These Broken Stars

by Amie Kaufman

  “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.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  LILAC

  Never put your hand out to a drowning man. I saw that on an HV special once. If you do, they grab on to you and pull you into their panic and hopelessness, dragging you both into the same watery grave.

  But I don’t care. I step close to him and slip my hand into his. His fingers tighten around mine with a strength born of desperation. Which of us is shaking more, I can’t tell, but where our hands are joined, we’re steadier.

  He’s drowning. And I’ll drown with him. It’s a long time before he speaks.

  “I can’t—” He breaks off, voice cracking. His eyes close against the vision of his family home in the valley. A vision both of us can see. The cottage looks just like it did in his picture.

  I know from experience that he’ll be dizzy, disoriented, tasting metal and feeling cobwebs on his face. I know from experience that he’ll think he’s mad. My own ears are buzzing, my body trembling, but I push it aside, force myself to focus. He needs me.

  “I’m exhausted,” he goes on. “I’ve had training on this. Your mind can—when you’re tired enough …”

  He thinks he’s hallucinating. Maybe it’ll be easier if he believes that. I squeeze his hand, wrapping my other around his arm. “You should rest, have some water. I’ll sit with you.”

  He nods, eyes opening to fix on the house below like a starving man would stare at a banquet. He lets me pull the pack from his shoulders, doesn’t protest as I tug him down to sit on the edge of the cliff, his face haggard and strained.

  I’ve never seen him afraid.

  I could be smug. I could rub his nose in the fact that he has no choice now, but to believe me. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But now one look at him is enough to kill that desire. He doesn’t deserve it. And I know what it feels like to think you’re going insane.

  I sit beside him, quiet, waiting. This isn’t like the silence of the past two days. For once, it’s simply that there’s nothing to say, not that there’s no way to say it. I’d wanted him to see what I see—but now I wish I could take it all back.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Tarver’s voice, rough with emotion and exhaustion, trickles into the quiet.

  I summon my steadiest voice. “I do. We’ll stop for the day here, and you’ll get some rest. I can make camp, I’ve watched you do it enough times. We’ll have some dinner and sleep and in the morning we’ll make for the wreck. We’ll keep going, and figure out a way off this planet, so you can go home for real.”

  Tarver only swallows, the muscles in his jaw standing out briefly as he clenches it. He lets go of my hand and rakes his fingers through his hair in a quick, jerky movement. I stifle the urge to touch him again and get quietly to work.

  I don’t do anything as well as he would’ve done it. I’m still shaking from the side effects of the vision, still fighting dizziness and nausea. The cottage is the most vivid, longest-lasting vision yet—and the side effects are worse. The fire burns dangerously low because I can’t find much fuel, and the bed is lumpy. I pull out the food we have that doesn’t require boiling, since we lost our canteen. Cold dinner, cold snowmelt, and it’ll be a cold night, with no blankets. But if we have one night where nothing is right, at least it will be one night he doesn’t have to be responsible for it all.

  “You see it too, don’t you?”

  His voice after such a long silence makes me jump. When I look, he’s still watching the valley. The house has faded, shimmering like an afterimage as the sun retreats behind the mountain ridges. It’s a beautiful sight, even more so than the picture in his pack suggests. I would have loved to see it for real.

  I gather up what I’ve pulled out for dinner and move back to Tarver’s side. “Your parents’ house?”

  “Then it’s not madness. I don’t know what it is, but if we’re seeing the same thing, I’m not crazy. And neither are you.”

  For a moment I want badly to remind him that I’ve been saying that all along. But I just nod, and drop down beside him to sit a few inches away. “Have something to eat.” I offer him the larger half of a ration bar and a few of the grasses that taste okay raw. We only have two ration bars left.

  Finally, he looks away from the vision and blinks at me. His pupils are huge—suddenly I can see what made him look at me the way he did, like I was mad.

  He’s quiet while he takes a few bites of the ration bar, and we settle into silence with the ease of familiarity. When he speaks again, his voice is soft. “We have to deal with a lot of crackpots who accuse the military of playing with mind control, telepathy. As cadets we would all joke about it, that the brass was in our heads, telling us to keep our bunks tidier. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe this place is an experiment—something in the air, or the water, that makes us see things. Some artificial, psychological connection.”

  After days of silence with only my own thoughts for company, I have more than a few ideas about what we’re seeing. And I don’t think it’s so simple. But just hearing him try to work it out, without suggesting I’m simply insane, is such a relief I almost don’t want to contradict him. “But what about the cave-in? Neither of us could have known that was going to happen.”

  “More than once I’ve moved from a spot that was blasted out of existence a second later. Maybe you did know, subconsciously.”

  But he doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Can I share a theory?” I’ve known this wasn’t a haunting since the cave-in—and now that Tarver is seeing it too, I can’t dismiss the thoughts that keep coming to me.

  “Of course.”

  Now I’m cursing myself. He’s going to think I’m insane again. But when I don’t reply right away, he turns to look at me as if seeing me for the first time.

  “I think—there’s something here.” I lick my lips, anxious, trying to articulate it. “Life. On this planet.”

  His brow furrows. Skeptical. But he’s not calling me insane—yet. “Like the cat? There’s no way that thing belongs here.”

  “No—I mean, intelligent life. Maybe even something that was here before the terraforming. If it were only the visions, maybe it could be some kind of shared hallucination. But the cave-in? Neither of us could’ve known. I think something is watching us.” The words alone cause a shiver down my spine, and I see his lips twitch as though he wants to dismiss me. I scramble to speak before he can. “There are whispers, everyone knows it. Even if nobody’s ever proven anything, there are always stories about what lies beyond the edge of explored space. Even on Corinth, we hear them. The corporations that built this place must have abandoned it for a reason. Something had to drive them away.”

  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 ke
ep 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.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  TARVER

  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 d
ays, 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.”