Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (14 page)

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.

He wakes quickly but groggily, barely a silhouette in the dark. “Mmph?” he asks, starting to sit up.

“Does anyone else use this building?” I whisper.

Gideon finds his voice, but thankfully keeps it low to match mine. “No, it’s just me.”

“There’s someone outside. Listen.” For a few seconds there’s only silence, but then the high-pitched whirring starts up once more.

Gideon’s forearm goes rigid under my hand. “It can’t be,” he murmurs. He waits one second more before scrambling abruptly out of bed, still in what he wore when he came to my rescue. He stumbles over to his screens, waving a hand at them to wake them up. There’s a soft chime, and a synthetic female voice speaks calmly. “Intruder alert. Security breach in process.”

“
Now
you tell me?” he snaps. A few flicks of his fingers summon up the display from his security camera. “Oh, God.”

I move off the bed and over to the screens, where the centermost one shows a trio of people, difficult to make out through the fuzziness of the footage. But I can see enough to tell one of them is crouched in front of the door, using some sort of device on Gideon’s locking mechanisms.

My heart seizes, fear banishing the last vestiges of sleepiness and warmth from Gideon’s body. “What’re they—”

“They’re drilling into the door.” Gideon’s voice is tight and cold, and without wasting another second he’s moving, throwing open cabinets to reveal banks of computer drives, shelves of equipment for breaking and entering, and a host of other things I can’t identify.

“How did they find us?” I gasp—I don’t waste time asking who “they” are. This has to be LaRoux’s doing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gideon replies. “We’ve got to run. There’s a back exit. Here, take this and pack anything useful you see.” He tosses an empty bag at me, then grabs a bag himself, the same one he wore when he came into LaRoux Headquarters after me. He shoves in a couple of handfuls of electronics, then reaches for the bottom drawer of his desk to pull out an old, battered, antiquated paper book. He carefully, gingerly tucks it into his bag to nestle against his lapscreen. He takes a precious moment to seal the bag, then dumps it on the ground.

I get to work, shoving gear and protein gel packets into the bag. Abruptly there’s a scream from outside the door, audible even through the layers of steel, and when my gaze flies up to the security screens, one of the fuzzy figures is lying on the ground.

“Defense measures won’t hold them forever,” Gideon says tightly. “Gas should release in a minute, but if they’re smart they’ll have masks.” He grabs for a handheld device that, once he clicks it on, emits a drone so high-pitched it’s nearly silent, while at the same time making my jaw ache. He starts swiping it up and down the banks of drives—the screen showing the security feed flickers, striated by white and black lines, then goes blank. A paper clip lying on one of the drives zips over and clings to the device—an electromagnet. He’s erasing his tracks.

“These here,” he commands, gesturing at a cabinet, and I dutifully empty a box of thumb drives into my pack. Then Gideon’s pressing tiny bricks of what looks like thick clay against the interior of the computer drive cabinet. I’m moving to add a bigger, heavier external drive to the others in my bag when he jerks to his feet and takes it from me. “No—that goes in here.” He slips the drive into his own bag, giving it an affectionate pat. “This one’s aluminized, keeps it from being wiped. That drive’s too important to risk.” As he speaks, he’s moving—a few steps and he’s at my side, stooping to grab at the edge of the faded rug on the floor and fling it aside.

“Oh, for the love of—” For a moment I forget the people trying to break into our sanctuary, staring at the trapdoor that the rug had been hiding. “You’re like a villain out of an old movie. I should’ve known the only homey touch here was to hide your getaway.”

“Can’t go wrong with the classics,” Gideon replies, and though the joke sounds like him, his voice doesn’t. It’s still tight with distress, and I can see panic starting to seep into his gaze, despite what must be a well-rehearsed contingency plan.

He’s not used to people finding him,
I realize. He hasn’t lived the life I have over the past year, always only a step or two ahead of the Knave, always waiting for him to find me and drive me to move on again.

“Let’s go,” I say, and he stops staring at the trapdoor and instead hauls it open. I start down the ladder it reveals, then pause. “We need to get the rug back over the trapdoor somehow, or they’ll just figure out where we went.”

“They’ll have other things on their minds,” Gideon says grimly. “Hurry.”

The ladder leads down into what must be an old, forgotten sewer from when the undercity of Corinth was the
only
city. Now it’s dry and empty and, when Gideon slams the trapdoor closed above us, utterly pitch-black. I freeze, trying to remember if I shoved a flashlight into the pack of gear on my back, but before I can start to look, a soft reddish glow illuminates the tunnel.

I glance back to see Gideon clipping an LED lamp to his collar and tossing a second one to me. Smart—the red light is the part of the spectrum least likely to ruin our night vision. If we have to shut off the lamps and hide, we’ll still be able to see as well as anything else down here.

“We have to keep moving,” says Gideon, his voice still strained, making my heart ache. I did this to him.

“Gideon, I’m so sorry. I never meant—”

“It’s not your fault,” he interrupts, before lifting his gaze to meet mine. The red light drains his face of any other color, leaching the sandy brown from his hair, the hazel from his eyes. He takes a breath, and when he speaks again, he sounds a little more like himself. “I can start over. We’re in this together.”

I swallow, and while I wish I could think of something to say, there’s no time for that. Despite Gideon’s promise, I’m expecting those goons to pull open the trapdoor at any moment. I take off down the tunnel again, Gideon’s footsteps right behind me.

I can hear him counting under his breath as we move, but not at the right pace to be keeping time—he’s counting out our steps. I’m about to ask why, when he reaches one hundred and pauses. I turn to see him holding something, about the size of a thumb drive or a gambling chip. He sucks in a breath and glances at me. “Brace yourself.”

I don’t have time to ask for more details, because he’s pressing a button on the object and then a sound blasts down the tunnel, making me cry out in spite of myself and clap my hands over my ears. A shower of dust and cobwebs and other things I don’t want to know about patters down onto my hair and shoulders, and I have to fight the impulse to throw myself to the ground. I know that sound. I know it so well it echoes in my nightmares, makes my shoulder throb with remembered pain.

An explosion.

The echoes of it through the tunnel die away, leaving me gasping, shaking, staring at Gideon, who slips the device back into his pocket. “What the—you said—”

He shakes his head, speaking softly. “The echoes make it sound bigger than it was. The charges were just to destroy anything left on my drives. Even if they were already inside, the worst they’d get would be some ringing ears and maybe some bruises if the force knocked them back.”

My mouth tastes bitter, and though I’m trying to make myself move again, my muscles are tense and shaking. Through the dim red light of the LEDs I can almost see the first responders at the base on Avon running toward the flames, can almost smell the acrid smoke and chemicals, can almost hear the shouts and screams of wounded soldiers beginning to fill the air.

“Hey,” comes Gideon’s voice, much closer to me. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I should’ve warned you—I promise we’re okay down here. This place could take a dozen blasts like that and survive.”

I blink, trying to clear my eyes of smoke that doesn’t exist, and realize he’s taken my arm, his hand warm and real, unlike the remembered heat of a barracks on fire. “I’m fine,” I gasp, unable to stop my voice shaking. “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s go.”

Gideon hesitates, eyes on my face until I turn away. If I tell him about my father’s so-called suicide, he’ll be able to figure out who I am the second he gets access again to the hypernet. And while he says he doesn’t still work for the Knave, I have no way of knowing how close his ties are, or whether he’d turn me over if he knew I was the thing the Knave had been chasing for the last year.

I start moving, pulling away from his hand on my arm, and after another second of hesitation, his footsteps start up again behind me. A few jogging steps and he catches up to me, clearing his throat.

“We’ll head to Mae’s,” he says, causing a ping of relief somewhere amidst the fog of memory in my head that he’s not pushing the issue. “She’s an old friend, and if anyone on the net has heard rumors about something bad going down at the
Daedalus
gala, she’ll know about it.”

“Can we trust her?”

“Absolutely.” Gideon glances at me, flashing me a smile in the dim red glow of our LED lamps. “She’s one of the only people on this planet I actually
do
trust. I knew her for years through the hypernet before we ever met in person. She’s good people. And she’s got a good rig, so we can use her place to regroup.”

I let out a slow breath. It’s hard enough teaching myself to trust Gideon—secondhand trust is even harder to accept. But I nod, reminding myself that even though he trusts her, I don’t have to. I can still run, if I need to. I still know how to disappear.

“Where is she?”

“She actually lives in this sector, on the north side. Mid-level.”

“Oh—perfect.” I try to bite back my surprise. Mid-level means money, at least enough to afford a decent place, a hover, a steady lifestyle. I was expecting the female version of Gideon, and had been bracing myself for another lair. “But Gideon—what do we do then? If something’s going down on the
Daedalus
, that doesn’t give us much time to stop LaRoux.”

Gideon runs his hands through his hair, a gesture of frustration that’s becoming rapidly familiar the longer I know him. “I know. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we should tell the police—it’s not like we’ve got proof, but maybe if they launch even a halfhearted investigation, it might be enough to throw a wrench in LaRoux’s plans.”

The police? I swallow hard, exhaustion making it harder for me to remember what I’ve told Gideon and what I haven’t. He knows I’m a con artist, knows I’d have no particular desire to bring the authorities into this. But he doesn’t know all the reasons why I
really
don’t want the police’s attention on me. Attention that could lead to questions like “Why do you own an illegal firearm?” and “What are you doing with the blueprints to LRI Headquarters?” and “Why are you hiding your genetag and your identity?”

“Surely LaRoux’s got people in law enforcement,” I say finally. “Not to mention that the sector relies heavily on LaRoux’s private security force, and as much fun as it was dancing with them last time, I wouldn’t mind avoiding their eye this time around.”

Gideon’s shaking his head, his eyes distant and his lips thin, his expression so clear I can almost feel his distress like it’s my own. Losing his den means a lot more to him than losing my apartment did to me.

I soften my voice. “Can we really trust them?”

“We’ve got to trust someone,” Gideon says finally. “We’ll keep it anonymous. We don’t even need to say it’s LaRoux—maybe even just a bomb threat, something mundane, something they have to look into. Anything to get their eyes on the
Daedalus
, because I don’t know what else we can do.”

And the problem is, he’s right. We’re days out from the gala on the
Daedalus
, and our arsenal is down to a backpack of whatever we could grab before he reduced his hideout to rubble. We have nothing. I swallow against the bitter taste of adrenaline still lingering in my mouth, and let Gideon lead me on through the darkness.