“Don’t move.” Jubilee’s sighting down her gun at Lilac, her every muscle tense, her body poised. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you take a single step.”
“No—Lee—” Tarver’s got one hand against the wall as he drags himself to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s still in there. Hold your fire.”
The barrel of the gun dips, an automatic response to what was clearly an order. “Dammit, sir…” She shifts her grip on the gun, torn, the instinct to obey him warring with the instinct to protect him.
“If you shoot my daughter,” Monsieur LaRoux says to Jubilee, cold—but visibly struggling for control—“I will personally see you executed.”
“It’s all right,” says the creature inside Lilac, smiling at Jubilee. “I was the first, I am the oldest, and now I am the last of my kind here. I don’t need to move to kill your captain.”
In the distance comes a great, low cry—like the moan of an immense beast, echoing through the ship. It isn’t until half a second later, when the floor shudders beneath us and Sofia and I go staggering back against the wall, that I realize what it was. The sound of immensely thick metal tearing like tissue paper.
Flynn rises to his feet unsteadily and steps up next to Jubilee, his movements slow. “We’ve met your kind before,” he says slowly, his voice soothing, calm—I can detect only the faintest hints of the terror that must be there, the same terror that’s making Sofia shake at my side. “We know what’s been done to you, and we mean you no harm. Please let us talk. You can clearly destroy us anytime you want to, but do that and we’ll never be able to talk to each other. You lose nothing by waiting, by hearing us out. Destroy us now and that door closes.”
He’s even better than he was in the Avon Broadcast—I’d surrender, given half a chance. But the Lilac creature just looks at him blankly, unaffected by his plea. “I was going to crush him,” she comments, glancing over at Tarver, leaning hard against the wall. “But this is far better. Let him die knowing he couldn’t save her. Let him die the way he should have died—falling in a tomb of twisted metal and fire.”
The words ring in the air, punctuated by the distant creaks and groans of whatever’s happening to the ship, and for a long moment I can’t understand what the creature means. Metal and fire…falling… Then, suddenly, my knees buckle. “You can’t—” My voice comes out hoarse with fear, choked with disuse.
Sofia reaches the same conclusion I do. “Oh God,” she whispers.
Lilac is going to bring down the Daedalus.
How the others back on the gray world fare, I will never know. Whether my kin on the other side of the rift can see me, sense me, I cannot tell. All I know is the blue-eyed man, and the link of hatred between us.
He talks to me often, of his wife, of his young daughter, of his work. He has begun work on a pair of ships that will use our universe to move even faster through theirs, and he delights in sharing with me all the successes in his life, certain they will cause me pain.
I wish I had brought his wife back to him, for then I could use her to free myself from this prison. Marked by our touch, she would be vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. I could take from him the thing he loves most all over again, and smile at him with her lips until his mind crumbles.
I could tell him that his new technology risks tearing a hole into our world. I could tell him that to toy with the fabric of the universe is to risk destruction. I could tell him his new ships are doomed.
But I have no mouth with which to speak. And I will wait.
ANOTHER SHUDDER TEARS THROUGH THE ship, throwing me against Gideon. I don’t protest the arms around me—hell, my arms go around him too—because in this moment, I don’t care.
I don’t care about the Knave, I don’t care about his connection to the LaRoux family, I don’t care that I work alone and I don’t commit and I don’t fall in love and I don’t become attached. We’re standing on a ship that’s falling from the sky and if these are my last moments alive I’ll spend them with my arms around Gideon.
“Crash this ship and you die too,” Flynn breaks in, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of destruction all around us.
“Please.” Lilac’s lips curve to a faint smile. My skin crawls at the sight—it’d be easier, better, if she looked and acted nothing like herself. But I’ve seen that smile a dozen times in magazines and in HV interviews, and if it weren’t for the terrible darkness in her eyes, I’d think nothing was different. This is nothing like what I saw with my father, who lost everything of himself right before he walked into that barracks. This…thing, whatever it is, is still Lilac. And yet it isn’t. Lilac’s smile widens. “I’m tearing a ship apart without lifting a finger. You think the crash will kill me?”
“Then think about the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people in the district below. They never did anything to you or your kind, and you’ll kill them all when this ship hits. Do that and you’re no better than LaRoux.”
Lilac’s smile widens a little, and she casts her glance to the side. I’d almost forgotten about LaRoux, that realization jolting through me—I’d almost forgotten about him. He’s still on his knees, where he’d been crouching after his daughter was shot. He looks up at her, face haggard and lined, the blue eyes seeming almost watery, weak, compared to the deepest black of Lilac’s gaze.
“True,” she replies, still looking at LaRoux, her expression a sick combination of loathing and love. “I am, I suppose, what my father made me.” She stoops a little so that she can lay a hand against LaRoux’s cheek, a tender gesture that makes me shudder. “But you are wrong, when you say I’m no better than he is.”
Flynn doesn’t answer, and I know why. He spent a lifetime surrounded by people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to logic, to compassion, to reason. He knows madness when he hears it.
Lilac waits, and when no reply comes, her smile drains away, leaving something full of steel and fire behind. “Roderick LaRoux is a creature who defines himself by power. And I…I am better than him in every way.”
The ship shudders again, in time with an explosion that makes my body seize, panic and adrenaline sweeping through and dimming the pain in my hand. Every muscle’s screaming at me to run. But run where? To get to the shuttles we’d have to go toward the sounds of destruction—if there even are shuttles anymore.
Lilac looks back down at her father and smiles. “Daddy,” she says softly. “You’ll come with me, right?”
Roderick LaRoux’s lips part, gazing up at the thing that isn’t really his daughter anymore—and, like a switch has been flipped, his face changes. The tension in his shoulders drains, his lips cracking into a tremulous smile. I see him will himself into believing it, with the same conviction that helped him believe the creature in the rift could never hurt his Lilac. “You forgive me,” he whispers. “For Simon, for the Icarus—you forgive me?”
The Lilac-thing reaches for his hand to draw him up to his feet. “You’re my father,” she says, kissing his cheek. “And I’m not done with you yet.”
LaRoux gapes at her for a long moment before a smile slides into place on his features—a deliberate sort of expression, as he chooses blindness over reality. “Oh, my darling.” LaRoux’s voice is muffled, and I’m half expecting his eyes to go black like Lilac’s—but they remain clear and blue. His own willingness to delude himself is all the control Lilac needs. “My heart. Yes. Let’s go.”