I make sure the gun’s safety is on before I tuck it into the back of my pants, set the whisper shield down quietly so Flynn won’t notice, and argue, and get unsteadily to my feet. There are so many people down here that there’s no reason for the whisper to pick me out of the teeming crowds of refugees, and I desperately need a moment alone to breathe. Grabbing one of the flashlights, I slip toward the back exit and glance over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of Jubilee sitting up sleepily and laying her hand against Flynn’s cheek. He’s leaning toward her, but the door closes between us before his lips touch hers.
I shiver, though it’s not just from the chill. It is colder, though—all the machinery and cars and people and vendors and life that heat up the undercity are silent now, and without the sun above, the temperature is falling in a way it never could normally. If this is the place Gideon went to get us food, then it’s not far from the arcade. And without making any conscious decision, I find that’s where my steps are leading me.
It takes me a few minutes to get my bearings, searching my memory banks for the landmarks I saw at the mouth of the alley. Without the lanterns overhead, and only my flashlight to guide my steps, it all looks different. But eventually I find the faux-brick fa?ade I remember, and find the loose one Gideon used to open the crack in the wall to slip through.
The space beyond is dark, but the sound of my footsteps changes, echoes speaking of the vastness of the hidden arcade behind the wall. In my memory, I hear the sound of a switch flipping, see the neon lights snapping into existence once by one, their milky reflections sweeping across the dusty marble floor. I can hear the Butterfly Waltz, and taste Gideon’s kiss.
I swing the flashlight around, my hand shaking—and my heart sinks.
Half the storefronts here are gone, piles of brick and stone and broken glass in their place. The few neon signs still visible are smashed to pieces—even if there were electricity, none of them would be shining now. I let the flashlight’s beam fall, my gaze following. The marble floor’s been shattered, the dust disturbed by showers of debris from high above that must’ve been dislodged when the Daedalus hit a few blocks away. I can’t even see where our footprints had been, the patterns we made while I taught him to dance.
I step back and scan the flashlight along the wall until I see the tangle of blankets where we slept. It’s all still there, as though Gideon left in a hurry after I ran from this place. The footprints are long gone, but I can still see the shape of us in the blankets, two bodies curled against each other, like interlocking commas—like yin and yang pendants. The cheap plastic kind that always break.
“Hey, Dimples.”
The voice shatters the silence and sends me stumbling backward with a gasp, flashlight swinging wildly until I can see who’s there—even though I already know, even though part of me isn’t even surprised. The night before battle, the calm before the storm—where else would we come, but the last safe place we knew?
Gideon’s got his hands in his pockets, leaning against the doorframe, head down so that when the flashlight beam falls on his face, it doesn’t blind him—and it also means I can’t read his expression. How well he knows me. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back here.”
I’m still trying to catch my breath, to coax my heart back down out of my throat—adrenaline sings through my muscles, keeping them tense. “T-Tarver?”
“He’s fine.” Gideon glances up for a moment, blinking in the light. His eyes are bloodshot—he looks exhausted. “Well, not fine. But he’s not hurt. He’s asleep, or at least resting, few blocks from here. Everyone else?”
“Same.” I can breathe again, but my heart’s still thumping, its pounding in my ears keeping time to the distant wail of a siren “Are you hurt?”
“Just tired.” I can hear it in his voice—the exhaustion, that he’s hanging on by his fingertips. He tries to hide it, but the glimpse I catch is enough to make me want to throw down my flashlight and go to his side.
Instead I tighten my grip on it and fix my eyes on the wall beside him. I can’t sit here and make small talk with him like everything’s fine, like we’re meeting for coffee somewhere and chatting about our days. “The reprogramming of the rift, can you do it?”
“I’m close,” he replies. “I’ll get there. The code is beautiful, so complex. I’ve never seen anything like it. If you separate it out from its purpose, just look at what they’ve made, it’s…it’s art.”
“But you can’t separate it out,” I point out, my voice hard in my ears. “It’s not just art, Gideon, it’s not some puzzle you have to solve to prove the Knave’s the best at what he does.”
“I know.”
And his voice is so small, so tired, that I relent—or perhaps it’s just that if we fight about this, I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. “Gideon, why are you here?”