These Broken Stars (33 page)

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 button 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 space 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 vanishing below one of the banks of controls as she tries to find out what’s underneath. She doesn’t look up as I pass 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 bump into each other, and I wince at the sound of her gasp.

“Where the hell 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 space 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.

“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 pass, 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 basement 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 buttons glowing blue-white. “Can you feel it?” She’s pale, shivering. 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 shiver 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.