These Broken Stars

by Amie Kaufman

  “Lilac, I don’t need to heal. I don’t want to.” My voice is as broken as hers. “I want you. We’ll find a way to stop this, get the power to keep you whole. I won’t lose you a second time.”

  “You’re not losing anything, Tarver. I was already gone.” Her struggle’s written all over her face, eyes closing tight, mouth pressed to a thin line that doesn’t keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks.

  For the first time I can see this other longing—the desire to stay. For the first time I realize that maybe she insists on us staying apart because she doesn’t want to lose this all over again.

  I slide my hand forward a fraction of an inch at a time, until I can slip my hand into hers. She closes her eyes, breath catching. If my touch hurts her, she doesn’t pull away.

  “Whatever they’ve done to me, Tarver, whatever I am—I love you. Don’t forget that.”

  I gather her against me, her hair spilling over my chest, her face in the crook of my neck. I hold her until she falls asleep, her breath warm against my skin. It should feel like a victory: she’s here, with me, finally coming into herself again. Instead, all it feels like is a goodbye.

  The rungs of the metal ladder are cold against my palms as I climb beneath the station once more. Though it’s night aboveground, down here the light is the same harsh, steady fluorescence. My footsteps echo as I walk along the hallway to the humming room.

  The rift waits for me, blue light curling about inside the circular steel frame of the containment device.

  Whispers rise up, and the metal frame crackles with the electricity of the beings trapped there. There must be a way these creatures can help me save Lilac. The images they showed us come flooding back—a valley full of flowers, my parents’ cottage as large and colorful as life, a single blossom in Lilac’s darkest hour to keep her going. I refuse to believe a species capable of such compassion could be so cruel.

  I stare up at the snapping, electric-blue glow of the rift, desperate to somehow decode these beings, to understand why they reached out to lead us here from so far away. Frustration surges up inside me as I stare at the ever-changing blue light. I’m running out of time, and I’m no closer to saving her.

  The whispers rush into my ears once more, shapes flickering at the edges of my vision. My heart pounds.

  All this way, all this pain, and now they can’t find a way to just give me their damn message?

  “What the hell do you want from me?” My voice is hoarse.

  The whispers surge, as if in reply. But of course, as ever, there’s no sense to be found there. No answers. No way out for Lilac.

  “Go on, then.” I fight the urge to strike at the damned thing with my bare fists, to attack the problem the only way I know how. “You’ve got me here. I trekked all the way across your damn planet. What do you want me to do?”

  Silence, broken only by the crackle and snap of electricity, and the humming of the machinery. If I can’t figure out a way to stop this, Lilac’s not going to last much longer. And this time it’s going to happen slowly, and I’m going to have to watch her die all over again.

  Like hell I am. Something in me snaps. I wheel around, slamming my hands down on the control box attached to metal frame around the rift. I hit one of the dimly lit screens, the plasma rippling at my touch. I strike it again, and again, until the plastic cracks and the monitor frame warps and my arm throbs with the impact, and it’s still not enough.

  Every step of this journey, every ounce of pain, everything I’ve found in her. It can’t end here. There’s a chair in my hands now, and sparks fly as I slam it into the metal framework. My mouth tastes like copper, and the room reels around me. Someone far away is bellowing grief and frustration, the blood roaring dimly in my ears. I bring down the chair again, and again, caving in the control box and the monitors attached to the rift, sending up sparks and smoke, intent only on destruction.

  Then there’s another voice, shouting to be heard over my grief.

  “Tarver. Tarver.”

  I whirl around, shaking with fury and helplessness. Alec stands on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets. The air goes out of my lungs.

  “Alec, you can’t be—”

  In the next instant I realize he’s blurred at the edges, not solid.

  My hands are still trembling, and I drop the chair with a clatter, swallowing hard against the sharp taste of metal in my mouth.

  Alec steps forward. His walk, the slight cant of his head, the thoughtful look on his face: it’s all so familiar, so hauntingly real. My heart shudders, constricting painfully in my rib cage. He doesn’t answer me, but looks instead at the rift, at the swirling energy inside. With a jolt, I realize that his eyes aren’t the brown that I remember. They’re blue—bluer than Lilac’s, bluer than the sky. They match the color of the rift perfectly.

  “You’re not my brother.” My hands grip the edge of the console, holding me up.

  “No.” He hesitates. “We came here through the …” He looks past me at the blue light.

  “The rift? How?”

  He nods at the smashed console. “You broke the dampening field. We can reach more easily inside your thoughts now. We can find words, and this face. It’s always somewhere in your mind.”

  I suck in a slow, steadying breath. “What are you?”

  Alec—or the thing wearing Alec’s face—pauses in a way so human I have to keep reminding myself he’s not who he looks like. “We are thought. We are power. In our world, we are all that is.”

  “Why did you come?”

  Alec’s mouth tightens, as if he’s in pain. “Curiosity. But we found we were not the only ones here.”

  “LaRoux Industries.”

  Alec nods. “They found a way to sever us, to cut us off from each other.”

  “But why don’t you leave?” I ask. “Return home?”

  “This is the cage they built around us. We cannot fully enter your world or return to ours.” His face—my brother’s face—is taut with grief. His image flickers, and fear snakes through my gut. Their strength—Lilac’s strength—is running out.

  “Please! How can I help you? I can’t lose Lilac again.”

  Alec’s face is awash with sympathy. “This cage keeps us here, but we are stretched too thin. There isn’t much time left. Less, now. If we could trade our—our lives for hers, we would. To find an end, to sleep.”

  “Why less?”

  “Her signal.

  “The distress signal? That’s draining you?”

  “Soon there won’t be enough left.” Alec flickers again, fading as his image sputters out. The next moment there’s only me in the room, and I’ve never felt more alone.

  I jog over to the bank of monitors where Lilac rigged her distress beacon, watching the signal jump brightly across the screens as I search for any way I can find to shut it down. In the end I simply yank out a handful of leads. The screens go dead, and for an instant the rift swirls a little brighter.

  Alec’s voice—the whisper’s voice—is still ringing in my ears. We are stretched too thin. Lilac’s only hope is tied to these creatures, and they’re fading.

  I walk back toward the ladder. I need air—I need space to move. Deep within me, I feel the weight the whispers carry.

  They’ve poured what energy they have into reaching out to us, drawing us here with visions and whispers, giving us what we need—giving me my Lilac—so we could find them. Now they can barely keep her here.

  I understand now why they brought her back. They needed me moving, exploring, trying to understand the mystery of the station. They couldn’t risk me blasting my brains out in the cave, when I was their only hope at release. But they’re still trapped, and I don’t know how to give them the end they want. My head’s spinning.

  The fresh air outside the station is a relief as I step over the rubble in the doorway and out into the clearing. I tip my head back to stare up at the now familiar stars, tracing out the shapes I’v
e come to know. I blink as my vision blurs for a moment, the stars shifting. Another blink, and I know what I’m seeing is real.

  One of the stars is moving. No, not one—there’s another. And another. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it on every planet I’ve been posted to. Those are ships in orbit. They must have picked up on Lilac’s distress signal and come to investigate.

  Panic hits me like a body blow. If they find us—if they find Lilac—they’ll take us on board, and if they take her away from the whispers sustaining her—

  My body flows into action before the thought’s complete, and I pound back into the station. We have to hide. If they drag us off this planet before I can find a way to save her, she’ll die, and I’d choose any length of time here with her over a life at home, alone. I choose her. I choose whatever world has her in it.

  I burst into our bedroom, and a moment later she’s sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and bewildered. “Tarver?”

  “Quick—” Panic steals my breath, and I’m gasping. “There are ships in orbit. I don’t think they know exactly where we are yet. We have to—” She’s scrambling to her feet before I’m finished, and I grab my bag and my gun as we bolt for the trapdoor that leads below the station. I’m praying they’ll think that if we were once here, we’re gone now.

  She falls down the last few rungs into my arms, and I half carry her along the hallway to the control room. She breaks away from me, stumbling past the rift to the bank of monitors. I hear her horrified gasp as she realizes the distress signal is shut down, and next moment her fingers are dancing across keys and screens. An instant later a shrill alarm pulses, red displays flashing.

  “Lilac, what the hell are you doing?”

  She looks up at me, eyes huge, shadowed, gaze wild. “I’ve got it back up. I can overload the system, it might create enough electrical activity for us to show up on a scan.”

  My heart stops. She’s trying to show them where to come and find me, using the last fragments of power that remain. The last fragments keeping her alive. I lunge for her. “Lilac, stop—”

  She slaps at a screen, and another alarm starts, screaming an alert at us. Blue light flares in the rift, then fades to nearly nothing. I wrap my arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides, dragging her back from the screens.

  Lights flash from screens, and the alarms scream their chorus.

  I’m going to fail them all. Lilac’s energy will drain away, and she’ll crumble to dust. The aliens will stay trapped in the rift, neither alive nor dead.

  There must be a way out. The blue light in the rift is twisting and pulsing, weaker than before, but trapped by the steel ring, the cage, unable to tip into nothing. My eyes light on the signs plastered to their steel cage. Contact with subjects forbidden. Risk of rift instability.

  And then I remember the charred papers, the first time we found any sign of the rift’s existence. The rift collapse would release energy, they said. The word fatal leaps up in my memory.

  Fatal to an ordinary person, perhaps—but Lilac isn’t, not anymore. Lilac is something different, created by the very energy inside the rift. All this time the whispers have been helping us—all this time we’ve only had to trust them.

  Of all the people they could have chosen, they used Alec to speak to me. The one person in the universe who I trusted more than my own self. The one person who always knew what to do.

  I tighten my grip on Lilac and pull her away from the console. She cries out, fighting me as I drag her toward the blue light of the rift. It’s like she senses my intention, using every last scrap of her remaining strength to pull away. In the end I wrap both arms around her and leap, sending us both plunging into the heart of the rift.

  “LaRoux Industries has suffered huge losses as a result of this venture, Major.”

  “I didn’t crash the ship.”

  “But the damage to the monitoring station. That was property of LaRoux Industries.”

  “How much did building the Icarus cost again? How many lives lost? And you’re more worried about a monitoring station? You think the station was the huge loss?”

  “Of course not. But we take any wanton destruction of our property seriously.”

  “Perhaps you could point out to Monsieur LaRoux that I was trying to save his daughter.”

  “It’s at Monsieur LaRoux’s request that you’re being questioned. I believe he would point out in return that he has lost his daughter anyway.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  LILAC

  I’m flooded with gratitude so overwhelming that it becomes me, takes me over. There is no voice, but sensation wraps me up and carries me out of the jolting blue light surrounding me.

  The world goes silent. All around me is power, and I feel it focus on me, pour into me and fill me up, heal me, restore me.

  I straddle two dimensions, and I see all, know all.

  I remember others of my kind, from a different time. Everything I am reaches out to them, longing for an end.

  Not yet. They sound tired. Weak.

  I try again to reach out, but they push me away. Gentle. Weary. Beyond them I can sense countless others, though I can’t see them or touch them. They’re behind some veil I can’t push aside, and retreating farther and farther away.

  I try to call out, to tell them to wait, but they are gone. All is cold and dark again, and I am alone. Dimly sensation returns to my body. I can feel something touching me, wrapping around me. My ears are ringing, blood roaring past my eardrums. Something warm and soft touches my face. The ringing in my ears is becoming a voice.

  “Lilac?”

  With an effort I swim up from the darkness.

  Tarver gasps for breath, his hand against my cheek. “Are you all right? Can you move?”

  I swallow, blinking. The only light comes from a series of monitors lining the wall, their glow slowly fading. With a rush I remember where we are: the basement of the station. I’m lying on the floor where we landed, looking up at an empty metal ring. The rift—Tarver, pulling me through. The blue electricity has vanished.

  Whatever gateway between dimensions was here in this room, it’s gone, and we’re alone.

  Somehow he’s still alive. We both are.

  I push myself up on my elbows, dazed, staring at him. “Tarver?”

  His arms wrap around me, pulling me in against him. His lips press against my temple. “For a second there—” His voice catches painfully in his throat.

  “What did you do?”

  He releases me just enough so he can look at my face. “You needed a burst of energy. The papers talked about a vast energy surge if we made contact with the rift. I hoped it would give you what you needed—and they wanted to go. They wanted it to end.”

  “Are you insane?” I curl my fingers in the fabric of his sleeves, urgent. “I also seem to recall reading the word ‘fatal’ in there too. It could have killed you!”

  Tarver looks down at where I’m grasping his arms, and then looks back up, grinning. I haven’t seen him smile like that since before I lit that fuse. “I chose you. And I don’t think they wanted me dead—I think they wanted us both to make it through.”

  I look over at the metal ring that circled the rift. The blue light is gone, leaving only the empty cage my father’s company built to contain the whispers. Tarver follows my gaze, his own smile dimming.

  “They wanted an end,” he says softly. “They were stretched too thin to go home.”

  Power gone, the last of the monitors fade, leaving us in utter blackness. Afterimages linger in front of my eyes—but not of the screens. “For a moment I saw them. All of them. They were once all part of each other in a way we could never … it was beautiful, Tarver. I wish you could’ve seen it.”

  His arm tightens around me as he kisses the top of my head. Then he pulls away so he can get to his feet, keeping hold of my hand in the dark to help me up.

  My head spins as I stand, but I can feel my strength returning. I open my mouth, but th
ere’s a low groan of metal that sends vibrations through the grid floor to our feet.

  “What was—”

  Another scream of metal interrupts me, the ground shaking beneath us. Tarver’s hand tightens in mine, and I hear him turn away.

  “The station—the shock wave from the rift collapse must’ve … come on!” He jerks at my arm, and though I brace myself, it doesn’t hurt like it would’ve a few minutes ago. As soon as I move I can hear something huge—the metal containment device, perhaps—come crashing down where I stood.

  Together we careen out into the corridor, sprinting up the slight incline in pitch blackness. There’s not the tiniest scrap of light, though my eyes keep trying to adjust to the darkness anyway, picking out imagined shapes looming ahead. Tarver keeps his hand wrapped firmly around mine, and I find myself growing stronger with each step. My blood races, my heart pounds—my lungs work for the first time in what feels like weeks.

  Tarver collides with the ladder, the clang of impact lost in a flood of curses. He shoves me up in front of him. The world is reduced the sound of our harsh breathing, and the clang of our feet on the rungs. The ladder bucks beneath us as shudders run through the station. I collapse on the ground just above the hatch, and Tarver scrambles up behind me and drags me to my feet. There’s light here, just enough for us to make out the doorways and the rubble, and beyond it the clearing lit by starlight so bright it dazzles my eyes.

  We scramble for the exit just as the floor caves in, and for a horrible moment it’s like I’m in the escape pod again while gravity outside wars with gravity inside—my head spins and I can’t figure out which way is up. Tarver’s hand closes around my wrist, and then I find purchase on the grass, and we drag ourselves up and over the lip of the cave-in.

  For long, labored moments all I can see are spots as my lungs heave for air, and though Tarver tries a few times to get back to his feet, eventually he’s forced to concede defeat and we just lie there, listening to the last remains of the building collapsing in on itself.