“She was working for LaRoux Industries,” I whisper.
Tarver’s eyes flick toward me for the briefest instant and then jerk away. “Yes. And she was on a secret project then, I barely understood it. Sofia’s right—she’s the one person in the galaxy who might actually have the answers we need.”
“Found her,” says Gideon, voice tinged with triumph. But his quick smile falters, his eyes on the palm pad’s screen, as whatever he’s found registers. “She’s…she was hurt when the Daedalus hit, she’s checked into a trauma center. Inside the crash site.”
The crash site, several kilometers of destruction, every inch crawling with husks. Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of them by now—and if Lilac’s whisper decides we’re a threat, we’ll be no match for their sheer numbers.
The urge to lie down returns, that longing to just let the warm marble claim me almost overpowering. I can see my thoughts mirrored in the faces around me—even Jubilee, the notorious Captain Chase, looks like she’d rather drop.
But then I meet Gideon’s gaze, and those hazel-green eyes lock onto mine, and for a moment our mistrust is set aside, and we’re simply together. Just one piece of me, the smallest kernel, calms, and I can breathe. Then his mouth twitches, and he winks. It’s enough.
I move, pulling myself up inch by inch, and that brings the others to life. They rise, coming to their feet, checking the charges on their guns, scrubbing at their faces with their hands as if they can wipe away the tiredness. One by one, they glance at me. So I suck in a deep breath and nod toward the door. “Let’s go.”
We have been waiting for so long, here in the place where the blue-eyed man first found us. The researchers all vanished long ago, but not before their minds crumbled, leaving us in an empty building filled only with the ghosts of madmen. We wait, growing weary, growing weak.
Then the silence is shattered, a great tearing in the sky that breaks the very stars—a ship appears where before there was only the remnant of the blue-eyed man’s experiments.
The ship is falling, and we are too weak to stop it. It carries thousands of souls, any one of whom could free us from this hell—and they will all die.
And then, a flash of light. A glimpse of something familiar. Blue eyes, and a face that once laughed while washed in the glow of the rift. A soldier with her whose soul is still somewhere in that garden, clutching that book of poems.
We have just enough strength to nudge their escape pod so that it skims through the atmosphere safely, just enough strength to watch as they take their first shaking steps on the surface of this world.
We have just enough strength to hope.
THOUGH THE STREETS ARE ABANDONED, we stay close as we make our way toward the crash site and the trauma center whose records tell us that they have Dr. Sanjana Rao. I’m betting that, tactically, it’d be better for either Jubilee or Tarver to scout on ahead for potential threats, but neither one suggests it. They both have their guns drawn, though, and Tarver and Flynn are each wearing one of my cobbled-together shields, tucked inside their military-supplied vests. In theory, if the rest of us stay close to them, within their range, we’ll be shielded from the whisper. I’m praying I duplicated the field in LaRoux’s device correctly, and they’re broadcasting the little electrical pulses we need to scramble any attempts by the whisper to take us over. On the upside, if I’m wrong, there’s every chance I’ll never know about it.
Every pocket in the vest Kumiko’s people gave me is crammed with tools and equipment, and tucked inside it is the slim aluminized bag I took with me to the Daedalus under my suit jacket. I wanted to make sure none of my equipment could be damaged by anything magnetic on the ship if we ended up taking a cross-country route to the rift.