My throat feels tight, forcing me to swallow before I can speak. “The right kind of pressure can turn anyone into a monster.” The sound of the gun going off. Lilac falling. Tarver’s face as he looks at me. “Anyone.”
Jubilee’s eyes swing toward me, and though I could be imagining it, for a moment I think I almost see sympathy in her face. She nods. “The one I spoke to…it hadn’t given into that rage. It was—it was my friend.” Her voice grows rougher, and she’s forced to clear her throat after she finishes.
“On the Daedalus, the whisper said it wasn’t just the last one left—it was also the oldest one. The first one he started experimenting with.” Flynn’s voice is quiet. “He’s had a long time to twist that creature into something evil.”
“But they’re not human,” I protest, mind spinning. “Sanjana said they were entities of pure energy. Concepts like vengeance and pain and hatred…For all we know, they don’t even feel emotion.”
“They do.” Jubilee’s quick to contradict me. “They may not have started out understanding emotion, but the one I knew…it did. It felt everything. It died to save us from the other whispers on Avon.”
“That doesn’t help us now.” I let my head fall back against a shelf with a thump. “Lilac is the only whisper left on this side of the rift, so we’re on our own. We don’t have others of its kind willing to help us. And if Lilac is still in there somewhere, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything she can do.”
We all fall silent after that, and I only wish I could silence the one thought circling around and around in my head. Gideon’s still up there.
And if he’s still alive, he’s getting closer and closer to the whisper.
It’s only when I lift my head, blinking away sleep, that I realize I somehow managed to doze. Jubilee’s asleep, or at least pretending to be, her head in Flynn’s lap. He’s gazing down at her, and his hand keeps making the same small gesture, fingertips stroking the hair at Jubilee’s temple. I swallow and he lifts his head, blinking once and then looking at me. His lips twitch a little into a faint smile. But there’s something in the back of his gaze that tips me off.
“Is she okay?” I whisper, glancing at Jubilee, who doesn’t move.
Flynn nods, eyes following mine and lingering on the girl asleep in his lap. “She’s tough.”
I find my own lips twitching. “That’s not what I asked.”
Flynn looks back up at me, exhaling a faint laugh. “Forgot who I was talking to.” He leans his head back against the shelves behind him. “This is bringing back bad memories.”
“Verona?”
He nods again. “She grew up there. Her parents were killed during the riots following the bombing attacks. Shot in front of her.”
My heart flinches, squeezing tight and twisting. “I had no idea.”
“Me neither, until—well, might as well call a spade a spade. Until I kidnapped her from the military base.”
“Someday you’re going to have to tell me the whole story of what exactly happened between that and…well, this.” I nod my head in their direction, something in my head still objecting on an instinctive level to the sight of my friend Flynn, leader of the Fianna, with his arms around a trodaire. If Gideon and Tarver fail—if the whisper ends up with the power to cut us off from hyperspace completely—we’ll be trapped together here on Corinth. Being an Avonite won’t mean anything anymore.
Flynn huffs another laugh, dropping his voice again when Jubilee stirs. “Got a few days?” He sobers, watching me. “Thank you, by the way. For what you did on the shuttle back on Avon, when Jubilee and I were on the run—thank you for distracting the soldiers so she and I could get away. I know you had no reason to trust her.”
“I trusted you,” I reply instantly—then halt, thoughts grinding together. Because I did trust him, completely. How could it have happened that in a single year I forgot how to do that? Why should I trust Gideon any less than Flynn?
Because he lied to you.
Well, I lied to him. What else you got?
“Are you okay?”
I open my eyes to find Flynn watching me, concern all over his expressive features. I start to reply, halting with my lips parted, voice sticking in my throat. “I’m tough, too,” I say finally.
One corner of Flynn’s mouth lifts. “That’s not what I asked.”
I shut my eyes, wishing I could shut my ears as well. Despite my conversation with Tarver, every part of me is screaming that this is still somehow my fault. It was one thing to be at peace with the idea of becoming a murderer, of killing an evil man responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It’s another to be at peace with causing the end of the world.
“He’ll be okay.” His voice is quiet.