—Chase—who’s still looking wary, though her hand’s no longer hovering over her gun. “Something to do with…uh…”
“With the rift.” Flynn finishes the sentence for me, earning him a sharp look from Jubilee and a startled one from Gideon. “Might as well acknowledge the elephant in the room. Or not in the room, as the case may be.” He tips his head toward the empty spot where the hyperspace engine—or the rift—would have been.
“If you’re from Avon,” says Chase, stepping toward us, “then you’ll understand. We have to make sure what happened there doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
Flynn puffs out a breath. “Look, in a minute, the rest of our team will be here. I sent them a signal when we found the rift was missing. And you’re going to have a hard time believing this, but—”
He trails off. He can see from our faces that we’re looking past him now, taking in the staircase. At its head stands Tarver Merendsen in his impeccable evening suit, and beside him Lilac LaRoux, in all her perfectly coiffed glory.
How is this possible? I can feel my pulse pounding at my temple. The rest of our team, Flynn said, but this is Roderick LaRoux’s family, standing and staring down at us.
How could these four people be in this place? And together?
And then I find myself remembering Gideon’s words back when we first met: that he was certain the Icarus survivors had encountered the same creatures that had terrorized Avon last year—whispers, Flynn called them in his broadcast.
I’m still gaping up at them, every last play from my hard-earned book emptying out of my head, when I realize Lilac LaRoux is staring straight past me. I glance over my shoulder to find Gideon standing there. My heart kicks up another impossible notch as I see his face. Grave, unsmiling, rigid; and when I look back again, Lilac LaRoux’s face has gone absolutely white.
Her mouth opens, lips working the shape of a word I can’t identify. It takes her long seconds to put breath enough behind it to speak, and when she does, it’s in a thin, frightened whisper.
“Simon?”
Our keeper’s daughter; the green-eyed boy of the gray world; the girl whose father will die and leave her broken; the poet with steel and beauty in his soul; the orphan whose dreams hold such hope…
They will all soon shatter because of the man with the blue eyes, and when they do, we shall see what they become. For if they fall as we are falling, we will turn away from this universe forever and leave it to its darkness.