The ruling senators for every planet in the galaxy, all in the same room, all with their guards down. “Oh, hell.”
“LaRoux wants power,” Sofia goes on. Her face, when she says that name, goes hard as granite. She may be a consummate actress, but she can’t hide her hatred. “If he could do to the senators what he did to the people on Avon, or the people at LRI Headquarters…”
“He’d control the entire galaxy.” My mouth is dry, a deep chill in my gut making me want to shiver. Hard enough exposing LaRoux and his company without the authorities themselves under mind control. “Would he be able to move something as big as the rift we saw? And hide it from an entire ship full of staff and guests, not to mention the media outlets that’ll be swarming the gala?”
Sofia hesitates, glancing at me, then at my screens, then away. “I have a contact,” she says finally, “within LRI. I only got a little from her—we were going to meet that day at the holosuite. But she told me that the technology LaRoux used to create the rifts is the same technology used in the new hyperspace engines, which makes sense given what you’ve just told me about where the whispers come from. My contact understands the rifts—I think she worked on the project, or at least on the new engines, like the one onboard the Icarus.”
“And the one onboard the Daedalus.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where she’s heading, and I’m already itching to get a look at the ship’s blueprints. “There could be a rift there already, hiding in plain sight.”
“And if we don’t get to him first, LaRoux’s going to use it to turn the entire Galactic Council into husks under his command.”
“Oh, hell,” I repeat, shutting my eyes.
“In a handbasket,” she agrees.
“Bring her back!” The blue-eyed man is screaming at us through the thin spot on the gray world. “You brought the scientists on Elysium back, again and again. You drove them mad with it. All I ask is one life, one—” His words fail him.
His face is haggard, the dark hair grown lighter with gray and white at temple and nape. His anguish is different from the anguish we have learned from the gray world. This anguish is special, individual, unique. He is teaching us pleasure. They have a word for it, this species. Revenge.
“Please,” the blue-eyed man whispers. “If not for me, then for my little girl. She needs her mother.”
We stay silent. Let him know loneliness. Let him understand. Let him be the one to watch, and wait, and learn. His lessons are bitter.
And I will learn pleasure.
I FIND MYSELF DRIFTING OFF to sleep as Gideon works at his screens, trying to figure out who we should contact to warn the Daedalus gala attendees about LaRoux’s plans. I know I should stay awake, but it’s the first time I’ve actually felt safe since I first saw the rift at LRI Headquarters, and exhaustion is catching up with me. Down here I have no idea what time it is, but it can’t be more than early afternoon and I feel ready to drop. I was thinking for a while about venturing out for some supplies. I cooked enough on Avon, and I learned about off-world ingredients when I spent a little time as Lucy, a waitress on Paradisa, but the prospect of moving seems to make my body even heavier. I wedge myself upright in the corner to keep myself from slumping, but despite my best efforts, it seems like only a few seconds have passed when I wake up to darkness.
For a moment I’m disoriented, but then the cushion I’m leaning against moves and memory floods back. I’m not leaning on a cushion. It’s Gideon. He must have stopped working and decided to join me in my nap. For a moment, indignation flares through me as he shifts again, chest rising and falling under my cheek in a sigh—but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I realize that I’m no longer in my corner. I’m the one who’s moved, to the other end of the bed, to lean on him.
God, I’m even lonelier than I thought.
I ought to pull away and creep back to my corner, and hope he was sleeping deeply enough not to have noticed me. I barely know him, except that he’s the closest thing I’ve had in a long time to someone I could trust. Even so, I remind myself sternly, he’s worked for the Knave. He’d probably try to stop you if he knew why you were after LaRoux. And you don’t know he’s telling the truth about anything.
And yet I don’t move.
A tiny sound rises above the gentle whir of Gideon’s various computers, and I open my eyes again. I listen hard, lifting my head so that Gideon’s heartbeat doesn’t drown it out. It’s a high-pitched whine, like the noise of far-off construction, only it doesn’t sound far-off. I’m unused to the sounds here in the undercity, so perhaps it’s nothing.
It’s not until there’s a thud, muffled but clear enough for me to recognize that it’s close by, that I sit bolt upright. I grab for Gideon’s arm, no longer caring if he notices how close I crept while we were sleeping.