“Lilac?” Tarver’s voice is urgent, and I can see him swallowing—he’s got the same taste in his mouth that I do, a thick, metallic tang like blood, or electricity. “Are you—”
“Fine,” she gasps, hands curling around his sleeves as she gets her feet under herself again. “It’s them. I can feel them, trying to…It’s okay. I’m okay now, it’s under control.”
“But the rift’s not here.” Tarver’s speaking low and fast, his eyes scanning Lilac’s looking for—what, I don’t know.
“It’s nowhere on the ship,” I say quietly, though I don’t know why I want to offer them any comfort at all. “I just finished searching for the energy signature when you arrived. Nothing. We thought he’d moved it up here, or that he had a second one—we were wrong.”
“I’m fine,” Lilac murmurs, lifting her head to smile at Tarver. “Truly. I just lost my concentration for a second.”
“I know what that felt like.” Sofia’s voice cuts through Lilac’s like laser fire through silk. She’s gripping her purse, white-knuckled, her face pinched. “Those voices, that metallic taste—that’s the Fury.”
“Not exactly, Sof,” Flynn says, laying a hand on her arm. “Lilac’s…she’s the reason we’re here.”
“There’s a rift here,” Lilac says softly. “Somewhere nearby. I can feel it.”
“Look,” says Tarver, letting his breath out in a rush. “We don’t have time to explain why, but Lilac’s connected to these rifts, and we know the last one is somewhere nearby or on Corinth.”
“Connected,” Sofia echoes, and I can see that word isn’t making him any friends.
Tarver nods slowly. “I can’t go into why or how, but we’ve got to find the last rift and shut it down to save her.”
Sofia’s eyes flick from his face to Lilac’s and back. “She’s a LaRoux.”
“Yes,” Flynn replies gently, still at Sofia’s side. “And she’s the reason your planet is free now. She’s the reason you’re not a smear on some prefab wall after a soldier’s Fury took over. You need to stop and listen, Sof.”
“It’s true,” I say softly, grudgingly. “Both of them helped Flynn Cormac and Lee Chase free Avon. I know. I was watching.”
She opens her mouth to speak. But before she can, another voice cuts through the stillness as a man strolls along the gantry above us, coming to a halt at the top of the staircase.
“Darling,” says Monsieur LaRoux, voice mild and eyes keen. “I was wondering where you got to.”
The blue-eyed man comes and pulls us from the others, brings us to a new world. The final world, he says. We glimpse only the briefest flash of it, of people so numerous even we struggle to see them all. Buildings that reach for the sky, noise and light and chaos all folding together into a greater pattern.
But we are not permitted to explore it. We are kept finite. We are locked away.
We…
I.
I am alone here.
Alone…but for the blue-eyed man.
MONSIEUR LAROUX, CLAD IN AN impeccable tuxedo and tails, strolls down the stairs with his hands in his pockets. His blue eyes sweep across the four of us, coming to rest, finally, on Lilac, closest to him where she stands just behind Tarver. “They’re almost ready for your speech, darling,” he says, lips curving to a faint smile, as casual as though he hadn’t just walked into a roomful of tension he could cut with a knife. “I wondered what might have caught your interest. I can’t say there’s much here in the engine bays that would generally be considered an attraction.”
I can’t think, can’t react. There’s no security field here, no guards—all I have to do is reach into my purse, grab the gun, pull the trigger. My mind is screaming the order at my fingers, but I can’t move.
Lilac’s the one who breaks the stunned silence. “Where’s the rift? Where are the whispers?”
“Darling.” He pulls a little face, otherwise unruffled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it’ll have to wait, or we’ll be late.”
Tarver’s voice is steel. “Everybody here knows what we’re talking about. Answer the question. Where’s the last rift?”
Monsieur LaRoux fixes him with a far less affectionate gaze. “Whisper? Rift? Where have you been getting these stories from?”
“From me,” says Lilac, through clenched teeth.
“It’s on Corinth, isn’t it?” Gideon’s voice is chilly, but at least he’s able to speak. I’m still frozen, unmoving. “It never left LRI Headquarters.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” LaRoux replies. “But if you’re talking about something as large as one of these hyperspace engines, it wouldn’t make much sense to try to move it, would it?”
Lilac’s voice sounds nothing like his—she’s shaking. “If you had any idea what it’s doing to me…”
He dismisses her with a quick shake of his head. “There’s simply no conceivable way any hypothetical creature, in a hypothetical rift, could reach you from LaRoux Headquarters, darling. We’re in orbit—we’re much too far away.”
“It could reach her from halfway across the galaxy, you asshole,” Tarver snarls, hands curling to fists by his sides. “You have to cut them off, send them back.”
“My boy,” says LaRoux, reaching up to adjust a mechanism against his ear—some sort of communication device, perhaps. “As much as I’d like to oblige you, there’s too much riding on the next few days for me to sit here discussing all of it with you. Lilac, come along.” He half turns, gesturing for the staircase as though expecting Lilac to fall obediently into step.
“No,” Lilac says in a low, tight voice. “Not this time, Father. I can’t keep going like this. We know about your experiments, about Avon, about the whispers, the rifts—all of it. And you know we know. We can’t keep skimming over it, pretending we’re a happy family. You’re—you’re destroying me with this.”
LaRoux’s calm exterior tightens a little. “You’re fine,” he insists. “And even if this—this rift as you call it—is affecting you, there are far better ways to prevent that than destroying my life’s work.” He reaches up, touching the device over his ear with a smile. It’s the same thing I saw the men at his headquarters clipping into place as they prepared to use the rift on me.
Realization dashes over me like an icy blast. “Of course,” I whisper, my anger making my hands shake. “You’d never create a weapon that could be used against yourself. You’ve got a way to make yourself immune.”
“Clever girl,” LaRoux replies, pretense falling away. And though the words are a compliment, his tone is hard. “Now, are we done here? They should be passing around the champagne for our toasts even as we speak.”
“You had a cure.” My voice comes out thin and strained, and I have to blink hard to clear my eyes of the furious tears blurring them. “You had a cure that could’ve saved everyone on Avon.”
LaRoux’s brows lift. “I am sorry for those deaths, truly. But one must always be willing to make sacrifices in the pursuit of progress. If it brings you any comfort, think how much their lives mean now—how much their deaths mean. They would’ve toiled in obscurity in their small, pointless lives on a small, pointless planet—now they’re a part of something much greater than themselves.” The glint in his eye frightens me far more than the words themselves do—he believes what he’s saying, believes it with every fiber of his being.