“Everything we send. From our parking tickets, to our poetry.”
“If I could see all of that,” she says quietly, into the dark, “all our anger, the things we say to one another, I wouldn’t think much of us.”
I let my knees bend, and she comes with me as my back slides down the wall, and I sink to sit on our nest of blankets. We sit there together in the near dark, limbs tangled together, pressed close, as though the contact alone will save us.
“There has to be another way to stop her, Gideon,” she whispers.
Here, holding her, looking at her face, her eyes, the curve of her mouth where the flashlight outlines it, I want to believe that loving her means I can trust her; that her I trust you meant something. Because if it was true—if she could feel that, after the ways he twisted her—then it would mean everything. But the uncertainty is there like the tiniest of splinters, worming its way deeper and deeper into my heart, carving a path for doubt to take hold like an infection. There’s no other way, and if this is her attempt to distract me from my choice, my path with Tarver, I can’t let her talk me out of it.
She leans forward, tilting her face up, and I give in and let my lips find hers rather than search for words. This much, at least, is true. This warmth, this need—whatever else has come and gone between us, and whatever else may come, this moment is true.
It would be such a leap, and in the end, neither of us is very good at remembering how to trust. At least alone, she with her plan and I with mine, there’s a chance one of us might be right.
So instead of making a new plan, instead of taking our leap, we ease down into the blankets, my heart hurting every moment, to say our good-byes in the only way we both can trust. Without any words at all.
We feel the loss of our kin on the gray world as keenly as we felt the loss of the first of our kind to die. We try to understand death, to understand how a thing can cease to be. Learning about the uniqueness of these creatures only deepens our confusion, for how can something so rare and so precious exist one moment and vanish the next?
We have only one of our kind left in their world, the one we cannot see. But because of the boy who lives in the hypernet pathways, we know the final prison is somewhere on the world at the heart of the galaxy. We must bring the six to this place, to find our last emissary and send it home so we can learn, finally, whether we can coexist with these strange, brief creatures who live and die without letting uncertainty destroy them.
The others, their paths all lead to this spot—all but the girl with the dimpled smile. We must bring her there somehow, twist her thread closer to the rest.
We learn that the boy wrapped in wires and data is searching for someone he believes can lead him to the blue-eyed man. We will nudge him onto the girl’s trail instead…and he will drive her here to us.
THE DARKNESS AS I CREEP with Jubilee and Flynn from the abandoned restaurant is absolute, and I’m forced to move with agonizing slowness. Unwilling to risk drawing attention with flashlights, we’re picking out each step by feel, navigating the debris-littered streets of the undercity based on my memory alone. What I wouldn’t give for Gideon’s knowledge of this place—I was never truly at home here, but he knows these streets like the back of his hand.
I left him while he was still asleep, making my way back to the others and praying they wouldn’t notice how long I’d been gone. As I lay there through the rest of the night, wishing for sleep that never came, my head was still ringing with the things we said to one another, and the things we didn’t. With images of black-eyed husks, and planets plunged into isolation. Of a whisper twisted and tortured until it became a weapon—of the moment I realized the same thing had happened to me. Even now, I can’t stop shivering, and it’s not from the bone-deep chill settling into the streets at the bottom of Corinth.
Jubilee’s hand on my arm signals a halt, and I jerk my thoughts back to the present. It’s still a few hours until dawn, and the electrical grid has yet to be restored after the Daedalus crash. I’ve been figuring out where we are based on landmarks I could touch, and gut intuition when that failed, but now…even Jubilee and Flynn, strangers to this part of Corinth, recognize the thing looming out of the darkness.
A maintenance shaft.
The climb leaves me breathless and shaking, but I’m still on my feet when we emerge into the apocalyptic landscape of the upper city. I’ve spent so much of the past few days afraid that I’m not sure my body processes fear the same way anymore.
The light pollution from other sectors of Corinth paints the skies a dark, ruddy orange, and I’m able to pick out the buildings much more easily—or where the buildings had been. Nothing looks right—where there ought to be skyscrapers I see only empty space, and where there should be the broad, green expanse of a park is a massive, hulking structure I’ve never seen. For a moment, I’m not sure I led us the right way, until I see the expanse of the LaRoux Industries courtyard below us, the color of its bright green grass leached away by the gloom.
We’re here. And that structure is no building at all.
The Daedalus wreck squats on the landscape like a vast, hulking beast. Its metal skin has been peeled back in long, jagged gashes, exposing wires and spilling conduits like viscera onto the ground. Twisted metal supports two meters thick have been torn free like splinters of bone, stretching toward the sky. Smoke still rises here and there, as though the creature isn’t fully dead yet, as though it’s still breathing its last, labored gasps that steam in the predawn air. It’s half-sunk into the ground, as if the concrete and steel supports below gave it no more resistance than water would—like at any moment it might rise up again, out of the depths.
It’s impossible to connect this dark, monstrous leviathan full of jagged metal and burnt chemicals with the glittering ballroom my memory conjures up when I think of the word Daedalus. Everything that happened there—coming face-to-face with LaRoux, discovering who Gideon was, the missing rift, seeing Flynn again, shooting Lilac LaRoux—it all feels like it happened to someone else, a lifetime ago. And the idea that any of us, that anyone at all, was ever inside this thing, the carcass of the great orbital ship, seems insane.
The idea that people are inside it still, crushed on impact or choked to death by the vacuum of space rushing inside the great rents down the ship’s side…it’s unthinkable.
We stand there in the shadow of the maintenance elevator, shrinking back against it as we stare at the immense thing sprawled before us. We’ve emerged at a level that once must have been a couple of floors above the courtyard, rubble stretching down from us in a steep slope. Even fearless Jubilee makes no move to descend, and when I glance back at my companions, I can see two sets of wide, glittering eyes scanning the wreck.
It’s with monumental effort that I swallow, trying to clear my dry throat and break the silence that has stretched the past hour as we traveled underground to reach this place unseen. “We should keep moving.”
I study the ground between us and the Daedalus, trying to pick out the smoothest course over the ruined terrain. The ground swims for a moment, moving before my eyes, and I try to blink away the tiredness, squeezing them shut. When I open them, it’s still moving, because it’s not the ground at all.