I swing the flashlight around, my hand shaking—and my heart sinks.
Half the storefronts here are gone, piles of brick and stone and broken glass in their place. The few neon signs still visible are smashed to pieces—even if there were electricity, none of them would be shining now. I let the flashlight’s beam fall, my gaze following. The marble floor’s been shattered, the dust disturbed by showers of debris from high above that must’ve been dislodged when the Daedalus hit a few blocks away. I can’t even see where our footprints had been, the patterns we made while I taught him to dance.
I step back and scan the flashlight along the wall until I see the tangle of blankets where we slept. It’s all still there, as though Gideon left in a hurry after I ran from this place. The footprints are long gone, but I can still see the shape of us in the blankets, two bodies curled against each other, like interlocking commas—like yin and yang pendants. The cheap plastic kind that always break.
“Hey, Dimples.”
The voice shatters the silence and sends me stumbling backward with a gasp, flashlight swinging wildly until I can see who’s there—even though I already know, even though part of me isn’t even surprised. The night before battle, the calm before the storm—where else would we come, but the last safe place we knew?
Gideon’s got his hands in his pockets, leaning against the doorframe, head down so that when the flashlight beam falls on his face, it doesn’t blind him—and it also means I can’t read his expression. How well he knows me. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back here.”
I’m still trying to catch my breath, to coax my heart back down out of my throat—adrenaline sings through my muscles, keeping them tense. “T-Tarver?”
“He’s fine.” Gideon glances up for a moment, blinking in the light. His eyes are bloodshot—he looks exhausted. “Well, not fine. But he’s not hurt. He’s asleep, or at least resting, few blocks from here. Everyone else?”
“Same.” I can breathe again, but my heart’s still thumping, its pounding in my ears keeping time to the distant wail of a siren “Are you hurt?”
“Just tired.” I can hear it in his voice—the exhaustion, that he’s hanging on by his fingertips. He tries to hide it, but the glimpse I catch is enough to make me want to throw down my flashlight and go to his side.
Instead I tighten my grip on it and fix my eyes on the wall beside him. I can’t sit here and make small talk with him like everything’s fine, like we’re meeting for coffee somewhere and chatting about our days. “The reprogramming of the rift, can you do it?”
“I’m close,” he replies. “I’ll get there. The code is beautiful, so complex. I’ve never seen anything like it. If you separate it out from its purpose, just look at what they’ve made, it’s…it’s art.”
“But you can’t separate it out,” I point out, my voice hard in my ears. “It’s not just art, Gideon, it’s not some puzzle you have to solve to prove the Knave’s the best at what he does.”
“I know.”
And his voice is so small, so tired, that I relent—or perhaps it’s just that if we fight about this, I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. “Gideon, why are you here?”
“It’s good to be somewhere familiar, even if it’s just for a few minutes.” His answer is so low, I barely catch it. “Somewhere with a good memory attached to it, something I want to think about. I needed it, tonight. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Tonight. Quite possibly our last night in the universe as we know it, is what he means. Quite probably our last night. I fight to ignore my thumping heartbeat, try to harden my thoughts again. We’re not on the same side. If he does this, he risks losing himself to madness, and he risks cutting us off from hyperspace forever—and I’m not sure which one scares me more. I can’t answer, not with my throat this tight. And even if I could, I’m not sure I could listen to myself speak the truth: I needed it too.
The silence stretches for a few seconds, and then Gideon’s hands come out of his pockets and he pushes away from the wall. “Sofia—” he starts, taking a step toward me.
I’m moving before I have time to think, dropping the flashlight and reaching for the gun tucked into my waistband. He stops moving when he sees it; the flashlight’s beam comes to rest against the wall, reflecting just enough light that I can see his face. The confusion there, as he halts a few steps away from me.
“Stop.” My voice is a lot stronger than I thought it would be. “You made your choice. You’re with Tarver. I’m with the others. We want different things.” Don’t come near me, because I don’t know how much of this I can stand.
“Except we don’t,” replies Gideon softly, watching me rather than the gun, whose safety is still on. I can’t even point it at him, not really. The barrel hovers somewhere in between, not quite lowering, not quite lifting to aim at him. “You don’t want Lilac dead any more than we want the universe destroyed.”
“You don’t hear how that sounds?” I burst out, shifting my grip on the gun. “One life versus the entire universe? Tarver I understand, he’s—of course he’s choosing her. But you…Why are you with him? Why did you leave, why not talk to me?”
Gideon’s silent for a few seconds, making me wish I hadn’t dropped the flashlight, making it harder to see his face. “Why didn’t you talk to me before you tried to assassinate Roderick LaRoux?”
The blow of that is a dull ache, his words just one more burden settling on top of the grief and guilt already making my knees buckle. I shift my weight, boot scraping whisper-like against the dusty floor. “Just go,” I manage. “I should make you come back with me, should make you take us to Tarver so we can stop him. But just—just go.”
Gideon’s weight shifts too, but he stops himself before taking another step toward me. “It’s because I have faith,” he says slowly. “In Tarver, in Lilac. In the fact that my brother loved her, because she was—is—worth it, worth dying for.” He swallows. “I told you already. It’s because if you were the one in there instead of her, there isn’t a force in the universe that would stop me going after you.”
I shake my head, throat too tight for me to speak. My face is heating, flushing with anger, with frustration, with all the things I told myself I’d say to Gideon if I could—and he’s standing here in front of me, and I still can’t say a word of it.
“It’s because there has to be a way for this to work,” he continues, his eyes scanning my face. “Because it’s impossible, any way you look at it, and I refuse to accept that this is how it ends.”
I take a shuddering breath, the barrel of the gun still wavering between us. “Are you still talking about Lilac?”
His mouth curves, the smile so sad it feels like my whole body’s ripping in two. “You’re the expert,” he murmurs. “You tell me.”
“We can’t trust each other,” I whisper. “You can’t love someone you don’t trust. You’ll never know if I’m playing you, and I’ll never know if you’re still the Knave, toying with me.”
“And that’s why I’m here,” Gideon snaps, shoving a hand through his hair in frustration. “I wanted to come back to a place before you and I learned the truth about each other. Odds are we’ll all be dead, or worse, tomorrow. We’ll never know if we could’ve learned to trust each other.”
“Whether you could’ve loved the real me.” My eyes burn, the weight of everything I wanted to say to him pressing in on my throat, making it impossible to speak.
“You think I don’t know the real you?” Gideon’s eyes widen, and there’s pain there. I didn’t expect that.