These Broken Stars

by Amie Kaufman

  And then I know how to convince him.

  “If you die,” I whisper, my eyes on his, “then I will too.”

  By the time I return from the ship to camp again, night has fallen, and Tarver is only half conscious. It didn’t take long for me to find one of the food stores—but even the sight of dried pasta and spices and sugar couldn’t relieve the knot of tension twisting in my chest. I ought to be relieved—we were on our last few ration bars. But hunger is no longer our biggest problem.

  The packets are all stamped with the stylized upside down V of my father’s logo—the Greek lambda, for LaRoux. My father and his stupid fixation on mythology. He told me all the old stories when I was little, of warring gods and goddesses, and I almost imagined he was one of them. All-powerful, all-knowing. Someone to be worshipped unconditionally. But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possesses that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?

  I’ve stopped waiting for him to come for me. There are no ships flying over the crash site. No one’s looking for us here. With a jolt, I realize that by now my father must think I’m dead. There are no rescue ships, so they must not know where the Icarus went down—she could have fallen out of hyperspace anywhere in the galaxy. He already lost my mother. I’ve been all he’s had since I was eight years old. I try to imagine him now, knowing I’m gone—and my mind just goes blank.

  I wonder if the engineers who designed the Icarus are still alive, or if his vengeance has already destroyed them.

  I shiver, tracing the shape of the logo with my fingertips, as I’ve done countless times throughout my childhood. It would be easier not to connect this twisted heap of wreckage, this mass grave, with the flagship of my father’s company.

  I make three trips back inside the ship, my last lugging a pot full of spices and boxes of powdered broth. I make a fire, heat some soup, try to get Tarver to drink. He wakes up only reluctantly, and only after shoving me away in his sleep. I get a few spoonfuls of broth down him before he collapses again. I get the camp ready for the night, checking to be sure the fire isn’t visible beyond our little hollow, that our belongings are all close, that Tarver’s gun is at his side, where it belongs.

  I lug some water from the stream nearby and use strips of the sheets to wipe his face and throat, which are burning hot to the touch. I’m afraid to unwrap his hand because I have nothing sterile with which to wrap it back up again, but the skin around the bandage is flushed red and painful-looking.

  Eventually I run out of tasks and crawl into the bed beside him. He’s so warm that despite the chill, it’s uncomfortably hot under the blankets. Nevertheless, I slip close to him so I can feel his heartbeat and smell his scent, grass and sweat and something else I can’t name. Familiar, comforting. In his sleep, his good arm curls around me, just a little.

  I’m awakened in darkness by someone shoving me roughly off the makeshift mattress and onto the hard ground. My mind is slow to wake, and for a few moments I can only think another survivor has found us and is trying to see if we have anything worth stealing. My heart is pumping pure adrenaline, my every nerve screaming.

  Then I realize it’s Tarver who shoved me away. As I pick myself up I hear him murmuring to himself, and my heart leaps. He’s awake. Surely this is a good sign. The sky is partially cloudy, blocking the light from the artificial mirror-moon.

  I crawl toward the coals of the fire and throw on a few pieces of deadwood until it flares up, letting me see his face.

  My heart sinks.

  He’s staring right through me, his eyes wild and glassy, and—I would’ve thought it impossible if I hadn’t seen him above the valley with the vision of his house—afraid. His muttering is unintelligible, his lips dry and cracked.

  “Tarver?” I crawl toward him. “I’ll get you some water. Let me just—” I start to reach for his forehead, to feel his temperature, when I’m suddenly knocked over, sent rolling in the dirt, my head ringing and throbbing. The stars overhead weave and waver as my vision clouds, and it’s only with a monumental effort that I claw my way back toward consciousness, dizzily dragging myself back upright.

  Tarver’s half sitting up with his gun pointed directly at my face, though his eyes are staring into space. His face is set in a snarl far more fierce than anything I could’ve imagined from him. The spot where the back of his hand connected with my cheek throbs and radiates heat with each pulse of my heart.

  “Tarver?” It’s barely a whisper.

  He blinks, and his head turns toward me. The barrel of the gun wavers and dips. His eyes focus, and my heart leaps. He swallows, speaks through dry lips.

  “Sarah,” he croaks.

  “It’s me,” I say pathetically. I sound like I’m begging. I am begging. “Please, Tarver. It’s me. It’s Lilac. Your Lilac, you know me.”

  He groans and collapses back again, the hand holding the gun dropping. “God, I’ve missed you.”

  “I haven’t gone anywhere.” I should get close, feel his temperature again, but it won’t do any good. I know he’s burning up. The makeshift pillow under his head is soaked with sweat.

  “Sarah, I feel rotten.”

  In his fever, he thinks I’m some other girl. His girlfriend, maybe— does he have one waiting at home? I realize I never even asked.

  “I know you do,” I whisper, giving in. I can’t reach him. The only thing I can do is get back inside that wreck, clear a path to the deeper, less intact parts, and find the sick bay.

  He mumbles something else, and I slip in close enough to ease the gun out of his grip. He doesn’t even twitch. I tuck it into the back of my jeans, my skin crawling at its presence. I don’t know the first thing about guns, but I know I can’t leave it here with him and risk him shooting me in his delirium.

  I take a deep breath, locating the flashlight—and after a moment of hesitation, Tarver’s notebook and pen. I need to make a map. It’s going to be harder to navigate the labyrinth of sharply slanting corridors and broken staircases in complete darkness, but I can’t afford to wait. Tarver can’t afford for me to wait.

  He’s so thin now. I hadn’t even noticed, seeing him every second of every day, but here, while he’s asleep and flushed and delirious, I can see how lean he is. I brush the damp hair back from his forehead.

  “I’ll be back,” I murmur. “Hold on.”

  He calls out for Sarah as I make my way back toward the ship, and it breaks my heart. I’d sit with him and be his Sarah if I could, if there were someone else to go look for his medicine. But I leave him with his ghosts and descend into the wreck, ignoring the voice behind me begging me to return.

  In the darkness, the ship is a maze.

  Over the last few days of searching I’ve still only found the one entry point, so every time I come back I have to retrace my steps, spending precious time going over the same ruined pathways. I try every possible turn, and each attempt ends in a crushed floor or a dead-end room.

  I found an emergency fire station a few hours into that first night, with a fire blanket, an ax, an extinguisher—and a handful of chemical glow sticks. I’ve discovered that they shine steadily for about an hour and a half before they start to fade, and so I’ve been using them as timers. An hour and a half, and then wherever I am, I turn back. To check on him.

  Three hours in and back, and then I can make sure he’s not dead.

  I’ve lost track of how many trips I’ve made. The flashlight is growing dim after so much use, so I turn it off, relying on the light of the glow sticks instead. I know this particular corridor, the pattern of its destruction, by heart now. I don’t need light here.

  To the right is the laundry room. I go straight. Farther along are more corridors branching off into dormitories for the staff. I discover a tiny gym with equipment so smashed it takes me long moments to realize what it is. What hope is there that, even if I can find the sick bay, there’ll be anything remotely usable?

  The darkness spins, exhaustion briefly threatening to steal my balan
ce. I shut my eyes, stretching out a hand to grab on to the wall. I can’t afford to think hopelessly.

  I wait until the dizziness passes and make a mental note to eat something the next trip I make back to camp. When I open my eyes I realize I’ve made it to an intersection where I turned right, last time. This time I go straight ahead, into new territory.

  Exposed steel spars and wiring make it impossible to move without deliberation, and debris strewn about threatens to drag me down at every step. I saw the Icarus dismantled like this once before, nearly a decade ago. She was my playground once, when she was little more than a steel frame and a sketch in the minds of my father’s engineers. But then she was new and clean, bare with unrealized potential and promise. Not smashed beyond recognition.

  I try to visualize the ship I played in. Did I know then what the rooms would be used for? I don’t remember. Did I ever know where the medical wing was? Was I ever sick?

  No. But Anna was. For the first time the thought of my cousin doesn’t fill me with guilt so tangible I want to throw up. Instead, a tiny flicker of memory floods my mind, and with it, something like hope.

  I remember the smell of soap as I brought Anna to sick bay. And not the astringent scent of medical cleanser, but light, airy, clean-scented soap. The laundry.

  I can’t be far, then. Can I?

  There’s no smell of soap now, though I can smell something else. Perishable food, I think. It smells like a meat locker that’s been without power for a week. But very faint.

  The glow stick is getting dimmer. I have to move more quickly. Soon I’ll need to go see if Tarver’s still alive. Check his bandage, force some water down his throat, and hope he doesn’t mistake me again for a threat. The bruise on my cheek throbs at the memory.

  I can only see about a foot in front of me by the dimming light of the glow stick. Tomorrow I’ll have to remember to set the flashlight out in the sun to recharge. Tomorrow? It is night, isn’t it?

  Maybe it’s tomorrow already.

  Go back, I tell myself frantically. Just go back now.

  I have the strangest feeling, almost a superstition, that if I leave him for more than my arbitrary three-hour limit, those few minutes will be the death of him. And yet, the time it takes to go back and forth checking on him, instead of locating medicine, could be just as deadly.

  I keep moving.

  The path is clear enough here that I can break into a slow run. All that hiking has paid off, and though it’s been a couple of days now since I slept more than an hour or two at a time, I still have enough energy for this.

  Ahead of me yawns sudden blackness, not the grid of the floor. My mind, sluggish with lack of sleep, fails to process it. Before I realize I have to stop, I’m falling.

  Something soft breaks my fall with a muffled crack. I drop the glow stick, gasping for breath as a sudden wave of nausea shudders through me. It’s the meat-locker smell, not the fall, making me sick. The smell is stronger here. Too strong.

  I roll away from whatever I landed on and push myself to my feet. Half in shock, my mind runs through an oddly detached checklist of my body, making sure everything’s still working. Tarver would kill me if he knew I’d been so reckless. If he’d been here.

  I turn back for the glow stick, which clattered out of my hand when I fell. I stoop to reach for it and freeze.

  It’s a face. A tiny patch of sickly green glow shines from the stick, lighting the hollows of the cheeks, the empty, staring eyes, glinting off the teeth just showing between parted lips.

  I scream, flinging myself away until I hit the floor. My face presses into the cold iron gridwork, and I gasp for breath, trying to inhale shallowly through my mouth. The meat-locker smell—God, and it is rotting meat, isn’t it?—is so overpowering I think for a moment I might pass out. I can taste it on my tongue.

  I lurch to my feet and into a run. In darkness and fear, I keep colliding with walls and ricocheting around corners. I step on something that gives beneath my heel, and my ankle rolls, but I keep myself upright. I know that if I fall, what I fall on will be the end of me. Soft things. Rotting things. Dead things.

  This ship isn’t a maze—it’s a tomb.

  Exposed debris slices at my clothes and my hair and my face. Still I run, deeper and deeper into the dead part of the ship, helpless with the knowledge that after such a long fall, I can’t climb back up to get out the way I came in.

  A jagged rebar catches my arm and jerks me sideways, flinging me against a wall. My scream is a hoarse, desperate noise.

  My hand finds a door handle and twists, and I lurch into the closet-like space behind it, dragging the door shut behind me. I slide down to the floor amid the clanking of buckets and mop handles and fumble for the flashlight. Its beam is warm and golden, if dim, and lights the inside of what seems to be a janitorial cupboard. It’s strangely intact, mops and brooms neatly lined up.

  My heart threatening to slam its way out past my rib cage, I put my head down on my knees and focus on my breathing. Anything but the thought of what waits for me outside, the dead eyes and bloated corpses.

  One. Oh, God. Two. Three. Four. Something snapped when I fell on that body. I broke something in it. It was like a wet branch. No. No. Five. Six. Seven. He would have despised me for running. Eight. What if one of those bodies was Anna’s? Oh, God. No. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Pull yourself together, Miss LaRoux. Twelve. You’re no use to anybody cowering in a broom cupboard. Thirteen. Fourteen. Don’t sell yourself short. I don’t know many soldiers who’d have done better. Fifteen.

  I make it to twenty before opening my eyes again. The beam of the flashlight shudders with each breath, the effort still enough to shake my whole body. But the darkness is no longer trying to strangle me.

  Tarver’s a liar, but he lies to keep me moving, and I can’t fault him for that. The least I can do is try to prove him right.

  I’ll take the girl I know, thanks.

  I force myself to stand up, opening the door again with an effort. I take a long breath through the collar of my shirt, trying to filter out the stench of decay, and step back out into the hallway.

  The flashlight dies.

  A tiny sound catches in my throat, but I keep from screaming again. Instead I stand still, gazing into the darkness and forcing myself to breathe.

  I catch a whiff of something fresher, something untainted by the smell of death all around. I move toward it, picking my way in utter darkness slowly and carefully through the bodies and wreckage littering the floor.

  It turns out to be coming from a tear in the side of the ship, where something ripped a long, narrow gash along its hull. I squeeze my body through, careful not to slice myself on the exposed metal and wiring nearly two feet thick in the wall.

  It’s night outside, but it’s like walking out into the sunlight. The air has never smelled so sweet, the sky never seemed so full of stars. The clouds have cleared and the mirror-moon shines down, coating the world in its pale blue luminescence. I drop to my knees, gasping for air, as though I can wipe away my memories of what waits inside the ship with enough fresh oxygen. I can’t go back in. How can I go back in? I can’t. It’s a tomb.

  We knew not everyone could have made it onto the pods in that frantic press of people, but now, faced as I am with the proof, the thought of returning to the ship makes me want to retch. I must have been near one of the evacuation points when I fell.

  I let myself crouch in the darkness for the count of five, breathing deep, before I get to my feet and follow the outer hull of the ship back to camp.

  Tarver’s unconscious. It’s almost a relief, though I don’t know if unconsciousness is a bad sign, or if the rest is good for him. But it means he doesn’t look at me with those burning eyes, doesn’t reach for me unseeing, shout nonsense, speak to me as if I’m his mother, his lover, his corporal, anyone but me.

  I bathe his face and chest in cold water, then lift his head and trickle some water from the canteen into his mouth. He swallows a few time
s, then moans and pushes me away. Angry red lines have begun to march their way from underneath the bandage up the inside of his arm. I trace them with my fingertips and swallow my dread.

  He’s so quiet, so still. I smooth his hair back from his brow, run the backs of my fingers along his cheek, rough like sandpaper with the stubble of the past few days. He looks younger than usual, no older than I am. I dampen my fingertips with water and run them across his mouth, which is dry and chapped. Even his lips are hot, flushed.

  “Tarver,” I whisper, cupping his burning cheek with my hand. “Please don’t—don’t leave me.”

  My whole body seizes up, my insides clenching with a horror and helplessness more profound than any I’d felt when confronted with the corpses in the wreck. Unable to breathe, unable to move, I crouch over him, my hands shaking as they try to somehow smooth away his illness.

  “Please don’t leave me here alone.”

  My fingers fan through the damp hair at the nape of his neck. My lips find his forehead, then his temple. I’m shaking, and I force myself to stop, dragging air into my lungs.

  “I’ll be back,” I whisper in his ear. I say it every time I go. It’s as much a promise to myself as to him. I try to make my feet move, make that promise real, but I’m so tired. All I want is to curl up beside him.

  I stagger away, and as I wipe at my eyes, something lying just inside the firelight catches my eyes. Something I know wasn’t there a moment ago, because a moment ago I’d been stretched out in that spot, at Tarver’s side.

  It’s a flower.

  I pick it up, my fingers trembling, though I already know what it is. Two of the petals are grown together, a mutation, one in a million. Unique. Except that I’ve seen it before. And that flower is gone—it was destroyed in the downpour, crushed against my skin. I left the pieces behind where we camped by the river.

  How is it here now?

  I cup the flower in my hands, closing my eyes for a long moment. I brush a fingertip along the joined petals, and abruptly I see Tarver’s quiet smile, the beauty in the moment he gave it to me. The memory spreads like a fire through my limbs, feeling and strength coming back to me. I can do this.