“But you’ve thought of something,” Tarver insists. “I know that look.”
Sanjana lets her breath out slowly. “Well…these entities, the whispers. They don’t belong here. They belong in their universe, what we refer to as hyperspace. Just as it takes huge amounts of energy for a ship to skip through hyperspace to travel between star systems, it takes a huge amount of energy to hold the whispers here. They’re constantly being pulled back toward their own universe, but the rift machinery—you’ve seen that, right? Looks exactly like a hyperspace engine, a giant ring, glows blue when it’s on?” She pauses, taking in the scattered nods around the circle. “The rift machinery is what holds them here, on our side. It creates the tiniest tear in the fabric separating our worlds, and keeps them inside. It’s an intensely intricate, delicate balance, governed by some of the most complicated programs anyone’s ever written. But, theoretically, if someone could rewrite the program to open the rift just a little wider, the forces pulling at them might pull the whisper back through the rift, into its own world. Leaving Lilac, physically, behind.”
“Physically?” Tarver’s voice shakes a little. “What about mentally? What about her, her thoughts and memories?”
Sanjana rubs at her temple, clearly uneasy. “I don’t know. She might be fine.”
“She would be,” Tarver murmurs. “If anyone can survive it, she could. Can you do it? Program the rift to send it back?”
Sanjana shakes her head, eyes widening a little. “Tarver—I’m not a programmer. I deal in theory, in physics—executing something like this is way, way beyond my experience. LaRoux’s got a team of the fifteen best programmers in the galaxy working constantly to tweak and perfect that machinery. I got printouts of some of the programming fragments before I escaped, but it’d take me years just to understand what I’m reading. It’s—it’s just a theory.”
Tarver’s gaze, haunted now, stays trained on Sanjana’s face. It’s Sofia who speaks, and though she’s speaking to everyone, her eyes are on me. “We just happen to have one of the best programmers in the galaxy. Dr. Rao, meet the Knave of Hearts.”
I feel everyone’s gazes shift toward me, but I’m still looking at Sofia, trying to read what little I can see of her face in the unsteady red glow of the emergency flare. Whether there’s bitterness in her voice when she uses my pseudonym, whether that same betrayal, that same disgust, haunts her eyes as she looks at me, I can’t tell. I’m not sure even she knows.
“Can you do it?” Tarver’s attention, on me now, feels like a two-ton weight—now I get why Sanjana was so hesitant.
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I’d have to read those printouts, learn the language.…I might be able to. I don’t have my rig here, I barely have anything. It would be a long shot.”
Tarver’s face shifts, the muscles in his jaw untensing. There’s a new energy to him as he reaches for Sanjana’s bag. I’m not sure he heard the words long shot at all. He searches for the printouts that’ll teach me what the hell I’m supposed to do. Despite Tarver’s newfound hope, Sanjana seems unconvinced. She opens her mouth to speak but pauses, uncertain.
Sofia’s the one to break the quiet again, reading Sanjana’s discomfort like she’s a neon sign. “What is it?” she asks the scientist gently. “Just tell us.”
Sanjana swallows. “I…I think it’s a bad idea to try it.”
That brings Tarver up short. “Why?”
Sanjana takes a deep breath. “Look, Tarver—I know this is impossible. I mean, God, if it were Ellie in there, if it was the one I loved, I’d do anything to save her. I just…”
“Tell me.” Tarver’s hope is already dwindling, like flames dying back to embers, to wait to be rekindled again.
“This balance, the forces involved in keeping the tear open just enough to hold them, but not enough to free them…you can’t imagine how delicate it is. Changing that balance could free Lilac, yes. But it could also give Lilac access to infinite power, make her invincible, unstoppable. It could bind her to the creature forever. They’d be irrevocably fused. There’d be nothing she couldn’t do, no harm she couldn’t inflict. And that’s not the worst-case scenario.”
The silence is palpable as we each try and imagine something worse than an all-powerful whisper, hell-bent on revenge.
Eventually Sanjana speaks again, gazing at her dead hand, and I can see how much she hates to say it. “Messing with the rift could give the whisper the power to cut us off from hyperspace completely. Just begin to imagine what that might mean.”
My heart drops, and Sofia and I exchange a glance—we talked about this, the first time we admitted the existence of the whispers to each other. “We’d lose all interplanetary travel,” I say. “We’d be back to below light speed. It would take dozens of generations to get anywhere.”
“We’d never be able to go home,” Flynn breathes, eyes flickering toward Jubilee.
“Whole planets would die,” Sofia murmurs. “Every colony that’s still terraforming, that still relies on outside supplies.”
“Hell,” I murmur. “Corinth relies on outside supplies. We have no farmland here, we don’t produce our own food, we import it.” It flashes before my eyes, like a movie in fast forward. The chaos wrought by the fall of the Daedalus would be nothing. We’d see riots, starvation. It would be the end of our world, literally.
“And without access to hyperspace, we’d have no hypernet,” Sanjana points out, repeating the other warning I gave Sofia. “Our communications would be at light speed as well.”
“So we’d have no way to even tell the other planets what happened,” Flynn finishes for her. “Everything would just go dark.”
Sofia’s face pales under the smudges of dirt on her skin. “Could that be what she wants now? We assumed it was trying to do the same thing as LaRoux—that they both wanted a rift on every planet, and the only difference was who would be in control when they went live. What if the whisper’s trying to extend its reach so it can cut us off from its universe?”
“So if we can’t destroy the rift, and we can’t try to send the whisper back to its universe, in case we cut ourselves off entirely…” Jubilee’s frustration speaks for all of us. “What other choice do we have?”
Sanjana’s not looking at Tarver—instead she’s staring at her prosthesis, though it’s cold and still now. “Until now, the entities have always inhabited the rifts, sending their mental abilities outward to affect you, to affect those on Avon and Verona. Destroying those rifts, those conduits, destroyed the whispers too. But now, the entity is inhabiting Lilac. The rift isn’t the conduit anymore. She is.”
“What’re you saying?”
My heart’s already sinking, and Sofia’s face is white too, her eyes finding mine. The silence hangs, no one quite willing to grasp what the scientist is telling us. Jubilee’s question hangs in the air, and no one looks at Tarver.
But he’s the one who finally answers her. “She’s saying we have to kill Lilac.”