Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel Read Free Page A

other side—I can see their eyes.
    And in that instant I’m standing on a military base on Avon, watching my father change in front of me. I’m seeing his eyes, multiplied a dozen times over in the faces around me, pupils so wide the eyes look like pools of ink, like the starless expanse of night over the swamps. I’m reliving the moment my father walked into a military barracks with an explosive strapped to his body. I’m remembering him as he was the last time I ever saw him, a shadow of himself, nothing more than a husk where his soul used to be.
    There are hundreds of people still dotting the white expanse of the holosuite—and every single one of them has eyes like darkness.

At first, there is nothing more. And then come symbols that look like this:
    TESTING .
    Then come more words, followed by images and sounds and colors. Bit by bit the stillness floods with this new kind of life, and we begin to understand the strings of symbols and sounds that pierce the stillness. The hard, bright, cold things come more and more often, leaving ripples in the stillness, gathering up the fabric of existence in waves as they skip through the surface of the world.

YOU’D THINK I’D KNOW TO stay away from trouble by now. But here I am, my mouth tasting like a SysCleanz tablet, bolting down a hallway, sucked into this fiasco by a pair of dimples. One of these years, I really have to get smarter.
    The girl just in front of me is slender, at least a head shorter than me, in one of those dresses all the rich girls are wearing right now. She’s got a mean turn of speed on her despite the heels. To add to the dimples, she’s got pale blond hair to just below her chin, tousled into an artful mess, and big, gray eyes.
    Yeah,
smarter
ain’t showing up anytime soon.
    “I’m really hoping there’s a part two of your plan, mastermind,” I gasp, as we pound down the hallway together.
    “What did you
do
back there?” Her eyes are even huger than they were before, true fear making her voice shake and chasing away my amusement in an instant. She had a better view of what was going on, and whatever she saw has left this girl—this girl who barely batted an eye when I started foaming at the mouth right in front of her—completely shaken.
    “That wasn’t me.” I glance over my shoulder, half expecting some of the security guards to round the corner on our tail. “Though I’m flattered you think it was.”
    I’m about to continue when she grabs a handful of my shirt, using my momentum to shove me into an alcove housing emergency fire supplies without breaking stride. I slam into the wall and she slams into my back, and since I figure she had some reason for steering me this way beyond a desire to see me hurt, I hold still. A moment later, voices are audible around the corner, and they sound pissed.
Good spotting, Dimples.
    “We need a diversion,” she whispers, one hand around my neck to yank my head down so she can whisper in my ear, which isn’t at
all
distracting. “Can you send them somewhere else?”
    “What makes you think I can do that?” I’m already pulling out my lapscreen from my satchel, but I’m interested to hear how she made me.
    “Please,” she mutters. “Maybe you didn’t turn on that machine, but I know you’re the one who shut off the projectors.”
    Huh. Well, at least she was watching me, that’s a start. I should try asking her out for a drink later. If we’re not dead or arrested.
    I wriggle around until I’m facing her, and judging by the way her lips thin, she’s all ready to pour cold water on the idea of getting this up close and personal, until she realizes I’m doing it—mostly—because I need room to get my screen in front of me. “Let’s give them something to go look at,” I mutter, pulling the activation chip from my pocket and sliding it into the port on the side of the screen.
    “What are you going to do?” she asks.
    “Would you understand if I answered that?” I bring