Free Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel by Amie Kaufman, Meagan Spooner

something to work with. My friend Mae—or at least, she’s closer than anyone else to being my friend—is my general for those. She has an amazing knack for dropping a comment here, an idea there, sending them scurrying toward whatever we want investigated.
    Straight in front of me is my tracking program for Antje Towers, and that’s what has my attention right now. She resigned her commission and vanished from Avon after the broadcast, with a paper-thin story about going off the grid, retiring to a pastoral colony.
Enough death,
she said.
    Not enough for me, Commander Towers
. When they went into the hidden facility after the broadcast, every hint of LaRoux’s presence was gone. That cleansing happened on
her
watch, and she looked the other way. I know she’ll have the dirt I need—the public testimony, if I have to choke it out of her myself—to expose LaRoux for what he really is. She’s been running and hiding for a year, now, switching IDs every few weeks—she’s been Lucy Palmer, Taya Astin, Anya Griffin, Natalie Harmon.…The list goes on and on. She’s always jumping to somewhere new, leaving me with ghost trails, and occasional reports of a blonde switching to a new ship, a different planet. From what I’ve dug up from their databases, even LaRoux Industries doesn’t know where she is—which makes her perfect for my purposes. LRI keeps such close tabs on its employees that I can’t even get close to any of them. But Towers—she’s not under the umbrella of LaRoux’s protection anymore.
    Her trail went cold when she hit Corinth months ago, and more than ever, my pulse is pounding with the urgency of finding her. I’ve had a thousand imagined conversations with her, hurled a thousand accusations her way. If I can find her, maybe I’ll learn more about what Alexis and I saw at LaRoux Headquarters.
    All these years of single-minded focus have led me here, to this. If I can find her, I’ll be able to drag all LaRoux’s crimes into the light. Not like Flynn Cormac did, but publicly, irrefutably—with Towers, I can prove enough of what he’s done to ruin him.
    I’m starting again with Towers’s arrival at Corinth—under a fake name, of course—and preparing to comb through the arrivals records for that date again, when off to my left I hear the soft rippling chime I assigned to the mailbox I left for Alexis.
Huh
.
Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again, Dimples.
    I lift my left hand, clad in a half-finger sensor glove, to point at the screen, then beckon. The sensors beep at me obediently as they switch the displays, flipping my main screen away to the left, and throwing up Alexis’s message in front of me. I’d pretend I wasn’t grinning, but there’s nobody here to know.
    Hi babe,
    No need to come over tonight after all. My father and some of his friends stopped by, so I’m going to go out to dinner with them. I’ll see you this weekend though—we’re still on for the park where we met last time, right? I’m dying to see you.
    Love, Alice
    My grin dies, crumbles to dust, and blows away on a cold, cold wind as I stare at the message.
Oh, hell.
But I don’t have time to dwell, because I’m already yanking down a keyboard, fingers flying over it to trace back her message and bring her cameras to life as I voice my other instructions. “Command: Scan the message on screen forty-nine. Check for security breach. Make sure no bugs got in with it.”
    The ping takes only a few seconds, and I force myself to slow my breathing, close my eyes for a moment, so I’m ready when two soft chimes announce the security check result, and success with the camera.
    “Security intact,”
the system promises me. And then the cameras blossom to life, delivering half a dozen sharp images of her apartment to my screens, and my oh-so-calm breath jams in my throat.
    There’s a brute of a man standing over her in a bedroom, and as I watch she tries to drag herself up onto her elbows, then collapses