I can’t trust her.
And yet I do.
Oh, hell.
My arms tighten around her of their own accord, and she surges in against me, lips parting as we lose ourselves in each other, try desperately to close the distance between us we both wish wasn’t there. My jacket hits the floor with a thud, pockets full of gear rattling, and with a kick I send it off into the dark. Her hands slide up inside my T-shirt, finding skin, and my brain starts to shut down higher function so I can concentrate on getting her shirt off without breaking the kiss for more than a couple of seconds.
But one thought persists, ricocheting around inside my skull, demanding to be heard.
Did she mean what she said?
I trusted her on the Daedalus, and she was playing me every second. She kissed me then, and when I held her, I thought she was sincere in the promise she made to abandon revenge. I couldn’t bear it if she was just taking her best, last chance to soften me up, change my mind.
Perhaps she needs to make peace, the night before it all comes undone. Perhaps she needs to speak her truth. Perhaps it is truth.
“Sofia, I have to—” I murmur the words against the skin of her shoulder, half my mind busy mentally mapping the distance to our old nest of blankets.
“Hmm?” She’s distracted, that one syllable dragging out into a moan I want to hear again. Then she’s dragging my shirt off and planting both hands against my chest so she can push away from the wall, walk me back toward the nest. Great minds, Dimples.
“Never mind,” I whisper. She feels so right in my arms, she fits, and yet some small part of me still can’t tell if all she wants to do is pull me away from Tarver’s side, make sure Lilac dies like Sanjana says she must. I know it would hurt her to manipulate me like that, but for stakes as high as these…could I blame her?
“Say it, whatever it is,” she murmurs, as my back hits the wall by our nest, and she comes to rest flush against me.
“I have to do it.” I whisper the words, even as some small version of myself howls in the back of my brain to shut up. “I won’t leave Tarver to face her alone.”
“I know,” she whispers in reply, and when I bow my head, she presses her forehead to mine. “After everything that was done to the whisper, maybe that’s what drove it so mad in the end. Being alone.”
The wistful sadness in her voice calls up an answering pang deep in my own chest. We both know what it is to be alone. I reach up to smooth back her hair, careful to keep my fingers from catching in the snarls the last few days have left there. “They’re not inherently evil. If they were, Lilac wouldn’t be here at all. She’d still be dead on that planet they crashed on.”
“I know,” she replies, turning her face away so she can rest her head on my shoulder. “Jubilee knew one of them as a child, the same one that helped her and Flynn on Avon. We turned this one into the monster that’s taken over Lilac.”
“LaRoux did this to it.” Just as LaRoux hurt Sofia, twisted the girl in my arms into someone capable of murder. Just as he twisted me into someone who could justify hunting her, terrifying her. The thought sits right there before me—which species is more dangerous, truly?
My mind throws up the passing thought I had at Mae’s…just a few days ago, though it feels like a lifetime. Now, I voice it out loud. “I wondered once if the whispers could see all our data, everything we send through the hypernet. And what they think of it, if they can. What they think of us.”
“Our data,” she echoes. “You mean…”
“Everything we send. From our parking tickets, to our poetry.”
“If I could see all of that,” she says quietly, into the dark, “all our anger, the things we say to one another, I wouldn’t think much of us.”
I let my knees bend, and she comes with me as my back slides down the wall, and I sink to sit on our nest of blankets. We sit there together in the near dark, limbs tangled together, pressed close, as though the contact alone will save us.
“There has to be another way to stop her, Gideon,” she whispers.
Here, holding her, looking at her face, her eyes, the curve of her mouth where the flashlight outlines it, I want to believe that loving her means I can trust her; that her I trust you meant something. Because if it was true—if she could feel that, after the ways he twisted her—then it would mean everything. But the uncertainty is there like the tiniest of splinters, worming its way deeper and deeper into my heart, carving a path for doubt to take hold like an infection. There’s no other way, and if this is her attempt to distract me from my choice, my path with Tarver, I can’t let her talk me out of it.
She leans forward, tilting her face up, and I give in and let my lips find hers rather than search for words. This much, at least, is true. This warmth, this need—whatever else has come and gone between us, and whatever else may come, this moment is true.
It would be such a leap, and in the end, neither of us is very good at remembering how to trust. At least alone, she with her plan and I with mine, there’s a chance one of us might be right.
So instead of making a new plan, instead of taking our leap, we ease down into the blankets, my heart hurting every moment, to say our good-byes in the only way we both can trust. Without any words at all.
We feel the loss of our kin on the gray world as keenly as we felt the loss of the first of our kind to die. We try to understand death, to understand how a thing can cease to be. Learning about the uniqueness of these creatures only deepens our confusion, for how can something so rare and so precious exist one moment and vanish the next?
We have only one of our kind left in their world, the one we cannot see. But because of the boy who lives in the hypernet pathways, we know the final prison is somewhere on the world at the heart of the galaxy. We must bring the six to this place, to find our last emissary and send it home so we can learn, finally, whether we can coexist with these strange, brief creatures who live and die without letting uncertainty destroy them.
The others, their paths all lead to this spot—all but the girl with the dimpled smile. We must bring her there somehow, twist her thread closer to the rest.
We learn that the boy wrapped in wires and data is searching for someone he believes can lead him to the blue-eyed man. We will nudge him onto the girl’s trail instead…and he will drive her here to us.
THE DARKNESS AS I CREEP with Jubilee and Flynn from the abandoned restaurant is absolute, and I’m forced to move with agonizing slowness. Unwilling to risk drawing attention with flashlights, we’re picking out each step by feel, navigating the debris-littered streets of the undercity based on my memory alone. What I wouldn’t give for Gideon’s knowledge of this place—I was never truly at home here, but he knows these streets like the back of his hand.
I left him while he was still asleep, making my way back to the others and praying they wouldn’t notice how long I’d been gone. As I lay there through the rest of the night, wishing for sleep that never came, my head was still ringing with the things we said to one another, and the things we didn’t. With images of black-eyed husks, and planets plunged into isolation. Of a whisper twisted and tortured until it became a weapon—of the moment I realized the same thing had happened to me. Even now, I can’t stop shivering, and it’s not from the bone-deep chill settling into the streets at the bottom of Corinth.