These Broken Stars(101)

But I know what the whispers were telling me in the corridor below. They brought the flower back and didn’t—like me. I am here, and not here. Perhaps the effort required to flicker the lights took their attention away from sustaining the flower. The words are there on the charred sheet of paper. Temporary energy-matter conversion. How long will I last?

Long enough to help Tarver get home? I try to imagine myself drifting to infinitesimal pieces on the wind, turning to dust like the flower did. It’s easier to contemplate it if I’m not real after all—if I’m only a copy, a remnant of the girl who used to be here. I remember everything of my life, of Lilac’s life. But is memory enough?

The question of the dress haunts me too, coming back to me at every turn. I know he thinks of it too. I left this dress behind in the wreck of the Icarus, discarded for more practical clothing. Each rip and run in the satin is identical to those the original had. I can trace my journey on it—here, the first tear, caught on a thorn as we watched the Icarus fall. There, rubbed raw as I climbed the tree to escape the cat beast. Each mark and stain bearing witness to what I’ve been through. Except that this isn’t that dress.

So whose story does this impostor tell?

“I need to see the body.”

We’re both startled, heads snapping up. It’s not until I see the horror registering on Tarver’s face that I realize I was the one who spoke. The fragment of paper slips from my nerveless hand, fluttering to the floor, streaming ash.

“The—what?”

“The body.” I assume he buried it—me. These thoughts ought to make me sick, ought to frighten me. Why do I think them only blankly?

“Lilac,” he whispers. “No. No. What good can come of that?”

“I need you to take me there.” My hands remember how to work again, clenching into fists pressed against my thighs. “What if there’s a body there? What if there isn’t?”

Tarver’s face has gone pale, something I never thought I’d see again after he recovered from his illness. My heart breaks a little, but not enough for me to crumble.

“Where did this dress come from?” I press. “We both know I left it on the laundry floor, back at the Icarus. Tarver, I have to know.”

“I don’t,” he retorts, suddenly fierce. He leans across the space between us, seeking my gaze. “Lilac, I have you back. That’s all I want. I don’t want to ask questions.”

To look at us one would think he was the one who’d come back from the dead. Maybe in some way he has. The way he looks at me now, like I’m water in a desert—how can I take that away from him? I make myself nod, and he relaxes.

He believes in me now.

The only problem is that I’m not so sure I do.

“I made up a bed for us in one of the rooms,” Tarver offers, leading the way down the hallway. When we reach the sleeping quarters, I see what he means—he’s pushed two sets of bunks together side by side, making a larger bed on the bottom, the top bunks forming a canopy above it.

“Us,” I echo aloud, halting on the threshold.

Tarver stops a few steps into the room and looks back at me. “Lilac?”

I swallow, shake my head. “Please. No. I’ll sleep out in the common room.”

Tarver turns and reaches for my hands. I manage to stop myself from jerking them away, but he senses the buried impulse in the way my skin twitches, and he lets them fall again.

“Why?” he says softly, his face bearing all the lines of grief and exhaustion and pain.

And why can’t I grant him this? I shiver. I must seem so cold to him now. How can he think I’m the same as his Lilac? He doesn’t know what I remember. He doesn’t know how hard it is to inhabit my own body, to make myself speak, walk, eat. How much I feel like I’m a prisoner, able to see and hear but unable to do the things the old Lilac would have done.

“I can’t. I told you—your touch, it burns. I can’t, not yet.”

He presses his lips together. Pain. The urge to go to him is so strong I think I must be tearing apart. I can’t let it go on like this.

“I lied to you,” I whisper, turning to lean back against the door frame. At least the pain of that pressure on my body is physical, distracting. “I let you think I don’t remember anything from the time I was—gone.”

I hear his intake of breath. “What—how—”

“I remember it all.” The cold is leaching my voice away, frost trickling through my limbs, crackling in my lungs.

“You mean—when it happened?”

He doesn’t deserve to know this. Kinder to let him think I just woke up myself again. Maybe the old Lilac would have protected him from this.