“It could reach her from halfway across the galaxy, you asshole,” Tarver snarls, hands curling to fists by his sides. “You have to cut them off, send them back.”

“My boy,” says LaRoux, reaching up to adjust a mechanism against his ear—some sort of communication device, perhaps. “As much as I’d like to oblige you, there’s too much riding on the next few days for me to sit here discussing all of it with you. Lilac, come along.” He half turns, gesturing for the staircase as though expecting Lilac to fall obediently into step.

“No,” Lilac says in a low, tight voice. “Not this time, Father. I can’t keep going like this. We know about your experiments, about Avon, about the whispers, the rifts—all of it. And you know we know. We can’t keep skimming over it, pretending we’re a happy family. You’re—you’re destroying me with this.”

LaRoux’s calm exterior tightens a little. “You’re fine,” he insists. “And even if this—this rift as you call it—is affecting you, there are far better ways to prevent that than destroying my life’s work.” He reaches up, touching the device over his ear with a smile. It’s the same thing I saw the men at his headquarters clipping into place as they prepared to use the rift on me.

Realization dashes over me like an icy blast. “Of course,” I whisper, my anger making my hands shake. “You’d never create a weapon that could be used against yourself. You’ve got a way to make yourself immune.”

“Clever girl,” LaRoux replies, pretense falling away. And though the words are a compliment, his tone is hard. “Now, are we done here? They should be passing around the champagne for our toasts even as we speak.”

“You had a cure.” My voice comes out thin and strained, and I have to blink hard to clear my eyes of the furious tears blurring them. “You had a cure that could’ve saved everyone on Avon.”

LaRoux’s brows lift. “I am sorry for those deaths, truly. But one must always be willing to make sacrifices in the pursuit of progress. If it brings you any comfort, think how much their lives mean now—how much their deaths mean. They would’ve toiled in obscurity in their small, pointless lives on a small, pointless planet—now they’re a part of something much greater than themselves.” The glint in his eye frightens me far more than the words themselves do—he believes what he’s saying, believes it with every fiber of his being.

I’m moving before I can think, the shaking in my body stilling, dwindling down to one single-minded purpose. I tear the gun out of my purse and level it at LaRoux, my whole world narrowing down to his face.

He barely reacts.

Dimly I hear Gideon’s voice, low, shaking with intensity. “Sofia, don’t.” He’s a few steps away from me—too far to reach me before I can pull the trigger. “Don’t do this. You promised me you wouldn’t become this.”

Ignore him, I tell myself, focusing on the man in front of the gun barrel.

Tarver and Lilac are standing perfectly still, but her father simply gazes at me like I’m some fascinating new type of insect. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into using that thing to shoot Mr. Merendsen?”

“Father,” Lilac interrupts, voice tightly restrained. She even sounds like him, especially now, fighting for control.

“A joke, my dear,” he replies, reaching out to stroke her cheek with one curled finger. If I didn’t know better, I’d think him a jolly old professor of something, or a kindly philanthropist. I swallow, trying to ignore the way my palms are growing sticky with the effort of holding the gun steady. LaRoux turns toward me again. “I actually know quite a bit about this young lady,” he continues. “She spent some time with us recently, and we finally managed to correctly identify her. However much I might wish it, she’s not going to shoot Mr. Merendsen.”

“No,” I manage, reminding myself to keep breathing. I can’t shoot straight if I’m half-unconscious from oxygen deprivation. “Not him.”

“Sofia Quinn,” Roderick LaRoux continues, as if reciting from memory. “Sixteen years old, with a spotless record until her disappearance in transit from Avon’s spaceport to an orphanage on Paradisa over a year ago.” LaRoux turns that smile on me. “You aren’t the first person to aim a gun at me, my dear. Put it away and we’ll discuss whatever you like. I’ll do whatever’s in my considerable power to help you.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” I spit back, the anger surging, easy to locate. “If you know who I am then you know why I’m here. My father’s dead because of your sick experiments on Avon.”

LaRoux just shakes his head. “I’m afraid so many lives were claimed by the tragic events on Avon, my dear. I couldn’t hope to remember them all, but you have my sincerest sympathies for your loss.”

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t even… My hands are shaking again.

“Sofia.” Lilac’s voice is soft as she speaks—testing out the name on her lips, her gaze suddenly full of a sympathy I’m not prepared for, not from her. “Sofia…please. Put the gun down, and you and Gideon can come with me. We’ll talk, after my speech. We’ll talk about all of it.” She doesn’t look at her father, even when he reaches out to wrap an arm around her shoulders, a gesture of such fatherly affection that my chest constricts.

“Just put it down.” The voice is no more than a whisper, and I can feel Gideon at my side like an anchor, a warmth pulling me back to myself. “Sofia, please. This isn’t you. I know you.”

“Ah yes, the accomplice.” LaRoux’s eyes shift to take in Gideon. “We had plenty with which to ID Miss Quinn here, but we never got quite a good enough picture of you.”

I flash a quick glance at Gideon, who’s only a few feet away from me, muscles tense and jaw clenched. “I’m not very photogenic,” he replies.

LaRoux’s brows draw in, his sculpted features settling into an expression of thoughtful scrutiny. “You look familiar, now that I see you.” He tilts his head a little, and then, as though referencing some cocktail party or charity function, remarks, “Didn’t I have you killed once?”

The sound that comes from Gideon’s throat, tangled and full of pain, is what unfreezes me. My voice comes back. “You—you son of a bitch, you piece of…” This time I have no problem lifting the gun, holding it steady, thumbing the safety aside.

Time slows. I hear Gideon shout my name, feel the air shift as he turns to lunge for me. I see Tarver moving, instincts razor sharp, reaching for Lilac. I see his fingers miss her arm by a breath as Lilac whirls toward her father, hair flaring out like a flame. I see her face, the panic there, her heart in her eyes, and despite everything, despite my finger tightening on the trigger, despite my hatred and despair and pain, I find myself wondering if that was the look on my own face in the moments just before my father blew up the barracks.

Then my hand explodes into fire, the fragments of the plas-pistol slicing my chin, my shoulder, peppering the wall behind me. The force of the gunshot knocks me over, and when I try to lift my head it’s like I’m drunk, my ears ringing, my movements slow and too fluid, muscles like putty. LaRoux staggers and my heart sings—but he’s staggering because Lilac pushed him aside, and it’s Lilac’s voice I hear crying out pain, and it’s Lilac’s blood spattered against the display behind her, and it’s Lilac who drops to the floor. It’s Lilac.