“Because you’re Jubilee Chase,” I murmur. “Not whatever the darkness makes you.”
The gentle swaying of the dangling flashlight makes the hollows of her features shift and change, making it impossible to read her face until she looks up at me again. She gives a shudder, then nods. My breath comes a little easier, seeing finally a flicker of the girl I know in there, a flicker of the soldier I’ve put all my hopes on.
“Take me back,” she whispers.
We switch off the flashlight and slip into the frigid water once more, leaving my sister’s hiding place cold and empty behind us.
The boy who’s not supposed to be in her dreams is lying next to her on the hood of a hovercar on the outskirts of town, a blanket binding them together. The boy has pink hair this time, though when she runs her fingers through it, it changes in response to her touch, growing longer, falling in gentle curls over his temples.
They’re looking up at the sky.
“That one we’ll call the huntress,” says the boy, laughter behind his voice. “See, there’s her gun, and that nebula is her hair, and this cluster is that line she gets between her eyes when she’s yelling at me.”
“Shut up, I do not.”
“Your turn.”
The girl watches the sky, but it’s empty. The only constellations on Avon are the ones they imagine.
“I can’t,” she whispers, shutting her eyes. “I’m bad at this game.” She knows what happens next in this dream. He’ll kiss her and they’ll lie there together, and when they sneak back onto the base she’ll go back to work, and be unchanged, except perhaps a little colder without the blanket.
But this time the green-eyed boy takes her hand, and when she opens her eyes, the sky is full of stars.
THE UNDERGROUND HARBOR IS TEEMING with rebels. They’re like ants swarming around a nest, like repair drones clustering around a damaged Firebird. Some of them are marked with red and rusty brown, but they don’t move like they’re injured. There are too many people wearing their loved ones’ blood.
“McBride doesn’t have them organized yet.” Flynn speaks in my ear, grounding me before images of the massacre can cripple me again. “We might be able to use that confusion.”
Even through a whisper, I can hear his heartbreak. He should be with his people. He should be helping them figure out what to do. And he can’t, because he’s the one they’re after. Because of me.
I search the dark waters of the harbor until I spot what I’m looking for, floating a few yards from the near bank.
“The boat I came in,” I whisper back, pointing to where it sits, out of reach of the lights in the harbor.
A muscle stands out along his jaw. He doesn’t look at me, or at the boats. His eyes are on his people, aching for them. But then he nods, gaze snapping back toward the clusters of little boats moored along the docks.
We wade through the water with painstaking slowness to avoid making telltale ripples, slower still as the water level rises to our knees, our hips, our waists. My training takes over, forcing exhausted muscles to function long enough for me to keep each movement careful and controlled. Stealth, I can do. It’s a task to focus on, something to keep my mind away from—from everything else.
We’d be spotted if we climbed in now, so when we reach the boat, we each take one side of it and start walking it toward the gaping mouth of the harbor. I’m about to let my breath out in relief when a light swings across the surface of the water and blinds me.
Flynn gasps a warning in Irish at the same time my muscles tense, reacting to the threat before my mind has time to process it. A shout echoes through the cavern, and the swarms of people head our way.
For an instant, we move as one. I grab on to the gunwale, steadying the boat as Flynn hauls himself up into it—then, leaning his weight to the side, he reaches for my hand and drags me up after him. He’s fumbling with the motor. With the searchlight blinding me, our pursuers are little more than blurry shapes in my streaming eyes. Flynn jerks the ignition cable once, twice. The motor sputters to life, and he guns it too fast, briefly sending the nose of the boat skyward. A bullet punches through the gunwale, and shouts echo in the cavern. We both throw ourselves down into the bottom of the boat. Instinct takes over, and I lunge for him—for the gun he took from me.
I look up and see a fleeting ribbon of fear cross Flynn’s features. Fear—of me. He says nothing, not even silently, not even a mute appeal. But with that same flash of connection that got us working together to climb into the boat, I know what he’s seeing as he looks at me, still bloody, holding the weapon that killed half a dozen of his people. I feel sick, violated down to my bones by what I’ve done; I’d give anything, in this moment, for him to not look at me like that.