These Broken Stars Part 28

"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-"

"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 good-bye.

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 compa.s.sion 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 d.a.m.n message?

"What the h.e.l.l do you want from me?" My voice is hoa.r.s.e.

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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l I am. Something in me snaps. I wheel around, slamming my hands down on the control box attached to the 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 s.p.a.ce 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've 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 h.e.l.l 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 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 sc.r.a.p 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 GRAt.i.tUDE 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?"