These Broken Stars Part 18

"Of course not, Miss LaRoux. You'd shoot me if I tried."

I continue to lie there after her breathing has evened out. Alec wells up in my mind again, and I can hear our conversation. I hope I die first.

Has she been thinking about that too? About what would become of her? My throat closes as I realize that she's not talking about learning to defend herself if something happens to me.

I should give her a lesson. If I at least show her how to operate the settings, she'll have options. I can't think about it any further than that.

I turn my head to take a better look at her now she's asleep.

There's a rip in the leg of her jeans, running down by her knee and exposing skin that's turned grubby with dirt. Her blue shirt's untucked, marked with black grime.

Her hair's escaping the piece of string tying it back, framing her face in a halo of wispy curls that remind me of how it floated around her in zero gravity during the pod's descent.

There are dirty smudges mingling with the freckles all over her face, and that bruise on her cheek. Even in sleep, her mouth is pulled into a straight, determined line.

There are purple half circles underneath her eyes, and she's sweaty, beat up, and utterly exhausted.

She's never looked so beautiful.

"You didn't stay at the wreck."

"You already know that. We saw no option but to leave."

"Your reasoning?"

"There were no rescue craft in sight. There was a disease risk with so many bodies around. We needed another option."

TWENTY-SIX.

LILAC.

BY THE AFTERNOON OF THE SECOND DAY, I have to threaten to sit on Tarver's chest to keep him from getting out of bed. More than anything, the speculative look-and thoughtful silence-that follow that threat convince me he's feeling better. I don't mind. After hearing him call out for his ex-girlfriend in his delirium, there's not much that'll make me blush. I let him sit up and shave, as a compromise-it's nice to see him looking a little more like himself.

On the morning of the third day we agree that our best move is to get to a higher vantage point and scout the area. For the first time since we crashed we're talking about the long term. If they knew where we were, someone would be here, at the wreck, to rescue us. The Icarus must not have transmitted her location before she was destroyed. Not even the all-powerful Monsieur LaRoux could find us now-though I have no doubt he'll take the galaxy apart trying, even if it's only to mark my grave.

We need a place near the Icarus, in case anyone does show up and land to inspect the wreck in the future, but we can't stay this close. Not to all those bodies, not with the air full of burned chemicals and the ground littered with shrapnel.

We scale the outside of the wreck, aiming for the highest point. The wind has picked up, making the ship sigh and moan in protest. Tarver says that the Icarus will have done most of her settling already, and that it's safe enough. The way the hull has splintered, the path is relatively easy, with plenty of handholds and places to rest. Still, Tarver is pale and sweating by the time we near the top.

It isn't until I'm standing on the sloping surface of the top of the ship, steadying myself with one hand on the mangled communications array, that it hits me.

We're looking for a place to live.

And the thought doesn't hurt.

I could never admit it to him, but here in the sun, warm from the climb, waiting for Tarver to catch up, there's nowhere I'd rather be. After all, what waits for me on the other side of rescue? My friends would scarcely recognize me now, and the thought of filling my days with gossip and parties leaves me cold. The best six-course meal never tasted half so good as a shared ration bar after a long hike, washed down with mountain-fresh water. And while I wouldn't say no to a hot bath, I'm warm enough at night, with Tarver there at my side.

It's only the thought of my father, grief-stricken, that causes me any pain at all.

I set down the pack and rummage around for the canteen. When Tarver joins me, I offer it to him. It lets him hide the way he's breathing heavily, gives him something to hold so that I can't see the shaking of his hands.

To the east are the mountains we crossed, whitecapped and foreboding, and I wonder how Tarver ever convinced me to go into them. Maybe it was just that I was too naive to realize how hard the pa.s.sage would be.

The camp below looks like a doll's play set. I can't see the dirty bandages, the ration bar wrappers. The river and its ribbon of trees lead away from the mountains and into the distance. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I can almost make out what seems to be an ocean, or some kind of salt flat, just visible at the horizon. In the other direction, the hills roll on like waves, growing smaller and gentler until they level out at the edge of a vast forest. It's like a painting, something out of a dusty museum. I've never seen so much open s.p.a.ce in my life-for a moment I'm dizzy, lost in the tableau, struggling for breath in air that's suddenly too rich. A hand at the small of my back grounds me again and I grip the metal of the useless communications array more tightly. I turn and see Tarver, pale but smiling.

"The breeze is stiffer up here; are you cold?"

"What would you do if I said yes?" I grin back at him. "Offer me some of your fever?"

"Sharing is caring." He steps in close, and my chest tightens convulsively. But he's just reaching to grab on to the metal as well, steadying himself in the wind.

He doesn't look good. Despite his smile, his nonchalance, he's gripping the beam too tightly, leaning into it.

I kneel by the pack, pulling out his notebook. "Do you know how to draw maps?"

"Of course I do," Tarver replies. He's watching me, and then after a moment he moves to join me. I try not to show my relief when he sits down, some of the lines of pain around his eyes easing. I wish he'd let me climb by myself. But since he woke up, he's been reluctant for me to stray too far from him. Perhaps he's afraid I'll go back into the tomb of a ship despite my promise not to.

Maybe he just likes my company. I give myself a shake, trying to dismiss the thought before I can start blushing again.

He takes the notebook from me, flipping through. Belatedly I remember that I pressed the replicated flower between two of its pages to preserve it and keep it safe; I still haven't told him about it. But he flips right past it, unseeing, until he pauses on the pages I used while he was sick.

"Did you draw these?" His voice is unreadable as he looks over the maps I made of the twisted and broken decks.

"After the first day I started forgetting where I'd already been." I keep my eyes on the horizon, easing down onto my heels. "In the dark it all blurs together."

I realize he's turned back to the last page he wrote on before my maps begin-a page containing only fragments of a poem in progress. Scattered words and phrases describing one of the purple flowers we found together, something beautiful in a sea of loneliness.

When he was ill I tried to imagine he was writing about me. Now, by the light of day, it seems ludicrous. But he's staring at it. He knows I saw it. Reading everything would've felt too much like accepting he was about to die, going through his things, but I can feel him wanting to ask me if I did. If I violated that privacy while he couldn't stop me.

I had been expecting field reports, notes on wildlife, but every page was filled with poems.

He's silent, and I swallow, fiddling with the tear in my jeans, widening it as I pull at each thread. Unlike our usual silences, this one begs to be filled.

I crack first. "My drawing lessons were always more focused on flowers and lakeside vistas, but my maps served their purpose."

Tarver grunts and turns to a fresh page. The tip of the pencil hovers over the empty white s.p.a.ce. His eyes are far away, staring through the page. The wreck beneath us gives a particularly wrenching shriek, and he blinks, and the moment's gone. He turns his attention to the horizon and begins sketching out the visible landmarks, expert and quick. I wonder where we'll go-if he'll suggest the forest, the hills, the river. I wonder if we'll ever go to the sea.

His eyes flick up and down from scenery to page-mine stay on him. If he notices my gaze he says nothing, concentrating on his task, letting me watch his profile uninterrupted.

He's still too pale, but he looks less likely to keel over. He's so thin it makes me ache, but I liberated some dried pasta and flour and shortening from the kitchens, all the things we can't find from the land. We'll eat better. He'll get stronger.

He sucks at the edge of his lip as he concentrates. The dimple there is hypnotic, fascinating me. I'm so focused on that tiny detail of him that I don't notice when he stops drawing, staring intently at something.

"Lilac."

I start guiltily, swimming up out of my trance. "I wasn't!"

"There's something-come look." His voice shakes-his gaze is fixed straight ahead.

I turn toward the hills, expecting an animal, other survivors, even a rescue craft. What I see instead is electrifying.

Before our eyes springs up a wave of flowers, the purple blooms from that first night on the plains, when Tarver tried to distract me from the fact that I was going mad. Just like the tiny purple blossom hidden in his journal. The narrow corridor of blooms extends as we watch, winding this way and that through the hills, toward the hazy green of the forest in the distance.

Beside me, Tarver is shaking. I can feel the dizziness myself, my skin tingling, itching, hot and cold all at once. "It's not real." I gasp, blinking my eyes hard and opening them again. The flowers are still there. "It's just a vision."

"The canteen-they made that, didn't they?"

I swallow. The flower was something they made for me, and just for me-to tell him would be to explain what it meant to me, in that moment of utter darkness. That it reminded me why I was returning to that shipwreck of the dead. That there's only one person in the galaxy I could've done it for. But I can't say those things to him, not yet.

The row of blossoms continues, the flowers growing thicker and brighter by the moment, until the entire corridor of the valley is shining with purple in the sunlight, leading toward the forest. It's a narrow, concentrated band, looking for all the world like a winding river of purple-or a road.

I gasp. "Tarver! They're-leading us. That's what they've been trying to-" But my voice sticks in my throat, my heart pounding.

He tears his eyes away from the flowers in order to look up at me. "Trying to what? What're you talking about?"

"The people I saw-they were pointing. The voice I heard was leading us away from the forest, toward the plain. Even your parents' house, the garden path led away-toward this spot. And now these flowers...I don't know, maybe I'm trying too hard to find sense in all of this."

"You think they're showing us the way." He turns back to face the hills. "Toward what?"

We stand, staring at the path before us, so clear and bright. All I want is to go find out if they're real, if they're as solid as the flower in his journal. If all of this is some dream in which the laws of physics don't exist.

"Lilac!" Tarver's voice is urgent, snapping me out of my daze. "Look!"

I blink, trying to catch my breath as he leans close to me. His cheek brushes mine, rough with faint stubble, as he brings his line of sight alongside my own. So close, I can smell him, feel the electric tingle where we touch.

This is no dream.

"Look along my arm, where I'm pointing." He stretches one arm out, toward the trees. "There's something there. See that glint?"

It's all I can do not to turn my face toward his, the way a plant grows toward the light. I draw in a deep breath and force myself to focus. I don't see it immediately, and my eyes strain along the strip of forest bordering the hills at its western edge.

And then, as sudden as a lightning strike, I do see it. A tiny glint of reflected sunlight, winking at me from the tree line.

"Wreckage," I whisper, staring at it, trying not to believe it's what I think it is. "It's a piece of the ship that landed there. Another crashed escape pod."

Tarver slowly lets his arm fall, but doesn't shift away again. He's staring at the thing too. "I don't think so." His voice is quiet too, barely audible over the wind. "It's tough to tell, but I think the trees around it are cleared, uniform."

I realize I'm holding my breath.

"I think it's a building."

There's no fuel for a fire out among the rolling hills, and it's bitterly cold, but I don't care. Tarver estimated a two-day journey to reach the edge of the forest, and as the sun set in front of us on the first day I could see the trees along the horizon, in the distance. The sea of flowers vanished into mist as we climbed back down the wreckage, but we know now where we're being led. To what end, or what purpose, we can't hope to guess, but if it's a building-and it's real-it might be the key to our rescue.

"Hot water!" I say cheerfully, eating cold, plain pasta with my fingers. I've never had anything so delicious.

"A roof," Tarver replies, munching at his own handful of the pasta I cooked before we left. The kitchen storerooms on the wreck were my best find-after the sick bay, anyway.

I glance over at him, the last of the light lending his still-pale face some false color. We're camped in the lee of a hill, as much out of the wind as we can be. Still, it'll be a cold night, even together.

"A bed," is my retort. "A real one."

"You win," he says, downing the last of his share of the pasta and leaning back on his elbows. He's still moving slowly, carefully. But he looks better, for all his trouble walking today. "I can't top that."

I hurry to finish the rest of my dinner and scoot over to where he reclines on the blanket, eager for his warmth and company. He folds his good arm around me, easy, comfortable. I don't think the old Lilac would've thought he smelled very good, but I turn my head toward him anyway, cheek rubbing against the material of his T-shirt.

We're quiet for a while, perhaps each of us imagining what might wait for us in the building Tarver saw on the horizon. His face has changed, a spark of hope where there had only been grim determination. How long has he been living with the belief that no rescue was coming? It's obvious that ever since we reached the Icarus, he's been aiming only for survival. Not for rescue.

Now there's a good chance we'll be able to signal for help. No remote outpost building would be without some method of communication.

I shift, pulling myself in more tightly. He inhales deeply, the rise and fall of his chest shifting my face where it's pressed against him.

"How long do you think we've been here?"

"Counting the time I was sick?" Tarver pauses, doing a quick mental calculation. "Sixteen days, I think."

So long? It knocks the wind out of me. Two weeks and counting. It feels like only two days and like a lifetime. "It was my birthday," I find myself saying, in a strange voice. "I turned seventeen a few days ago." The day you came back to me from your fever. But I can't bring myself to say that out loud.

Tarver's breath catches, then releases. "Happy birthday, Miss LaRoux." I can hear the smile in his voice.

I've become a year older while stranded on this planet. I swallow.

Perhaps sensing the shift in my mood, Tarver lifts his bandaged hand to trail his fingertips along my arm. I suspect the movement hurts him, but if it does, he makes no complaint.

I clear my throat. "What would be the first thing you'd do when we get rescued? A real meal? Call your family?" I smile against him, plucking at his T-shirt in distaste. "Take a shower?"

"My family," he says immediately. "Then they'll probably hose me down and interrogate me for a few weeks. The military will, I mean. Not my parents."

"Gosh." Now I'm trying to banish the mental image of someone hosing Tarver down. At least I'm not thinking about my birthday anymore. "I hope n.o.body tries that with me."

That earns me a laugh, my head jumping a little as Tarver's body quakes beneath my cheek. "I doubt anyone will try any such thing with you. It's pretty much just soldiers and criminals who get the high-pressure hose."

Even in the realm of imagination, we're already separated. Him, in his interrogations and debriefings-me, presumably taken somewhere for coddling and polishing. My heart twinges painfully, its beat rapid and strong against Tarver's ribs.

It's not that I don't want to be rescued. I do. I want to see my father again-and more than that, I want Tarver to find his family again, keep them from losing another son. But I had begun to imagine a life here, with him and me. A hungry, cold, barely-surviving-each-week kind of life-but a life together.

Before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling out. "What about me?"

"What about you?" Tarver echoes, one shoulder moving in a shrug. "Your family will scoop you up and quiz you on whether I compromised your virtue and whisk you off to strap you into one of those extraordinary dresses, and it'll be like this never happened."

My mouth is dry, my tongue heavy. Why doesn't he understand what I'm asking? If we're to be rescued, I don't want it to happen before we figure out whatever's happening here between us. I may not have many more opportunities.