These Broken Stars (21 page)

He’s looking less skeptical and more thoughtful now, watching me—the way he’s looking at me, I’m not even sure he’s listening to what I’m saying. The shock of seeing his parents’ house must have been worse than I realized. He clears his throat. “Don’t you think, if a corporation discovered intelligent life here, it would’ve been all over the newscasts?”

“Unless they’re keeping it hidden for some reason.” I try not to think 
of my father, of the rooms upon rooms of isolated, secret servers and data cores. I asked about them often as a child, but he had always managed to distract me with a gift or a story, until eventually I wasn’t even curious anymore—his secrets were just a part of who he was.

Surely he wasn’t the only corporate executive to keep certain things hidden from public view. “You think the military are the only ones keeping secrets?”

I take a deep breath. “I dreamed, right before the cave-in. That someone I couldn’t see was whispering at me, warning me. When I woke up, that someone was still there, still whispering, but I couldn’t understand the words. It’s like they—whatever they are—are trying to talk to us, but they don’t know how. They’re pulling things out of our minds, 
the things that hurt us the most. I thought I was being haunted, but if 
they’re seeing my thoughts, then they know how torn up I am about the people who died on that pod. Maybe it was the only way they knew to start a conversation, to pick up on the thing that was playing so much on my mind. And maybe this, your parents’ house, is meant for you.”

Silence follows my speech, my heart pounding as I try to catch my breath. I know he’ll go back to thinking I’m mad. Any moment and he’ll open his mouth to dismiss me as always.

But instead he just says softly, “If these whispers were trying to make me hurt, they managed it pretty well.”

We sit for a time in silence. I can feel Tarver’s warmth next to me, a finger’s width away. Despite the comfort of his presence, my skin prickles with the unmistakable feeling that we’re being watched. I don’t ask him if he feels it too—the tension in his body says it clearly enough. The whispers are out there, and even though they’re quiet now, we both know we’re not alone.

After a time he gets to his feet and offers me a hand, and we make our way back to the campfire. I add a few of the meager bits of deadwood I was able to collect, and we settle in. He puts his arm around my shoulders, encouraging me to lean in against him. The distance that had grown between us has vanished, and I’m more than willing to comply. We sink into the quiet together.

My eyelids are drooping when his voice, barely more than a rumble against my cheek, rouses me.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty about the people on the pod. There were plenty of pods for everyone. You had no way of knowing what was about to happen.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I say, my chest constricting, but perhaps not quite as tightly as before. “But ours is the one that survived.”

“Well, whether it’s the only one or not, I’m glad I ended up in it with you.”

I snort, a sound I never used to make. “Major, please. I know an outright fabrication when I hear one. I’m the last person you’d want to have with you here.”

“Think again, Miss LaRoux.” His voice is calm, earnest. I know him well enough to recognize when he’s lying, and he isn’t. “If you hadn’t 
been on that escape pod when it jammed, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

He shifts, causing me to lift my head, and I find him looking at me, 
his face only an inch from mine.

I feel my face starting to burn, and I look away first. I can only hope that he dismisses the redness as heat from the fire.

“If only Swann was here,” I say briskly. “She’d have killed that cat thing with her bare hands. Or Simon, he’s the one that taught me about electronics, he was—” My voice cuts out. I don’t think I’ve said his name out loud in nearly two years. “He was a boy I knew,” I finish lamely.

I can still feel his eyes on me. “I think I’ll take the girl I know, thanks.” By now the sun has vanished and the stars have come out, a scattering 
of light across the sky. I fix my eyes on them, grateful for something to look at that isn’t the soldier with his arm around me. I never realized how unfamiliar the stars could seem until now.

“If it’s true, then we know we’re not mad,” I say, keeping my eyes on the sky.

“And if it’s true, we know we’re not alone.” He, however, sounds more troubled than relieved.

“The whispers haven’t hurt us so far. I just think they don’t know how 
to reach us except by showing us what’s in our thoughts.”

“If they’re trying to communicate,” Tarver murmurs, curling his hand around my arm, possessive enough to keep my face burning, “then the 
question is, what are they trying so hard to say?”

“This water bottle you gave me is empty.”

“Indeed. I’ll send for another. In the meantime, what were your 
goals when you reached the crash site?”

“Supplies. Safety.”

“Rescue?”

“We hadn’t seen a single flyover. I wasn’t confident of rescue.”

“Did you discuss that with Miss LaRoux?”

“No. We were tired. We just concentrated on the basics.”

“What were the basics?”

“We were almost out of food, and she was quite pleased to 
find a change of clothes.”

In the morning, the silence between us is gentle, broken by our puffing and panting as we scramble down the snowy mountainside, our breath clouding the air. My throat’s rough and my mouth’s dry—it takes too much energy to melt snow in our mouths, and the cold leaves our stomachs cramping. The canteen’s at the forefront of my mind. Losing the Gleidel would have been less of a blow.

I squeeze through a gap between two rocks, and before I turn back 
to help Lilac through, I glance down to make sure my feet are planted firmly—and there it is. A military canteen. It’s in flawless condition, khaki sides smooth and unmarked. As though it just came off the production line.

I reach down, half expecting my hand to go straight through it, but my fingers connect with solid metal—it’s real. When I flip it over, my stomach lurches. My initials are there, engraved by my own hand, impossible to re-create—and yet the dents and scuffs have been erased. The canteen is as flawless as the day I got it. I pull out the stopper, and there’s the filtration system sitting in place, clear water just below. A shiver starts between my shoulder blades and runs down my spine.

We left my canteen behind in the cave, crushed under rock and snow. And now, as though we willed it into existence, here lies a replacement directly in our path. No, not just a replacement—this is the
same
canteen. “Tarver?” It’s Lilac, trying to look past me at what stopped me short.

I step aside to let her through, but it takes her a moment to spot the 
canteen. When she does, her blue eyes widen, and she nearly falls the rest of the way through the gap. I wrap both arms around her. We pause for a moment with her tucked against me, holding still.

“You’re touching it,” she says, reaching out to press a fingertip against 
the canteen. “Tarver, it’s solid. It’s not a vision.”

“It’s mine, but brand-new.” I flip it over to show her the initials, and 
her breath catches.

“How? No—all those soldiers on board. Someone was bound to share your initials. It’s a coincidence.”

I’m about to point out that there’s no way the canteen could have ended up here, in our path, if thrown from the wreckage—but then I see her face, and the words die. She knows. But neither of us wants to say what’s on both our minds. These whispers are capable of more than just visions, or premonitions. What else can they do?

I try the water—sweet, fresh, clean. We each drink, grateful it’s not snow, icy cold and trickling down our faces as we swallow. When Lilac finishes, she holds the canteen in her hands, staring down at it. She keeps running her fingertips over its surface, as though it might change upon inspection. Then she lifts her hand, staring at her own fingers. It takes me a moment, but by the time she lifts her gaze to mine, I get it. She’s not shaking. This is no vision. No image plucked from our minds and given to us by the whispers.

This is real.

I wish that I could take this as a sign of friendship from these beings, if that is indeed what we’re dealing with. But despite my relief at having a canteen again, all I can think is this: Why work so hard to keep us alive? What do they really want from us?

We reach the grassy foothills at the base of the mountain by late morning, and it’s an unspeakable relief to be walking across level ground again, able to stretch my legs and unbunch my muscles for a while. I realize as we walk that in just a few short days, I’ve become familiar with this place—the wildflowers we saw on the other side of the mountain are missing, and my eyes can pick out burrows where I can lay snares later. Any sense of comfort doesn’t last long, though. I’m soon reminded we’re walking through a graveyard.

The debris blankets the hills. We pass pieces of twisted plastene the 
size of my hand, and great, melted piles of metal that tower above us.

Most of the pods are too damaged to scavenge anything from, but we’re down to our last ration bar. I think we could survive on the tiny critters and grasses here, but it wouldn’t be pretty. And so I risk peeking inside the first reasonably intact pod we come to, its only major damage consisting of the panels on the side torn away where it was still attached to the
Icarus
. I’m relieved there’s only one occupant. Her head hangs forward and her hair hides her face where she sits, still strapped into her seat, in about the same position Lilac took in our sturdier mechanic’s pod. She’s in her nightclothes, a pink silky wrap tied on over whatever’s underneath. I imagine she died on impact. Her hair is brown, not red, but it’s all too easy to see Lilac there instead. I keep my eyes averted from her as I climb through the gash in the pod and rummage through one of the underseat compartments. There—half a dozen more ration bars. Food for another couple days if we supplement with the local flora.

When I climb out again. Lilac doesn’t ask whether anyone was inside. She knows from one look at my face what I found there.

The
Icarus
looks like someone’s run a knife along the side of her and peeled her open. For nearly a third of her length her innards are visible, scorched framework laid bare. The plowed-up trail behind her shows where she skidded in to land, carving out a furrow you could lose a platoon inside. There’s a faint chemical smell on the breeze.

“In the military,” I say, “we call this proceeding with caution. Usually that’s code for ‘let someone else go first,’ but since we’re the forward scouts this time, let’s just watch ourselves carefully. We don’t know how bad the structural damage is inside. We don’t know what breathing those chemicals in the air will do, and we don’t have the medical supplies if we get hurt. Let’s be careful, okay? Test every step.”

There’s no haughty reply or cutting glare. She stares at the ship, solemn, and simply nods. “We can avoid the heavy damage completely. That’s the stern; it’s mostly propulsion systems, apart from the viewing decks.” A pause. Maybe she’s thinking of our encounter there, as I am. That was another lifetime, and we were different people then. She pushes on, businesslike. “The bow’s technical as well. That’s where the communications were.”

What she doesn’t have to say is that the communications clearly aren’t there now. The bow is hopelessly mashed from the impact.

She’s scanning the wreck, gaze intent. “The middle third of the ship is—was—passengers and cargo. That’s probably where we’ll find supplies, and it looks like some of it hasn’t been torn open.”

The false moon has been getting higher in the sky, staying for longer and setting later. It sits just above the horizon now, visible even in broad daylight. Lilac sees me staring at the horizon and comes to stand at my side. “Do you think it had something to do with the crash?”

I can’t help but remember the awful lurching feeling as the
Icarus
tried to phase back into hyperspace, and failed. Caught by gravity, or by whatever force had ripped it from that dimension in the first place.

“Seems too much of a coincidence not to,” I reply.

I hear her breath catch. “I don’t know whether your schools would have focused on this, but my father taught me endless lessons on terraforming and its history. It was the one subject he refused to leave to my tutors—I guess being a pioneer means you don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Before the first emigration, when they were still trying to figure out how to terraform Mars, one of the ideas for heating up the planet enough to have liquid water was to set up a large orbital mirror to direct more sunlight to its surface.”

My eyes flick from her face back to the false moon. “Or an array of mirrors. I think I remember something about that. They never tried it, though, because it was so impractical, right? If that’s what’s up there, why now? Why this planet?”

She shakes her head, looking over at me. She has no answers, and neither do I. I turn my back on the moon as it sinks toward the plains, and head for the ship.

It turns out the part of the hull that hasn’t been torn open is sealed off almost completely by melted streams of an alloy that was never meant to go through atmo. The sealing off is a good sign, I guess—maybe whatever’s inside will be intact—but that only matters if we can find a way to access it.

I keep the Gleidel in my hand as we work our way along the edge of the broken hull, two ants trooping along the base of a huge metal wall that 
rises to the sky above us. We don’t see any sign of other survivors. Can 
we really be the only ones? Surrounded by the utter silence of the wreck, I realize all over again that Lilac’s actions are the reason we’re alive. I may have saved her life when it came to the cat monster, and I may have gotten her this far, but neither of us would be here if she hadn’t found a way to wrench us away from the
Icarus
. I can’t help but watch her as we walk, my attention divided between our surroundings and the girl at my side. Seeing her in all her finery on board the ship, could I have ever imagined her like this? Wrapped up in the dirt-stained mechanic’s suit, ruined dress stuffed in underneath and hair tied back with a dingy piece of string?