This Shattered World (40 page)

“Okay?” Flynn’s voice is stiff. “Okay to shoot you, you mean.”

My heart tightens. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I can feel his anger and frustration radiating through the darkness, and part of me longs to reach out for him. If our positions were reversed, I don’t think I’d be able to listen to this either. But it has to be said. “Yes,” I whisper. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Then I can’t promise you that,” he says tightly. “And don’t ask me again, Jubilee.”

“You can’t afford not to! This isn’t about us, this is everyone, all of my people and all of yours. This is
worth
dying for, Flynn, this chance to save Avon. We can’t afford to let anyone stop us. Even if that someone ends up being me.”

Flynn doesn’t answer in words. Instead he reaches behind his back to pull his stolen Gleidel from his waistband. Then there’s a loud thud as he tosses the gun into the bottom of the boat.

“Flynn, you can’t—”

“I’m going in there,” he says, as fierce as he’s ever been. “But I’m not shooting you, no matter what happens.”

I want to argue, I want to tell him he’s being sentimental and foolish, that this is what I was trying to avoid when I stopped him that night in the back room of Molly’s. That choosing me over everything else is weakness. A few weeks ago, that’s exactly what Captain Lee Chase would’ve told him. But I can hear the strength in his voice, and in the choice he’s making. Because it’s not that he’s choosing me, a girl he met less than a month ago—he’s choosing a world in which no one has to die.

I want that world to be real. I want it so badly my pulse quickens, the air sharpens. Captain Lee Chase never goes anywhere unarmed; it’s against her nature. My hand’s gripping my Gleidel so tightly I’m half afraid my skin’s going to fuse with the metal.

Lee doesn’t leave her gun behind—but maybe Jubilee could.

I exhale slowly, easing my Gleidel out of its holster. It fits so easily in my hand, its cold weight so comforting, so familiar. I swallow, then toss it down with Flynn’s.

When I lift my eyes again, Flynn is no more than a silhouette. He moves toward me, taking hold of my arm and pulling me in against him. He doesn’t speak. Our brief time together, the extraordinary circumstances that made us allies—there aren’t any words to give it shape. He could tell me he loves me, but he doesn’t know me the way a lover would; he knows the shape of me, though, the curve of my heart, as I know his. He could tell me he doesn’t want to lose me, but we’re both already lost, and only the tether between us keeps us from drifting out into the black.

I hear him draw a quick, shaking breath, and then his mouth finds mine. His kiss is fierce, his fingers splaying across my back, pressing me close. His lips this time ask for nothing, no demand for fire or for possession, nothing like the way he tasted in the back room of Molly’s, turning my bones to ash. He’s just kissing me, holding me, searing me into his memory. I lean into him, making his arms tighten around me in response, and we stand there, the water quiet around our ankles, as though all of Avon is holding its breath.

When we let each other go, we don’t speak. Instead Flynn braces his foot against the edge of the boat and shoves, sending it drifting back out so anyone who finds it won’t know where we are. I watch it cut through the mist until the fog closes back up around it and it’s gone.

She’s had this dream before, too. This one starts with fire, but she’s not afraid. It sweeps through the shop like it’s alive, but when it reaches her, it feels like nothing more than a summer breeze, pleasant and warm. She can control the fire, she can make it go where she wants, and she can keep it from consuming a single mote of dust in her mother’s shop.

She tells the flames to pull back, to return to being a merrily crackling fire on the hearth. But this time the fire doesn’t listen.

The girl tries again, and again nothing changes; the fire flares instead, and this time it burns her hands. She feels no pain in the dream, but she’s afraid. She knows she has to run, but the fire is all around her now, and there’s nowhere to go.

Her only choice is to let the fire take her.

THERE’S NO WAY BACK NOW
. I know that as the boat vanishes. For an instant my heart tugs me after it—a place to hide, to hold Jubilee and be held. I can still feel her against me, and I cling to that warmth, pushing from my mind the possibility that I’ve kissed her for the last time.

I turn toward the seemingly empty muddy island before us. “How do you find something you can’t see?” I keep my voice low—out in the swamps I can still hear the subtle sounds that tell me there are Fianna hunting for us.

She squints toward the center of the island. “We know it’s there. Now that we understand what we’re looking for, maybe we can bypass whatever the whispers are doing to our heads to conceal it.”

I scan the flat expanse of mud. “All right,” I murmur. “Come on, let’s see you.” I pull up the memory of the facility I saw. I’m looking for straight lines on a landscape that’s all curves. Walls, corners, a chain-link fence. There’s a dizzying compulsion to look away, and I narrow my gaze and try again.

It’s only when Jubilee grabs my chin and turns my face toward the center of the island that I realize I’d turned away after all. She has a sympathetic grimace, and we link hands to keep ourselves from moving apart. Our fingers wind tightly together as we edge forward, pausing every step to check we’re still moving toward the center.

The air shimmers before me, and I let myself close my eyes for just a second, pain creeping in at my temples. My whole body’s starting to protest, shoulders aching where the harness cut into them, gut still settling after our wild ride. I wait until the pain dims a couple of degrees.

Don’t trust what you see,
Lilac LaRoux said. I dredge up the memory of the facility again. Then I open my eyes and there’s a chain-link fence a foot in front of me.

I jerk to a stop, and a second later Jubilee walks face-first into it. It clangs and rattles, shedding droplets of condensed fog in a glittering shower. We both freeze, waiting for a sound in the swamp behind us or a shout from within the compound. Seconds tick by, and as though we’ve turned a key, the rest of the fence slowly materializes, and a clump of prefab buildings behind it. The shimmering’s gone, and the air in front of us is clear.

“Son of a—” Jubilee swallows down her protest, lifting a hand to swipe the water from her face. “Stopped just in time, but you couldn’t warn me?” But her mouth’s quirking, and despite everything, I want to snicker.

I take a step back, trying to follow the perimeter of the fence in the darkness. “That tower—is it a security checkpoint?” I point to a low, squat blackness some distance away.

Jubilee shakes her head, eyes lifted. “It’s a communications tower—see the satellite dishes? But they’ll have an alarm system there too, and there are floodlights on every fence post. We go near that tower and get spotted, they’ll light this place up like a parade route and we’ll have nowhere to run.”

“I could try to make a hole up here, then, the way we do on your base to sneak in.”

Jubilee just rolls her eyes at me. She drops my hand and takes three steps back, staring up at the fence, which has to be at least four meters high. Then she runs at it, using her momentum to clamber to the top in seconds, swinging a leg over and leaning down to wink. “Hurry up, then. Need a hand?” Faced with a task she knows, she’s every inch the soldier, grinning and self-assured. I would have hated her for it such a short time ago, but now her smile’s familiar.

My grin matches hers as I climb up after her, and for a moment it’s like being with my friends when we were kids, seeing who could scale the highest spire of rock. We get only a few seconds to revel in our small victory. Then there’s a sharp whistle out in the fog, and my heart leaps. “That’s the alert,” I say, translating the Fianna’s signal for her. “They’ve found our boat.”

Jubilee’s smile vanishes, and once more we’re fighting for our lives. “Let’s go.”

The facility seems to be almost empty, at least from the outside. Once we see a figure in night vision goggles disappearing around the corner of a building, but though we crouch and wait, the guard doesn’t return.

Keeping to the shadows, we make for the nearest door to the main building, only to find it locked tight. If this were a normal facility it’d be print-coded with the latest security—but print-coding would leave a record of the people who’ve accessed the place. Instead the handles are the low-tech kind, requiring manual keys. I feel around the door frame, but we’re not lucky enough for someone to have stashed a key somewhere. Instead we’re forced to make our way along the wall, testing the windows until we find one that Jubilee’s able to pop open with a dull
thunk
of her elbow against the frame.

The small room we climb into is empty but for a few supply cabinets; we’ve entered through some kind of storeroom. When we slip out into the hallway, muddy footprints mark the floor, telling us people were here recently. Beyond the room is a series of hallways, but a faint trail of dirt shows which path is most traversed. Jubilee takes point down the corridor, and I move silently after her, ears straining for any sign of life. My heart’s beating too fast, and I can feel a corresponding pulse in my head. There’s no sign of the wisp; our guide, for better or for worse, is gone.

Jubilee stops at the first corner, easing her head out to check that the way ahead is empty. Lifting her hand, she jerks two fingers to bid me follow and eases forward again.

The facility is laid out like a maze, but the paths and doors are labeled. We reach a branching corridor, and I tap my finger against a sign with an arrow that reads
MAIN CONTROL ROOM
. Jubilee nods; from there we might be able to get an idea as to the layout of this place and find some sort of records room or computer access.

A few doors feature glass panes, revealing unrecognizable equipment and fully stocked laboratories beyond them. Some are occupied by white-coated scientists, and we’re quick to move past those. True, we could grab one or two of them to interrogate, but there’s no guarantee that they even know who they’re working for. We need hard evidence.

On one group of researchers, my eyes linger. They’re gathered around a man’s body laid out on a table. He still wears his camouflage trousers and military boots, and the scientists are gathered around his head. When one of them moves to retrieve a tool from a nearby tray, I can see that the whole top of his skull has been removed; the scientists are carefully removing pieces of his brain, laying them out in a neatly labeled row. A glance at Jubilee tells me she’s as tense as I am, her shoulders drawn in tight. But we can’t help him now, we both know that.

Our path leads to a door marked
MAIN CONTROL ROOM
, and Jubilee pauses to look back at me. I’m watching her eyes, checking her pupils, looking for that vacant hint that will tell me she’s under the influence of the whispers, but I’ve never seen it happen like she has. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and it’s keeping me sick with tension.

Then abruptly the door opens, and we’re face-to-face with a startled man in a white coat.

For a long moment, we all just stare at each other in surprise. He opens his mouth to shout an alarm, and Jubilee moves instantly. She punches him, and the way his head snaps back as he folds to the ground would be comical any other time. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what I looked like when she decked me before escaping the Fianna caves.

Now she and I move as one—I get my hands under his arms and she grabs his legs, and we haul him back into the room. A quick look over my shoulder shows it’s empty, and we’re alone save for a long bank of computer screens and an unconscious scientist.

I crouch to take a look at him, and as I peel back one of his eyelids, all I can see is the white of his eye. “You really had to hit him?”

Jubilee’s standing by the door, listening for trouble. “What else could I do? I didn’t hit him hard, he’ll be fine.”

“You really have to start thinking laterally.” I roll the man onto his side so he doesn’t choke on his own tongue while he’s out.

“Not my forte.” She shrugs, abandoning the door to prowl the room. “This is monitoring Avon’s climate,” she says after leaning down to study a screen. “It’s got terraforming data displayed here for the last two decades. Far more detailed readings than what we get sent by TerraDyn.” She falls silent, but I know we’re both thinking about Merendsen’s theory that Avon’s progress, like the progress of the planet LaRoux destroyed, is being tampered with.

I stay by the scientist’s side, and he doesn’t stir as I check him for weapons, then push aside his white coat to make sure there’s nothing clipped to his belt. All I see is an ID badge, and I’m about to drop the fabric when a glint flashes through the plastic cover of the pass. Sitting alongside a card showing a serial number—no name or photo—is a tiny ident chip. It’s exactly the same as the one Jubilee found on our first visit here, right down to the tiny lambda. The room spins a little and I rub at my eyes, trying to remember when I last had more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. “LaRoux Industries,” I say, pushing slowly to my feet.