These Broken Stars

THIRTY-THREE

LILAC

TOO BRIGHT, TOO LOUD. Harsh on my skin, in my eyes. The world tastes like ash and acid, and I am drowning in the air.

He sits opposite, against the stone. He led me here, this cave, made me sit where he could watch. The sun outside has gone while he stared at me, leaving us in darkness. The thing is still in his hand. Gun, my mind supplies. His gaze is burning me.

I press my shoulder blades against the wall at my back and clench my jaw at the pain. Every inch of me is raw. The fabric on my body scalds me, like I have no skin, like I’m only blood and bone and pain.

And he stares, always staring, watching me, waiting for something.

Tarver, I know. I know him. I know—

He shifts, the whisper of his shoe on the stone screaming across the distance between us. I gasp, try to retreat through the stone. But I am blood and bone, and I cannot pass that way.

He jumps as I flinch, the barrel of the gun retraining on me, a cold metal eye in the darkness.

“What are you?”

His voice—I can’t hear it. It’s all wrong. Not supposed to—

“Answer me.”

He’s so angry. So afraid. I remember—I want to take that fear away. But I don’t know how. I can’t move, pinned to the wall by his stare. I can feel him dissecting me, peeling me away layer by layer, trying to understand.

I swallow, trying to remember how to answer. “Lilac,” I whisper, the name sounding strange. I try again, better this time. “Lilac.”

His face ripples, muscles standing out as he clenches his jaw. He leans forward, gesturing with the gun.

“We both know that’s not true. She’s dead.”

Dead.

Dead.

“Tarver.” I try his name again, and it sounds better on my lips than my own. “I don’t—”

“Don’t say it!” He’s on his feet, electrified, blazing in the glare of the dark cave. “You say it like—like her.”

Then I remember. “Your Lilac.”

He’s across the space between us before my eyes can follow him, pushing me back against the wall; his hand grasps my shoulder, sending ribbons of pain down my arm.

“Don’t say that.”

The grief and horror on his face cut deep. I don’t recognize my own hand as it reaches for his face.

“Tarver, it’s me.”

His hand clenching my shoulder shifts, slides up to touch my cheek. Fire. It’s all I can do not to jerk away. Grief and anger battle on his features, banishing the flicker of hope that surges there.

“What are you?” he repeats, whispering this time. I realize the gun was pressed against me only when he lowers it, letting it clatter to the ground.

I wish he had pulled the trigger. It would have been easier.

I make myself look in his eyes, fighting every instinct to flee, to find some way back to the dark and the cold and the quiet.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you and Miss LaRoux wonder why the structure was abandoned?”

“We wondered, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.”

“Why is that?”

“We had no information.”

“And no theories?”

“We had better things to do than speculate.”