I shake my head. “They’re less powerful than the EMP. No chance.”
The silence rings for a heartbeat or two until I find my voice, clearing my throat. “We know why she’s different,” I say quietly. When Tarver says nothing, I relay the story to Sanjana that he told us—of how Lilac died, and came back, and brought with her some connection to the other side of the rift that’s been inexorably drawing her back toward the whispers.
“And now,” Sofia adds when I’ve finished, “LaRoux’s sending representatives back to every planet with plans to build more rifts, like the one on Avon, and the one here. We think that she’s letting him think he’s still running the show, that he’s not the risk. He’s losing his mind, and she can drive him over the edge anytime she wants. Once he’s put everything in place, she’ll be able to spread the whispers like an infection until every person in the galaxy is one of those empty shells. Unless we figure out a way to stop her.”
“On Avon, we destroyed the rift.” Flynn’s voice is troubled. “And that stopped the whispers, too. We were hoping you’d know enough about this rift to tell us how to destroy it.”
“We were hoping,” Sofia adds, “that you’d be willing to help us. Since you were almost willing to help me once before.”
“Help…” Sanjana’s brow furrows deeper, but then her eyes widen. “You’re Alexis? You’re the one I was going to meet, the day of the riots at LRI Headquarters?”
“Yes, except that it’s actually Sofia,” Sofia replies. “I was worried they’d caught you, when they turned up at my apartment.…Thanks for trying to warn me.”
“I’m glad you’re safe, I never knew.…” Sanjana shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can help you, but I’ll try. How did you destroy the other rifts?”
“I don’t think LaRoux had figured out yet how to build shields like the ones we’re using, when we were on Avon.” Jubilee’s quick to answer. “There was a self-destruct mechanism built in, I assume so he could terminate the project if things got out of hand. He wouldn’t need that now, though.”
“No,” Sanjana agrees. “I doubt there’s a self-destruct switch this time. He won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Tarver takes longer to answer. “I don’t entirely know,” he says finally. “I jumped into the rift with Lilac. I thought it would kill me, to be honest, but I thought there was a chance it would save her. I think it was the whispers themselves that destroyed the rift.”
“Any portal between dimensions would have to be highly unstable,” Sanjana says quietly. “Adding your own energy and disrupting the field by leaping into it could have released the whispers contained inside, allowing them to destroy their own prison. But anything that unstable is unpredictable, and we have no way of knowing what changes LaRoux has made. It was the very first rift, after all. He’ll have learned more since it was built. If you were to try that again, you could end up doing exactly what the whisper wants, opening the way for more of its kind to come through.”
“And I don’t think it would be survivable this time,” Tarver says, though there’s an edge to his voice that scares me—an edge that says failing to survive is an option for him, if that’s what it takes. “Whether it was having two of us to dispel the energy, or Lilac’s connection to them protecting me, I don’t know, though.”
Sanjana blinks, then shakes her head. “It’s just a theory. I’m working blind here, without a net. I’ve only been able to work indirectly on the project, so my knowledge is limited.”
“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?”