These Broken Stars

THIRTY-FIVE

LILAC

WE SIT ON THE FLOOR of the station’s main room, sifting through the half-burned pages, looking for answers. The nausea has passed and my head’s not throbbing so badly. Most importantly, my nose has finally stopped dripping blood. If Tarver noticed what happened to me the closer I got to the locked room below, he said nothing, for which I am grateful. The key to this planet, to the whispers, to finding a way home…it all lies behind that door, and we’re going to find a way through if it kills me again.

I fight to stay silent as a hysterical bubble of laughter tries to escape. If it kills me again. What difference does it make, anyway, if it does? For the first time I don’t feel like the violent paintings on the walls in this room are staring at me. They used to feel like a threat, or a warning, of what might lie in store. Now they just seem to match the violence of my thoughts.

The records left behind were scattered around the room, some charred in fires that guttered for lack of fuel in the concrete building, others dropped, stacked, scattered, like this place was evacuated in a hurry. We’ve gathered as many as we could, and we’re searching them line by line for anything that might help us.

Or, at least, for the password to the door below us. Tarver’s shoulders are hunched, his eyes fixed on the singed page in his hand. Determined, focused. Driven. A fragment of me wants to go to his side, run my fingers through his hair, kiss his temple, distract him until that tension disappears.

But instead I just sit here, unmoving. No matter how hotly that part of me burns, the rest of me is frozen, unable to so much as reach for him. This half-life is torture—I’m little more than a prisoner in this numb, lifeless shell. All I have left, now, is to try to get Tarver home. I force my attention back to the records scattered all around us.

My father’s lambda is watermarked on every page. I can’t help but stare at it, thoughts dwelling on the man I thought I’d known so well. I want to believe he doesn’t know about this place, that the mysteries and horrors of this planet are buried somewhere deep inside LaRoux Industries. But I know my father, and I know he has his finger on the beating pulse of the company he built. He’s the one who hid this place. He has to be.

“They keep referring to a ‘dimensional rift’ here.” Tarver’s voice jars me out of my thoughts.

“Dimensional? Like hyperspace?” I look down at the page in my hand, trying to focus. But my paper is only a list of supplies and requisitions, nothing helpful.

“Maybe.” Tarver’s brown eyes scan the document. “The Icarus did get yanked out of hyperspace by something. Maybe there’s a connection.”

The overhead lights shine through the page he’s holding up, silhouetting my father’s insignia stamped at the top. “Then it’s not coincidence that we just happened to crash on a terraformed planet, my father’s planet.”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it?” He falls silent, then leans forward, suddenly alert. “It says here, ‘Further attempts to re-create the dimensional rift using the super-orbital reflectors have failed, both here and on Avon.’ What the hell does any of that mean? I know Avon, I was posted there for a few months.”

I abandon my stack of pages and cross to Tarver’s side of the room, where I start sifting through some half-burned documents.

“Are they talking about the mirror-moon? That must be what they mean by ‘super-orbital reflectors.’ Mirrors in the sky, to speed up terraforming. Even lifting the temperature a degree or two can change the terraforming timelines by decades.”

“Okay, but then how does the mirror-moon cause a rift? Does it say anywhere what the rift is?”

He fishes out another page, blowing away a layer of ash and inspecting the text. “Dimensional rift collapse will release unpredictable quantities of energy, potentially fatal in nature. Do not attempt direct physical contact with any objects or persons.”

“Then it is like hyperspace.” I can feel the connections clicking together, and I trip over my tongue trying to explain. “The power surge when the Icarus was ripped out of hyperspace—remember I told you then that there’s always a huge energy surge when a ship enters or exits hyperspace? There’s usually preparation, better protection. The rift they’re talking about must be like a hyperspace rift. A way of accessing another dimension, but without the need for a ship.”

“They’ve found a way to reach into another dimension?” His voice is hushed.

“And it’s unstable. What makes hyperspace travel so dangerous is that these rifts always want to close; it’s their natural tendency. They’ve found a way to hold open this dimensional rift, but if you touch it, it’ll collapse. There’ll be an energy blast like the one that fused the circuits on the ship. Or worse.”

He shakes his head, looking down at the sheet once more. “‘Continued extraction of test subjects is dependent on rift stability.’ The rest of it’s burned, I can’t read it.”

“Test subject extraction,” I echo. “They’re pulling something out of the other dimension to experiment on? But what? And where is this rift?”

“Behind that door, I’ll bet. I’m more interested in the test subjects themselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“This.” He reaches behind him, pulls a fragment of paper from a pile. It’s barely more than a quarter of a page, the rest burned away, but there is some writing legible in the corner. He passes it to me.

“‘Subjects display remarkable telepathic abi—’” I read, forced to stop where the page is gone, and skip down the remaining lines of text. “‘…phased life-forms…energy-based…noncorporeal…temporary energy-matter conversion…’”

The rest of the text is lost in the crumbling ash, leaving black streaks across my palm.

“The whispers.”

“The whispers,” he agrees.

My head spins. There are answers in here somewhere, in the scorched remains of my father’s secret research facility. These beings, experimental test subjects to my father’s teams, have led us across the wilderness to this spot. If we’re right, then Tarver and I are not so different from them—all of us castaways on a forgotten world.

“I wish we knew what they want. Perhaps they could get us past the door.”

“We’ll figure it out.” He lifts his head, eyes meeting mine. His mouth twitches like he’s about to speak, and I know what he’s going to say. Together. We’ll figure it out together.

I turn away before he can form the words. Just his glance is enough to set my very blood on fire. He’s become so sure of me in such a short time. He thinks I don’t notice when he watches me move, thinks I don’t see the way he reaches after me, stopping just short of taking my hand. He’s impatient, but not urgent—he wants me back, but he’s waiting. He thinks we have time.

But I know what the whispers were telling me in the corridor below. They brought the flower back and didn’t—like me. I am here, and not here. Perhaps the effort required to flicker the lights took their attention away from sustaining the flower. The words are there on the charred sheet of paper. Temporary energy-matter conversion. How long will I last?

Long enough to help Tarver get home? I try to imagine myself drifting to infinitesimal pieces on the wind, turning to dust like the flower did. It’s easier to contemplate it if I’m not real after all—if I’m only a copy, a remnant of the girl who used to be here. I remember everything of my life, of Lilac’s life. But is memory enough?

The question of the dress haunts me too, coming back to me at every turn. I know he thinks of it too. I left this dress behind in the wreck of the Icarus, discarded for more practical clothing. Each rip and run in the satin is identical to those the original had. I can trace my journey on it—here, the first tear, caught on a thorn as we watched the Icarus fall. There, rubbed raw as I climbed the tree to escape the cat beast. Each mark and stain bearing witness to what I’ve been through. Except that this isn’t that dress.

So whose story does this impostor tell?

“I need to see the body.”

We’re both startled, heads snapping up. It’s not until I see the horror registering on Tarver’s face that I realize I was the one who spoke. The fragment of paper slips from my nerveless hand, fluttering to the floor, streaming ash.

“The—what?”

“The body.” I assume he buried it—me. These thoughts ought to make me sick, ought to frighten me. Why do I think them only blankly?

“Lilac,” he whispers. “No. No. What good can come of that?”

“I need you to take me there.” My hands remember how to work again, clenching into fists pressed against my thighs. “What if there’s a body there? What if there isn’t?”

Tarver’s face has gone pale, something I never thought I’d see again after he recovered from his illness. My heart breaks a little, but not enough for me to crumble.

“Where did this dress come from?” I press. “We both know I left it on the laundry floor, back at the Icarus. Tarver, I have to know.”

“I don’t,” he retorts, suddenly fierce. He leans across the space between us, seeking my gaze. “Lilac, I have you back. That’s all I want. I don’t want to ask questions.”

To look at us one would think he was the one who’d come back from the dead. Maybe in some way he has. The way he looks at me now, like I’m water in a desert—how can I take that away from him? I make myself nod, and he relaxes.

He believes in me now.

The only problem is that I’m not so sure I do.

“I made up a bed for us in one of the rooms,” Tarver offers, leading the way down the hallway. When we reach the sleeping quarters, I see what he means—he’s pushed two sets of bunks together side by side, making a larger bed on the bottom, the top bunks forming a canopy above it.

“Us,” I echo aloud, halting on the threshold.

Tarver stops a few steps into the room and looks back at me. “Lilac?”

I swallow, shake my head. “Please. No. I’ll sleep out in the common room.”

Tarver turns and reaches for my hands. I manage to stop myself from jerking them away, but he senses the buried impulse in the way my skin twitches, and he lets them fall again.

“Why?” he says softly, his face bearing all the lines of grief and exhaustion and pain.

And why can’t I grant him this? I shiver. I must seem so cold to him now. How can he think I’m the same as his Lilac? He doesn’t know what I remember. He doesn’t know how hard it is to inhabit my own body, to make myself speak, walk, eat. How much I feel like I’m a prisoner, able to see and hear but unable to do the things the old Lilac would have done.

“I can’t. I told you—your touch, it burns. I can’t, not yet.”

He presses his lips together. Pain. The urge to go to him is so strong I think I must be tearing apart. I can’t let it go on like this.

“I lied to you,” I whisper, turning to lean back against the door frame. At least the pain of that pressure on my body is physical, distracting. “I let you think I don’t remember anything from the time I was—gone.”

I hear his intake of breath. “What—how—”

“I remember it all.” The cold is leaching my voice away, frost trickling through my limbs, crackling in my lungs.

“You mean—when it happened?”

He doesn’t deserve to know this. Kinder to let him think I just woke up myself again. Maybe the old Lilac would have protected him from this.

“I mean after.” I close my eyes. For a moment all is quiet and I can almost believe I’m gone again, to the silence. “Cold and dark don’t begin to describe it. Cold is just an absence of heat, dark an absence of light. There, it’s like—light and heat don’t exist, ever.”

The scrape of his shoe on the cement floor. He’s trying not to go to me. He’s trying to hold himself back.

The frost in my chest creaks, something else trying to come through. “I remember being dead, Tarver.” I swallow, and my breath comes out like a sob. “How do you live again, knowing what waits for you in the end?”

“You don’t sound like you believe me.”

“It’s our policy in such cases to maintain a certain amount of healthy skepticism.”

“You have a lot of precedent with survivors of serious trauma making things up as they go?”

“Considering the circumstances in which you were stranded and subsequently rescued, we don’t have a lot of precedent for anything.”

“What reason would I have to lie?”

“Now that, Major, is a very interesting question.”