These Broken Stars

THIRTY-TWO

TARVER

THIS IS SHOCK. I know that from my field training. my mouth is dry, and my hands are starting to tremble. I’m cold.

I stare down at her face, but it’s like I’m looking at her through glass, removed. I find myself noticing trivial things—the length of her eyelashes, the new freckles that stand out on her pale cheeks. She never knew about those.

But I saw them, and I loved them, I loved—

I should close her eyes, I know that. There are steps to be followed. My body’s trying to move, trying to do what it’s done before, but I can’t stop shaking. I observe the tiny cuts and blackened fingernails on my hand, and wait for it to stop trembling so I can brush her eyelids, but it won’t. It worsens, and I stare at it, fascinated.

The brain places importance on these small nothings to distract itself from overwhelming trauma. Instinct causes it to start memorizing details feverishly when it’s in danger. I’ve been trained for this.

No. No one trained me for this.

I know there’s this other thing I should be thinking about, this other thing I know, but every time I try to approach it my mind reels away, shuddering. I can’t think it. I can’t know it.

The bile rises up my throat in a rush, and I wheel away from her to plant my hands in the grass as I cough, gag, then swallow hard. I’m panting, but I keep from throwing up. My elbows start to bend, and I lock them in place.

I know with utter certainty that if I let myself fold to the ground beside her, I’ll stay there forever. The lessons they’ve drilled into me forbid it.

I stagger to my feet, movements clumsy. I’m swaying when I stand, looking around the clearing for something—anything—that will tell me what to do. The small fires from the explosion are burning out. Time must have passed. I don’t remember.

And I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing here. No protocol, no notification, no debriefing, no—anything. Just me, standing in the middle of the clearing, Lilac at my feet.

The building is still smoking, one wall blown inward, debris scattered and metal twisted. The trees around the edge of the clearing bow inward, the forest beyond utterly silent. The tiny details of the scene clog my thoughts, dragging my attention away from this thing I can’t understand.

I try again to push past the great wall of resistance in my mind.

Lilac is dead.

Nothing.

Lilac took shrapnel. Lilac bled out.

Nothing. I can say it to myself, I can push the words around in my mind, but there’s not even a twitch of a response. They’re just words. Stupid, impossible words—so ridiculous that I ignore them.

I try again, something smaller, like worrying at a loose tooth or picking at a scab.

Lilac won’t talk to me again.

There’s a tremor.

Lilac won’t kiss me again. I won’t hear her laugh.

My lungs constrict.

Why am I doing this to myself?

I don’t know how to grieve. I’ve seen death before. I’ve seen it at close quarters, felt the heat of it on my skin. I’ve seen it from a safe, clinical distance, in the statistics on my intelligence reports. I’ve seen whole platoons die, too many to meaningfully understand.

I’ve seen my friends die, witnessed their final moments and accepted last messages to loved ones they never truly believed they’d leave.

When it was Alec, my mother needed me, and so I refused to succumb—but that didn’t mean I stopped trying to grapple with what had happened. Soul of a poet, she always said. But I worked through it quietly, holding the grief inside myself, somewhere secure. Emotion had no place at my briefings. In the field, it was simply dangerous. You shut it away, mourned later, silently.

This is different. This is deafening, consuming. There is no next task. There are no other soldiers to see to. No parents who need me.

Just my Lilac, blood still seeping out across her shirt, even with her heartbeat stopped. Her skin, still warm, eyes open, face slack.

This is beyond comprehension. This is too much. I can still hear her voice.

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.

I answered her. I remember that, too. I would be anything but fine.

In fact, I’m nothing. I don’t exist. I’m lost.

I drop to one knee to gather her up in my arms, and she lolls horribly against me, head tipping back, arm slipping to hang down limply. Her skin feels different already.

I gather her in closer, so her head tips in against my shoulder. Her blood stains my skin. I carry her down the path to the cave.

I can’t bury her today. I’m not strong enough to dig the hole. Some horrible, practical part of me knows that I’ll dig until I’m exhausted, and it won’t be deep enough. It will have to be tomorrow.

And I’m not ready to let her out of my sight yet.

I lay her down on our bed, carefully straightening her neck and folding her hands. I settle the pillow under her head.

I lie down beside her on the stone floor of the cave, rolling over on my back to stare up at the daylight coming in through the chink in the stone that serves as our chimney. I curl my hand around her cold one.

Sometime later, I realize there’s no more light coming in through the crack in the ceiling.

I’ll bury her in the morning. Not yet.

I feel like I’m observing these events taking place, without revealing myself or participating. I’m watching a boy lie on the floor of a cave beside a girl. In the darkness, they look like they’re asleep.

The idea of the building drifts into my head eventually. I can picture the wall, forced in by the explosion. My memory of it is obscured by smoke and dust, so I can’t see inside. I know, in a dull, uncaring way, that I should go and explore it tomorrow. Except that I can’t imagine bringing myself to walk through the broken doorway.

A few minutes later, or a few hours, I notice the Gleidel digging into my back. I angle an arm to retrieve it, fingers wrapping around the familiar grip, sliding into place. I lift it and position the barrel underneath my chin. I nudge the barrel to the left so it sits in just the right spot.

The compulsion creeps up through me, starting somewhere in my belly. It travels up my spine, tingling down the length of my arm, until my finger tightens a fraction. It would be so easy to let it tighten just a fraction further. Nobody’s coming. Nobody would find us. They think we’re dead already.

Nobody would ever know what I chose.

It’s dark when I wake, and cold. My bones ache, and I’m on stone, not blanket. Where the hell is Lilac? Has she pushed me away and stolen the blankets?

I smile faintly to myself. Unlikely. She’s so insistent at night, snuggling in against me and teasing me that she’ll steal all my warmth, leach it out of me. She presses her back in against my front, and I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair, then—

The memory hits me like a body blow. My throat closes, muscles tensing, mind reeling. I can’t remember how to move—my limbs are numb. Then, slowly, unwillingly, I reinhabit my body.

I push up onto one elbow, my back screaming a protest after lying on the cold ground for so long.

My eyelids are heavy and reluctant, but I blink to clear my vision.

Lilac’s sitting in front of me, cross-legged, smiling.

My breath jams in my throat, and I roll onto one side, coughing, gasping for breath.

Lilac lies beside me, dead.

It only takes a moment to realize that the body beside me is barely visible, a silhouette to my night vision. The girl sitting cross-legged before me is sunlit, vivid, impossible. Shaking, choking on the metallic taste the vision brings to the back of my mouth, I drag myself upright. As I watch her, an image blossoms across the wall of the cave. My parents’ house springs to life: white walls, green leaves, and the purple flowers that share Lilac’s name.

I see the wooden front door, the windows and window boxes, filled to overflowing with herbs and yellow flowers. As I watch, a pathway appears, grass swaying on either side of it. It threads its way down to where she sits, curling past her so now she’s relaxing in my mother’s garden.

I can’t do this.

I only realize I still have the Gleidel in my hand when I lift it, aiming it at the ceiling. The laser shrieks when I pull the trigger, and the room’s lit for an instant by the bolt of energy, like a lightning strike. The image flickers, then solidifies once more. How dare they show her to me? How do they dare touch her memory?

“Get out!” My voice is hoarse, ragged, throat feeling like it tears with the shout. “Get out, get away from her. Get away.”

I lift the gun a second time, and the blast of sound echoes again as the shot dislodges a shower of sand and pebbles. “Don’t touch her. Where was your goddamn warning this time? What was the point in getting her out of that cave? What was the point in dragging her halfway across your forsaken planet, to do this? To let her bleed out? We should have died in our pod, like everybody else. You should’ve just let us die together.”

I can’t think about why they’re showing her to me now, what purpose could be behind their torture. My voice is giving out, words jagged, slicing my throat. “Go.” I close my eyes. “You could have saved her. You could have warned her. You did this.”

When I open my eyes again, the vision is gone, and I’m alone in the dark.

I crawl over to the pack, pulling out the last of the blankets, and I roll myself in it to lie back down. I close my eyes, breathing out slowly, waiting for the trembling to stop.

In the morning my body’s stiff and sore from a night sleeping on hard stone, and I silently stretch out my cramped limbs.

I walk back to the clearing, keeping my gaze away from the blasted hole in the wall of the building. Keeping my gaze away from the blood soaked into the grass. I cross over to the shed where the fuel was stored, reaching past the paint tins for the shovel. I carry it back some distance from the mouth of the cave, and there I dig. The ground is sandy on top, the hole collapsing in on itself as the top crust keeps crumbling. Lower down the soil is darker, more densely packed. I set the edge of the shovel against it, then drive it down with my foot. It takes both hands to lever it back with my weight.

Three hours later, it’s deep enough.

I wash my hands and face in the stream before I go back to her. Sometimes, a day later, the body is still stiff. It’s mostly passed, though, and I lift her without trouble.

I climb down into the grave and lay her out carefully, wrapping her in a blanket. I crouch beside her, gazing down at her face, wishing I had words, or tears, or something to offer her. But this is beyond all of that.

I carefully lay the cloth across her face so the dirt won’t touch her. Then I rest my hands on the edge of the hole and hoist myself up.

I’ve never been to a funeral that wasn’t military, and that recitation doesn’t fit. I don’t know the words to any prayers. Eventually, thinking of Alec, feeling him beside me, I begin to scrape the dirt back into the grave, shutting my ears to the way it patters down onto the blanket.

There are flowers growing everywhere in the woods. I’d been planning, once we were into the building, to pick some of them and lay them all around our bed. A surprise for her when she woke.

I pick them in armfuls now, covering the low mound of dirt until not a glimpse of brown is visible. Now it looks no different from a patch of wildflowers growing in the forest. You could walk right by it, and never know it was there.

Except that I do. It’s my landmark, now. I’ll always know how far I am from this spot. From her.

I sleep, lying on one side of the blankets, as though there should be another body sharing them with me. I find that her scent clings to the pillow, and I bury my face in it at night.

I walk left of center along the path we wore through the trees, leaving room for her at my side.

I eat, breaking the ration bar in half automatically before I realize I have nobody to hand it to.

I go back to the mound of flowers, adding fresh ones, taking out those that die each day.

I can’t count the days.

I can’t think.

I can’t focus.

I can’t go into the building. I can’t leave.

I sleep again. I eat again.

I fall asleep each night with the cold metal barrel of the Gleidel against my throat.

I see her again as I duck out of the afternoon sunlight and into the cave, arms laden with another load of wood. She’s standing with her back to me, beside our bed—where her body lay for a night. This time there’s no false sunlight, no vision of my parents’ cottage. She’s wearing the same green dress she was wearing when we crashed, as ragged and ruined as it was when she finally traded it for clothes from the wreck. She always wears that dress, in my memory.

She turns her head, and I feel a sick rush. They’re doing it again. I’m not angry. Just tired and hurting. I don’t want this vision. It feels like they’re trying to force me to keep moving, trying to keep me from giving in. Don’t let her death be for nothing, they’re saying. But it is for nothing. I am nothing, without her.

“I told you to stop.” My voice is a hoarse growl, roughened with disuse. It’s been days since I’ve spoken. I don’t know how many. “I’m not doing anything for you.”

She jerks at the sounds of my voice, turning abruptly to face me. Her face is a pale smear in the darkness, but I hear her gasp, and the hitch of her breath. She doesn’t speak. They never speak, these visions. The voices only came to Lilac on the wind, disembodied, incomprehensible. I never heard them. “Please, don’t.” I don’t know if they can understand me when I speak, but maybe they’ll read the grief in my thoughts.

She lurches backward, stumbling over the pile of supplies and knocking the canteen over to clang against a rock. She clamps her hands over her ears, crying out as she backs up to press herself against the stone wall, her breathing harsh, audible over the echoes.

There’s something wrong. Something different. My mind is sluggish, struggling to understand what’s changed. The canteen. The noise. This vision is solid—it can touch things.

“How did you do that?” I’m asking them, but she’s the one that cringes.

I walk farther into the cave, slow and cautious.

She flinches at every footstep and presses herself back against the cave wall. She’s watching me like a trapped animal, gaze skittering away from me, then drawn back again—as though she can’t quite look at me, and can’t quite look away.

I want to close my eyes at the sight of her. I want to drink her in. “Please.” I’m not sure what I’m asking for.

I’m only a few feet away when she cries out like she’s in pain, lurching sideways and stumbling away from me. She trips over a stalagmite, crashing down onto her hands and knees—she scrambles up with a desperate haste, and I tear after her as she disappears through the cave’s entrance.

And then I see it, a thrill of shock running through me. A smear of blood where she squeezed through the narrow opening.

How could a vision be bleeding?

My tiredness falls away now as instinct sends adrenaline surging through my limbs, and I dodge through the trees after her as she runs along the bank of the stream. I don’t realize where she’s heading until we’re nearly there.

She only halts when she reaches the center of the clearing, stopping sharply at the bloodstained, flattened spot in the middle of it where Lilac died. There, she drops to her knees, chest heaving as she struggles for breath, one hand lifted to shield her eyes from the pale light of the sun.

I stop at the edge of the clearing, resting one hand against the tree beside me. The bark is rough under my fingers, a contrast to the smooth grip of the Gleidel in my other hand. I don’t remember drawing it. “What are you? Where did you come from?”

Her breath catches again, her long shadow quivering as she trembles. It’s only then that I realize my hands are steady, my eyes clear. This is no vision.

She lifts her head to look across at me. Her face is flushed with exertion, streaked with tears. The eyes that gazed up lifelessly at the sky are wide and fearful now. Her mouth moves slowly, haltingly, as though it’s an effort to speak at all.

“T-Tarver?”

“And you didn’t notice anything unusual?”

“Unusual.”

“About the structure, Major.”

“Oh. No. Nothing unusual.”

“Then why did you and Miss LaRoux remain at the station?”

“She believed that rescue teams might be aware of the building’s location, and look for us there.”

“And you?”

“I was tired of coming up with new plans.”