These Broken Stars (26 page)

I had been expecting field reports, notes on wildlife, but every page was filled with poems.

He’s silent, and I swallow, fiddling with the tear in my jeans, widening it as I pull at each thread. Unlike our usual silences, this one begs to be filled.

I crack first. “My drawing lessons were always more focused on flowers and lakeside vistas, but my maps served their purpose.”

Tarver grunts and turns to a fresh page. The tip of the pencil hovers over the empty white space. His eyes are far away, staring through the page. The wreck beneath us gives a particularly wrenching shriek, and he blinks, and the moment’s gone. He turns his attention to the horizon and begins sketching out the visible landmarks, expert and quick. I wonder where we’ll go—if he’ll suggest the forest, the hills, the river. I wonder if we’ll ever go to the sea.

His eyes flick up and down from scenery to page—mine stay on him. If he notices my gaze he says nothing, concentrating on his task, letting me watch his profile uninterrupted.

He’s still too pale, but he looks less likely to keel over. He’s so thin it makes me ache, but I liberated some dried pasta and flour and shortening from the kitchens, all the things we can’t find from the land. We’ll eat better. He’ll get stronger.

He sucks at the edge of his lip as he concentrates. The dimple there is hypnotic, fascinating me. I’m so focused on that tiny detail of him that I don’t notice when he stops drawing, staring intently at something.

“Lilac.”

I start, swimming up out of my trance. “I wasn’t!”

“There’s something—come look.” His voice shakes—his gaze is fixed 
straight ahead.

I turn toward the hills, expecting an animal, other survivors, even a 
rescue craft. What I see instead is electrifying.

Before our eyes springs up a wave of flowers, the purple blooms from that first night on the plains, when Tarver tried to distract me from the fact that I was going mad. Just like the tiny purple blossom hidden in his journal. The narrow corridor of blooms extends as we watch, winding this way and that through the hills, toward the hazy green of the forest 
in the distance.

Beside me, Tarver is shaking. I can feel the dizziness myself, my skin tingling, itching, hot and cold all at once. “It’s not real.” I gasp, blinking my eyes hard and opening them again. The flowers are still there. “It’s just a vision.”

“The canteen—they made that, didn’t they?”

I swallow. The flower was something they made for me, and just for me—to tell him would be to explain what it meant to me, in that moment of utter darkness. That it reminded me why I was returning to that shipwreck of the dead. That there’s only one person in the galaxy I could’ve done it for. But I can’t say those things to him, not yet.

The row of blossoms continues, the flowers growing thicker and brighter by the moment, until the entire corridor of the valley is shining with purple in the sunlight, leading toward the forest. It’s a narrow, concentrated band, looking for all the world like a winding river of purple—or a road.

I gasp. “Tarver! They’re—leading us. That’s what they’ve been trying to—” But my voice sticks in my throat, my heart pounding.

He tears his eyes away from the flowers in order to look up at me.

“Trying to what? What’re you talking about?”

“The people I saw—they were pointing. The voice I heard was leading us away from the forest, toward the plain. Even your parents’ house, the garden path led away—toward this spot. And now these flowers … I don’t know, maybe I’m trying too hard to find sense in all of this.”

“You think they’re showing us the way.” He turns back toward the hills. “Toward what?”

We stand, staring at the path before us, so clear and bright. All I want is to go find out if they’re real, if they’re as solid as the flower in his journal. If all of this is some dream in which the laws of physics don’t exist. “Lilac!” Tarver’s voice is urgent, snapping me out of my daze. “Look!”

I blink, trying to catch my breath as he leans close to me. His cheek brushes mine, rough with faint stubble, as he brings his line of sight alongside mine. So close, I can smell him, feel the electric tingle where his face touches mine.

This is no dream.

“Look along my arm, where I’m pointing.” He stretches one arm out, toward the trees. “There’s something there. See that glint?”

It’s all I can do not to turn my face toward his, the way a plant grows toward the light. I draw in a deep breath and force myself to focus. I don’t see it immediately, and my eyes strain along the strip of forest bordering the hills at its western edge.

And then, as sudden as a lightning strike, I do see it. A tiny glint of 
reflected sunlight, winking at me from the tree line.

“Wreckage,” I whisper, staring at it, trying not to believe it’s what I think it is. “It’s a piece of the ship that landed there. Another crashed escape pod.”

Tarver slowly lets his arm fall, but doesn’t shift away again. He’s staring at the thing too. “I don’t think so.” His voice is quiet too, barely audible over the wind. “It’s tough to tell, but I think the trees around it are cleared, uniform.”

I realize I’m holding my breath.

“I think it’s a building.”

There’s no fuel for a fire out among the rolling hills, and it’s bitterly cold, but I don’t care. Tarver estimated a two-day journey to reach the edge of the forest, and as the sun set in front of us on the first day I could see the trees along the horizon, in the distance. The sea of flowers vanished into mist as we climbed back down the wreckage, but we know now where we’re being led. To what end, or what purpose, we can’t hope to guess, but if it’s a building—and it’s real—it might be the key to our rescue.

“Hot water!” I say cheerfully, eating cold, plain pasta with my fingers. 
I’ve never had anything so delicious.

“A roof,” Tarver replies, munching at his own handful of the pasta I cooked before we left. The kitchen storerooms on the wreck were my best find—after the sick bay, anyway.

I glance over at him, the last of the light lending his still-pale face some false color. We’re camped in the lee of a hill, as much out of the wind as we can be. Still, it’ll be a cold night, even together.

“A bed,” is my retort. “A real one.”

“You win,” he says, downing the last of his share of the pasta and leaning back on his elbows. He’s still moving slowly, carefully. But he 
looks better, for all his trouble walking today. “I can’t top that.”

I hurry to finish the rest of my dinner and scoot over to where he reclines on the blanket, eager for his warmth and company. He folds his good arm around me, easy, comfortable. I don’t think the old Lilac would’ve thought he smelled very good, but I turn my head toward him anyway, cheek rubbing against the material of his T-shirt.

We’re quiet for a while, perhaps each of us imagining what might wait for us in the building Tarver saw on the horizon. His face has changed, a spark of hope where there had only been grim determination. How long has he been living with the belief that no rescue was coming? It’s obvious that ever since we reached the
Icarus
, he’s been aiming only for survival. Not for rescue.

Now there’s a good chance we’ll be able to signal for help. No remote outpost building would be without some method of communication.

I shift, pulling myself in more tightly. He inhales deeply, the rise and fall of his chest shifting my face where it’s pressed against him.

“How long do you think we’ve been here?”

“Counting the time I was sick?” Tarver pauses, doing a quick mental 
calculation. “Sixteen days, I think.”

So long? It knocks the wind out of me. Two weeks and counting. It feels like only two days and like a lifetime. “It was my birthday,” I find myself saying, in a strange voice. “I turned seventeen a few days ago.”
The day you came back to me from your fever.
But I can’t bring myself to say that out loud.

Tarver’s breath catches, then releases. “Happy birthday, Miss LaRoux.”

I can hear the smile in his voice.

I’ve become a year older while stranded on this planet. I swallow. Perhaps sensing the shift in my mood, Tarver lifts his bandaged hand 
to trail his fingertips along my arm. I suspect the movement hurts him, 
but if it does, he makes no complaint.

I clear my throat. “What would be the first thing you’d do when we get rescued? A real meal? Call your family?” I smile against him, plucking at his T-shirt in distaste. “Take a shower?”

“My family,” he says immediately. “Then they’ll probably hose me down and interrogate me for a few weeks. The military will, I mean. Not 
my parents.”

“Gosh.” Now I’m trying to banish the mental image of someone hosing Tarver down. At least I’m not thinking about my birthday anymore. “I hope nobody tries that with me.”

That earns me a laugh, my head jumping a little as Tarver’s body quakes beneath my cheek. “I doubt anyone will try any such thing with you. It’s pretty much just soldiers and criminals who get the high-pressure hose.”

Even in the realm of imagination, we’re already separated. Him, in his interrogations and debriefings—me, presumably taken somewhere for coddling and polishing. My heart twinges painfully, its beat rapid and strong against Tarver’s ribs.

It’s not that I don’t want to be rescued. I do. I want to see my father again—and more than that, I want Tarver to find his family again, keep them from losing another son. But I had begun to imagine a life here, with him and me. A hungry, cold, barely-surviving-each-week kind of life—but a life together.

Before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling out. “What about me?”

“What about you?” Tarver echoes, one shoulder moving in a shrug. “Your family will scoop you up and quiz you on whether I compromised your virtue and whisk you off to strap you into one of those extraordinary dresses, and it’ll be like this never happened.”

My mouth is dry, my tongue heavy. Why doesn’t he understand what I’m asking? If we’re to be rescued, I don’t want it to happen before we figure out whatever’s happening here between us. I may not have many more opportunities.

I take a deep breath and lift myself up on one elbow. It’s dark, but I 
can still make out his features through the gloom. “You mean we’ll never see each other again.”

For a moment he just looks at me, unreadable as ever. The mirror-moon lights his face, silver on his skin, in his eyes. My heart threatens to slam its way out of my chest.

“Maybe not.” There’s a softer, less certain note in his voice.

The idea that someone will swoop down and take him away from me, 
off to fight some distant war in some distant system, makes me feel like my lungs are filling with water. I don’t know how to reach him, how to 
make him see how I feel. I don’t know what’s going on behind the brown eyes I’ve come to know so well. I don’t know what he’s thinking as he looks at me.

But suddenly I do know that I’ll never live with myself if we get rescued before I can make him understand.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I whisper.

I lean down, my hair falling forward around his face, and let my lips 
find his.

For an instant I feel him reach for me, and all I want is to lean against him, let him wrap me up, keep me close. All I want is for no one to take 
him away.

“What did you hope to gain by making for the structure?”

“Better shelter at least. Some method of communication, 
at most.”

“With whom did you wish to communicate?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“All our questions are extremely serious, Major.”

“Anybody who could hear us. I had Lilac LaRoux with me. I 
knew her father would stage a retrieval at any cost, if he knew 
where we were.”

“It was on your mind that you were with Monsieur LaRoux’s 
daughter.”

“It could hardly escape me.”

“Just the two of you, alone.”

“I noticed that too.”

I want to surge up against her, tangle my fingers through her hair, pull her down to meet me—and for a moment I find myself reaching for her, unable to resist. How long have I been wanting to touch her like this? A charge runs from her fingertips and into my skin, and all my careful self-control starts crashing down as I feel the heat of her near me. I want to lose myself in her, let this moment take me over completely.

My fingers find the edge of her shirt, and she makes a quiet sound as 
my hand curves against the small of her back. She shifts, and I realize it’s my bandaged hand in the same instant that a white-hot line of pain runs up my arm. A groan tears out of me as I tense, pushing her away with my good hand.

We’re left gasping, staring at each other—she, confused, uncertain why I stopped; me, trying to breathe, pushing away the need coursing through me despite the ache in my hand.

I know what this is. I recognize that desperate longing in her expression—I’ve seen it before, in the field. Lilac was very nearly left alone on this planet, and she’s mistaking her relief for something else.

A girl like her would never look at a guy like me in other circumstances. If that building on the horizon is our ticket home, I’m not sure I could stand to see her waltz off into her old life and leave me behind. Not if I let myself—no.

I can’t afford to show her how badly I want her.

Not when it isn’t really me she wants.

Her expression is shifting with every moment I keep her at arm’s 
length, eyes darkening, the confusion turning to doubt.

A treacherous part of me doesn’t care that she’s confused, desperately wants to kiss her anyway. Maybe one moment would be worth it, even if afterward it all dissolved into mist, like our trail of purple flowers.

I could be wrong. Maybe she does want—maybe—

I’m drawing breath again when she pulls away sharply, climbing to her feet to stalk off into the darkness. There’s anger in her jerky movements, in the tense line of her shoulders.