These Broken Stars

TWELVE

LILAC

I’M POSITIVE HE KNOWS how much I hate it when he goes ahead to “scout.” He probably does it just to provoke me. I suppose he’s wandering off to imagine how much nicer it’d be not to have me around. Perhaps he’s even wishing he’d let that beast eat me yesterday.

I’m sitting in a patch of afternoon sun on one of the blankets, spread over the nasty forest floor. Not that it matters all that much, as I’m already carrying half the forest along with me in my dress. The hem is hanging in tatters and the skirt is muddy. I can only imagine my hair and skin are as dreadful, but as the major scarcely glances in my direction at the best of times, and there’s no one else around to see, I must try to bear it as best I can.

I know he’ll come back—he always has—but tiny eddies of fear swirl in my subconscious anyway. What if he doesn’t? What if he falls down some unseen gully and cracks his head open, and I’m left all alone? What if my last insult was one too many?

The forest is full of sound and movement I can’t track, things that flicker out of the corners of my eyes, vanishing before I can focus on them. The major doesn’t seem to notice—or if he does, he isn’t bothered. But it’s as though the forest is whispering all around us, saying incomprehensible things in my ear. Sometimes I almost think I can hear voices, though logic insists that I’m searching for the familiar in this alien world. I’m used to being around other people, and my mind is turning the sounds of the wilderness into sounds I find comforting.

Except none of this is comforting.

If my father were here, he’d tell me to stand up, pull myself together. He’d tell me not to let anyone see me fall. He’d tell me to find the power in this situation and get it back.

That makes me smile, however weakly. The only power I have in this horrible wilderness is getting under Major Merendsen’s skin. It’s so easy to undercut his know-it-all attitude, and score a point in our endless battle.

I can imagine Anna beside me, close and real for a moment. Choose what you let them see, she’d say. My throat closes as I think of her.

His opinion of me is already a lost cause—years later, when he looks back at this escapade, I’d rather he think bitch than weakling.

The sounds of branches cracking and leaves rustling alert me that he’s returning. He makes a point of making a little noise now, after the first time he appeared soundlessly behind me and ended up with a scream and a canteen thrown at his face. My heartbeat quickens, mind turning over a dozen ways to pick a fight.

But just as I’m about to speak, I see his face.

He doesn’t look at me, but there’s a rawness in his gaze as he drops into a crouch that wipes my mind clean of insults. He rubs his hand over his scalp, fingers fanning through his dark hair, lips pressed tightly together. My eyes sweep across the telling droop of his shoulders as he crouches there motionless.

I was wrong—there is one thing for me to read in the middle of this alien forest.

I’m afraid to ask, but my lips form the question anyway. “Did you find something?”

He doesn’t answer right away, pushing up from his crouch to collect the canteen from me and give a jerk of his head to indicate that I should get off the blanket and allow him to pack it away. Only after he’s done that, leaving me standing there awkwardly with my arms wrapped around myself against the chill, does he speak.

“Yes. We’re going to have to stop for a while so I can take care of it, but I want you closer so I can hear you if you shout. I need you to just do as I say for once, all right, Lilac?”

When he gives orders, my first instinct is to blast him with some kind of insult for his arrogance. But now he’s so sad, so tired, that the thought barely flickers through my mind before I dismiss it. He’s watching me, expressionless.

I nod, and a tiny bit of the tension in his shoulders drops away.

“Good. I’ll find you a spot a little ways back from where I am. You can keep resting your feet, or if you want you can help by gathering some rocks.”

“Rocks? What for?”

He turns away to shrug his pack back onto his shoulders. “There’s another downed escape pod over the next ridge.”

I’m about to fall into step, ready to follow him, when his words halt me mid-stride. “There’s a what?” The torrent of relief and hope is so tangible it nearly drives me to my knees. I don’t have time to analyze the tiny stab of disappointment—company means the end of this strange, private partnership—before words come pouring out of me. “How many people? Was it a first-class pod? Do you know anyone who was inside? Is their rescue beacon working?”

He’s shaking his head and tightening his hands around the straps of his pack. “No, no,” he says, cutting across the flood of questions. “There’s no one.”

“Maybe we can catch up with them!” I cry, plucking the hem of my skirt out of dirt and crossing toward him. “They must be heading toward the ship like we are.”

“No,” he says again.

“Well, you ignore them if you like, Major, but I’m going to go find them.”

“There’s no one to catch up with,” he says shortly, tone sparking with annoyance.

“How do you know there’s no one?”

“Because no one survived!” he snaps, turning finally so I can see the fierceness in his features, the rawness of dashed hopes, and the weariness that has replaced them. He takes a slow breath, not unlike the way he usually does when trying not to rise to my bait. This time, though, the tension drains when he exhales.

“They’re all dead, Lilac.”

My hands are starting to dry, the skin threatening to crack. The hours spent digging stones out of the earth and carrying them to the pile at the edge of the forest clearing have left me exhausted, sweating through my dress despite the crisp air. I never knew it was possible to be so miserable in so many ways.

I keep looking up at the sky through the trees, as though a rescue ship might fly over at any moment, but the sky stays empty, blue, clear. My father has to be coming for me. It’s just the two of us, and has been since I was eight years old. I’m the only one he has in the world—just as he’s the only one I have. And when he gets here, cracked, dry skin will be a dim, unpleasant memory.

Major Merendsen refuses to let me see the crash, demanding that I come no closer than the clearing’s edge. This is what he meant when he asked that I do as he says. He doesn’t want me to see the bodies.

I tried to protest that it couldn’t make much difference, that all my time spent watching medical dramas on the HV meant I was immune to that kind of shock. Surely the three-dimensional gore and excitement of watching holographic limb-replacement and thoracic surgeries would prepare me for anything a crash could throw at me. But my protests sounded weak even to my own ears. I couldn’t have understood it before, but I do now. It’s different.

He urged me to rest, sit down and stay off my battered feet, save them for walking. But when I sit, I think, and I don’t want to make it any easier for my imagination to conjure horrors in front of my eyes.

And so I’m collecting rocks for markers while he finishes digging the graves.

He’s returned once or twice to check on me and drink from the canteen, face grimy with dust and sweat, hands as red and raw as my feet. I’ve yet to see him tired like this—hiking seems to him no more difficult than a light stroll around the promenade deck—and the sight of him dirty and out of breath is sobering. Major Merendsen is human after all.

I hand him the canteen quietly, and wait beside him while he rests until he’s ready to continue the task.

It’s edging into late afternoon when he returns carrying his pack in one hand and his shovel, a makeshift thing rigged from a branch and a piece of debris, in the other. He tosses both down beside my pile and gestures for me to have a seat.

“I need you to put these on for me,” he says as I sink down beside him, skin crawling at the feel of the springy leaf litter underneath, but not quite ready to demand a blanket to sit on. I’m confused at his request, until he opens his pack and pulls out a pair of boots.

I’m recoiling almost before I have time to register what he’s suggesting. “No. Tarver, no. I won’t.”

He rubs a hand across his eyes, leaving a streak of dirt on his forehead. “Please don’t argue with me. You can’t possibly make it much farther wearing those monstrosities.” He jerks his chin at my feet, mostly hidden by their cocoons of tape, nestled inside the ruins of my Delacours.

This isn’t about practicality, though. My skin crawls and I shut my eyes. “Please,” I whisper. “I can’t wear a dead woman’s shoes. Please, please don’t make me.” My stomach roils, nauseous despite being empty.

I’m braced for one of his sarcastic remarks, designed to get me moving before my brain kicks in, like I’m one of his soldiers. Instead there’s a light touch against my chin, startlingly gentle, and I open my eyes in surprise.

“If they could, these people would tell you to take what you can,” he says quietly, crouching next to me with one hand on the ground for balance and the other outstretched, urging me to lift my head. “They can’t use these things anymore. We can. I don’t know how you’ve walked so far without decent shoes, but that, at least, can change now. I believe that rescue is coming, but we have to be in a place they’ll find us. I’m not going to leave you behind, but that means you’ve got to do what you can to keep up.”

The dizziness sweeps on past me, leaving me drained and tired, but no longer about to throw up. “I’m trying.”

His sudden grin is as startling as the gentle summons to lift my head. “Believe me, I know. Come on, let’s see if they fit.”

No wonder he managed to take the remnants of an intelligence outpost on Patron and lead them to safety. There’s not a person in the central planets who hasn’t heard tales of his heroism, but no one actually believes in the stories that come from the border—suddenly I see in the man in front of me the qualities of the Major Merendsen, war hero. He could probably lead water uphill if he wanted to.

Later, when he’s helped to cut my feet out of the tangle of tape and ruined shoe, and laced me up in the boots (he didn’t mention having to wear a dead woman’s socks as well), we share a drink from the canteen. Together we carry the rocks I’ve gathered over to the site of the crash. The grave is one long mound, no way to tell how many are buried beneath it, and I don’t ask. We scatter the stones over the top as markers. I don’t need to investigate the pod to know that its beacon isn’t working—a whole side of the wreck is destroyed, circuits exposed and scorched where it was torn from the Icarus when it hit the atmosphere. These people were probably dead before the pod even broke away from the ship. It’s a first-class pod; I have no idea where the boots came from. Maybe a few soldiers were mixed in with society in the chaos.

Suddenly I wonder if Anna was among its occupants. Would Tarver have recognized her? Perhaps all of us are only blurs of color and hairstyles to him, one rich person very much like the next. Even if he had recognized her—would he have told me?

“Could I say something?” I say, surprising myself.

He blinks and looks over at me as he shifts one of the stones and straightens. “Go ahead.”

“I mean—alone. To them.” I tilt my head toward the grave.

“Oh,” he says, looking down at the disturbed earth and stone. “Of course. I’ll be up at the tree line when you’re ready to keep moving.”

I listen to his footsteps moving away, my eyes on the stones I’ve gathered and placed. Always, my ears are tuned for the sounds of engines, the whine of a flyover jet, the hum of hovercraft. But they never come. It’s always this silence. A world of quiet broken only by my footsteps and Tarver’s, and the whispering of the woods.

I know he has no reason to lie. Still, it’s hard to connect the long mound with the reality of people resting beneath it, actual flesh and bone. The sky is as empty as it always is—the world is quiet. My ears pick out the wind, the sighing of the leaves, the distant chirp of a bird. The stillness of an undisturbed wilderness. I can’t help but wonder how long it’ll take for the grass and the trees to consume these graves—how long until it’s impossible to tell anyone ever rested here.

How long until we too are swallowed up?

“I don’t know who any of you are,” I whisper, eyes blurring with sudden tears. “I wish I did. I wish I could keep pretending none of this is real. That my father will swoop down, pick everyone up, and everything will go back to normal. That this is all some terrible dream.”

I crouch, reaching out to lay a hand against the stones warming in the sunlight streaming through the clearing. The surface is rough and smooth at once, irregular but soothing. Nothing like the stones in our gardens, polished and placed with perfect artistic balance. I’m hungry and tired, and there’s sweat rolling down my back. Tears drip from my chin, splattering against the stone, leaving uneven patches of darkness against the gray rock.

“I could have fit a lot more people in that maintenance pod. Maybe it could have been you. I’m sorry.”

I straighten and look back, toward where Tarver waits at the tree line, adjusting his pack. From here the trek to the Icarus seems endless—I can’t even see the mountains, much less the plains, or the rest of the forest that lies between us and our only chance at rescue. Maybe it would have been better to have died in this crashed pod. Easier than dying slowly out here, alone but for this man who hates me, so far from the one person who cares about me. Fear, icy and sickening, roils in my stomach.

Tarver lifts his head as if sensing my gaze across the distance between us. If he heard any of what I said, he gives no indication, merely hefting his pack and inclining his head to suggest we get moving.

I swallow, glancing down once last time at the freshly dug graves. “I think you might’ve been the lucky ones.”

We walk.

My feet are nothing but a dull ache as Tarver marches me through the woods. He takes my hand sometimes to help me over logs and rocks and lifts me over the creek when we cross it. Other times he makes me drink from the canteen. I let him, because what else can I do? The day morphs into eternity, a nightmare from which I cannot wake. As the hours stretch on, not even the sounds of the forest make me jump. I see nothing but the ground before my feet. I cannot turn back because there is no back, only the next step, and the one after, and the one after that.

I used to think that my name would always keep me safe. That those two words—Lilac LaRoux—would be the only password I needed no matter where I ended up.

I had been so sure my father was coming for me, but now it’s hard to find that certainty. This is a wilderness waiting to swallow me; I’d barely make a dent trying to fight it. There are no rules for me to learn, no points to be scored, no bluffs to be called. This is a hell I’ve never imagined.

And I think I’m going to die here.

“Nothing of note happened when you camped that night?”

“If you’d tell me what kind of thing of note you’re wondering about, I’m sure I could be more help.”

“Are you saying that nothing unusual happened?”

“Nothing at all.”