Merendsen meets my eyes, and after a long moment, he nods, as if I’ve passed a test. “Then let’s go.”
Within a couple of minutes we’re slowly making our way through the desolate landscape once more. Merendsen’s climbing ahead of me, looking utterly at ease in black fatigues. He’s lacking only his gun—killed by the EMP—to look the perfect soldier. Though his shoulder must still be aching after he dislocated it on the Daedalus, he’s moving more quickly than most healthy people could.
He looks at home amidst the ruins of Corinth, as if the destruction around us is an outward manifestation of the pain inside him. Though I’m dressed the same outwardly, I’m out of my element and I know it.
The physicality of our fight to cross the burning city doesn’t bother me—the climbs and scrambles are no worse than some of my onsite hacks—but I’m used to silent, sterile places, not bloodstained sidewalks and chunks of buildings lying across my path. I’m used to security teams I can track, not silent husks, single-mindedly dissecting the city in a slow, methodical search grid. As we work our way through the wreckage, a part of my mind is preoccupied—taking what I learned from Sanjana’s printouts, turning that information over and over in my head. I’m still grappling with even understanding the programming of the rift, let alone closing it down without empowering the whisper to end the world. And I’m on a countdown that’s elapsing far too fast.
We climb through a restaurant that was inhabited when the debris hit—food’s scattered everywhere, and blood’s pooled underneath one slab of fallen wall, congealing a dark red after so many hours. Fires are still burning as we make our way toward the center of the destruction, the acrid smell of entire city blocks laid to waste getting inside my nose, making my eyes water. We’re seeing parts of the Daedalus herself now, enormous chunks of metal half melted by reentry and impact.
Tarver pauses for a moment atop a broken wall, surveying the landscape below us—the twisted shards of metal, the broken escape pods. Eventually, when it’s clear he’s not going to move on, I speak. “Merendsen?”
He blinks, looking across at me like he had no idea I was there at all, then shakes his head. “I’ve seen this before,” he murmurs, turning his gaze back out to the ruined city.
“This…here?” With a whisper involved, a vision doesn’t seem out of the question.
He shakes his head again. “A dead ship,” he says softly. “I never thought I’d see something like the wreck of the Icarus again. And here I am, heading into its heart once more.” His mouth forms a dark hint of a smile. “You watched my interrogation footage. But I lied about what happened at the wreck.”
“What really happened?”
His smile curves a few degrees further. “Lilac saved my life is what happened. And we found a path that led us out. The wreck of the Icarus was our turning point.” Then he’s moving again, carefully sliding down the slope made out of a crazily leaning wall. I slither after him, landing with a grunt.
He speaks again when we hit the bottom and find level ground. “Lilac never let herself feel for anyone again, after Simon. Not until Elysium. Not until she thought her father would never know. A part of her died when Simon did, Gideon. You should know that.” The words are a gift—the only sort of thank-you he can offer me right now. I understand that.
“I do,” I say, and I know now that it’s true. That I should have known it all along—Simon was a dreamer, but he was never a fool. He wouldn’t have given his heart to someone who could say farewell to him without a backward glance. It took me until I was fourteen to find a way into the military databases and find out exactly how he died.
It was a friendly-fire incident—another terrified recruit, jumping at shadows, who turned his gun on Simon by mistake. He turned it on himself just a few weeks later.
But every time I’ve thought of Simon dying alone on the battlefield, every time I’ve thought of his fear and confusion, all that blame belonged squarely at the feet of Monsieur LaRoux. Never Lilac.
“She told me about him.” Merendsen’s voice is quiet. “If she’d known you still needed her support, I know—”
“I know that too.” We pause, navigating our way around a crack in the road, jumping across a gap that offers a view clear down to the levels below, where fires rage, sending up black smoke. “There was nothing she could do. After Simon died, my parents split. My father couldn’t take what LaRoux did to us. My mother swallowed it, because she was a businesswoman, and making an enemy of Monsieur LaRoux simply wasn’t something she could do, not without the sort of revenge that would ruin her. So they went their separate ways.”
“What about you?” The glance Tarver shoots me might have belonged to Simon—quiet, measuring me up.
“I took off. I couldn’t deal with my father’s grief, I couldn’t watch my mother’s betrayal. I was down in the slums by the time I was twelve.”
“And that’s where you learned hacking?”
“That’s where I learned the dirty tricks. I already knew a lot of it. Simon taught me.”
“He taught her, too. The skill with electronics she learned from him saved her life—both our lives.”
We’re silent as we make our way along the edge of an open section of road, both watchful, but for a time, it’s as if my brother’s the third member of our party, walking silently beside us. It shouldn’t be easier to think about him than about Sofia. I don’t want to imagine her face when she realizes we’re gone. I owe her nothing, after the way she lied to me. But as I walk through my burning city beside a man who’ll risk the entire human race to save the girl he loves, I know that ‘should’ means nothing, when it comes to my heart. I hope she turns and runs—I hope she finds a place to hide from what’s coming. Somehow, I know she won’t.
I’m torn from my thoughts when Tarver grabs my arm, yanking me back into a ruined storefront. I follow his gesture, sinking to a crouch behind the remains of the wall, and immediately I register the reason for his urgency. The low rumble of a heavy vehicle is making its way up the street behind us, and with the city as it is, there’s no reason to assume the folks we’ll meet will be friendly. Tarver finds a metal rod and hefts it in both hands silently, and I pick up a chunk of concrete from the pile of rubble at my feet.
The engine turns out to belong to a delivery truck, with a woman behind the wheel, and four guys sitting on the open flatbed. It’s on sturdy hover cushions, suspended a couple of feet above the ground, where it’ll miss most of the debris. All five of them have the eerie, black-eyed stillness of husks. Their heads turn in slow, constant arcs as they scan their surroundings. Judging by their clothing, I’d say they’re the warehouse workers and office staff of the firm whose logo is on the doors of the cabin. “This is not good news,” I murmur, watching them as they slowly cruise past. “If they can drive, they can cover ground far more quickly than we can.”
“That’s not the worst of it,” Tarver replies in a low voice, and I turn my head to follow his gaze. A slow procession of husks is rounding the corner. There are dozens—no, hundreds—of others, some on foot, others in cars, moving toward the heart of the crash site. All of them with that fluid, unnatural gait. All of them with empty faces and black eyes. There must be a thousand of them between us and Lilac.