These Broken Stars

TWENTY-THREE

TARVER

IN THE MORNING, THE SILENCE BETWEEN US is gentle, broken by our puffing and panting as we scramble down the snowy mountainside, our breath clouding the air. My throat’s rough and my mouth’s dry—it takes too much energy to melt snow in our mouths, and the cold leaves our stomachs cramping. The canteen’s at the forefront of my mind. Losing the Gleidel would have been less of a blow.

I squeeze through a gap between two rocks, and before I turn back to help Lilac through, I glance down to make sure my feet are planted firmly—and there it is. A military canteen. It’s in flawless condition, khaki sides smooth and unmarked. As though it just came off the production line.

I reach down, half expecting my hand to go straight through it, but my fingers connect with solid metal—it’s real. When I flip it over, my stomach lurches. My initials are there, engraved by my own hand, impossible to re-create—and yet the dents and scuffs have been erased. The canteen is as flawless as the day I got it. I pull out the stopper, and there’s the filtration system sitting in place, clear water just below. A shiver starts between my shoulder blades and runs down my spine.

We left my canteen behind in the cave, crushed under rock and snow. And now, as though we willed it into existence, here lies a replacement directly in our path. No, not just a replacement—this is the same canteen.

“Tarver?” It’s Lilac, trying to look past me at what stopped me short. I step aside to let her through, but it takes her a moment to spot the canteen. When she does, her blue eyes widen, and she nearly falls the rest of the way through the gap. I wrap both arms around her. We pause for a moment with her tucked against me, holding still.

“You’re touching it,” she says, reaching out to press a fingertip against the canteen. “Tarver, it’s solid. It’s not a vision.”

“It’s mine, but brand-new.” I flip it over to show her the initials, and her breath catches.

“How? No—all those soldiers on board. Someone was bound to share your initials. It’s a coincidence.”

I’m about to point out that there’s no way the canteen could have ended up here, in our path, if thrown from the wreckage—but then I see her face, and the words die. She knows. But neither of us wants to say what’s on both our minds. These whispers are capable of more than just visions, or premonitions. What else can they do?

I try the water—sweet, fresh, clean. We each drink, grateful it’s not snow, icy cold and trickling down our faces as we swallow. When Lilac finishes, she holds the canteen in her hands, staring down at it. She keeps running her fingertips over its surface, as though it might change upon inspection. Then she lifts her hand, staring at her own fingers. It takes me a moment, but by the time she lifts her gaze to mine, I get it. She’s not shaking. This is no vision. No image plucked from our minds and given to us by the whispers.

This is real.

I wish that I could take this as a sign of friendship from these beings, if that is indeed what we’re dealing with. But despite my relief at having a canteen again, all I can think is this: Why work so hard to keep us alive? What do they really want from us?

We reach the grassy foothills at the base of the mountain by late morning, and it’s an unspeakable relief to be walking across level ground again, able to stretch my legs and unbunch my muscles for a while. I realize as we walk that in just a few short days, I’ve become familiar with this place—the wildflowers we saw on the other side of the mountain are missing, and my eyes can pick out burrows where I can lay snares later. Any sense of comfort doesn’t last long, though. I’m soon reminded we’re walking through a graveyard.

The debris blankets the hills. We pass pieces of twisted plastene the size of my hand, and great, melted piles of metal that tower above us.

Most of the pods are too damaged to scavenge anything from, but we’re down to our last ration bar. I think we could survive on the tiny critters and grasses here, but it wouldn’t be pretty. And so I risk peeking inside the first reasonably intact pod we come to, its only major damage consisting of the panels on the side torn away where it was still attached to the Icarus. I’m relieved there’s only one occupant. Her head hangs forward and her hair hides her face where she sits, still strapped into her seat, in about the same position Lilac took in our sturdier mechanic’s pod. She’s in her nightclothes, a pink silky wrap tied on over whatever’s underneath. I imagine she died on impact. Her hair is brown, not red, but it’s all too easy to see Lilac there instead. I keep my eyes averted from her as I climb through the gash in the pod and rummage through one of the underseat compartments. There—half a dozen more ration bars. Food for another couple days if we supplement with the local flora.

When I climb out again, Lilac doesn’t ask whether anyone was inside. She knows from one look at my face what I found there.

The Icarus looks like someone’s run a knife along the side of her and peeled her open. For nearly a third of her length her innards are visible, scorched framework laid bare. The plowed-up trail behind her shows where she skidded in to land, carving out a furrow you could lose a platoon inside. There’s a faint chemical smell on the breeze.

“In the military,” I say, “we call this proceeding with caution. Usually that’s code for ‘let someone else go first,’ but since we’re the forward scouts this time, let’s just watch ourselves carefully. We don’t know how bad the structural damage is inside. We don’t know what breathing those chemicals in the air will do, and we don’t have the medical supplies if we get hurt. Let’s be careful, okay? Test every step.”

There’s no haughty reply or cutting glare. She stares at the ship, solemn, and simply nods. “We can avoid the heavy damage completely. That’s the stern; it’s mostly propulsion systems, apart from the viewing decks.” A pause. Maybe she’s thinking of our encounter there, as I am. That was another lifetime, and we were different people then. She pushes on, businesslike. “The bow’s technical as well. That’s where the communications were.”

What she doesn’t have to say is that the communications clearly aren’t there now. The bow is hopelessly mashed from the impact.

She’s scanning the wreck, gaze intent. “The middle third of the ship is—was—passengers and cargo. That’s probably where we’ll find supplies, and it looks like some of it hasn’t been torn open.”

The false moon has been getting higher in the sky, staying for longer and setting later. It sits just above the horizon now, visible even in broad daylight. Lilac sees me staring at the horizon and comes to stand at my side. “Do you think it had something to do with the crash?”

I can’t help but remember the awful lurching feeling as the Icarus tried to phase back into hyperspace, and failed. Caught by gravity, or by whatever force had ripped it from that dimension in the first place.

“Seems too much of a coincidence not to,” I reply.

I hear her breath catch. “I don’t know whether your schools would have focused on this, but my father taught me endless lessons on terraforming and its history. It was the one subject he refused to leave to my tutors—I guess being a pioneer means you don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Before the first emigration, when they were still trying to figure out how to terraform Mars, one of the ideas for heating up the planet enough to have liquid water was to set up a large orbital mirror to direct more sunlight to its surface.”

My eyes flick from her face back to the false moon. “Or an array of mirrors. I think I remember something about that. They never tried it, though, because it was so impractical, right? If that’s what’s up there, why now? Why this planet?”

She shakes her head, looking over at me. She has no answers, and neither do I. I turn my back on the moon as it sinks toward the plains, and head for the ship.

It turns out the part of the hull that hasn’t been torn open is sealed off almost completely by melted streams of an alloy that was never meant to go through atmo. The sealing off is a good sign, I guess—maybe whatever’s inside will be intact—but that only matters if we can find a way to access it.

I keep the Gleidel in my hand as we work our way along the edge of the broken hull, two ants trooping along the base of a huge metal wall that rises to the sky above us. We don’t see any sign of other survivors. Can we really be the only ones? Surrounded by the utter silence of the wreck, I realize all over again that Lilac’s actions are the reason we’re alive. I may have saved her life when it came to the cat monster, and I may have gotten her this far, but neither of us would be here if she hadn’t found a way to wrench us away from the Icarus. I can’t help but watch her as we walk, my attention divided between our surroundings and the girl at my side. Seeing her in all her finery on board the ship, could I have ever imagined her like this? Wrapped up in the dirt-stained mechanic’s suit, ruined dress stuffed in underneath and hair tied back with a dingy piece of string?

It’s Lilac who finds the fault line that lets us in. A sheet of metal has buckled away from the unbroken wall a fraction, rivets showing, only darkness within. We don’t speak as we get to work, lining up side by side to take hold of it and lean back, muscles straining to bend it and make the hole a little bigger. I feel like telling her to take a rest, but when I glance down at her, her jaw’s squared and her frown is determined. Maybe she’s not quite as weak as I thought—and maybe I’m not as strong or as heavy as I was when we landed.

An instant after I finish that thought, red-hot pain cuts across my palm, and I let go, stumbling back from the metal sheet and whipping my hand free. The metal springs back into place and Lilac nearly gets her own fingers trapped. I should have been concentrating, heeding my own advice. Now there’s an angry red line across my palm, and a moment later there’s blood, oozing, then flowing freely.

“Tarver, are you—oh.” She curses admirably, then turns businesslike, hauling the pack off my shoulder and dropping to the ground to dig out our pathetic first-aid kit. All I can do is lift my bleeding hand above my head, and use my free hand to squeeze the wrist, trying to limit the blood flow, but it’s deep. I can tell already.

“Where did you learn to say that, Miss LaRoux?” I try, keeping my voice light.

“You just wait until it’s my father asking that same question, Major.” She pulls out the little kit and starts to unpack it. “Then you’ll know what real trouble is. Come down here, I’ll try to bandage it up.”

“I plan on being far away by the time the subject arises.” I carefully sink to my knees. “Exiled to some far colony to fight the rebels, in punishment for making eyes at his daughter.”

“You keep your eyes to yourself.” The wound’s bleeding properly now, and she wads up one of our bandages with our only gauze pad to press it against my palm, then straps it all into place with the other bandage. I wince as the pain begins to register properly, burning its way up my arm.

“Baby,” she teases, wrapping the bandage around my palm. Despite her best efforts, though, the blood starts showing through the bandages while she’s still packing away the nearly empty first-aid kit.

It turns out we’ve bent the metal far enough that she can wriggle in, and I wait anxiously as she turns herself sideways and squirms, pulling herself inch by inch into the darkness. “Keep checking you can move backward,” I say, squatting down to try to get a better look at her progress. “You don’t want to get stuck. And check with your fingertips before you grab anything.”

Her legs disappear, and I hold my breath, waiting. My heart hammers in my chest. There’s a clang, and the metal sheet shudders as she kicks from inside, then kicks again. It bends more easily with force in that direction, and once the gap is wide enough, I stoop to crawl in after her.

The air inside the ship is cold and still, but it smells okay. It’s not as dark as I’d feared—small breaks in the hull let in speckled daylight, though it won’t be much good once we go deeper. I keep my hand tucked against my body, hoping the bleeding will slow.

“We should be in a storage area.” Her voice startles me. “Cargo, luggage maybe. Some services as well.”

“There were a lot of troops on board. I’d love to find some rations. They taste like cardboard, but they’re nutritionally complete and they’ll keep forever.” I feel like biting my tongue as soon as I’m finished. I’ve been trying hard not to mention the possibility that forever is exactly how long we’ll be stuck here.

“There’s a proper hallway up ahead.” She disappears from view again, and then I realize her body was blocking the light as she climbed out of the service duct we’re in and into a passage. It’s tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, but we can keep our footing if we’re careful. I hold open the pack so she can fish out the flashlight, and suddenly we can see.

The first two doors we try are jammed shut by the warping of the ship, but the third one swings open. The room’s full of crates that have tumbled and smashed, and piles of circuitry litter the floor. Useless.

Lilac pushes open the next door, and I try the other side of the hallway.

“No use,” she calls as I push my door open.

Inside, there are piles of fabric everywhere, sheets and clothes all down one side of the room, lying together where they fell. I’ve hit the mother lode. It’s got to be the laundry. I don’t know if the stuff in here is clean or not, but it’s got to be cleaner than we are.

“Remember that ladylike behavior of yours?” I call out, letting her hear the smile in my voice. “This is the time for it. No pushing, shoving, screaming, or—”

I don’t get any further. She’s heard the shift in my voice and crossed the hallway in a heartbeat. She wastes only a moment in gaping, then shoves past me to dash across to the pile of clothes, laughing.

“Tarver, Tarver. There are—can you see them all?” She’s running the flashlight over the offerings, revealing swaths of fabric of every color.

I’ve got my mouth half open to reply when she starts unzipping the mechanic’s suit, and then my mouth falls the rest of the way open by itself. It’s dark inside the room, but I catch a quick glimpse of pale skin beneath the remnants of her dress before I remember myself, and decide to take a good, hard look at my boots. To judge by the sounds over on the other side of the room, she’s forgotten I exist. The mechanic’s suit must have been really uncomfortable, even wearing it over her dress, if she’s that eager to get it off while I’m standing right here.

“There’s dresses,” she whispers, and I catch a movement in my peripheral vision. Oh, God, come on. It’s the mechanic’s suit and the ruined green dress being kicked across the floor away from her. So what does that mean she’s wearing right now? She didn’t actually say I couldn’t look.

“Don’t look,” she cautions me, as though she just read my mind. Dammit.

I turn away and hold my palm out to examine it in a small stripe of light that falls near the doorway. The bandages are red, and it’s throbbing to the regular beat of my pulse. I wish it would stop. The scratch itself is nothing, and I’ve had far worse in the field, but never without any hope at all of a medic or stitches. It’ll just have to be all right.

“There are sheets, we can make a bed. A proper bed, imagine. We won’t know what to do with it.” She’s laughing as she speaks.

Oh, trust me, Miss LaRoux. I’d know what to do with it. I can think up a whole list of things, if you like.

“You can turn around now.”

I turn slowly, sure I’m going to see her clad in something frilly and impractical, but I can’t make out a thing because she’s got the flashlight pointed at me. Then she changes the angle of the light so I can see her, and I find myself staring.

She’s picked out a pair of jeans and a pale blue shirt, and standing there barefoot with her hair hauled back out of her face, freckles dusting her nose and cheeks, she looks perfect. She looks nothing like a princess, but she looks exactly like a girl from home. She smiles, and her dimples show, and my words get stuck in my throat.

She seems to take my slack-jawed silence as approval, and hands over the flashlight, politely turning to face the doorway so I can pick out some clothes for myself. I spare a thought for the man whose fatigues I find, but I’m most comfortable in khaki, and he was about my size. I find a new pair of pants and a T-shirt and ease into both using one hand, then call out to her so we can gather up some spares and extra layers.

I show her how to tear up a sheet to make bandages—I can’t use my hand for much at all now—and we make up a better dressing for my gash. She works carefully, using a pillowcase to wipe the blood away, then emptying what’s left of the tiny bottle of antiseptic over my palm. We’ve used most of it on scratches and scrapes, and now I’m regretting that. Once she’s finished, she sets another pad gently against the gash, then swathes my hand in bandages, so my fingers poke out the top.

We fill the canteen from one of the water tanks in the laundry, then find big white bags and fill them to bursting with spare clothes and a pile of sheets to make up our bed, carrying one each as we make our way back out to the hallway.

“Do we have enough for dinner tonight?” she asks. “I guess we’ll eat the rations you got out of the pod, then we can make camp. It’s getting dark.”

I follow her gaze and realize she’s right—the daylight coming in through the cracks in the ship’s hull is fading out. I should have been the one to notice that.

She starts toward the doorway dragging her bag of laundry, but I swing the flashlight over to where she changed her clothes. “Want me to grab your dress?”

Her eyes follow the beam of the flashlight toward the pile of dirty green satin. The corner of her mouth lifts in a rueful smile, and then she shakes her head briskly. “Leave it,” she decides, turning her back on what’s left of her old life.

We push and pull our laundry bags through the service chute once more and find a place to camp in the lee of a huge, twisted sheet of metal outside. There’s a stream nearby, and if the wreckage has contaminated the water, the canteen’s filter should take care of it.

We haven’t seen any sign of a living soul, but I dig our fire pit deep anyway, trying in vain to keep my hand clean. It’s still throbbing. Lilac busies herself making an elaborate bed, sorting the clothes into piles, then covering her efforts up with a sheet. After a moment’s consideration, she stuffs a few items into the white laundry bags and makes us pillows.

We don’t have a lot of fuel—a little we carried in, and a little we find nearby—but it’s enough to heat a canteen of water and make ourselves some weak soup, and it helps make the ration bars a little more of a meal.

We talk about the things we want to try to salvage from the ship—medical supplies, food, warmer clothes, even a cooking pot—and study the silhouette of the wreck against the stars. I wonder whether we can climb her to get a better look at the terrain around us.

Lilac falls asleep with her head on my shoulder, and I carefully tug the sheets up over us, trying not to use more than two fingers.

No sign of the whispers. I can’t help but wonder what it means. In coming to the wreck, have we done whatever they were trying to communicate? Or are they still watching, waiting? I don’t understand—or trust—their intentions.

I suppose something could be preventing them from reaching us. Maybe now we’re on our own.

“Significant parts of the ship were intact?”

“You’ve got the recon pictures.”

“I’m asking a question, Major.”

“You’re asking a lot of questions you know the answers to. Is there a purpose to that?”

“Is there a purpose behind your refusal to cooperate?”

“I’m cooperating. Is that water coming anytime soon?”

“The ship. Significant parts of it were intact?”

“Parts weren’t incinerated, but I wouldn’t say they were intact.”

“You conducted salvage without incident?”

“I cut my hand. That was about as exciting as it got.”