These Broken Stars

SIX

LILAC

HE’S LEADING ME AWAY FROM THE BLUFF, his hand wrapped around my wrist. His fingers are five individual points of contact, rough and hot, too tight. I think my eyes are closed. Whether they are or not, the only thing I see is the fall of the Icarus, a river of fire in the sky, great storm clouds of smoke and steam. It’s burned into my retinas, blinding me to anything else. He could pull me off the cliff and I wouldn’t notice until we hit the ground.

My ankles wrench and twist as I stumble along in his wake, the heels of my shoes rolling on the uneven ground or else sinking into the earth and tripping me. Why don’t ladies dress for such occasions? Surely the occasional hiking boot with evening wear would make a statement.

A bubble of laughter tears out of my throat, and he pauses only long enough to glance over his shoulder at me before shifting his grip on my arm.

“Only a little farther, Miss LaRoux. You’re doing well.”

I’m not doing much at all. I might as well be a rag doll. Comes complete with matching shoes. Spine sold separately.

I’ve got no clue where we are or how far behind we’ve left the pod, but as a branch hits me in the face, I’m forced to close my eyes again. The ship is still there, a painting of muddled afterimages. The sunlight’s lancing almost horizontally through the trees, alternating flashes of glare and shadow that shine red through my eyelids. How long were we on that bluff?

My father’s ship is in ruins. I watched her fall from the sky. How many souls fell with her? How many couldn’t launch their pods?

My legs stop working. He nearly jerks my arm out of its socket in his attempt to keep me on my feet, and some detached part of my mind notes how much that’s going to hurt later. Another tug, and I can’t quite help the moan that squeezes past my lips. After a second he seems to accept that he cannot drag me through the forest without some assistance from me.

He drops my arm and I collapse in a heap, barely catching myself on my forearms before my face hits the half-rotted gunk coating the forest floor. It smells like coffee and leather and garbage—nothing like the sweet, homogenous earth in the holo-gardens on Corinth. So much for trying to get through this with some dignity. So much for making him think I haven’t fallen apart.

I’m given a moment to pant, the force of my breath blowing bits of leaf and dirt away. When he crouches beside me, I can’t help but flinch back.

“Lilac.” The gentleness in his voice is more arresting than any barked order could be. I lift my head to find his brown eyes not far from mine. It’s like I can see the Icarus’s fall etched on his face, the way I know it is on mine.

“Come on. It’s going to be dark soon, and I want us back safe in the pod before that happens. You’re doing so well, and it’s only a little farther.”

I wish he’d kept being an ass. Dislike is so much easier to handle than sympathy. “I can’t,” I find myself gasping, something tight and cold inside me cracking open. “I can’t, Major. I won’t do any of this. I don’t belong here!”

He lifts his eyebrows, the expression taking away some of the grimness about his face. There’s a curious warmth to his features when he lets them relax. This, more than anything, jars me from my haze of grief and denial. Then he speaks, and ruins it.

“Just try to stay on your feet. Do you think you can manage that much, Your Highness?”

Much better. “Don’t patronize me,” I snap.

“Only an idiot would patronize you, Miss LaRoux.” The warmth is gone again, and he stands up in one smooth motion.

He takes a few steps away, scanning the forest around us as though he recognizes something in it. He’s at home here. He can read this place like I read the tiny shifts in a crowd, the back-and-forth of couples and conversation, society executing its slow revolutions around me like the stars in the heavens. Known. Charted. Familiar.

The forest has nothing of this. To me it’s a haze of green and gold and gray, every tree like the next, nothing of sense to be gleaned from them. I’ve been in nature before, but then, all it took was the flick of a switch to change the holographic projector from perfectly sculpted and manicured garden terraces to a sunny, songbird-filled forest. It smelled of airy perfume, and all the trees were hung with flowers. The earth was rich and uniform and never stained my clothes, and the ground was soft enough to sleep on.

When I was little my father used to bring me to that forest for picnics. I’d pretend the forest with its cathedral canopy was my mansion and I was the hostess, serving him invisible cups of tea and sharing the inconsequential secrets of my life. He was always solemn, playing along without hesitation. As the light waned I’d pretend to fall asleep in his lap, because then he’d carry me home in his arms.

But this forest is thick and alien and full of shadows, and the ground has rocks in it, and when I try to use a nearby tree for support, its bark scratches my hands. This can’t be real—this is a nightmare.

And yet the major nods to himself, like he’s read the next step from some instruction manual I can’t see. A surge of jealousy runs through me so violently that my arms quiver where they’re holding me up.

“I don’t know how much battery power the pod has,” he says, “so we’ll use as little as possible. I’ll get you a bed set up in there and we’ll keep the lights off, and tomorrow I’ll figure out if there’s any chance at all we’re sending a signal for rescue ships to read.”

He’s still talking, taking so little notice of me that he might as well be talking to himself. “I think for tonight we’ll concentrate on taking stock, having something to eat, getting some rest. I promise you the pod is only a short distance away. Can you stand?”

I push myself onto my knees. Now that we’ve stopped, my ankles have stiffened, and I’m forced to bite down on my lip to keep from letting out a sob. I’ve sprained an ankle or two on the dance floor while smiling as though everything was fine, but it was never like this. Then, all I had to do was summon a medic and the discomfort melted away.

I swat his hand away when he extends it.

“Of course I can stand.” Pain makes my words come out clipped, angry. His expression locks down tight, and he turns to lead the way back.

He’s true to his word, and in only a few minutes the pod comes into view through the trees. From this direction I can’t see the impact of our crash: the flattened trees and the deep groove in the earth carved by the pod as it rolled and skidded to where it rests. I see only trees, hear only incomprehensible rustling and shuffling. Even the stench of scorched plastene and corroded metal is fading, swallowed by the smell of green and wet and earth.

I drag forth enough energy to look up. Not a single rescue ship in sight—not even a shuttle or a plane from a colony. The sky is empty but for a pale sliver of moon overhead, and a second moon just clearing the trees. Shading my eyes with my hand, I look for the beacon light that should indicate that we’re broadcasting our signal to the rescue ships. There’s only the broad expanse of pitted, twisted metal. So much of the pod is wrecked—how did we survive?

How could anyone else? But I push that thought down, lock it away. This will all be over in a matter of hours—a ship as famous and as respected as the Icarus can’t go down without setting off a thousand alarms all across the galaxy.

The major has continued on into the pod without a word, but he is only a few steps away, and I cannot let myself grieve yet.

I cannot think of Anna, and her face as she was swept on down the corridor by the panicked crowd, stripped suddenly of its coy confidence. Maybe she got into a pod. Maybe there was a mechanic who got hers free in time.

I cannot think about the fact that we have no signal light, no beacon, nothing to tell our rescuers where to look for us. My father will come for me, no matter what. He’ll move heaven and earth and space itself to find me. Then I’ll never have to see this soldier again, never have to feel so incapable.

When I step over the lip of the doorway into the pod, the major is going through his pack again, doing one of his supply checks. Like he thinks he can somehow make rescue come more quickly by taking inventory.

How can he just stand there, hunting through that stupid bag? I want to shake him, scream at him that our rescue ship isn’t in that bag, that nothing’s going to have magically appeared inside it to put the Icarus back into the sky where she belongs.

“Well?” I manage to sound civil. “You always know what the next step is—what now?”

He doesn’t lift his head until he’s finished his check, infuriating in and of itself—but when he does glance over at me, he only gives a slow blink. “Right now we sleep. Then tomorrow, if we’re not broadcasting, we’ll head out and find a better place to be seen. Maybe the wreck itself, if we don’t come across a colony between here and there.”

The wreck? The man’s insane. It’s days away at least. “Head out? Speak for yourself. I’m not going anywhere. They’ll see our crash site. If we leave, my father won’t know where to look for us.” And he will come for me.

His look is dubious, almost insolent. “You may be content to wait for your white knight, my lady, but I’m not going to sit around while our supplies run out.”

My lady? Does he know how crazy his faux courtesy makes me? Surely no one could be so aggravating by accident or coincidence. I cling to that anger, trying not to let it fade as I look at him. It’s safe, this fury. I can’t afford to feel anything else.

The anger is a shield, and if I relinquish it, I’ll shatter.

A tiny piece of me wonders if he knows that. On the ship he was out of his element, awkward and almost tentative. Here, he’s certain. Everything he does has a purpose. Maybe some part of him is deliberately goading me, keeping me strong.

Or maybe he’s just an ass.

I stew in silence as he goes through that pack of his again, and then the lockers. He piles a coarse reflective space blanket with a softer one he finds in a locker near the roof, then looks across at me expectantly.

When I just gaze back at him, confused, his jaw tightens.

“Abhorrent though it may seem to you, we are going to have to spend the night together. Brace yourself.”

With a jolt, I realize it’s not supposed to be a random pile of fabric, but a bed. Just the one bed. The words fly from my lips before I can stop them. “Absolutely not.” My voice has the same cold steel my father’s does—at least I can put what I’ve learned from him to good use. “If you will leave me some water, you can take the rest of the supplies and sleep out there, in the forest you enjoy so much.”

I’m watching him carefully, so I see his hands curling slowly into fists. An odd flare of pleasure runs through me. If he’s infuriating me on purpose, then at least I can give as good as I get. “Maybe while you’re at it you can stand on top of the pod and flag down the rescue teams when they come in the night.”

He throws his pack down, making me jump. When he speaks, though, his voice is calm, controlled. “Miss LaRoux,” he says softly. “All due respect, but I’m not sleeping outside when there’s a perfectly good shelter here.”

My satisfaction at having stung him falters. If the rescue teams do find us in the night, Merendsen’s war hero status won’t last long in the face of my father’s wrath.

I take a deep breath, trying to backtrack. Maybe anger wasn’t the way to go. “Major, the circumstances might be unconventional, but that’s no reason to abandon—”

“Screw the circumstances.” Despite everything, the flash of annoyance across his features prompts an answering surge of satisfaction in me. At least there’s one thing I can do well in this godforsaken wilderness. “It’s going to be cold out there, and it’ll be warmer in here with two. I’m as tired as you are and I’m not going to stay up all night on watch. I also don’t think much of being eaten.”

That makes me pause. “Eaten?”

“Tracks,” he says shortly. “In the woods, a ways back. Big ones.”

He’s trying to scare me, I know. I saw no tracks, and he certainly never pointed them out to me. Besides, terraforming companies would never introduce large enough predators to their ecosystems to endanger human inhabitants. I grit my teeth.

Even if he was telling the truth, the risk of predators would be less than the risks he’d face if found with me. “Major Merendsen, believe me, if my father finds us together—”

“—then you’ll have to find a way to explain it to him. I’m not going out there in the face of all good sense. You can have the bed, I’m fine in one of these chairs. Sleep or don’t sleep as you like, but if we have to move out tomorrow, I expect you to keep up a decent pace. Good night.”

It’s an order: Good night, Private, or else. Without another word, he jerks the string tight on his bag, slouches in his chair, and stretches his long legs out in front of him. His chin to his chest, he closes his eyes and clicks the flashlight off, leaving me in darkness. The only sound is his breathing as it immediately begins to slow.

Without his face distracting me, it’s easier to be furious. How can he have been so abrupt with me? Doesn’t he realize that I’m only trying to keep him from losing his commission—or worse? I struggle with the urge to wake him up and insist. I wish I were brave enough to sleep outside, but lie or no, his talk of big animal tracks is enough to keep me from moving.

I take a deep breath and try to think. My father isn’t completely unreasonable—surely he’ll understand. Especially since it’s quite clear the major doesn’t want anything to do with me. Perhaps it isn’t the end of the world if he stays here, just for tonight.

And a tiny, tiny part of me points out that I’d rather have him here, beside me, in case anything does come in the night.

I slide between the two blankets, trying not to wince at the coarseness of the space blanket against my skin. It’s barely better than sleeping on the floor, the metal grid cutting into my hip, and I begin to think maybe the major has the smarter idea. I’ll be damned before I imitate him, though, so I curl up beneath the blanket, pillowing my head on my arm.

Maybe there’s something I can do with the remnants of the communications array. Get some sort of signal transmitting, to tell people we’re here. If I can prove we’re signaling, maybe the major won’t drag me across this nightmare of a planet.

I’m inching toward sleep when my cousin’s face flashes in front of my eyes. My throat seizes so suddenly it’s as though invisible hands are strangling me. She was only doing what my father forced her to do; she was still my best, my only friend. I should have gone back for her, tried to find her in the crowd, brought her with us. And instead, I left her there.

My lips shape the words in the darkness. I left her there to die.

I think of Elana, her mindless devotion to chasing the trends I set. I think of Swann, the ragged edge to her voice as she tried to fight her way back through the crowd to get to me as the Icarus began to break apart. Did they find escape pods that worked? Or did Swann spend too long trying to find me in the midst of the crowds, and go down in flames with my father’s ship?

It isn’t the first time someone’s death has been my fault, but that doesn’t make it any less impossible to bear.

My father is light-years away, perhaps being told at this moment what happened to the Icarus. And he has no one there to lean on, without me. Since my mother’s death when I was little, we’ve never been apart for more than a few weeks at a time—and never without the ability to speak to each other at the touch of a button on a console.

And now I’m stranded on an alien planet with a soldier who hates me and everything I aspire to.

For the first time in my life, I’m alone.

I cover the sounds my tears make, tossing and turning in my makeshift bed, so the space blanket crinkles noisily. I expect him to chastise me for being such a princess, but he says nothing and his breathing doesn’t change. He doesn’t even hear me. I give up and just let myself cry.

“At that stage your expectation was that you would be rescued promptly?”

“I was with Miss LaRoux. I imagined she’d be their top priority.”

“What did you make of your companion?”

“It was a change of pace from a platoon.”

“That’s not a substantive response, Major Merendsen.”

“I hadn’t had long to form an opinion. The situation wasn’t ideal.”

“For you or her?”

“For either of us. Do you know anyone who’d have been pleased in our places?”

“We’ll ask the questions, Major.”