These Broken Stars Part 25

"What were you talking about? What flower?"

She straightens. "Your pack-is your journal in there?"

"Yes, but-"

She reaches for it, sliding it off my shoulders and upending it, sending supplies and belongings everywhere. The case with my family's photo goes clattering across the floor along with the ration bars and the canteen-but it's the journal she reaches for.

"The flower from the plains-I put it here, in these pages." She flips through the pages, but when she gets to the end she freezes. There's no flower there.

She starts riffling frantically through the pages, over and over, searching. "It was here, I know it was here." She's afraid, her voice starting to shake.

"You left that flower by the river," I say carefully. She doesn't remember, and how could she? She's not Lilac. "It wilted and died, and you left it behind."

"No," she gasps. Her sudden distress pulls at my heart-if only I could understand the significance of this. "They brought it back. While you were sick, at the wreck, they brought it back, re-created it like the canteen. An exact copy. They did it to keep me going, to remind me how much I-" She chokes, closing her eyes. "I never told you. But I put it in here to keep it safe, and it's gone."

This time when I reach for the journal she lets me take it from her limp grasp, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond me, her body starting to shake. I flip through the pages but see no pressed flower there. She's mistaken, maybe given a false memory by the beings that created her. But my stomach twists uneasily, instinct fighting against my mind's attempt to keep her at arm's length. She remembered that I was sick, that I had this journal. For all I know, the real Lilac did find that flower, did slip it into my journal. Her fear is so real.

Something catches my eye, and my hands freeze. I flip a few pages back. There, hard to see against the backdrop of a poem I wrote on Avon-the faintest of stained impressions. It could almost be the outline of a flower.

In her distress, she forgets her fear of my touch and leans forward, one hand curling around my sleeve, urgent. My heart seizes and suddenly I can't breathe. The gesture is so familiar I can't bear it.

She takes the journal again, slow this time, tipping it up on end. A fine rain of dust patters down against our arms, but I'm not looking at the dust, our arms, or even the journal. I'm looking at her face. The way her every emotion is clear, the way her lips quiver, the way her eyelashes shadow her gaze.

"They re-created it, but didn't," she whispers. "The things they make are only temporary."

Clarity flashes like a torrent of ice water. Maybe fear kept me from seeing it, or grief-maybe I had to mourn before I could understand what was right in front of me. I don't know how it's possible, or why it's happened.

But this is my Lilac. And I refuse to lose her again.

We sit there on the floor of the corridor, sharing a ration bar and drinking from the canteen. Lilac isn't the only one who needs the break. My thoughts are churning so fast I can't make sense of anything. All I know is that this is her, my Lilac, and I can't live without her. We inspect the canteen, the only other thing we know the whispers have re-created-aside from Lilac. But it seems just as solid, just as real, as it was the day we found it. The flower is a fluke. It served its purpose and now it's gone, not worth sustaining anymore.

They wouldn't take Lilac back. They can't.

Eventually we're both calm enough to continue what we came down here to do, locate whatever the power source for the station is. If we can find that, we may be able to restore full power to the communications systems and send out a distress signal.

The corridor stretches away from us on a downward angle, lined with doors on both sides. Each door is stamped with the LaRoux insignia, the upside-down letter V of the lambda. We make our way down the corridor in silence.

I open a few of the doors as we pa.s.s, but they only contain more of what we found upstairs-dark screens, unresponsive. It's then that Lilac stirs from her silence, stepping past me. She points out a few dim orange lights here and there that I missed-the machines are in standby mode.

"It's like the whole station's on backup power. When my father's company pulled out, they must not have shut everything down, not completely." She steps back, following a tangle of cords that run up the corner of the wall to where it joins the ceiling, and then out to the main corridor. "If we can find the real power source and get it operating fully, instead of on this backup mode, maybe we can send a signal."

We head back out to the hallway, following the cables on down the sloping corridor. "You're sure it can't just be a generator?" I wonder aloud.

She shakes her head without looking up. "There's too much equipment here for that. There has to be something else here, something powering the hot water and the lights. And how did they power everything else, back when this place was operational? There's something more. I can feel it." Her voice is quiet, and there's a quaver there-weariness, or distress.

"What do you mean, feel it?"

"You mean you can't?" She pauses, swallowing hard, and presses a finger to her temple. "It's there. It's like having a headache-or, no, not a headache. It's like having something inside, something that shouldn't be there. Something's wrong here."

"You mean like the shakes when they send you a vision? Or a voice?"

She shakes her head. "Close, but different." Her voice drops to a whisper. "I think whatever's down here is what the whispers want us to find."

I try to shake the uneasy feeling that even though our light-flickering friends are quiet now, they're still watching us as we try to track down the power source.

Lilac does most of the work as we follow the cables through the rooms and hallways. This place must be four or five times as big underground as it is aboveground. Slowly, though, I begin to see her logic, and together we trace a path through a series of rooms along the first hall we saw, and then down a metal staircase to a second bas.e.m.e.nt level.

When we round the corner at the bottom of the stairs, we find the door.

It's not square and chunky like everything else down here, but a perfect circle, sealed shut. I reach out to run my fingertips along the lines of its seams; it's made to dilate like the iris of an eye. With the sections interlocked, it's stronger by far than any normal door would be.

Lilac studies a keypad beside the door, its b.u.t.tons glowing blue-white. "Can you feel it?" She's pale, s.h.i.+vering. And now I know what she meant before: I'm not taken by the full-blown shakes that herald a vision, but there's an almost unbearable s.h.i.+ver running down my spine, a coppery taste in my mouth. It's affecting her more strongly-I can see her swallowing hard, forcing herself to breathe slowly.

"It's behind this door." My voice is a whisper. "You're right. This is why they brought us here."

She tries the keypad with trembling fingers, entering a few arbitrary numbers and letters. The illumination behind the b.u.t.tons flashes red with an angry, low-pitched drone. "And we don't know the pa.s.sword."

I could laugh, if our lives weren't on the line. All of this-the struggle to survive, to make it out of the forest, to dodge storms and snow and cave-ins. Staying sane in the face of the impossible. All of it-for this. Leading us to a door we can't open, a pa.s.sword we don't have.

I catch a quick, furtive movement out of the corner of my eye-Lilac, twitching a hand across her face. She's fast, and trying for subtle, but the shakes have made her clumsy, and I can see what she's trying to hide. Her nose is bleeding, leaving a smear of crimson across the back of her hand. She's clenching her jaw, one hand resting against the wall; she's trying to look casual about it, but her knees are buckling. Whatever's down here is making her worse by the second.

I'm trying not to think about what she said-that they brought the flower back to life, the way they brought her back. And that now that flower is no more than dust.

I stand there staring, unable to lift my feet. When you have so little left to lose, even the tiniest loss feels like a body blow. It's Lilac who eventually leads me away. Now that I know it's her, the touch of her hand alone is enough to make the blood roar in my ears. I never thought I would get to touch her again.

"You seem distracted, Major."

"Not at all. Just as focused as when we began this little conversation."

"Perhaps if you were more cooperative, we would be done by now."

"I'm being as cooperative as I know how. I certainly wouldn't want to inconvenience LaRoux Industries. If I knew what you were getting at-"

"We are attempting to determine the extent to which you explored the structure and its surroundings."

"Then I've already answered that question."

"So it would seem."

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sword 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 hypers.p.a.ce?" 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 doc.u.ment. "The Icarus did get yanked out of hypers.p.a.ce by something. Maybe there's a connection."

The overhead lights s.h.i.+ne 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 h.e.l.l 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 doc.u.ments.

"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 quant.i.ties of energy, potentially fatal in nature. Do not attempt direct physical contact with any objects or persons."

"Then it is like hypers.p.a.ce." 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 hypers.p.a.ce-remember I told you then that there's always a huge energy surge when a s.h.i.+p enters or exits hypers.p.a.ce? There's usually preparation, better protection. The rift they're talking about must be like a hypers.p.a.ce rift. A way of accessing another dimension, but without the need for a s.h.i.+p."

"They've found a way to reach into another dimension?" His voice is hushed.

"And it's unstable. What makes hypers.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sume 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 s.p.a.ce 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.