These Broken Stars

THIRTY

LILAC

“YOU OKAY?” he lifts his head from my neck, lips grazing my jaw.

I shiver, choosing to answer with a small murmur, content. After a moment I open my eyes to find him watching me. His hair is stuck to his forehead, visible in the half-light from the dying fire.

“Happy,” I add, just to see the line of his mouth curve upward, highlighted by the dim glow of the coals.

“Good.” He leans down to kiss me, keeping his weight off on one elbow. I tilt my chin up, discovering the way it makes him lean into the kiss harder, uttering a sound of mixed satisfaction and surprise.

When he lifts his head again, he moves his hand from my waist to trail a fingertip along the edge of my brow, down across my cheek, nudging a few stray hairs away from my face.

“You’ve got no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.” His voice is still a little hoarse, and my stomach lurches in response.

“You took your sweet time.” I try for airy and unconcerned, though I know my performance is not convincing.

He laughs, and I watch his mouth, distracted, and almost miss what he says next: “I’m pretty sure if I’d tried to kiss you while dragging you through the forest that first day, you would’ve thrown one of those ridiculous shoes at my head.”

I expect him to put up a fight when morning arrives and I suggest, a little wistfully, that we take a rest day. I don’t want to leave our bed, don’t want to find clothes, don’t want to be apart from him. The way he looks at me now is so different. Clear, unguarded, warm. I didn’t even know there’d been a wall between us, until now, seeing it gone.

Instead of putting on his soldier voice and saying something about getting a march on the day, he just stretches and gathers me against him with one arm. The other, he tucks behind his head, looking up at the ceiling of the cave, where a little daylight comes through a crack. The light plays over the cavern walls, revealing formations carved over the ages—stalagmites reaching up from the ground for their twins overhead, vast curtains of gleaming limestone dripping down from the ceiling.

“I can’t think of any way inside that building. For now, there’s nothing we have to do that requires immediate attention.”

I prop myself on my elbow, staring at him. “What do you mean, nothing we have to do?”

“Just what I said, beautiful.” He grins at me, making my stomach flutter. No one in my old life would be permitted to grin at me like that. “You think I have any burning desire to get out of bed today?”

I can’t help but smile back at him. He leans up and kisses me, a brief thing before he starts to pull away again. He pauses, eyes half closed, thoughtful, before leaning up once more, taking his time, his mouth warm against mine. By the time he pulls away, my heart is pounding.

“I’ll get us some breakfast,” he says, slipping out of our nest and tucking the blankets back around me. He hauls his pants on but doesn’t bother with his belt, letting them hang low on his hips. I curl into the warm space beside me that he left behind and watch him as he moves around the camp. How is it that I can want him so badly when he’s only been gone from me for a minute?

He rummages in his pack, searching for ration bars. After a moment he pauses, staring down at something in the bag. I see only a flash of silver as he picks it up, closing his hand around it, but I know what it is—the case containing the picture of his family.

It’s then that I realize something that began to take root the day we climbed the wreck, looking for our next move. When I discovered that the thought of living here didn’t hurt. The truth is that I don’t want us to be rescued. I wish I could stay here, with Tarver, forever—even if forever is only a few short years, or months, or days, before the savageness of the planet overcomes us. Because the moment the rescue ships touch down, I’ll never see Tarver Merendsen again.

And this is the thing I’ve been trying to fight, because I know it’s not the same for him. I know he couldn’t be happy here, not when his heart is in a little garden cottage with a teacher and a poet and the memory of his brother.

I watch as he sets the silver case aside, carefully, tenderly. He returns to his search, but I can see the grief lingering in his expression.

It doesn’t matter that being rescued means the end of us—that it means a return, for me, to a life unlived, watched every moment and kept apart from anything that could touch me. All that matters is that he gets home. That his parents don’t have to suffer the loss of their second child.

We have to get inside that building. By the time Tarver returns to me, I am smiling, and I wrap myself around him. But even as he murmurs in my ear, kisses my shoulder, twines his fingers in my hair, my mind is working. I’ll think of a way.

It isn’t until late afternoon that we finally drag ourselves from bed, and only then because we need to refill the canteen from the spring. We locate clothes and take a walk through the woods afterward, making our way back toward the building.

I try the shutters again; he taps at the door to gauge its thickness. We share a few ideas, each more improbable than the last. Tentatively we think about some sort of battering ram, but even if we use the rusted tools to chop down a tree, there’s no way the two of us could lift and swing a log big enough to break a steel door. Whatever supplies or equipment might be inside stay firmly locked up.

I hear whispers of sound at the edge of my hearing, rising like rain hissing across the grass toward me. There’s an urgency in the voices that moan in my ear, pleading, pained. They’re always coming from the station itself—we’re not the only ones who desperately want to find a way to get the station open. The whispers have been leading us here all along, and now they’re beseeching us to come inside.

Eventually, as dusk approaches, we give up and return to our cave to rekindle the fire and reassemble our bed, which, over the course of last night, got scattered about the place. As I’m rebuilding pillows and settling blankets, Tarver’s crouched by the fire. Tonight he’s building it up high. Easier to be naked, he says, when you’re not freezing.

“Slumming’s not so bad, is it, Miss LaRoux?” he teases, flopping onto our makeshift bed and pulling me down on top of him.

Frustration flares, despite the urge to let it slide under the circumstances. “Do you really have to do that, after everything? Act like you’re beneath me?”

He smiles again, shrugging, dismissive. “The whole universe knows I’m beneath you, Miss LaRoux. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Fifty thousand people on that ship, give or take.” I choose my words carefully. “Three thousand of them soldiers. At least a dozen decorated war heroes. I looked at you.”

He starts to speak, but I run my hand along his arm, and this is enough to make him hesitate, voice catching in his throat at my touch. This newfound power is intoxicating.

“Do you think I like you just because you saved my life? Because you know what to do and I don’t, because you make sure I eat enough and you keep me from losing my mind? Because you’re the only man on the planet?”

He protests, but I see it in his face. I’m not completely wrong.

“It is,” I whisper. “It’s because of all those things. It’s because of your strength, but it’s because of your goodness too, and your softness. You act like you inherited nothing from your mother, but that’s not true. There’s—there’s poetry in you.”

He inhales sharply, the arm around me tightening and his fingers twisting into my hair, tugging at it, tugging me close. I can’t breathe—I don’t want to. When he speaks his voice shakes a little, the way it did right before he kissed me for the first time.

“Sometimes you take all my words away from me.” He leans back onto his elbow, then pulls me down to him so he can stop me answering with the press of his lips. When he breaks the kiss I end up blinking down at him, breathless.

“I’m still not sure you’re right, Miss LaRoux,” he murmurs. “I am beneath you.”

It takes me a few seconds to see the spark of amusement in his eyes as he looks up at me. I realize he’s laughing, in his way, not at my expense but because he’s happy too. So I blurt one of the words I learned from him in his fever, and reach for the laundry bag that serves as our pillow to swing it at his head.

He catches my wrist before I come close, moving with such speed that I’m left gasping, laughing as he pulls me back down into our nest. He stops my laughter with his mouth, sending electricity crackling down my spine, like sparks resting in my belly.

Tarver tilts his head to kiss me behind my ear, teasing. I lift my chin and he makes his way down my throat, the softness of his mouth at a sharp contrast to the roughness of the stubble on his face.

Sparks, I think, something in the back of my mind stirring. The seed of an idea, the one I’ve been trying to ignore, leaps into a fully fledged plan.

“We should blow the doors off the station.”

Tarver stops mid-kiss, lifting his head and looking absolutely baffled. “We should what now?”

“The doors! They’re too thick to break open with any battering ram we could lift, but an explosion? That would do it, wouldn’t it?”

He’s blinking at me, half confused, half cranky. He doesn’t like being interrupted. “You’re being even more bewildering than usual.”

I laugh, reaching up to run my fingers through his hair. “The hovercraft, in the shed? There are fuel tanks in the back. Stack a few of those up against the door, make a fuse out of some string, and we’ve got ourselves a party.”

His expression is shifting from cranky to cautiously impressed, and I can’t help but feel a thrill of excitement that he’s impressed with me. Genuinely, without sympathy or surprise. Like equals.

“Who are you,” he says eventually, “and what have you done with my Lilac?”

My Lilac. I want to stop and revel in that, but I’m too excited by my idea. “Anna has older brothers, and when I was little we’d blow things up all the time on our tennis court. My father had to have it resurfaced so many times.” The memory causes a pang, my throat closing a little. For the loss of my cousin, for the loss of the way things were when we were children—for the loss of my own childhood.

Tarver’s eyes soften, seeing my face. “We’ll have to be careful. Clear the trees from the door, minimize the debris and the danger of a fire afterward.”

There’s an electricity in the air, a nearly tangible sense of purpose. We have a plan. I ignore the stab of pain that lances through me—now there’s a limit on our time together. A countdown clock, set to some finite amount I can’t see. Each moment is one we’ll never get together again.

“Could we use your gun to set it off?”

His lips purse, thoughtful. “The Gleidel was designed to interact with organic matter—not metallic. Meant to prevent anyone dumb enough to fire it on a ship from breaching the hull. Wouldn’t so much as scratch the tank.” He reaches out to trace his fingers along my lips.

“A fuse, then. Like we used as kids.” I close my eyes and kiss his fingers as they wander across my mouth. “I’ve never used fuel as an explosive, but the principle’s bound to be the same. A sudden impact like that should blow the doors right open, leave the rest of the station intact.”

Tarver makes a low sound in his throat, making me shiver. “Keep talking about blowing things up,” he suggests, bending his head to resume what he was doing before I interrupted him.

It takes nearly an entire day to clear the area in front of the station doors. The power tools have long since lost their charge, so we’re using rusty saws and a big pair of shears from the shed. We probably would have finished earlier, but I keep finding myself at his side without remembering the impulse to go to him. I keep demanding kisses, and he keeps dropping what he’s doing to oblige. We don’t make a very good team, distracting each other from what we’re meant to be doing. We cut down the young trees, clear away the brambles, stack four of the fuel tanks against the doors.

I look over the dents and damage on the tanks, and finger the uneven length of rope we’ve found for a fuse. Suddenly I’m not so sure this is as foolproof as I’d thought. There are so many ways it could go wrong.

As the sun slants through the trees, close to the horizon, Tarver drags the last of the fallen saplings away and then arches his back until it pops. I move toward him and he lifts his arm without looking, knowing I’ll be there. I slip beneath it, wrapping my arms around his waist.

“Do we do it now?” I rest my mouth against his chest, eyes turned up to look at him. Let him be the judge of when we start being rescued. I can’t see it objectively. I so badly want it and don’t—I’m caught so tightly between staying and going.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘it,’” he says, letting his fingers creep in against my arm under the edge of my T-shirt sleeve.

“Quit it,” I reply, though I doubt he’ll take me seriously with laughter in my voice.

“Not tonight,” he says before leaning down to kiss me. It’s a long moment before he speaks again. “We’ll wait until there’s good light, when we’re sure we’re ready. Tomorrow.”

“If people were stationed here, there could be food inside. Hot water, maybe, if there’s a generator inside. Beds too.” I grin at him. “Though I suppose not having a bed hasn’t really been a problem for us so far.”

Tarver lifts an eyebrow, shifting his weight and wrapping both arms around me. “No, but the ground does have its limitations.”

He leans down to kiss me again, his bandaged hand sliding up my side under my shirt, and that reminder of his injury—how close I came to losing him—sends a jolt through me. I can’t let him be the one to do this. We don’t know how volatile the fuel tanks are, or how fast the fuse will burn.

I let him kiss me for a while, wait until I feel him make the soft, growly noise he usually makes before he tries to remove some item of my clothing. Let him be as distracted as possible, before I try to do this. Because he’s not going to like it.

I pull my mouth away a fraction and murmur, “I’ll start testing fuses tomorrow morning. I don’t relish the idea of losing a hand lighting this thing.”

Tarver starts to lean in again, but then stops, frowning at me a little. “I don’t relish the idea of you losing a hand either. I like both of yours. I’ll do it.”

“Don’t be silly,” I say, trying out my best, most capable smile. I can’t let him see how desperately I need him to believe me. How much I need him to not get hurt if something goes wrong. “I did this all the time when I was a kid, my father never knew.”

He’s still frowning, something lurking in his expression—fear? I can’t make it out. “I know how to take a hit,” he says. “How to drop and protect myself in an explosion.”

“But I won’t need to do that, because I know what I’m doing. I’m not trying to be a hero or anything. I’ll be perfectly safe. If something did go wrong, if something happened to you, I’d last a grand total of ten seconds out here by myself. But if something happened to me, you’d be just fine.”

He’s gazing at me like I’ve just offered to stab him in the gut. I can almost see him fighting with himself. But I’m right, and if nothing else he’ll have to see my conviction. I can see his fevered face in my mind’s eye, and my throat constricts just remembering how close I was to losing him. I can’t let that happen again.

“It’s a simple risk-reward analysis,” I murmur. “You taught me that.”

Tarver lifts one hand to touch my face, tracing the curve of my cheek. “Lilac, if something happened to you,” he murmurs, “I would be anything but fine.”

I reach up to take his hand, curling my fingers through his.

“Lilac, are you sure?”

I squeeze his hand, looking up at him, letting him see the confidence, the easy knowledge. I can do this. I will him to see it, with every fiber of my being. I can’t let him light the fuse. I can’t watch him put himself in danger again.

“Positive.”

His gaze searches mine for a few moments as I hold my breath. Then he ducks his head to kiss my forehead, and turns to lead the way back to the cave.

There aren’t many things my old life prepared me for. Not many skills developed in the world of society, of balls and dresses and intrigue, apply out here in the wild, with this man I would’ve never known but for this strange twist of fate.

But at least I’m still a good liar.

“You were found not far from the structure. Can you clarify what happened to it?”

“I was trying to get inside. Whoever left it last was inconsiderate enough to lock the doors, so we had to get creative.”

“And was Miss LaRoux involved in this act of vandalism?”

“Vandalism? We were trying to survive.”

“Shall I repeat the question?”

“Of course she wasn’t.”

“And yet you say you were together the entire time.”

“Miss LaRoux isn’t the kind of girl to get her hands dirty. She waited in the woods, out of harm’s way.”