Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)
Amie Kaufman
For Josie Spooner and Flic Kaufman, our sisters and very first partners in crime, whose imaginations helped set us on the path of storytelling all those years ago.
A ripple.
The stillness quakes and splits and where once there was nothing, only us, there is something new. Bright and hard and cold and skimming the surface of the stillness, the new thing is there only an instant before it is gone again.
But we gather. And we watch. And we wait, because there has never been anything new before, and we want to see it again.
THE DAPPLED SUNLIGHT THROUGH THE grass is beautiful, though I know it’s not real. The light casts no warmth on my skin; I’ll suffer no burns, no freckles. The grass doesn’t bend under my feet, though they sink through it to the marble floor beneath the holographic images. A year ago I would have gasped aloud at the sight of sun and blue skies, even holographic ones, but today I find they just make me miss home. What I’d give, now, to lift my head and see bruise-colored clouds sweeping down to meet the marsh, a vastness to the horizon that no holographic lobby in an office building could hope to replicate.
The holosuite is full of people, and while many of them seem to be employees here at LaRoux Industries Headquarters, others are harder to pinpoint. Some carry old-timey briefcases in a nod to ancient vintage fashion from 1920s Earth, the current fad among the upper crust. Others sport only their palm pads; the affectation of carrying purses and cases is absurd, when everything that would’ve gone inside—money, documents, telephones, identification cards—was digitalized hundreds of years ago.
But the trend does make it easy to carry around everything I need without anyone asking questions. Only a couple years ago I would’ve been stuck in pseudo-Victorian garb if I wanted to be fashionable, hiding the tools of my trade under an unwieldy skirt. As it is, my tea dress is light, easy to run in if necessary, and—most importantly—an airy, innocent ivory lace that makes me look even younger than seventeen. I tuck my handbag close to my body, taking a deep breath and scanning the throngs of people.
There’s a tension in the air that makes my pulse quicken. It’s subtle—those hiding here in plain sight are doing so flawlessly. Almost. But I grew up on Avon, and I know how to read a crowd. I know how quickly a protest turns into a riot—I know how quickly a peaceful town becomes a battlefield.
I don’t know if the vast security network at LaRoux Industries is aware of the underground protests scheduled to occur today. I only know about them because I was told by one of my contacts in Corinth Against Tyranny—a ridiculous name, but it’s a romantic notion to fight the good fight against the oppressors. Looking around the holosuite outfitted with lemonade dispensers and sodas whizzing here and there on hover trays, the air littered with conversation and laughter, I can’t help but think that these people don’t know what oppression is. I tear my eyes away from a couple indulgently watching a child of five or six chasing a pair of holographic birds through the air. There’s a reason LaRoux Industries tops the “best places to work in the galaxy” list every year, and if I’d been the one organizing today’s protest, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen the new twentieth-floor holosuite as the setting.
Free for employees, and available to the public for only a small charge, the holosuite is part of LaRoux’s new outreach program. “See how generous I am?” he’s saying. “I’m dedicating whole floors of my headquarters to providing safe, fun places for you and your children.” His campaign to make the galaxy love him, to make people forget the accusations leveled at him in the Avon Broadcast, is enough to turn my stomach—not least because it’s working.
The people here do seem happy. No one here cares that people were dying on Avon before Flynn Cormac’s now-infamous speech a year ago. Nobody cares that Roderick LaRoux is a monster—mostly because only small pockets of people here and there actually believed a word of Flynn’s broadcast. These people are here because it looks good on their media pages to say they were at a protest. Some of them are probably hoping to get arrested so they can later post their mug shots on the hypernet.
But it does make a great distraction for what I’m here to do.