“You’re lying. No one asks for death.” Lilac glances around, head tilting as though to get a better look at each of us. “Though maybe you will, before the end.”
“Don’t move.” Jubilee’s sighting down her gun at Lilac, her every muscle tense, her body poised. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you take a single step.”
“No—Lee—” Tarver’s got one hand against the wall as he drags himself to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s still in there. Hold your fire.”
The barrel of the gun dips, an automatic response to what was clearly an order. “Dammit, sir…” She shifts her grip on the gun, torn, the instinct to obey him warring with the instinct to protect him.
“If you shoot my daughter,” Monsieur LaRoux says to Jubilee, cold—but visibly struggling for control—“I will personally see you executed.”
“It’s all right,” says the creature inside Lilac, smiling at Jubilee. “I was the first, I am the oldest, and now I am the last of my kind here. I don’t need to move to kill your captain.”
In the distance comes a great, low cry—like the moan of an immense beast, echoing through the ship. It isn’t until half a second later, when the floor shudders beneath us and Sofia and I go staggering back against the wall, that I realize what it was. The sound of immensely thick metal tearing like tissue paper.
Flynn rises to his feet unsteadily and steps up next to Jubilee, his movements slow. “We’ve met your kind before,” he says slowly, his voice soothing, calm—I can detect only the faintest hints of the terror that must be there, the same terror that’s making Sofia shake at my side. “We know what’s been done to you, and we mean you no harm. Please let us talk. You can clearly destroy us anytime you want to, but do that and we’ll never be able to talk to each other. You lose nothing by waiting, by hearing us out. Destroy us now and that door closes.”
He’s even better than he was in the Avon Broadcast—I’d surrender, given half a chance. But the Lilac creature just looks at him blankly, unaffected by his plea. “I was going to crush him,” she comments, glancing over at Tarver, leaning hard against the wall. “But this is far better. Let him die knowing he couldn’t save her. Let him die the way he should have died—falling in a tomb of twisted metal and fire.”
The words ring in the air, punctuated by the distant creaks and groans of whatever’s happening to the ship, and for a long moment I can’t understand what the creature means. Metal and fire…falling… Then, suddenly, my knees buckle. “You can’t—” My voice comes out hoarse with fear, choked with disuse.
Sofia reaches the same conclusion I do. “Oh God,” she whispers.
Lilac is going to bring down the Daedalus.
How the others back on the gray world fare, I will never know. Whether my kin on the other side of the rift can see me, sense me, I cannot tell. All I know is the blue-eyed man, and the link of hatred between us.
He talks to me often, of his wife, of his young daughter, of his work. He has begun work on a pair of ships that will use our universe to move even faster through theirs, and he delights in sharing with me all the successes in his life, certain they will cause me pain.
I wish I had brought his wife back to him, for then I could use her to free myself from this prison. Marked by our touch, she would be vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. I could take from him the thing he loves most all over again, and smile at him with her lips until his mind crumbles.
I could tell him that his new technology risks tearing a hole into our world. I could tell him that to toy with the fabric of the universe is to risk destruction. I could tell him his new ships are doomed.
But I have no mouth with which to speak. And I will wait.
ANOTHER SHUDDER TEARS THROUGH THE ship, throwing me against Gideon. I don’t protest the arms around me—hell, my arms go around him too—because in this moment, I don’t care.
I don’t care about the Knave, I don’t care about his connection to the LaRoux family, I don’t care that I work alone and I don’t commit and I don’t fall in love and I don’t become attached. We’re standing on a ship that’s falling from the sky and if these are my last moments alive I’ll spend them with my arms around Gideon.
“Crash this ship and you die too,” Flynn breaks in, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of destruction all around us.