These Broken Stars Part 24

That's not the problem.

The problem is that she looks like Lilac, and she sounds like Lilac, and I can't stand this.

I reach for the canteen and take a long swig. When I set it down on the rock floor of the cave, her breath catches. The sound hurts her ears. I try to remind myself that she's something created, not the original. Not her. But is there really a difference? My mind whispers the question.

"Are you in pain?" I can't use her name.

"Everything hurts." She speaks in a tight whisper, trying to keep her voice steady, failing. "The sun, the air. It's like when we came out of the snow in the mountains, so frozen you can't feel anything, until everything starts to burn in the thaw."

"Do you know what's happening?" My voice is rough, agonized. How does she know about the mountains?

"No." The word's nearly lost as she swallows. "What did you do?"

I didn't do anything. This is just another one of the ways this planet screws with your mind. "What do you remember?"

"I don't know." She's still whispering. "Nothing." And then a moment later: "I remember you. Your face. A picture of you...of your family. I remember poetry."

This is impossible. How can she know? G.o.d, if only she didn't sound like Lilac. My heart twists inside me. She's still huddled against the rock wall like she's trying to melt through it, and as I watch, one hand creeps down to her side, fingers pressing to the spot where her wound was. There's only the ruined satin of her green dress.

"It's okay," I whisper, because she looks just like my girl, and I can't help myself. I don't want her to be scared. "I don't understand either, but you're here, you're safe."

But is she? She came from nothing, will she dissolve right back? Creating a canteen's one thing. This is a human being.

I can be kind to her as long as she lasts, at least.

"How long was I gone?" Her voice is still quiet, quavering.

"A few days." A few days. Forever. I don't know. You're still gone.

We lapse into silence, each retreating to our own thoughts. Tiredness creeps over me until it can't be denied, and she watches me wordlessly as I unlace my boots, stretching out on the blankets.

I can't bring myself to imagine she's dangerous. If they wanted to create something that could harm me, one of those giant cats that chased her up a tree would have done.

What they gave me instead might make me want to die, but she won't kill me herself. I know a man can follow a mirage to his death, but at this moment that seems like a good way to die.

She stays curled up in her corner, and in the shadows I can hear her breathing. I don't know how much time goes by.

She's the one who speaks next, her voice echoing out of the black, soft and tired. "I'm sorry I left you."

This creature, or whatever it is, is so like her it's hard to remember she isn't real. Is there any harm in letting myself pretend, just for a moment? In the darkness, it's easier to say things I can't say in the light. "I'm sorry I let you set the fuse. I shouldn't have." Those words twist like a knife. Nothing else matters, except that I let her light that match.

I'll never be able to say these things to my Lilac, but saying it now is better than not saying it at all.

"Oh, Tarver." For a brief moment her voice takes on a hint of color. It's not amus.e.m.e.nt, but it's a faint upward tilt, the barest echo of a smile. It's even more heartbreaking than her fear. "You think you could have talked me out of it? You didn't stand a chance."

I don't believe that. I could have barked at her. I could have ordered her. I could have pulled the gun on her. She'd probably have done it anyway. My foolish, stubborn girl. I could have stopped her somehow. But there's no point arguing. "Are you hungry?"

"No."

I'm not hungry either, but I force myself to eat half a ration bar. I've been breaking them into pieces and putting them in my mouth and chewing and swallowing for days. I don't remember the last time I tasted one.

When sleep comes, I let it take me. She stays in her corner.

I wake once in the night, and her breathing's not slow enough for sleep, but she doesn't speak, and neither do I.

When I open my eyes in the morning, she's awake too. Maybe she didn't sleep at all. Maybe sleep is too much like the other thing. I can't allow myself to think about that. This isn't my Lilac.

We breakfast in silence. I break the ration bar in half automatically and pa.s.s it to her, and she reaches out to take the other end of the piece so our fingers don't touch. She's starting to look a little better-there's a hint of color in her cheeks, and it seems like the trembling's a little less. I eat a little and she nibbles, and then we rise without speaking to make our way out of the cave.

We both know without speaking where we're going.

She clears her throat as we step across the stream and start the walk toward the clearing. "I thought I'd seen the last of this dress. I threw away the pieces."

"Me too." I speak without thinking. I can't help but reply-I know she's scared, and she's trying. "It's what you're wearing, when I think of you."

My memory throws up a quick flash of my parents' house. They showed that to me covered in flowers, the way I always remember it. Is that why she's wearing the dress? Because this is the image preserved in my memory?

"Really?" She sounds faintly, briefly amused. "How mortifying." And then, softer, horror creeping into her voice: "I wonder if there are two of them, now."

"Don't think about that." I say it quickly, but it's too late. We both are.

The first room is bare, open to the elements. Our boots crunch on debris as we climb in through the twisted opening. I've seen a hundred outpost entrances like this one-room for a sentry if you need one, or your muddy gear if you don't.

An inner door opens into a larger room lined with monitoring equipment and file cabinets. It's dark, lit only by the light streaming in through the blasted entrance. At some point there was a fire, leaving half-burned pages from the files scattered all around the floor. I can see stacks of printouts, half intact. Some have been dumped in trash cans, where the fire burned out before the doc.u.ments dissolved completely into ash. I wonder if they hold the answers to our questions about the mirror-moon above us, or the cat beast near our crash site-things that have no place being here.

"These could lead to a generator, or some other power source," she suggests, standing above a bunch of cables that plunge down into the floor. She crosses to a bank of circuit breakers on the wall, jerking open a small door and pumping the switches. For an instant I see her in the pod, stripping wires with her fingernails and hot-wiring our escape.

I close my eyes, trying to shake the image away. This isn't her. Instead I lean down, pressing my cheek to the nearest computer bank. With my eyes closed, I can feel the faintest of vibrations if I hold my breath.

There's still power here. A knot of tension releases inside me, and I stay where I am, letting the monitor take my weight. Power means some chance of a signal. Power means the game's not over yet.

The lights above us flick on one by one, dim from lack of power or long disuse. The walls and the far end of the room are illuminated, covered in something patchy that looks like wallpaper for a moment, completely out of place. Then my words die in my throat.

It's paint.

She turns, and together we stare, uncomprehending. Words and numbers cover the walls, incomprehensible equations and nonsensical half sentences. They start orderly, in marker, scrawled in even lines across the walls. But here and there they start to dip and slant crazily, the marker replaced by paint, until the words devolve into pictures crudely painted on by fingertips. Figures of animals, trees-and men. Handprints. Here and there a swirl of blue stands out amid the earthy reds and browns, electric-always the same shape, a spiral radiating outward. The blue spirals are a focus, but I can make no sense of them. The colors are as bright as if someone had painted them yesterday. With a jolt, I recognize the same reds, blues, and yellows we saw dried on the lids of the paint cans in the shed, back when we inspected the hovercraft.

Paint dribbles down from the walls to the monitors. Some of the paintings are orderly, almost artistic, painted with sensitivity and planning. Clearly identifiable. But overlaid on these murals are cruder, savage depictions of death and carnage, of men and animals fighting and dying. Gaudy crimson streams from a gash across one figure's throat. Another is impaled by a thick slash of black paint, some kind of spear. Red flames stream up from a bonfire laden with bodies.

"They went mad," she whispers, fearful, and I shove my hands in my pockets to keep myself from reaching out to take her hand.

I know what she's thinking-something about this planet sent the people stationed here insane. If an entire station of monitoring specialists, researchers, and whoever else was posted here fell apart so completely, what chance do we have? At least we're starting to get a picture of why this place was abandoned. Why the entire planet stands empty and forgotten. I tear my eyes away from the walls and focus on the lights overhead. We have to keep moving.

I clear my throat, and she startles. "If there's a generator we could turn it off. Disrupt the power, and if they're monitoring it, somebody might show up to do maintenance. Or maybe they're broadcasting updates, we could hack that and try signaling prime numbers to show someone's here?"

"I think we can do better," she says, swallowing hard. Her skin's pale beneath her freckles, but her voice is firmer. I can see it's still an effort to remain composed. Discussing the circuitry and power sources was the right move-like my Lilac, these things interest her. "I think perhaps we could send a real signal."

She drags her eyes away from the paintings and walks slowly back to the circuit breakers. Slowly, she closes the cover so I can see the mark stamped on it. It looks like an upside-down V, but everyone in the universe knows that symbol. Even I know it, out in the muddy far reaches of the galaxy. Especially there.

The lambda. LaRoux Industries. Not only was this an abandoned terraforming project-it was Lilac's father's.

She says nothing, turning her back on the symbol. We move around the monitoring room, exploring the hatches and machinery, trying to ignore the feeling that the primal figures in the paintings are watching us. We turn for the next door at the same time, and if it had been my Lilac, I would've reached down to wind my fingers through hers. Instead I just stand there, motionless, and let her through ahead of me.

The hall leads to a dormitory full of bunks, and a shower-I press the b.u.t.ton and wait as long-disused pipes gurgle and groan a protest, then provide a stuttering flow of water. Half a minute later it steadies out, then begins to heat up. We both stare at it like we've never seen running water before.

"This isn't right," she says. "The lights, the hot water. A generator alone couldn't be doing this, especially after being abandoned so long. There must be another power source."

I reach out and hold my hand under the flow, watching hypnotized as the water curves around my fingers and streams off their tips. It's such a small thing, a shower-and then again, it's everything we haven't had. It's cleanliness and food on plates, and sitting in a chair instead of on a rock. It's civilization, safety. Of course, safety has come too late.

She crosses to inspect a bunch of cables where they plug into a bank of silent computers. "These cables lead downstairs. We should follow them and see where they go."

"Downstairs?" I glance around the confined room. "These places don't usually have an underground level. Are you sure it's not just wiring under the floor?"

"I'm sure," she says, tugging aside a panel to get at the keypad below it. "There's too many of them; there has to be more underneath us."

Observant and thoughtful, just like Lilac. I can barely look at her, and yet I can't look away. Her every word and gesture, every look she gives me...they're all Lilac's. But this isn't her. I watched you die, my mind screams at her. I held you while you bled to death.

In the end I have to leave, put s.p.a.ce between us, on the pretext of looking for the underground level she insists is here. It takes me twenty minutes of searching the small base, but eventually I find it. The floor in the hallway is faintly worn, but only halfway. When I crouch to pull up the rubber floor mats, raising a small cloud of grit and dust, I find a hatch.

It's locked, and I try digging my fingers in and prying it out. That doesn't work, and after a few tries I give up. Time for a little gentle persuasion, as my first sergeant used to say.

I stomp hard on the hinges, the vibrations traveling up through my heel. The plastene cracks, but in the end I have to head out to the shed to retrieve the crowbar. In the main room, all I can see is a flash of red hair vanis.h.i.+ng below one of the banks of controls as she tries to find out what's underneath. She doesn't look up as I pa.s.s by. I yank the hatch cover free. A ladder disappears down into the dark.

I've seen a lot of terraforming monitoring stations-this doesn't come standard.

I take a deep breath. "It's open," I call out, and a few moments later she walks through to stand beside me, looking down into the dark. There's no switch up here-the lights must be operated from down below. I grab my pack-I've gotten trapped in half-destroyed buildings before, and I'm not about to explore without food and water. I head down first and then reach up to steady her as she climbs after me, her breathing growing quick and shallow.

She drops down beside me and then steps away from my hand-still loath to let me touch her. I can't see my hand in front of my face, and the air is perfectly still. It doesn't feel close and stuffy, but that doesn't tell me much. It's bone-achingly cold down here.

We feel around in the dark for the lights and b.u.mp into each other, and I wince at the sound of her gasp.

"Where the h.e.l.l is the switch?" I stumble against the ladder, stifling my curse as my elbow collides with the metal.

As if in answer, a light flickers on overhead. It's a pale, fluorescent ceiling panel that does little to illuminate anything beyond arm's reach. We seem to be at one end of a corridor; the rest of it is lost in darkness. We stand frozen by the sudden light, faces turning up toward it, blinking.

"Was that you?" I ask, despite the fact that she's standing in the middle of the corridor, nowhere near any switch I can see.

She shakes her head no. In the fluorescent light she looks even paler than she does by daylight. "It's like something heard you."

The light flickers, dropping us back into darkness for the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat and then creeping back to life again. I turn, searching again for the switch-but she's found it first. She stands to one side of the hallway, staring at the switch as I cross to her side.

"It's off," she whispers, glancing at me wide-eyed in the dim, wavering light.

"But how..."

She suddenly straightens, staring upward at the light. I know that look-it means Lilac's thought of something. But this isn't Lilac. It's a copy. Not real.

"If you can hear us," she says slowly, "blink the light three times."

On command the light cuts out once, twice-we wait, silent. I'm holding my breath. Then the lights click out a third time, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

"Once for yes, twice for no." I swallow, my mouth dry. "Are you trying to hurt us?"

The lights flicker twice. No.

"Warn us?"

A brief pause, then three flickers. Is that a maybe?

"Communicate something else?"

YES.

"Where are you? Why won't you come out and talk to us?" I don't trust anyone who refuses to show themselves.

The lights remain even-there's no answer to that question. I lift both hands to scrub at my face. "Are you able to come and talk to us?"

No.

I look over, catching Lilac's eye. She looks back at me, face drained of all color. Then she takes over, her voice quieter than mine, echoing down the corridor.

"Are you what's been sending us visions? Leading us here?"

Yes.

"Did you bring the flower back?"

Pause. Yes. No.

Flower? What flower? I want to ask, but Lilac's riveted, her eyes on the lights, scanning them for signs of flickering.

"I don't understand," Lilac's saying. "You brought it back...but didn't? Not completely?"

Yes. "Are you even-" She shakes her head, tries a different way. "Are you capable of showing yourselves? Do you have a physical form?"

There's a long pause, and then the lights flicker twice. No.

Her voice drops to a whisper. "Are you ghosts?"

No.

She takes a slow, wavering breath. "Are you the ones that brought me back?"

The lights flicker once. Then we're plunged into utter darkness.

I hear her gasp. "No! Wait-come back! I have questions-what am I? Why did you bring me back?" She hits the switch on the wall and the lights come on for real, steady and cold. The switch clicks as she flips it on and off frantically. I can see her face as if flickering in a strobe light. "Please-come back!"

Eventually I tug her away from the switch. She's so distraught she doesn't even notice that I'm touching her for a few moments. Then she comes to life and jerks away, shoulders hunched.