The cameraman is speechless—and so are we, all of us gathered around the glow of the palm pad. When I look up I see only a ring of pale faces.
“That’s not everything,” Lilac says, her eyes on her father. “Tell them, Daddy—go on, tell them.”
LaRoux gives her hand on his arm a pat, smiling. “It may not be the appropriate time for such an announcement, but—it is my intention to share the plans for this device with all planetary delegations. For free. No catches, no favors owed. It’s my belief that sharing this free, limitless power with the galaxy will remove the need for rebellions. All people, whether colonist, citizen, or rebel, will have access to computers, to schools, to hospitals. Terraforming efforts will proceed with unprecedented speed, reducing the period of time before new planets become self-sustaining, self-governing. With education, medicine, and the free exchange of ideas, I am confident we can all finally find peace.”
The camera swings back toward the rift machinery as LaRoux’s people continue moving it, then freezes. A little bar pops up along the bottom of the projection, telling us it’s buffering—then goes gray, showing a dropped connection. The hypernet’s out again.
Silence. Only the distant sirens, and the minute noises of Kumiko’s people in the next room, tell me I haven’t gone deaf.
It takes a seeming eternity before someone—Gideon—moves. He leans forward, reaching for the palm pad, whose image is still frozen on the rift. He zooms in on the picture with a flick of his fingers, and though he can’t make it any less grainy, it’s obvious to everyone what he saw. One of the people helping to move the rift has her head turned just enough that we can see her eyes—empty, black, like starless night.
I find myself shivering and wrap my arms close against my body like I might be able to somehow comfort myself. LaRoux couldn’t have had this go any better for him if he’d planned it. No doubt he planned on trying to send out the rift technology to other planets after the summit—now he can capitalize on the disaster to make it look like a mercy mission. No one will blame him for the crash of the Daedalus if they believe he’s bringing clean, renewable energy to every corner of the galaxy. If they think he’s single-handedly repairing the galaxy, they’ll sing his praises as a hero and remember the Daedalus as the tragic catalyst toward a golden age.
Except that we know what the rift really is. Those black eyes stare at us from the woman’s grainy face on the palm pad footage.
He couldn’t have planned it better.…
The breath goes out of me in a gasp so harsh my throat aches, and I feel all the eyes in the room swing toward me. “One week,” I manage, looking up until I find Gideon’s face. “When we first found this rift at LaRoux Industries, we heard them say they had one week to get it working properly. We thought that they were talking about the Daedalus gala, that he’d planned something for tonight.”
Gideon’s face is going white—whiter—as I speak. He lifts a shaking hand to pass it over his features. “It was never the gala. It was the summit talks all along. He couldn’t have planned the crash, but this…He wanted the rift for the summit.”
“If he gathers what’s left of the planetary leaders,” Flynn says slowly, “and gives them blueprints to construct what they believe are sources of infinite clean energy…”
“Then in a matter of weeks, there will be rifts on all the planets.” Jubilee finishes when Flynn’s voice peters out. “And he’ll be able to control every single person in the galaxy. Like he practiced on Avon. Like he’s been perfecting here on Corinth.” For once, she doesn’t look like the ultimate soldier we all feared so much on Avon—she doesn’t look like the Stone-faced Chase who led the fastest, deadliest squads on the base. She just looks terrified.
I swallow the sour fear threatening to choke me. “And that’s how he’ll stop the rebellions.”
“But why is the whisper controlling Lilac helping him?” Jubilee asks, brows drawn in. “He’s only ever used its kind for his own ends.”
Tarver swallows and then speaks, his voice hoarse. “Lilac said she could feel this last whisper in the rift—that it was angry, twisted by the years of torture. If it wants revenge, not just on LaRoux but on all of us…then having access to rifts across the galaxy would only suit its purposes, extending its reach so that humanity has nowhere to hide.”
“LaRoux and the whisper, they want the same thing,” Flynn murmurs. “It’s just a question of who’s in charge when those rifts are turned on.”
The holographic woman’s blank, black eyes dominate the room, larger than life in the palm-pad projection. Peace, said LaRoux. As though peace is simply the absence of conflict. As though it’s something that could be imposed, forced, upon every mind in the galaxy. As though choice is a flame to be extinguished with a smothering blanket.
The scrape of a chair on cement jolts us from our own individual pits of fear; I look up to find Tarver on his feet for the first time since the crash.
“We’ll stop him,” he says quietly. “We’ll go to the summit, expose his plans, and stop them both.”
The boy who lost his brother to the blue-eyed man’s jealousy is older now, too. He comes alive in our world more than in his own, seeking connections throughout their hypernet. His grief is not so very different from that of our keeper’s daughter, and yet they do not seek each other out to share this pain.
Instead he dives deeper into the web of data and information streams, and she pulls back, to skim the surface of the world. He stays low, in the darkness and shadow, leaving no trace of himself where he’s been; she lights up the world, seen by all and known by none.
They are both so alone.
THE UPPER CITY IS ALL but abandoned, even after dawn starts creeping up the streets between the buildings. The sun seems to rise more gradually than usual, filtered through Corinth’s smog and the smoke above us now, not purified by Sofia’s smartglass windows. Slowly, it’s oozing down the streets and turning the white stone ruins of the huge mall before us a pale gold, and with the faraway sirens finally silent, there’s a sense these buildings fell centuries ago, not just last night.
Some seem utterly fine, unaffected—others have suffered structural damage even this far out from the crash site. Everyone who can evacuate already has. It’s like walking through the set from a disaster movie, the postapocalyptic landscape of a city after a volcanic eruption has covered the world in ashes. There are surprisingly few bodies—Jubilee’s the one who explains to me in a whisper that they’ll be mostly inside the buildings, buried under debris. There’s an eerie beauty to it, a sense of waiting, as though the people will step out from behind the cardboard sets any moment—like visiting a school after hours or breaking into an amusement park during its off-season.
Except, of course, the only people we see are still, never to move again, or they’re the whisper’s husks—and we only see those from a distance. But all of them are heading in the same direction: toward the wreck of the Daedalus, and the rift.
The LaRoux estate occupies an area covering at least ten city blocks, and even after catching a ride with some of Kumiko’s soldiers, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Thankfully they had the spare supplies to outfit us—otherwise we’d all be trying to infiltrate the LaRoux estate in battered formalwear. As it is, seeing Sofia clad in black cargo pants and a military-style vest and boots is strange enough to do my head in.