Monsieur LaRoux.
By the time the rest of us reach Lilac’s side, she’s crouched on the dusty, cracked floor, one hand half-out toward the man curled a meter away. His white hair is gray with dust from the explosion, the grime on his lined face cut through with swaths left by tears on his cheeks. He’s got his arms wrapped around himself, wedged into a corner of debris, watery blue eyes fixed some distance past his daughter’s face.
“Daddy?” Lilac whispers, voice shaking, tentative. “Daddy…it’s me. It’s Lilac.”
But the LaRoux Industries titan doesn’t even seem to hear her, his eyes never wavering. He’s murmuring under his breath, and only as he exhales and the words rise in volume for an instant can I make out what he’s saying. “…and we’ll all be happy again…”
I glance at Sofia, whose face is grim. She has every bit as much reason to hate this man as I do, and yet I see my own heart mirrored there in her expression. When I look at the tiny shadow of a man huddled on the floor, it’s hard to find that hatred anymore, the bitter-edged determination that’s driven me on since Simon’s death. I look down at him and feel nothing—I look down at him and feel…pity.
Flynn draws my attention with a soft intake of breath, and when I lift my head, he’s pointing at the rift behind me. I twist, heart rate spiking as my exhausted body tries to ready itself for…something. There’s a gold mist, silken and ethereal, slowly creeping out from the rift in strands that grow stronger and brighter by the moment.
“What is that?” Tarver whispers, from where he crouches.
“It’s them,” Lilac replies, just as softly. “They’re going to leave the barriers down. We have…a lot to learn from them. And they want to know us, to learn from us what it means to be human.”
“I think,” Flynn murmurs, “that they just had their first lesson.”
“What do we do with him now?” Jubilee asks, hesitant, looking down at Roderick LaRoux.
“I don’t think there’s anything left to do to him now.” Lilac’s grief is visible, and for an instant I’m back in the LaRoux mansion courtyard, listening to Tarver speak to her father. She’s perhaps the only person, the last person, in this existence to care for you at all.
“What do we do with ourselves now?” Sofia’s voice is quiet, but near enough to my ear that it resonates through my bones.
Lilac dashes her hand across her eyes and straightens, exhaling as Tarver’s arm curls around her waist. “Now…” she starts, eyes shifting to sweep across the rest of us. “Now, we rebuild.”
We are whole again.
We are the weary ones who waited, forgotten, for a pair of shipwrecked lovers to set us free. We are the angry ones who fought, all too eager to bring pain to those who brought pain to us. We are the strong ones who loved, and were loved, discovering hope in stolen dreams and in the clasp of fingers made to interlock.
And we are the darkest ones, who lived in agony and in rage, and found that even in silence and darkness there is always a spark.
We are, and will always be, what we choose.
WITH A FAINT CLUNK, THE door to Gideon’s new den shuts behind me. He’s sprawled on the mattress on the floor that serves as a couch, and looks up to flash a smile at me—or at the armful of takeout I’ve got with me, sending the smells of coriander and coconut milk and lime wafting through the air.
“Mrs. Phan made her first batch of laksa,” I announce, crossing the room to flop onto the mattress next to him.
In the three weeks since the crash of the Daedalus, Gideon’s managed to put together a reasonably respectable den. He’s satisfied with the security of his hypernet lines, and this time there’s a fridge for food that doesn’t come in foil packets. I’d planned on getting my own place, knowing Gideon’s almost religious obsession with anonymity, but before I could even raise the issue, he’d programmed a security code for me. He had to rewrite his whole system to make it possible for there to be more than one entry password, but there it was, waiting for me. Along with a row of skylights letting in actual light, through a clever series of mirrors leading up shafts to the surface above the undercity.
Gideon digs in, practically ripping the bag open in his eagerness to get to the soup inside. “Good call, Dimples,” he says, already reaching for the chopsticks and spoons. “They’ll be celebrating her reopening from here to the next sector.”