These Broken Stars

TWENTY-ONE

TARVER

THE MORNING DAWNED CLEAR AND PROMISING, and I had let myself hope a little that the ascent wouldn’t be as bad as I had anticipated. Streams of snowmelt run down the mountainside, and though they’re gut-achingly cold, I never lack somewhere to fill the canteen. But the higher we climb, the faster the temperature drops. The sunlight feels pale and cold, but I know it’s the only thing standing between us and a much bigger problem. A problem we’ll face when the sun starts to sink.

Lilac works stubbornly to keep up, and my heart tugs at me to slow down and let her rest. But I press on, up past the boulders and the thinning tufts of grass.

As we climb, my mind circles back to how utterly alien this must be for her—as far from her experience as her life is from mine. What must it have been like to grow up with your face on the cover of every gossip magazine in the galaxy?

I can’t stand to think what the paparazzi would say if they heard her mutter one of my curses under her breath, or saw the way she nestles in close to me at night. What they’d make of her strength.

I can smell the snow coming. We don’t have time to waste in getting to the crash site, and the difference between slowing down and pushing on might be an extra night up here. So we keep climbing.

It’s a few hours after we split a ration bar for lunch that the first flakes start to fall, so tiny at first that they almost look like a mist. Behind me Lilac makes a soft sound, and I realize she’s probably never seen real snow before. She’s had more reality since we crashed than over the rest of her life put together. Part of me wants to stop and appreciate the start of the snowfall with her, but I know it won’t be long until it’s coming thick and fast, so I park her in the lee of one of the huge rocks that litter our path and scramble up over it for a better view. We need a cave, or at least an overhang. The twisted trees up here have bare, spindly branches, and they’re useless for shelter. I’ve never seen trees like this—combined with the thick, pale moss on the rocks, they make this place ghostly, unwelcoming.

I used to do a lot of mountaineering with Alec when I was a kid. Me and my hero. I’ve been thinking about him as we climb, and about my parents. By now they must think they have two dead sons. He’s one of the voices in my head that keep me moving when I want to stop. A line of sergeants and commanding officers comes to life in my head when I get tired—big, wild men from the frontier who screamed at us until their instincts became ours. They keep pushing me on, instructing me on finding the right campsite, making sure I take the extra minute to make the bed as comfortable as I can so I don’t pay for my laziness by tossing and turning all night. But Alec’s voice is quieter, patient, the way he used to sound when he came home on leave and taught me the things he’d learned.

It doesn’t take long to find a cave. The entrance is barely more than a space between two rocks, roofed over with earth and stone, but it extends farther in, and it’ll do.

The cold cuts into my face and the rising wind pulls at my coat as I work my way across the mountainside to fetch Lilac. She’s huddled against the rock, and her hands are freezing as I guide her up the slope toward the place I’ve found.

We make our way in past the first twist of the cave. It’s dark, but we’re sheltered from the wind. When I catch sight of her face in the flashlight, her gaze is dull and hopeless.

I wish she’d come alive and start listing my faults for me. I bundle her in blankets and build a fire with deadwood piled by old snowmelt at the mouth of the cave, then crawl inside the blankets with her. She’s too tired to resist, maybe, because she leans in against me and rests her head on my shoulder. “Don’t drowse,” I say quietly, my voice hoarse from disuse. “Not until you’re warmer.”

“Mmm,” she agrees, drawing the blanket in tighter around us. “Why am I always the problem? Just once I’d like to be the useful one.”

“We happened to get stranded on my turf,” I say. “That’s the way it goes, sometimes.”

“I just wish—” She shifts a little, getting comfortable again and subsiding against me with a sigh. “Well, I suppose I wish a lot of things.”

“Me too,” I say quietly to the girl in my arms. I know exactly what you mean.

“I wish I had a really good cup of tea,” she says, with a sigh. “And some scones, jam, cream.”

“I wish I had a steak.” We both dwell on that for a moment. “Or something to boil. There’s a guy in my unit who can make food out of anything. He boiled up a shirt when we were in a tight spot on Arcadia. But he says it’s got to be a general’s shirt, because they use a better quality dye on those.”

“Major.” She sounds like she doesn’t know whether to giggle, or chastise me.

“Oh, don’t worry, you remove the insignia first. Otherwise it would be disrespectful.”

Talking again after the day’s silence is like a truce after a long campaign. As we settle in to wait to warm up, I’m careful to keep my mind from drifting toward the people she saw by the river. All of them pointing this way, at the mountains, or the wreck, perhaps. But why? I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to think about it. For now, we’re allies again, and I’m not about to mess that up.

My internal clock tells me I’ve been asleep for hours when something wakes me. The fire’s burned down to embers, and the wind outside is howling in the way only a blizzard in full swing can. But we’re wearing everything we own, including our boots, and I’m warm.

Then I realize what woke me. Lilac’s sitting bolt upright, staring into space. Her eyes are wild and vague—she’s been dreaming. Cold air’s leaking in where she’s pulled the blankets away from me, and I wait to see whether she’ll lie back down, keeping one eye barely cracked open. I really want to sleep. I want her to sleep too.

No such luck. She scrambles out of the blankets and onto her knees, reaching down to shake my shoulder. “Tarver,” she hisses. “Tarver, I know you’re not asleep, get up.”

Dammit. I open my eyes. Flushed and urgent, she stares at me. I see her trembling, a drop of sweat trickling down her temple despite the chill. She looks sick with whatever nightmare woke her.

“Lilac, please. Just kill me.” I let her hear a little of the impatience in my voice, which I’m usually so careful about. But it’s the middle of the night. I was finally warm. I really want to sleep. “What is it?”

She tries to calm herself, but I can still see the urgency in her eyes—she’s hoping I’ll listen if she hides away the crazy. “We have to get out of here.” Her breath catches as she says it, as though she’s surprised to hear herself speak those words. “It’s not safe.”

“No kidding,” I say, hauling the blanket up underneath my chin. “And trust me, the first rescue ship I see, we’re on it. But for now, we’re as safe as we can be in here. We’ll freeze out there. You don’t screw around with blizzards.”

She hauls back the blankets and grabs my wrist, throwing her weight into the effort. I can feel the tremors racking her body. Not just a dream, then—this was one of her visions. She’s clearly beyond reason.

“Believe me,” she says, teeth gritted with effort. I don’t let her shift me, and without my cooperation, neither of us moves. “Tarver, I know. But we have to go, we have to go right now. Please, it’s not safe in here, something’s going to happen.”

“Something’s going to happen if we go out there,” I say, pulling my wrist back, which jerks her closer. “We’re going to start slurring our words and shaking, then we’re going to stop shaking, then we’re going to go mad and start pulling off our clothes, stumbling around, laughing. Then we’ll collapse, and that’s the merciful part, because that way we won’t feel it when we freeze to death. For once, please just make things easy for me and lie down, all right?”

This is the thing I’ve been afraid of. This is why I made her promise not to go running after one of those voices she hears. That’s how I could lose her.

“Please!” There’s an edge to her voice, hoarse and desperate—whatever’s scared her so much, she believes in it completely. “I don’t know how, but I swear to you, I know.” She closes her eyes for a moment, gathering calm, gathering steel. I know that look. When she opens her eyes again, her voice shakes with passion. “I know you lied to me back there, and I don’t care. I’ve trusted you with my life every second, Tarver. Can’t you trust me for one second? Just once?”

My heart’s breaking, and I reach out for her hands, but she snatches them back. “It’s not about trust,” I tell her. “I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t see what you see. But there’s a difference between making some educated guesses about who died in that pod and thinking you can see the future. Lilac, if we leave in the middle of this blizzard, we risk dying from exposure. It’s insane. We’re not going out there, if I have to hold you down myself. Give yourself a few moments to calm down, and you’ll see I’m right.”

“We don’t have a few moments!” Lilac is breathing hard, agitated. “You’re wrong. It’s all about trust. You just don’t believe me.”

I don’t know what to say, and I’m still searching for words when she snaps into action. She scrambles to her feet, grabbing my pack and wheeling around to dash for the mouth of the cave.

I can hear myself roaring in pure frustration. The blankets seem to come to life, wrapping around me and tangling my arms for vital seconds before I rip my way clear. I pound after her, leaving behind the blankets and the fire, the warmth and safety of the cave.

The cold hits me like a wall, cutting in through my open jacket. I’m thanking whoever’s listening that we slept fully dressed. No light from the strange moon makes it through the clouds and the snow swirling through the air. For long, terrifying seconds I can’t see her at all, the darkness leaching the color out of everything. Then there’s movement—she’s stumbling away from the cave, scrambling over rocks and dragging herself to her feet again—and I hurl myself after her, breath rasping, boots crunching on the snow.

I’ve been moving so slowly and carefully for days that for an instant it almost feels good to stretch my legs. I vault over a boulder and throw myself after her, driven by my fear that she’ll disappear into the night, or fall, or I’ll lose her in any countless number of ways. I’m not gentle when I catch her—I grab her upper arm and slam on the brakes, so she’s pulled up short and jerked into my arms, to hold her still and keep her from escaping again.

She doesn’t struggle, and my heart pounds as the two of us stand there, panting, the snow quickly coating our heads and shoulders.

Then a sound starts to rise above the howling of the wind, and the muffling blanket of the snow, and the harsh rasp of our breath. It’s a deep rumbling, starting as a whisper and then building to drown out everything else as the ground trembles beneath our feet. I’m forced to let go of her to catch my balance, but she doesn’t move away. She looks past me toward the cave, and when I follow her line of sight, I see the faint glow of our fire wink out of existence as the roof of our campsite collapses in an avalanche of rock.

We both stand for a few moments, still panting, still staring.

It’s nothing but a pile of rubble and snow.

Our bed and blankets are buried beneath it all, as we would have been too, if we’d been inside. I know this, but somehow I’m disconnected from the knowledge. I know that our cozy shelter is somewhere under the debris, but I can’t imagine that it’s really true.

Or how she knew to run.

When I turn to walk away, she comes without a word. We can’t move far in the dark, but we find a place to wedge ourselves between two rocks and build up some of the snow to shelter us from the wind. It creates a poor shelter, but lacking any alternative, we huddle down together. We sit on the pack and wrap our arms around each other, and I don’t think either of us sleeps a wink in the few hours until dawn.

The sky’s only starting to lighten when the snow stops. My arms and legs have long since gone through the agony of losing circulation, and they’re out the other side into numbness. The feeling comes flooding back in bolts of fiery pain as I instruct my body to move.

She follows my example as I stretch, exhausted but uncomplaining. She must hurt as much as I do, but I note with a twinge of admiration that it doesn’t show up in more than a tightening of her jaw, a careful slowness to her movements. Once we’re both able to take a step without stumbling, we turn away from the cave.

The last of the stars are sparkling overhead, as they always do after snow, and the artificial moon hangs low in the sky. The world is crisp and beautiful. Every step is careful and testing—you never know what lies beneath the overnight crust of snow. I sink in over my ankles, and Lilac’s breathing behind me quickly becomes labored. Our progress is slow.

I don’t want to think about what happened, but my mind insists on revisiting it over and over.

She saw the folks I buried.

She dreamed, and knew to run from the cave.

I let myself skid in a controlled slide down a rock as big as a tank, then turn to lift my arms up so she can slither down to join me. I catch her, hands braced against her sides, and when I move to release her, she grabs the fabric of my sleeve, holding me still.

I look down at her, and though her skin’s pale with exhaustion, and her eyes are two dark, sleepless circles, her gaze is locked on mine.

She wants what happened to be her proof. Proof her voices are real, proof of her sanity. She’s waiting for me to admit she’s not crazy, for my conversion.

But what happened last night was impossible. Nobody can know something before it happens. I can’t explain it, can’t let myself dwell on it. I have to stick to the task at hand, and get us out of here.

I’ve been trained to close my mind in order to keep functioning. I’ve been trained to keep moving.

I let my gaze slide away from hers, and I hear her breath catch as she stiffens. I can imagine her face closing over, but I can’t let myself look at her. She releases my arm, and I turn back toward the path.

I thought yesterday was awkward and too quiet; it pales against today. The hopelessness in the set of her shoulders as she trudges through the snow is heartbreaking.

We struggle through the snow without speaking, legs made of lead and arms protesting every moment they’re put to use. The things we don’t say grow thicker between us, and by the time we’ve been walking a few hours, the silence has set like concrete.

When we stop I reach for the canteen, only to find it gone. I look up to find Lilac watching me, and we realize at the same time. The canteen is with our blankets, buried in the rubble. I close my eyes against the blow of it. Without a way to carry water, we’re tethered to creeks and streams, left hoping our guts can take the local bacteria. Without water—

She starts moving again first, continuing on down the slope. Maybe she doesn’t realize what the loss of the canteen means. Maybe she does know, and is just moving anyway.

When we finally make camp, we work side by side to clear a spot of snow and hunt for meager piles of grasses for our bed, picking out twigs and stones and scooping out a hole for our hip bones. Without the blankets, we’ll have to bury ourselves in whatever we can find.

We melt snow in a strip of fabric torn from the too-long sleeves of the mechanic’s suit, sucking at the water as it drips. It’s precious little, but eating snow will only increase the effects of exposure. I reach inside the pack for the flashlight to lay it by the bed, and catch sight of the small case that holds my photograph inside it. I can’t help wondering why she grabbed the pack before she ran. Why, in such a panic, would she think to get supplies?

Then it hits me. She wasn’t sure I’d come after her, unless she had my prized belongings with her.

Half-formed words gather in my throat, but she won’t even look at me, and I don’t know what to say.

When I curl up behind her to sleep, the curve of her spine says everything she doesn’t. Tense and unhappy, she only barely tolerates our proximity. If it were warmer, if we had our blankets, if she had a choice, she’d be on the other side of the fire. For a moment it seems like she’s about to say something, her breath hitching with intention, but she remains silent.

Neither of us has spoken a word all day. It’s a long time before we sleep.

We wake a little later than usual in the morning, paying the price for the night before. One of the many prices. It doesn’t take long to clear up the camp—stretch, pack up our supplies, split one of the last few ration bars.

I stretch again as she tightens the laces on her boots, and when we set out it’s clear she’s determined to keep to the pace I set. But by the time we reach the crest of the pass she’s breathing fast, lagging behind despite her best efforts, her gaze fixed on the ground in front of her.

The view of the rolling hills before us is spectacular. They stretch out for klicks before they level off and reach a forest that’s only a dark line from this distance. Between the base of the mountain and the start of the forest lies the Icarus.

She’s strewn out over a huge distance, ripped apart by her descent. Though sections of it have collapsed in the unfamiliar gravity, a large part of her hull is intact, with her trail showing where she came skidding in over the ground. My heart thumps in my chest as I run my gaze along the trail of debris—ruined escape pods that didn’t detach until the ship broke apart, chunks of metal, burned streaks along the hillsides, half-melted things I can’t begin to identify.

The Icarus held fifty thousand souls. I wish I could believe that any of them have survived this charred disaster. Not a single pod that I can see is intact, and the ship herself is beyond all redemption.

But it’s what’s not there that nearly drives me to my knees.

There should be rescue craft buzzing around the ship’s carcass. There should be crews climbing all over her like so many ants. There should be people, life, salvation. But what lies before us looks like nothing more than a graveyard. I’ve been holding on to the hope that we could have somehow missed their approach, that if we could get as far as the crash site, rescue would be waiting for us there. But there’s not even a hint of other survivors.

After everything we’ve been through, I finally admit to myself what I’ve been avoiding since we landed.

I don’t think anyone’s coming for us.

And I don’t know what to do, except try to stay alive. The wreck and the broken pods below us must hold the soldiers I sparred with, the folks I met on the lower decks. The man who conned his way into the first-class salon to petition Lilac. Her gaggle of friends, her bodyguard, her cousin.

I take a breath, and turn to begin making my way down the mountain.

“Just—just stop.” Lilac’s voice cracks behind me, hoarse from dehydration and ragged with emotion.

She’s staring down at the wreckage, stuck in place. She’s flushed, or burned from the glare of the snow, more likely, her hair curling across her forehead, damp with sweat. When she turns her burning gaze on me, I flinch. “I need you to look. Look at me; look at that, Tarver.”

“I see it.” My own voice sounds nearly as bad, unused for so long. “But we can’t stay here. We need to keep walking. There might be supplies in the wreck, some kind of communications equipment we can salvage.”

She sways, then sinks to the ground in utter exhaustion. “When are you going to stop punishing me for not being crazy after all? I saved your life. We’d never have survived the cave-in.”

Lilac, I know. I know we’d never have survived it. I know you heard or saw something before you ran, I watched it happen. I know you saw something real by the river. I know.

But I can’t let myself admit it out loud. This goes so far beyond anything I’ve been trained for, and my training is all I have. I’m better equipped to drag a crazy person across a wilderness than cope with the possibility that she’s receiving communications from—what? Ghosts? The thought is more than absurd; it’s impossible.

If I let myself believe her, then everything I know goes out the window. And what I know has kept us alive this far.

She’s still looking at me wearily, pain written clearly in her expression. “I’m not trying to punish you,” I say finally. “But I can only work from what we know. I don’t think I know everything, and in a place like this, I know even less than usual. But what I do know is that we need to keep moving.”

She slumps over to rest her forehead against her knees, and my heart groans under the pressure. I wish I knew what to do, or even what to say. I wish I knew anything useful at all.

“So you’re going to shrug it off again,” she mumbles, fixing her tired glare on me. “I’ve been struggling for anything I could find to show you I’m not crazy, even when my own logic told me I must be, even when you lied to me outright. And now that we both know I’m not, you’re just going to dismiss this?” She’s crying, but the harsh edge to her voice is anger. “Just once, Tarver, just once, I wish you could see what I see.”

She speaks the words like a witch in an old story, laying a curse on me. I look away, down the mountain at the wreckage below us.

“I’m sorry, Lilac. I don’t know what you see. I only know how to keep us moving. I’m just a soldier. Once we get out of this place, you won’t ever have to see me again. But I can’t make myself see what you do.”

She starts climbing to her feet, slow and painful, and if looks could kill I’d be dead and buried. “I hope that one day you’re forced to believe in something for which you haven’t got a shred of proof.” Her voice is taut like wire. “And I hope someone you care about laughs in your face for it.”

She stalks off down the mountain, and I wonder which one of her fancy tutors taught her this—the ability to make an exit without a door to slam, picking her way down the snowy path with her back ramrod straight in furious indignation. I wonder where she finds the strength for it.

“I’m not laughing at you,” I whisper. I adjust the pack and start to make my way down the mountain after her.

She’s learned a thing or two about trailblazing in the time she’s spent following me, and she makes good time at first, though eventually she starts to slow from exhaustion.

I can almost see my younger self, marching along, trying to keep up with his big brother as we trekked near home. I think of my parents, and my throat closes as I conjure up our cottage in my mind’s eye. My sanctuary, the place that’s always safe. No matter how I try to stay focused on what’s real, what’s in front of us, I can’t resist the thought of home.

The path—maybe a path, anyway—that we’re following curves around the side of the mountain. As we clear an outcropping and a secluded valley becomes visible below, Lilac’s head snaps up. She draws breath to speak, her eyes widening. Then it’s gone, stamped out, and she’s quiet again as she turns away to start working her way around a boulder. She has one last longing glance over her shoulder, as if whatever she sees, it’s something far preferable to our reality. On cue I see her start to shake, shivering as though cold, fingers twitching before she shoves them into her pockets.

Another vision, then. A wave of dizziness washes over me, like a sympathetic reaction—I clench my jaw before my own teeth can start to chatter. At least she knows the difference now. I ignore the part of my brain that points out that if she knows the difference between visions and reality, she can’t be that crazy. I follow in her wake, and I glance down into the valley below us.

It feels like the air’s been sucked out of my lungs. I’m caught gasping for breath, grabbing thin air for something to support me.

There’s a cottage in the valley. My parents’ cottage. It’s all there—the white walls, the rich purple of the lilac, the curving path and the red flowers in the field behind it. The faint wisp of smoke from the chimney, the black smudge to one side that must be my mother’s vegetable garden.

The path winds its way out of the valley, vanishing into the distance, through the hills toward the wreck.

It’s perfect, to the last detail. It’s my home. It’s not really there.

I can hear her voice in my head. Just once, I wish you could see what I see.

I feel her presence beside me, and she reaches out to slip her hand silently into mine. It isn’t until her fingers wind through mine that I realize I too am shaking violently.

I’m going mad.

“As a member of the military, you’ve been trained to withstand a certain degree of shock.”

“If we weren’t, I don’t think we’d last long on the front lines.”

“At any point while you were on the planet’s surface, did your training…falter?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”

“Did you ever experience any side effects from your exposure to such harsh conditions?”

“I think I lost a few pounds.”

“Major, did you ever experience any psychological side effects?”

“No. Like you said, we’re trained not to let that kind of thing happen. Solid as a rock, and just as dense.”