These Broken Stars

by Amie Kaufman

  But I know what the whispers were telling me in the corridor below. They brought the flower back and didn’t—like me. I am here, and not here. Perhaps the effort required to flicker the lights took their attention away from sustaining the flower. The words are there on the charred sheet of paper. Temporary energy-matter conversion. How long will I last?

  Long enough to help Tarver get home? I try to imagine myself drifting to infinitesimal pieces on the wind, turning to dust like the flower did. It’s easier to contemplate it if I’m not real after all—if I’m only a copy, a remnant of the girl who used to be here. I remember everything of my life, of Lilac’s life. But is memory enough?

  The question of the dress haunts me too, coming back to me at every turn. I know he thinks of it too. I left this dress behind in the wreck of the Icarus, discarded for more practical clothing. Each rip and run in the satin is identical to those the original had. I can trace my journey on it—here, the first tear, caught on a thorn as we watched the Icarus fall. There, rubbed raw as I climbed the tree to escape the cat beast. Each mark and stain bearing witness to what I’ve been through. Except that this isn’t that dress.

  So whose story does this impostor tell?

  “I need to see the body.”

  We’re both startled, heads snapping up. It’s not until I see the horror registering on Tarver’s face that I realize I was the one who spoke. The fragment of paper slips from my nerveless hand, fluttering to the floor, streaming ash.

  “The—what?”

  “The body.” I assume he buried it—me. These thoughts ought to make me sick, ought to frighten me. Why do I think them only blankly?

  “Lilac,” he whispers. “No. No. What good can come of that?”

  “I need you to take me there.” My hands remember how to work again, clenching into fists pressed against my thighs. “What if there’s a body there? What if there isn’t?”

  Tarver’s face has gone pale, something I never thought I’d see again after he recovered from his illness. My heart breaks a little, but not enough for me to crumble.

  “Where did that dress come from?” I press. “We both know I left it on the laundry floor, back at the Icarus. Tarver, I have to know.”

  “I don’t,” he retorts, suddenly fierce. He leans across the space between us, seeking my gaze. “Lilac, I have you back. That’s all I want. I don’t want to ask questions.”

  To look at us one would think he was the one who’d come back from the dead. Maybe in some way he has. The way he looks at me now, like I’m water in a desert—how can I take that away from him? I make myself nod, and he relaxes.

  He believes in me now.

  The only problem is that I’m not so sure I do.

  “I made up a bed for us in one of the rooms,” Tarver offers, leading the way down the hallway. When we reach the sleeping quarters, I see what he means—he’s pushed two sets of bunks together side by side, making a larger bed on the bottom, the top bunks forming a canopy above it.

  “Us,” I echo aloud, halting on the threshold.

  Tarver stops a few steps into the room and looks back at me. “Lilac?”

  I swallow, shake my head. “Please. No. I’ll sleep out in the common room.”

  Tarver turns and reaches for my hands. I manage to stop myself from jerking them away, but he senses the buried impulse in the way my skin twitches, and he lets them fall again.

  “Why?” he says softly, his face bearing all the lines of grief and exhaustion and pain.

  And why can’t I grant him this? I shiver. I must seem so cold to him now. How can he think I’m the same as his Lilac? He doesn’t know what I remember. He doesn’t know how hard it is to inhabit my own body, to make myself speak, walk, eat. How much I feel like I’m a prisoner, able to see and hear but unable to do the things the old Lilac would have done.

  “I can’t. I told you—your touch, it burns. I can’t, not yet.”

  He presses his lips together. Pain. The urge to go to him is so strong I think I must be tearing apart. I can’t let it go on like this.

  “I lied to you,” I whisper, turning to lean back against the doorframe. At least the pain of that pressure on my body is physical, distracting. “I let you think I don’t remember anything from the time I was—gone.”

  I hear his intake of breath. “What—how—”

  “I remember it all.” The cold is leaching my voice away, frost trickling through my limbs, crackling in my lungs.

  “You mean—when it happened?”

  He doesn’t deserve to know this. Kinder to let him think I just woke up myself again. Maybe the old Lilac would have protected him from this.

  “I mean after.” I close my eyes. For a moment all is quiet and I can almost believe I’m gone again, to the silence. “Cold and dark don’t begin to describe it. Cold is just an absence of heat, dark an absence of light. There, it’s like—light and heat don’t exist, ever.”

  The scrape of his shoe on the cement floor. He’s trying not to go to me. He’s trying to hold himself back.

  The frost in my chest creaks, something else trying to come through. “I remember being dead, Tarver.” I swallow, and my breath comes out like a sob. “How do you live again, knowing what waits for you in the end?”

  “You don’t sound like you believe me.”

  “It’s our policy in such cases to maintain a certain amount of healthy skepticism.”

  “You have a lot of precedent with survivors of serious trauma making things up as they go?”

  “Considering the circumstances in which you were stranded and subsequently rescued, we don’t have a lot of precedent for anything.”

  “What reason would I have to lie?”

  “Now that, Major, is a very interesting question.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  TARVER

  When I wake again there’s light creeping in through the shutters, and I roll over to squint at the illuminated clock built into the wall. I’ve learned from it that this place has twenty-six-hour days. I haven’t mentioned that to Lilac. It might seem a little too much like validation for every time she’s told me the day really does seem to go on forever here.

  The last thing I remember was thinking that I’d never get to sleep on this damn bunk. The mattress is narrow and confining, and there’s a discomforting sense of being too far above the ground and in an unfamiliar space. I dragged the beds apart for her again and retreated to the top bunk, the frame screeching a protest as I hauled it across the floor.

  The clock announces that it’s not too early to rise, and I shove the blankets aside so I can lean over the edge of the bunk and check whether Lilac’s still sleeping below.

  She’s gone.

  A thread of ice runs through me, bypassing rational thought completely—somehow I make it from the top bunk to the floor, banging my shoulder against the door as I hurl myself through it, out into the comms room. No sign she was ever there.

  An image flashes through my mind of the outline of the flower in my journal—the flower she said they created, the flower she said disintegrated. Why didn’t I listen to her?

  No, please.

  I nearly trip on my way through the blasted entrance, stumbling out into the clearing and looking around wildly. She can’t be gone. They wouldn’t. They can’t.

  I’m only a few steps out into the clearing when she emerges from the trees, smoothing down the ruined dress she refuses to replace. I pull up short, and we stare at each other across the space for a long moment. My chest is heaving as I try to push the panic back down again.

  “Tarver?”

  “I thought—I woke up, and you were—”

  Her mouth opens a little as she understands, and though I find myself rooted to the spot, she closes the distance between us and halts within arm’s reach. When I hesitate, she reaches out to touch my hand, brushing it with the tips of her fingers. After so long without her touch, that little gesture is electrifying.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “
I’m here. I went for a walk. I’ll leave a note next time, or a sign. I’m so sorry.”

  I want to turn my hand and wind my fingers through hers, to tug her in closer so I can fold my arms around her, tuck her in underneath my chin, stand in this place and on this spot, and hold her until the sun goes down and it’s dark again.

  Instead I nod, and clear my throat, and nod again. I’m realizing that my bare feet are stinging with the cold of the dew, and from sprinting across the debris by the entrance. I’m shivering without my shirt.

  She gazes up at me for a long moment, then turns back toward the station.

  She’s gone the next morning when I wake up, and the morning after that. I lie awake for hours at night, listening for the sound of her departure, but I never hear it. After that first morning, she starts leaving the canteen hanging from the doorknob, a silent assurance that she’s coming back.

  Each day we work on finding a way to get through the door and power up the station properly, to transmit the signal we need. We’re here. Someone’s alive. Come get us. Each day she grows weaker. She keeps trying to pretend that whatever’s behind the door isn’t destroying her.

  We’ve tried entering the word lambda into the keypad by the impassable door, but to no avail. Lilac’s tried every word she can think of associated with her father’s business. We keep sifting through the burned documents in the main room, trying to find some mention of a password. We’ve even tried random patterns of numbers, words from the records, but the door doesn’t budge.

  On the third or fourth morning after she started going for her morning walks, I climb down from my bunk and lace up my boots, reaching for the canteen where it dangles on the door. The morning sun’s peeking through the clouds as I walk out into the clearing, glancing up at the mirror-moon, dimly visible.

  I wish I knew what part it played in all of this. If it caused the Icarus to crash, if it caused the rift mentioned in those documents, why keep it a secret? Whatever’s happening here is wrong. It would’ve cost a fortune to keep an entire planet hidden from the galaxy—and LaRoux Industries wouldn’t spend that money if they weren’t doing something worth hiding.

  We’ve tried a few times to get the whispers to talk to us again using the lights in the underground hallway, but we’ve gotten only darkness and silence in response. Perhaps they wore themselves out that first time. Either they can’t answer, or they won’t.

  We even tried last night to overload the door, assuming that if it had an electronic locking mechanism, zapping it might trick its systems into opening. But despite Lilac rerouting every system we could think of to pour into the door, it stayed shut. The entire station’s power fluctuated and dimmed, but the door didn’t budge. Lilac was unwilling to try again, pointing out that if we don’t know what’s powering the station, we don’t know how much power’s left. If we use it all up opening the door, there might not be any left to create a distress signal.

  I turn the canteen over in my hands and find myself thinking of the fragments of meaning on that shard of paper Lilac read from. “Energy-matter conversion,” it said. Energy-based life-forms. So, these things can manipulate energy. They can do it to the electricity in our brains, and the electricity in the lights. They can convert energy into solid matter, create physical objects. After all, I hold the evidence of it in my hands. They re-created the canteen. Lilac says they re-created her flower.

  I shake my head and stretch, tossing the canteen up into the air and letting it tumble down again to smack into my palms. I toss it up a second time, seeing it rise as if in slow motion to the pinnacle of its arc.

  I witness the moment it dissolves, crumbling into fine dust while I stare, paralyzed. The dust rains down on my outstretched hands, slipping through my fingers and falling to the ground. Shock holds me in place, and slowly I tilt my hands so the rest of the dust can slide off them and disappear into the still-scorched dirt and grass at my feet.

  It’s when I finally lift my gaze that I realize Lilac’s standing at the edge of the clearing, staring at the place where the remains of the canteen fell.

  It might be the fifth day, or the sixth, or the seventh, when I wake up and she’s gone again. My boots have been moved over to the doorway as a signal that she didn’t vanish in the night, and I climb down to stomp into them, making my way through the common room to grab a ration bar, and out into the clearing.

  I’ve been trying desperately to push aside the thought of the canteen disintegrating just like her flower did. The whispers somehow re-created those two things, and Lilac’s the only thing left that they’ve given us. Did they dissolve because it was too much effort to hold them together? Were they sending us a message?

  All I know is that the things they create aren’t permanent. If these beings, whatever they are, are behind that locked door, then that’s where we need to go. The source of the energy that made her—if we can tap into it somehow, maybe we can stop her from falling apart. If there’s a way to save Lilac, that’s where I’ll find it.

  I’m chewing on the ration bar and standing in the doorway for nearly a minute, sleepily surveying the clearing, before it hits me. The door to the shed is standing ajar. Why would Lilac go there? I cross the clearing and stick my head inside. Something’s missing.

  The shovel’s gone.

  And in a moment of horrified realization, I know why.

  The morning walks, despite her weakness; the way she waits for me to sleep before she slips out; the way she returns each day at dawn, before I can go looking for her.

  She’s looking for her grave.

  The ration bar turns to ash in my mouth, and I throw the rest aside as I break into a run. I dodge through the trees and break out the other side, coming to a halt at the edge of the stream.

  I’m too late. My mound of flowers—dead and wilted now—has been churned up and pushed aside. She’s on her knees, shovel by her side, gazing down into the hole she’s dug. From here I can see only a glimpse of red hair in the grave, but Lilac can see everything.

  I want to drag her away, take away the memory, somehow get her to unsee what she’s seen. I wish I could turn back time and stop her before she ever found the grave.

  But I can’t. And now we both know.

  “You can glare at me as long as you like, Major. I am in no hurry whatsoever.”

  “Was I glaring? Must’ve drifted off there.”

  “If you’d care to answer the question, perhaps I can send for some dinner, and we can take a break.”

  “What question?”

  “What reason would you have to lie?”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  LILAC

  I let him lead me back to the station, and even after he lets me go and retreats to the common room, I can feel his hand in mine.

  Now, back in the dormitory, I’m standing in front of a mirror. It shows me freckles. Scattered across the nose, pointed up, too pert for real beauty. This nose I’ve always hated—now it doesn’t even seem like mine. A tiny white line graces the edge of one cheekbone, a memento of the blow Tarver delivered in his delirium. The lips are chapped. The eyes sunken, the skin below them like a bruise. Under the freckles, my face is pale.

  For a moment I’m standing again in the forest, looking into a shallow grave at the translucent gray porcelain skin, the long lashes sweeping the cheek, the hair a bright mockery against the dull gray earth. Her lips are violet, slightly parted, as though she might draw breath in another moment. My own breath stops, the sound of my heartbeat roaring in my ears.

  For a dizzying moment I don’t know which body I am: the one in the grave or the one in the mirror.

  No. I’m not her.

  I’m not her.

  Then I am once again back in front of the mirror in the station, staring at this too-thin body wrapped in a towel. Not my body—something else, something other. Something created.

  The towel chafes at me, an agony of sensation. I let it fall. Tarver isn’t here anyway. There’s no one to see this body but m
e.

  I close my eyes, shutting out the sight of the face in the mirror. Before I found the grave, I was a prisoner in my own body, feeling the impulse to reach out, to touch, to love, but unable to act on it. Now it’s like I’m an echo, inhabiting nothing more than a statue. A memorial to the Lilac who once lived here.

  The old Lilac, the one Tarver loved, would have patted herself dry, combed out her hair until it dried shiny and smooth. She would have stood near enough for him to feel her warmth, for their arms to brush now and then, her hair to tickle his shoulder, until he could not help but turn and reach for her, on fire. She would have loved him.

  For the first time in a life of balls and salons, designers and high fashion, flirtations and intrigue—that Lilac came alive inside her own skin. Who am I now?

  Tarver is so certain I’m me, I’m his girl—but how can he know? I want to believe him. Sometimes I almost do. I want to believe I’m more than imaginary smoke drifting from an imaginary chimney. But for the scrape of fabric against my bare, raw skin as I dress, I would think myself no more than a memory.

  By the time he returns I have forced myself into my clothing, put my wet hair into a knot that drips ice down my neck, cleaned my teeth, sipped enough water to give these chapped lips a semblance of color.

  Tarver pauses on the threshold as he enters and smiles at me.

  “Lilac,” he says. He thinks I don’t see how he starts to reach for me and stops, the movement so quick it’s barely there. My thoughts scream at him not to use that name. Lilac. An echo.

  Without him to say the name, I could just fade away.

  He busies himself trying to make the bare dormitory habitable, oddly domestic. I know he’s doing it for my sake, but he’s also not used to being helpless. He sees me falling apart, little by little. He’s torn, wanting my help to sort through documents and try to bypass the locking mechanisms, and wanting me nowhere near the underground station and its weakening influence.