I don’t have to ask who. Instead, I follow him as he climbs up another girder, grabbing for a beam across the ceiling and almost silently scrambling until he’s above eye level, sitting on a broken ledge. I climb onto his perch, and he lifts a finger to his lips, turning his gaze down. Just a few seconds later, the first of the husks come moving through the space we left, slowly searching for whatever made the noise.
We sit jammed in place, side by side, for a full ten minutes as they move through the building. There must be a hundred of them, methodically combing through wreckage and climbing past each other. They’re not efficient or particularly creative, but they’re relentless. And as if I need a reminder of the fragility of our situation, my temporary lapscreen shield dies as we sit there, leaving me dependent on Tarver’s once more. Only once the last has been gone for a couple of minutes does Tarver speak in a low voice. “What are you doing here?”
“What the hell do you think I’m doing here, Merendsen? I heard there was a sudden drop in property prices in this area, I wanted to check out some places I saw advertised.” I snort. “I’m here to help.”
“You’re here to help me.” His look is flat, disbelieving. Face smudged with dirt, gaze tired, he couldn’t be further from the guy I saw climb onto the dais alongside Lilac in the ballroom of the Daedalus. I have to find a way in, and quickly, or I’ll lose him all over again. What would Sofia do?
And in the instant I ask the question, I know the answer. She’d tell the truth. Why is it that I’m so sure of that, yet I can’t trust that she’s ever told me the truth? I draw a slow breath. “It’s not for you. I’m here to help Lilac. And Simon. This is what he would have wanted for her, and I’ve realized that she never changed at all from the girl I knew as a kid. I needed people to blame, and she was one of them, but we should have been grieving for Simon together. This is what he would have wanted, and I’m the one that’s left to do it.”
Merendsen meets my eyes, and after a long moment, he nods, as if I’ve passed a test. “Then let’s go.”
Within a couple of minutes we’re slowly making our way through the desolate landscape once more. Merendsen’s climbing ahead of me, looking utterly at ease in black fatigues. He’s lacking only his gun—killed by the EMP—to look the perfect soldier. Though his shoulder must still be aching after he dislocated it on the Daedalus, he’s moving more quickly than most healthy people could.
He looks at home amidst the ruins of Corinth, as if the destruction around us is an outward manifestation of the pain inside him. Though I’m dressed the same outwardly, I’m out of my element and I know it.
The physicality of our fight to cross the burning city doesn’t bother me—the climbs and scrambles are no worse than some of my onsite hacks—but I’m used to silent, sterile places, not bloodstained sidewalks and chunks of buildings lying across my path. I’m used to security teams I can track, not silent husks, single-mindedly dissecting the city in a slow, methodical search grid. As we work our way through the wreckage, a part of my mind is preoccupied—taking what I learned from Sanjana’s printouts, turning that information over and over in my head. I’m still grappling with even understanding the programming of the rift, let alone closing it down without empowering the whisper to end the world. And I’m on a countdown that’s elapsing far too fast.
We climb through a restaurant that was inhabited when the debris hit—food’s scattered everywhere, and blood’s pooled underneath one slab of fallen wall, congealing a dark red after so many hours. Fires are still burning as we make our way toward the center of the destruction, the acrid smell of entire city blocks laid to waste getting inside my nose, making my eyes water. We’re seeing parts of the Daedalus herself now, enormous chunks of metal half melted by reentry and impact.
Tarver pauses for a moment atop a broken wall, surveying the landscape below us—the twisted shards of metal, the broken escape pods. Eventually, when it’s clear he’s not going to move on, I speak. “Merendsen?”
He blinks, looking across at me like he had no idea I was there at all, then shakes his head. “I’ve seen this before,” he murmurs, turning his gaze back out to the ruined city.
“This…here?” With a whisper involved, a vision doesn’t seem out of the question.
He shakes his head again. “A dead ship,” he says softly. “I never thought I’d see something like the wreck of the Icarus again. And here I am, heading into its heart once more.” His mouth forms a dark hint of a smile. “You watched my interrogation footage. But I lied about what happened at the wreck.”
“What really happened?”