These Broken Stars

FOUR

LILAC

PAIN LANCES THROUGH MY SHOULDERS, and I taste blood as I bite the edge of my tongue—but I’m not falling anymore. I’ve hit another railing, the bar catching me under my arms. I have no breath, no strength. The crowd surges past, paying no attention. Spots dance before my eyes as I try to force my lungs to work before my grip gives out.

I can’t have fallen more than a floor or two, or surely I wouldn’t have been able to catch myself without jerking my shoulders out of their sockets. Below me stretches a drop that will shatter my body beyond any surgeon’s ability to repair it.

A ragged cry tears out of me as my lungs finally expand and contract, but nobody hears. The people around me are a blur of color and sound, the smell of sweat and fear, the feel of hips and elbows connecting with my face and arms. They’re too terrified to even dodge the girl clinging for her life to the railing—much less help me. “Swann!” I scream, trying to make my eyes focus on anything long enough to recognize faces, but it’s all moving too quickly.

And then a voice snarls at them to keep back. Not Swann. A male voice.

Strong hands wrap around my arms, pulling me from the railing back onto the catwalk. Someone hurries me down the walkway, moving with the flow, his body between mine and the screaming people scrambling for safety. My feet don’t even touch the ground.

He jerks me into a side corridor free of traffic and sets me on my feet. All I can see are brown eyes staring into mine, stern, urgent. With an effort I recognize him.

“Major,” I gasp.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

My shoulders are shattered. My tongue is bleeding. I can’t breathe. I gasp for air, fighting the surge of nausea that threatens to overcome me. “I’m okay.”

Major Merendsen leans me against the wall like a sack of laundry and goes to the mouth of the corridor, where the crowd whizzes by in a blur. As we watch, a man in an evening coat goes down, pushed by someone behind him; in an instant he’s gone, before the major can even reach for him.

This isn’t a crowd—it’s a riot. And a deadly one. Swann might be able to take care of herself in this chaos, but—“Anna!” I cry out abruptly, lurching away from the wall. I lunge for the crowd. I only know I need to find them.

The major grabs my arm with an iron grip. I beat at his hand, but he pulls me away and swings me around before letting me go, sending me staggering backward, heels skidding. “Are you insane?” he gasps.

“I have to find them.” I raise a hand to my lips, wiping away the hint of blood from my tongue. I recognize where we are now—a maintenance corridor, one of the many that thread through the private areas of the ship. “They’re out there—I need to make sure they’re—”

Major Merendsen blocks the way between me and the torrent of people rushing for the lifeboats. The ship lurches again, the floor buckling and heaving beneath us, throwing us both against the wall. The sirens start up, and we have to raise our voices to make ourselves heard over the urgent wailing.

“There’s nothing you can do for them,” he says, when he’s regained his balance. “They’re two decks up and half a klick away by now. Can you walk?”

I inhale sharply through my nose. “Yes.”

“Then let’s move. Stay between me and the railing. I’ll try to keep them from flattening you, but you have to keep your feet under you.”

He turns toward the crowd, squaring his shoulders.

“Wait!” I stagger forward and grab his arm. “Not that way.”

He sucks in an irritated breath, but he stops. “We have to get to an escape pod. Much more of this shaking and she’ll tear herself apart.”

I’m still struggling to breathe, and it takes me a moment to get enough air to reply. “I know this ship,” I gasp. “There are pods for the crew nearby.”

He stares at me a moment, and though I know he must be debating, struggling, none of it is written on his face. “Then let’s go.”

The service corridor is empty, only the emergency lighting strips along the walls to tell of any problem. The crew must be at their stations, assisting the passengers into their pods before heading for their own. Or else there’s no way for them to get back here, all pretense of civilization gone.

The major follows me in silence, though I can feel his tension. For all he knows, I could be leading him to his death. I’m sure he doesn’t want to follow me anywhere. But he doesn’t know this ship like I do. He didn’t spend his childhood in her skeleton as she was being built.

We turn down a maze of branching corridors. I head for a door marked Authorized Personnel Only and shove it open with a slight whine of unused hinges. My shoulders still ache, but I can use my arms—maybe I’m not so shattered after all. The door opens onto an escape bay, a five-seat pod waiting with open door for its refugees.

“Thank you for the escort, Major,” I say crisply, stepping over the lip of the entrance and turning to face him. He’s just behind me, stopping abruptly to avoid running into me. I want to burst into tears, thank him for what he did, but if I do, I’m not sure I’ll ever stop crying. And he doesn’t know what it would mean for him if we got picked up in the same pod. My father would never believe there was an innocent explanation.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s another pod a little ways down the corridor. It won’t take more than five minutes to reach it.”

The soldier lifts both eyebrows. “Miss LaRoux, there are five seats in that pod, and I mean to use one of them. We may not have five minutes. It seems like something’s pulling the ship out of hyperspace before it’s supposed to.”

For a moment fear freezes me. As my father’s daughter, I know better than most what happens when the fabric between dimensions is disturbed. I take a deep breath and step back so as not to have to crane my neck. “Major, if they find you alone in a pod with me when the rescue ships arrive—”

“I’ll take my chances,” the major replies through gritted teeth.

He doesn’t want to be in this pod with me any more than I want him to be. But the ship gives another horrible lurch, sending me crashing into one of the chairs. The major braces himself in the pod doorway. From somewhere in the distance comes a terrible metallic shrieking.

“Fine!” I pull myself up with the straps on the chair. This is no cushy first-class pod. This is bare-bones, designed for mechanics’ crews. The floor is a grid, and as I try to stand, the heels of my Pierre Delacour pumps wedge down into the holes.

Two thousand Galactics’ worth of shoes, destroyed in an instant, the silk stripped from the heels. I stare at the floor, trying to catch my breath. What difference do the shoes make? And yet I can’t stop my mind turning it over, can’t stop staring at the ruined shoes. My mind seizes this tiny detail and clings to it.

The major palms the pad by the door, sending it hissing closed behind him. Then he punches the auto-eject launch button, starting a countdown that gives us enough time to strap in. A trio of lights goes on overhead, blinding me. His boots clomp across the metal floor to a chair opposite mine, and he starts clipping himself in. With a jerk, I wrench my heels out of the grid floor and turn so I can sit in the chair.

I take a full breath for the first time since the alarms started blaring. Safe. For now. I’m trying not to think of the fact that there’s no way the screaming crowd can all be safely inside escape pods.

The ship’s autolaunch will send us speeding away from the Icarus, and in no more than an hour or two a rescue ship will pick us up. I just have to get through the next few hours, with only Major Merendsen for company.

His face is blank, locked down. Why did he even bother to save my life if he hates me so much? I wish I could apologize to him for what I said on the promenade deck. Tell him that what I say and what I mean are never the same, because they can’t be. My throat feels tight, my mouth dry. I never should have given him another glance in the salon.

“How much would we have to pay you to not spread this story around once they pick us up?” I fumble with the harness. It’s not the elegant and comfortable lap belts of the passenger pod—this is a five-point harness that chafes at my bare shoulders.

The major snorts, turning his head toward the tiny viewport, which shows only a scattering of stars that blur and lurch as the ship does. “Why do you assume I’d ever want to tell anyone about this?”

I decide to bury the major in icy silence until this is over, for both our sakes. If we don’t speak, he’ll have nothing to report.

The countdown to ejection continues, blood roaring in my ears out of annoyance with the major. Forty-five seconds. Forty. Thirty-five. I watch the numbers over the door click down one by one, trying to make my stomach settle. A LaRoux doesn’t show weakness.

Without warning, we’re slammed down into our seats as the entire pod jerks. A ripple of white-hot energy shoots through its metal frame. I taste copper, and then the universe goes black with a sound like a thunderclap in my ears. All the lights, the countdown, even the emergency lighting…gone. We’re left in utter blackness but for the stars outside the viewport.

Stars that are no longer stretched thin. The Icarus has been torn out of hyperspace.

For a few moments there’s no sound. Even the background hum of the engines and life support are gone, leaving us in the depths of the most crushing silence either of us has known since we came aboard.

The major starts cursing, and I can hear him fumbling with his straps. I understand his haste. Without power, we’re going to run out of oxygen before anyone out there even realizes the Icarus has had a problem. But that’s not our most immediate problem.

“Don’t!” I manage, the words tearing out of a throat gone dry and hoarse. “There could be another surge.”

“Surge?” I can hear the confusion in his voice.

“There are huge amounts of energy involved in interdimensional travel, Major. If there was another surge and you were standing on the metal floor, it could kill you.”

That makes him pause. “How do you know—”

“It doesn’t matter.” I close my eyes, trying to concentrate on breathing. And then, the emergency lighting comes back online. It’s not much, but it’s enough to see by. And it means the emergency life support has engaged.

The major’s face is drawn, tense. He looks back at me, and for a moment neither of us speaks.

And then a scream of metal tears through the ship, making the pod shudder; it’s still attached to the Icarus. We both look up at the countdown clock—still blank. We’re stuck. I look across at the major, then down at the metal grid floor. If there’s another surge while I’m standing on it, I’ll die—but if there’s another surge while we’re attached to the ship, it could destroy the pod anyway.

Just do it. Don’t think.

I jerk my straps open and drop to the floor. The major protests but I ignore him and make for the control panel by the door. I don’t know what’s happening to the Icarus, but I know that the last thing we want is to be attached to the ship if another surge goes through it like the last one. I just have to get the separation and ignition sequence going using the emergency power, buckle myself back in, and we’ll be safe until the rescue ships show up.

You can do this. Just imagine Simon, and his tools, and everything he showed you before.… I take a deep breath, and open up the panel.

So much for not giving him a story to take back to the tabloids. They’d go crazy for a month with just one picture of me up to my elbows in circuits. No man, woman, or child of my class would own up to something like this.

But none of them would know what they were doing. Not like I do.

I reach in for the bundle of rainbow-colored wires behind the panel, pulling them out and inspecting them. No doubt they’re coded in some way, but lacking knowledge of this particular system, I have to trace them out manually, deciphering amid the tangle which are the two I want.

“Need any help?” The question is tense but civil, revealing nothing.

I jump, jolted out of my concentration. “Not unless you were an electrician out there on the frontier, and given I’ve heard they don’t even have lightbulbs, I doubt it.”

A faint noise behind me, a muffled exhalation. Is he laughing at me?

I glance over my shoulder, and he’s quick to avert his eyes toward the ceiling. No wire cutters, so I use my fingernails. One advantage Simon never had—he couldn’t strip wires bare-handed. And he never would’ve dared use his teeth on live circuits.

The major is silent behind me, and when I sneak a second peek over my shoulder, his eyes are still on the ceiling. A little of my annoyance fades. He did save my life, with no guarantee he’d have time afterward to make it to an escape pod.

I shouldn’t say anything to him. I should make sure there’s nothing for either of us to tell when we return. I should make sure he continues thinking I’m the worst person he’s ever met. But for some reason, when I’ve got a section of the green and white wires stripped, I find conversation fighting its way out of me. I mean to be conciliatory, but despite my best intentions, it comes out as acidic as ever.

“On the frontier, isn’t this how they hot-wire a hover—”

I brush the two wires together, and instantly the rockets ignite, catapulting the pod away from the ship. I have only the briefest glimpse of the wall in front of me careening at my face before the universe goes utterly black.

“What did you think was happening at that point?”

“I didn’t know. There was no communication equipment in the pod.”

“You didn’t try to guess?”

“We’re trained to work with solid information.”

“But you had none?”

“No.”

“What was your plan?”

“Sit tight and hope. There was nothing to do except wait.”

“And see what happened next?”

“And see what happened next.”