by Amie Kaufman
He doesn’t know I want him to touch me, that I want nothing more than to throw myself into his arms. My body’s still raw but I don’t care anymore. I want his fingers in my hair and his lips on my face—I want his warmth and his strength so much it hurts. I want it every moment, for as long as I can, before I’m gone forever.
But I am not his Lilac. I can’t think about what I am or who I’ve become, or let him touch me—all I have is what drove me before I died in the clearing. All I have is the need to find rescue and get him home. If I’m to be dust at any moment, and I can’t fight it, then at least I can finish what I started when I blew the doors off the station.
I can save him.
He’s better able to tolerate the strange energy field in the bowels of the station, the power radiating from behind that door. He’s not the one who knows electronics, though, so I’m slowly dismantling the wall panels, inspecting the circuits, trying to bypass the lock electronically. I think the only reason he hasn’t forcibly dragged me away from the round door in the basement is that he thinks getting through is our only hope. Everything that’s happened here has led us to that door, and he thinks he can use what’s behind it, if only he can get to it. He thinks whatever’s behind the door will save me.
But how can you save someone who’s already dead?
I’m beginning to think I know what’s behind the door. The shakes, the metallic taste, the dizziness that touched me every time I received a vision or a dream—the sensations are overwhelming when I come close to the door.
I can almost feel the whispers behind it. Desperately wanting something, but unable to do anything but reach for it in our thoughts. Trapped there. Waiting.
And I’m starting to understand what it is they want from us.
After all, I’m a prisoner now too, in a body that’s falling apart. I understand better than Tarver what an agony it is to be so trapped.
I can’t keep this up. It’s harder and harder to focus. I can’t help but imagine that their pain is like my own, trapped as they are between life and death, unable to reach past their own torment. When we get through that door it will be all I can do to use whatever’s there to power the distress signal, and not succumb to the urge to give them what I know they want.
Because while that tiny part of me wants him, and only him, the rest of me wants what the whispers want. An end to it all.
During the day, at night, while we eat, he watches me, and I can’t—my mind doesn’t work. I can hear him trying to get my attention.
“Lilac, you okay?”
My spoon is in my hand. We’re eating dinner, and a bowl of rehydrated stew sits in front of me. I’d forgotten.
I stare at him, blank, confused.
“Lilac?” His voice is softer, his brows furrow. His left hand twitches where it rests against the table, as though it might reach across the gulf between us and take mine.
“Don’t call me that.”
“What?” He’s staring at me, bewildered. “It’s your name, what else should I call you?”
“I don’t care. But you can’t call me that. I’m not your Lilac. I’m a copy.”
“Are you serious?” Shock gives way to anger, hurt, confusion. His voice is ragged. “You’re you, you have your memories, your voice, your eyes, the way you speak. I don’t care how it happened, you’re you. You tell me what the difference is.”
Breathe. I force myself to watch him. Lilac would’ve looked away. Somewhere inside my mind she’s desperate to get out, to go to him, stop torturing him like this.
“The difference is that she’s dead.”
I can see him warring with himself. The urge to go to my side. The urge to shout. The urge to give up, just for a little. I will him to let the latter win, let us both rest. Just for a little.
“You’re you,” he repeats, his eyes full of grief. “You’re the same girl who crashed on this planet with me, who I dragged through forests and over mountains, who climbed through a shipwreck full of bodies to save my life. You’re the same girl I loved, and I love you now.”
Stop. Stop. No more. Please.
My throat seizes.
“I love you, Lilac.” His voice is soft, intent. “I love you, and I should’ve told you before you—”
I listen to the way his voice catches, feeling the break in it deep in my own chest. I close my eyes.
“You’re my Lilac.”
I shake my head, find my voice. “I don’t know what I am or why I’m here, but until I do, I’ll do what she would’ve wanted. Which is to get past that door, power the signal, and get you home.”
“Get us both home. I’m not leaving without you.”
“My father is a powerful man, but we’re talking about a corporation powerful enough to bury an entire planet. He may not even know what’s happening here, and if someone else is the one to discover what’s happened here—you think they can’t bury us? I was dead … you think they’re going to just let me walk back into a normal life?”
Tarver’s jaw clenches. “They’ll never find out what happened here. We’ll lie.”
I stare at him, my heart aching. “Tarver,” I breathe. “You can’t lie. They’ll know. They’ll run tests on me and find out. They’ll court-martial you. You’ll lose everything.”
“Not everything.”
He watches me calmly. Now that he’s made up his mind about what I am—that I am his Lilac—it’s as though nothing else matters. He looks so tired. If only he would sleep.
“She loved you so much,” I find myself whispering. “I wish you could have heard it from her.”
It isn’t until later, when I’ve changed for bed and he’s cleaned up the few dishes from dinner, that he speaks to me again. He stands in the doorway, watching me open the window shutters so I can look out at the night.
“Do you really imagine yourself staying here if they come for me?” he asks.
“No. But I know I’m here for you. They didn’t bring me back to be nice—they brought me back because they need us both to get past that door and do what they’ve been trying to get us to do all along. Without you here there’s no reason for them to sustain me.”
I keep my eyes on the night outside, try not to let him see how afraid I am.
“It’s not that I imagine myself staying here when you go,” I say softly. “I imagine myself ceasing to exist. You have to let me go, Tarver. You can’t …”
“I can’t what?” His voice is lower, tightly controlled. I’ve never heard him sound like this before. I turn to find him clutching the doorframe, his grip white-knuckled, every muscle tense.
I swallow. “Lose yourself in a ghost.”
For long moments he’s quiet and still, the silence drawn between us as tightly as a wire. At any moment it will pull me from my spot at the window and draw me toward him at last.
I can’t keep this up.
But he breaks first, and vanishes from the doorway. I hear his footsteps, angry and quick, crunching over the debris in the mudroom as he heads out into the night. The tension drains and I find myself falling, hitting the ground with bruising force, my skin fragile and paper thin now. I can barely summon the energy to drag myself to the bed.
I can’t—
I have to get past that door, and for the first time, as my eyes light on the LaRoux lambda embroidered on the blankets, I think I know how. I have to do it soon. I don’t think I have much time left.
“This is insane. You’re the one who imagines I’m being less than truthful, then you want me to explain why? You tell me.”
“Perhaps we can both agree, hypothetically, that there may exist some reason for you to conceal the truth.”
“Hypothetically.”
“It means conditionally, conceivably.”
“I know what the word means.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
TARVER
It’s late when I make my way back across the clearing, head clearer, step surer. There’s something about going outside and stretching my
legs that helps me line up my thoughts. When I make my way through into the comms room, it’s empty—but different.
The monitors, usually black, are lit up like a city skyline, blinking incomprehensible lines of code at me in vivid red, lights dancing across the controls. We’ve got power. Proper power, not whatever we’ve been squeezing out of the backup power mode.
Hope surges through me. Maybe she found a way to get through the door, into the locked room. I’ve spent every waking moment trying to find a way in, hoping for something behind that door I can use to help her.
But if she got the door open, why didn’t she come find me? My mind keeps replaying one image: the canteen dissolving to dust.
Stay calm. She’s fine. But my heart’s thumping wildly as I swing down onto the top rung of the ladder. I can hear my old drill sergeant screaming in my ear to keep me from trying some stupid, impossible jump to reach her faster. Keep yourself safe, he bellows at me from beyond his grave on another planet far away. You can’t help anybody else if you’re in pieces. Don’t rush in.
But I can’t help it. I scramble down, ignoring the stab of pain as I twist my ankle in my haste. The lights are on, and I hurl myself down the corridors and then the metal stairs, swinging around the corner.
The round door is open.
Lilac must have heard me coming—she stands framed by it, looking out, waiting for me. Her skin is nearly a dull gray, too pale, her eyes lost in the shadows. I can see her shaking as she grips the edge of the round doorway. I slow to a walk as I approach her.
“I guessed the password.” Her whisper rasps.
I want nothing more than to go to her side, but I know she doesn’t want me to, and I hold back with a monumental effort. “How?”
“My father. This is his station—his emblem is everywhere. He always said my name was all I’d ever need to get anywhere. So I did. I used my name.”
“Lilac.”
She nods, her mouth twisting. I understand the grief in her expression. If the password was her name, it means her father did this, and not some faceless person at LaRoux Industries without his knowledge or consent. He’s responsible for whatever happened here, and for covering it up afterward. And he used her name as his key.
“I got a distress signal working, though it’s weak.” She says it quietly, tightly. “It’ll only show up as static, unless enough relays catch it and boost the signal.”
This news that, once, would’ve been some of the best I’d ever heard is instead twisted, dark. I don’t know anymore whether I want them to come for us. Not if I can’t find a way to save Lilac.
“Come through,” she says. “There’s more.”
She steps back, and I climb through the doorway, unable to stop myself from reaching for her hand. When I grip her fingers, the squeeze she returns is just a weak flutter. I can feel my own strength draining away as the shakes start to take me. It’s like the side effects from the visions, only ten, twenty times worse.
The room hums with power, lined on every side with banks of monitors, control panels, and machines. Thick cables stretch from the consoles into the middle of the room. Towering over us is a circular steel frame twice my height. Flickers of blue light snake back and forth inside it like lazy lightning strikes, creating a shimmering layer of air. The frame dominates the room, overwhelming.
I can no longer hear my heartbeat, my harsh breathing—all sound is lost in the crackle and hiss of electricity. The room beyond the metal frame is hazy. The air is thick and heavy and tastes of something metallic at the back of my throat. The humming in the room makes my very teeth ache.
Two large, yellow-and-black-striped warning signs are mounted on the steel frame, one at the top, one down the side. Contact with subjects forbidden. Risk of rift instability, they read, in blocky letters.
Subjects. The test subjects from the papers above us.
Whispers rise suddenly, swelling in my ears, insistent. They hover just on the edge of comprehension—as though if I could close the gap between us just a little more, I could understand them.
Without thinking, I step toward it, unable to resist its pull.
For a moment the room around me is gone, and blackness overlays it, pinpoint stars twinkling.
And then something jerks me back. I blink again, and it’s gone—and Lilac is there, grabbing at my hand and pulling me away.
“Are you insane?” she gasps. “Don’t you remember what those papers said? If you touch it, you could bring the whole thing to a fatal collapse.”
“What?” I’m still shaking the vision of stars, the sense that I was a hairsbreadth away from understanding.
She gestures at the hypnotizing blue light inside the metal frame. “Don’t you see? This is the rift. It has to be.”
I open my mouth to respond, but before I can, the lights overhead flicker, leaving only the roiling blue electricity to light the room. The lights dim once. Yes.
“Oh, God,” Lilac whispers, her eyes on the portal. She’s sweating, her hand clammy in mine. She feels cold, too cold. I can’t tell for sure in the flickering blue light from the metal frame, but it looks like her eyes have become more sunken, the dark circles under them more pronounced.
“Lilac?”
“It’s them.”
“What—” But I can see her staring at the frame. And I realize what she means.
“The creatures, the subjects. The whispers. They are the power source for the station. This light, this energy—this is my father’s rift. A gateway between dimensions. And they’re here, trapped somehow by this metal ring they’ve built around it.”
The lights flicker madly, and overhead a number of the fluorescent lights burst, showering the metal floor with shards of glass. Within the steel frame containing the rift, the blue forks of lightning fluctuate wildly.
“Energy-based life-forms.” My voice is a whisper.
Suddenly Lilac’s weight sags, her clammy hand slipping from mine as she drops to her knees with a moan.
My heart stops, and I drop to the ground beside her.
Her pale skin is nearly translucent now—I can see the dark veins snaking up her arms. She lifts her head with an effort, gasping for breath. When I lay a hand on her shoulder, a part of her dress crumbles at my touch, drifting away. Like the flower; like the canteen.
Being this close to the whispers is killing her—the symptoms are a thousand times worse. I have to get her out of here. I wrap an arm around her and drag her to her feet, more of her dress turning to dust with every movement. The fabric flutters and flakes away, drifting through the air like ash. I haul off my jacket and wrap it around her, then swing her up into my arms.
They’re the power source, I hear her voice echo.
And they’re running out.
My mind shuts down, and I turn to carry her back out through the doorway. All I know is that I have to get her out of here.
She recovers enough to grab at the ladder a little as we climb back up to the surface, and I help her into one of the chairs in the common room. I’m as gentle as I can be, but she still winces. It’s clear she has a link with the creatures in the rift that I don’t. The energy flowing through the station is the same as the energy flowing through her, the life force keeping her here with me.
She fixes her gaze on the far wall as she tries to steady herself, and for a moment my heart stops as I see her go still. Then I realize she’s staring at the savage paintings we try so hard to ignore.
I follow her gaze to a figure painted in red.
“Tarver, I know what the paintings are.” Her voice is a cracked whisper now, quivering with intensity. “Do you see?” She lifts one hand, the effort obvious, to point at the next in the sequence, also in red, and then the next. “He’s there again. See the handprint beside it? It’s the same. In this first one, he breaks his neck. Here, it’s the spear. Here, he’s burning. It’s the same man, over and over. Tarver, the researchers stationed here did this to themselves.” Her voice is raw, and she’s
forcing the words out of her throat. “And then they were brought back, like me.”
“Holy—you’re right.” My mind’s whirling, freewheeling, trying to find something to latch on to. “They came back again and again.”
The figures painted on the wall are clearly distinguishable, and suddenly I can see each individual going through death after death, the pictures surrounded by the handprints, and the LaRoux lambda, painted large and bold beside them. Suddenly the recurring blue spirals scattered throughout the paintings have a new meaning. The rift, and its prisoners.
Her gaze sweeps across the paintings, which become wilder, more frenetic, and slowly degenerate into primitive daubs I can barely make out. At the end of the stream of pictures is a single handprint, smeared.
Then nothing.
I know we’re both seeing the same thing. This is what they found here. They died, and lived again, and found madness somewhere in between. They came here to study the creatures that gave me Lilac again, or to kill them, perhaps, and discovered a kind of twisted immortality.
Until—what? Until the whispers were too weak to bring them back anymore and power the station at the same time, and the researchers died for good? Until LaRoux Industries pulled them out, and buried this place?
I’m still staring when Lilac brings one hand down against the floor with a dull smack. “Why would anyone choose this? Living in limbo, in constant fear that you’ll crumble away?” Her voice is ragged, broken.
I wish I could reach out, wrap my arms around her. Instead the distance between us feels like a canyon. “Maybe it was different for them, when this place was at full power. We only have the remains, what the company left behind.”
“And when I do fade away, they won’t have the energy to bring me back.”
She sounds as though that’s what she wants. My breath fails me, and I’m left staring at her, aching.
“I just want to sleep,” she whispers, eyes dark in her white face, transformed by her longing. “I wish it—because you’d be heartbroken, and you’d mourn, but you’d—you’d heal. They’d find the signal and you could go home. And you’d have your parents, and the garden, and … Then the station could die, and the whispers could rest. I could rest. That’s all we want. Real rest, not that coldness, that—”
