Starsight

5

I stumbled back from the screen, colliding with the press of officers. I was suddenly fully alert like I felt before a battle, and I found my hands forming fists. If they wouldn’t let me out, I would punch my way to—

“Spensa?” Kimmalyn said, taking me by the arm. “Spensa!”

I blinked, then looked around, sweating, wide-eyed. “How?” I demanded. “How did it . . .” I looked back at the screen, which had paused on the image of the dead man and his room filled with stars. The line at the bottom indicated the video had reached its end.

The freeze-frame had a complete shot of me standing behind him. I was there. I WAS THERE. Wearing my modern DDF flight suit. Same shoulder-length brown hair and narrow face. I was frozen in place, reaching toward the man.

My expression though . . . I looked terrified. Then that expression changed, impossibly mimicking how I now felt.

“Turn it off!” I shouted. I reached for the screen, pulling out of Kimmalyn’s grip, though a stronger grip seized me.

I wrestled against those hands, struggling to get to the screen. Both with my body, and . . . and with something else. Some sense inside me. Some primal, panicked, horrified piece of me. It was like a silent scream that emerged from within and expanded outward.

Then, from someplace distant, I felt as if something responded to my scream.

I . . . hear . . . you . . .

“Spensa!” Jorgen said.

I looked up at him. He was holding me back, his eyes locked on mine.

“Spensa, what do you see?” he said.

I glanced at the screen and my image there. Wrong, so wrong. My face. My emotions. And . . .

“You don’t see it?” I asked, looking around at the others and their confused expressions.

“The darkness?” Jorgen asked. “There’s a man on the screen, the one who was making the log. Then there’s a blackness behind him, broken by white lights.”

“Like . . . eyes . . . ,” one of the techs said.

“And the person?” I asked. “Don’t you see someone in the darkness?”

My question was met by more confused stares.

“It’s just blackness,” Rodge said from the side of the group. “Spin? There’s nothing else there. I don’t even see any stars.”

“I see stars,” Jorgen said, narrowing his eyes. “And something that might be a shape. Maybe. Mostly just a shadow.”

“Turn it off,” Cobb said. “See what other logs or files you can dig out.” He looked at me. “I’ll speak with Lieutenant Nightshade in private.”

I looked from him to the room’s startled faces, feeling a sudden shame. I’d worked through my worries about being viewed as a coward, but it was still embarrassing to have made such a scene. What did they think, seeing me break like that?

I forced myself to calm down and nodded to Jorgen, prying myself from his grip. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a little caught up in the video.”

“Great. We’re still going to talk later,” Jorgen said.

Cobb waved for me to follow him out of the room, and I made my way to the door, though just before we left he paused and looked back in. “Lieutenant McCaffrey?” he asked.

“Sir?” Rodge said, perking up from beside the wall.

“You still working on that project of yours?”

“Yes, sir!” Rodge said.

“Good. Go see if your theories work. I’ll talk to you later.” He continued on, leading me out of the room.

“What was that about, sir?” I asked him as the door shut behind us.

“That’s not important now,” he said, leading me into the observatory across the hall. A wide, shallow room, the observatory was named for its dramatic view of the planet below. I stepped inside, and through the wall-to-wall window Detritus confronted me.

Cobb stood at the window and took a sip of coffee. I approached, trying to keep the trepidation from showing in my steps. I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder toward the room where we had watched the video.

“What did you see in that video?” Cobb asked.

“Myself,” I said. I could speak honestly to Cobb. He’d long since proven he deserved my trust, and more. “I know it sounds impossible, Cobb, but the darkness in the video took shape, and it was me.”

“I once watched my best friend and wingmate try to kill me, Spensa,” he said softly. “We now know something had overwritten what he saw—or the way his brain interpreted what he saw—so he mistook me for the enemy.”

“You think . . . this is similar?”

“I have no other explanation as to why you’d see yourself in a video archive hundreds of years old.” He took a long drink of his coffee, tipping the cup back to get the last drops. Then he lowered it. “We’re blind here. We don’t know what the enemy is capable of—or really even who the enemy are. You see anything else in that darkness?”

“I thought I heard something tell me . . . that it ‘heard’ me. But that felt different somehow. From a different place, and not nearly as angry. I don’t know how to explain it.”