So you would have us leave?
On this side of the rift, in this world, nothing is certain. But the only shields against the darkness are the moments that bring light, and you have seen that in these people, their stories. They are unique, and they are all the same. I can think of no better armor. And we can teach you how to forge your own shields.
Think of everything you’ve learned from us, everything we’ve been through, every choice the six of us have made that has brought us here. Having experienced that, having felt life, love, trust, faith…can you really give it all up just to be safe?
I wait for an answer, but get no reply. I feel their minds pulling away from mine, and an insistent tug that I instinctively know is my tether to my own world, my own body. For a moment I want to cling to this world, to the shards of another kind of existence that no human could ever hope to truly understand.
But I have to let it all slip away and fade back into the light, wrapping myself once more in the roaring quiet. Into my thoughts creeps a single image, a pair of clasped hands—and with it, a single voice, saying, I choose you.
I will not go back. The pain is all there is—all I am, all I have to give. I am no longer one of you, and I cannot become part of you again. I cannot go home.
We are a part of you. You have been alone so long, but you will always belong with us.
Not anymore. I am vengeance. I am fear. I am everything you should leave behind.
We will learn to bear the darkness. They will show us how.
You cannot understand. I…I will not bring this pain to you. I could not bear to see it shared. Please, just let me go. Let me die.
If that is truly what you wish, that choice is yours to make. But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.
I am not worth saving.
We are all worth saving.
How can you know?
We cannot ever know, not truly.
But we have faith.
SOMETHING STIRS AGAINST ME, AND as I blink my eyes open, blue sparks still playing across my vision, I register Sofia’s warmth against my chest. Are we in my den? Did she crawl up to my end of the bed?
For a moment I’m in an impossibly vast place, my thoughts expanding with infinite speed—and then, an instant later, that space is contracting, flying back toward me until the world is the right size and shape again.
Like a bucket of cold water, the truth splashes over me, electrifying and sudden. We’re lying on the ground, piled on top of the rubble by the rift like so much debris, and Sofia’s wrapped in my arms.
“Did it work?” she whispers in an exhausted rasp. Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Are we alive?”
My ribs are bruised, my shoulder aching where I think I landed on it, but I push upright, looking around for some sign of the others.
I see Flynn and Jubilee immediately. She’s muttering a curse in another language she must have learned from him, judging by the way he seems to understand it. I make eye contact with Flynn, and he lifts a hand to signal that they’re okay.
I follow his gaze across to where Tarver sits in the center of the room, curled in on himself. He starts to straighten, moving like every part of him is in pain. Like an old man.
“…the hell was that?” Jubilee groans.
“Disrupting the rift sets the whispers free,” I say, trying to climb to my feet and failing. “It worked on Elysium when Tarver and Lilac jumped. It worked on Avon, for you. She said they were trying to come through, and since she didn’t want them to…we thought maybe they would help us stop her.”
Beside me, Sofia sucks in a breath as I say Lilac’s name. “Gideon, where’s Lilac?”
“She just…” Flynn’s voice dies away. “She vanished. Pulled into the rift with you.”
My gaze sweeps the room frantically, and I try to climb to my feet again, staggering and crashing back down onto one knee as my legs give out. No. No, no, no. I felt her in the rift. In the instant we passed through that infinite space, I sensed her there, I know it.
Early morning sun’s creeping in through the tears in the Daedalus’s hull now, chasing away the shadows, and there’s nowhere she could be hiding. Her father lies in one corner of the ruined room, gazing at the rift as though conducting some mental calculation or conversation.
As I force breath into my lungs, grasp helplessly for what to do next, the light abruptly changes. The lazy blue sparks of the rift grow frantic and the room darkens, as though all the light is being pulled from our surroundings into that one focal point.