But it turns out I don’t need to worry, because Kumiko’s just staring at Jubilee like she’s seen a ghost, shaking her head slowly.
And Jubilee just stares right back. “Corporal Mori? What the hell are you doing here?”
We watch them grow. The three of us are alone, and we do not know if the others can see what we see, but we press on with our mission, seek the answer to our question.
The girl whose dreams so fascinated us is a soldier now, and though she is younger than the others and smaller, she trains harder than any of them. Already she’s showing the steel that will draw her so to the poet. A change of a few symbols on a military document flying through our universe sends her to serve with him.
They will become friends. She will learn what she needs from him, but his path is not with her. She will stay here, with us, on the gray world.
And we will protect her.
I WAKE FROM DREAMS OF fire and pain, lurching upright with a strangled noise, heart pounding. Someone’s there immediately, a warm hand on my shoulder, a voice in my ear, quiet, urging me to lie back down.
“Gideon?” I croak, trying to blink away dreams and sleep.
“He’s fine, he’s with Mori and Jubilee.” I blink again and suddenly Flynn’s face swims into focus. “Stay put, Sof, you’re going to be groggy for a while still.”
I let him push me back down onto what seems to be a military cot, and take a shaking breath. I can’t feel my hand, and after a stab of fear I look down—it’s still there, just swathed in a cocoon of bandages and numb from the shoulder down. We’re in a large, dim room, the light casting oddly against bare cement walls. There are a few people here and there, whose faces I don’t recognize; they’re huddled together, expressions drawn and fearful, some faces tearstained, some wooden. A couple of them are hunched over a palm pad, trying—and failing, it seems from their frustration—to find a signal.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
“Mori’s base. Kumiko Mori. Gideon’s friend. She also happened to serve on Avon with Jubilee.”
I stare at him, trying to make my mind work through the thick, impenetrable fog cocooning my thoughts. “Just happened to…?”
“She’s a Fury soldier,” he replies, voice quiet. “She and the others here are all soldiers who were once on Avon and reassigned after the whispers there made them snap. From what she tells me, they’ve been gathering here, doing exactly what we’ve been doing—trying to figure out how to take LaRoux down.”
None of the overhead lights are on—all I can see are a couple LED flashlights and an emergency lantern.
“Why…What’s with all the…” But I can’t remember the words I need, can’t make my lips shape them.
Flynn follows my gaze to the emergency lantern on a packing crate next to my cot. His eyes flick back toward mine. “How much do you remember? We had to put you under to treat your hand. We didn’t have a choice, you kept—” He swallows, his face grim and eyes a little wild. “We had to knock you out.”
I swallow, my voice raw and shredded like I’ve been shouting. Or screaming. I shut my eyes, taking a deep breath. “I remember the Daedalus.”
Flynn finds the fingers of my good hand and wraps his around them, squeezing. “The impact knocked out power for kilometers, at least. Communications are down, HV networks, everything. Gideon can’t even get to the hypernet, though that’s what he and Mori are trying to do now.”
“What about…” But my voice sticks when my memory conjures up the image of the LaRoux heiress, smiling at us with those black eyes. I can’t even make myself say her name. “L-L-LaRoux? What about LaRoux?”
“We don’t know. We don’t know much of anything yet.”
I suck in another breath and then try to sit up again, pushing Flynn’s arm away when he moves to stop me. “Flynn, I tried to—” My voice cracks. “LaRoux was standing right there. I couldn’t let him live. I couldn’t—”
“Shh, I know.” Flynn looks older, more than he should after only one year. The green eyes are the same, and the dark wavy hair. And yet, he seems somehow more real than he was before, solid, warm—and the pain in his gaze, the sympathy, is as deep as it ever was. “I know, Sof.”
“This is my fault,” I whisper, too numb and too groggy to cry. “If I hadn’t—”
“None of that,” Flynn interjects. “From what we got out of Tarver, this has been a long time coming. That whisper’s been trying to reach Lilac ever since she and Tarver were stranded on that planet together. I think the pain just interrupted her concentration—it would’ve gotten her eventually anyway.”
But it wouldn’t have been onboard the Daedalus. The thousands of people, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands by now—they would be alive if I hadn’t tried to murder Roderick LaRoux.
“I want to see Gideon,” I hear myself saying, to my surprise. “Is he…”
But before I can finish the question, Jubilee’s striding in through one of the doorways, with Gideon and a woman with short black hair and a kerchief around her neck. Kumiko, my brain supplies. Corporal Mori. The trodaire who shot Garret O’Reilly in the street and broke the ceasefire. But then, my father killed far more than one man because of LaRoux’s Fury, and his explosion started a war. My thoughts are so tangled with anger and grief that I don’t know what to think, looking at the ex-soldier next to Captain Chase.
Gideon veers off from their path, his feet curving toward my cot before he lifts his head and sees me sitting up—his steps falter for a second, then quicken as he jogs over. Flynn glances at me, the corner of his mouth quirking as he pulls back, making room for Gideon to crouch down beside me.
“Hey, Dimples.” There’s visible relief in his eyes, in his voice—and yet, still, something reserved, held back. There’s a war going on behind the look he gives me, his hand twitching as though he’d like to reach for me but can’t. This isn’t you, he’d said, while I pointed a gun at LaRoux. I know you.
“Hey,” I whisper back. You never knew me.
I didn’t think I’d ever have to face him after he found out I was never working with him to expose LRI, that I was only ever trying to kill Roderick LaRoux. I thought I’d be dead.
And for the tiniest moment, I wish I was.
Jubilee, standing by Kumiko some distance away, clears her throat. “We’ve got a net connection,” she announces gently, breaking the silence between Gideon and me. “Flynn—you should come see this.”
“I’m coming too,” I say, before anyone has a chance to leave me in the cot.
Gideon glances at Flynn, who no doubt has a lot more experience with field medicine than he does—and Flynn just shakes his head. “I gave up telling her what to do when we were kids,” he says, stepping back toward me and offering me a hand.
Gideon backs up a step, glancing from me to him, then turns to rejoin Jubilee and Mori as they head into the room next door. Whatever they used to knock me out is still with me—my steps feel rubbery and slow, my muscles not responding right to the commands from my brain. Flynn’s forced to duck down so I can put an arm around his shoulder as we move next door.