But it’s what’s not there that nearly drives me to my knees.
There should be rescue craft buzzing around the ship’s carcass. There should be crews climbing all over her like so many ants. There should be people, life, salvation. But what lies before us looks like nothing more than a graveyard. I’ve been holding on to the hope that we could have somehow missed their approach, that if we could get as far as the crash site, rescue would be waiting for us there. But there’s not even a hint of other survivors.
After everything we’ve been through, I finally admit to myself what I’ve been avoiding since we landed.
I don’t think anyone’s coming for us.
And I don’t know what to do, except try to stay alive. The wreck and the broken pods below us must hold the soldiers I sparred with, the folks I met on the lower decks. The man who conned his way into the first-class salon to petition Lilac. Her gaggle of friends, her bodyguard, her cousin.
I take a breath, and turn to begin making my way down the mountain.
“Just—just stop.” Lilac’s voice cracks behind me, hoarse from dehydration and ragged with emotion.
She’s staring down at the wreckage, stuck in place. She’s flushed, or burned from the glare of the snow, more likely, her hair curling across her forehead, damp with sweat. When she turns her burning gaze on me, I flinch. “I need you to look. Look at me; look at that, Tarver.”
“I see it.” My own voice sounds nearly as bad, unused for so long. “But we can’t stay here. We need to keep walking. There might be supplies in the wreck, some kind of communications equipment we can salvage.”
She sways, then sinks to the ground in utter exhaustion. “When are you going to stop punishing me for not being crazy after all? I saved your life. We’d never have survived the cave-in.”
Lilac, I know. I know we’d never have survived it. I know you heard or saw something before you ran, I watched it happen. I know you saw something real by the river. I know.
But I can’t let myself admit it out loud. This goes so far beyond anything I’ve been trained for, and my training is all I have. I’m better equipped to drag a crazy person across a wilderness than cope with the possibility that she’s receiving communications from—what? Ghosts? The thought is more than absurd; it’s impossible.
If I let myself believe her, then everything I know goes out the window. And what I know has kept us alive this far.
She’s still looking at me wearily, pain written clearly in her expression. “I’m not trying to punish you,” I say finally. “But I can only work from what we know. I don’t think I know everything, and in a place like this, I know even less than usual. But what I do know is that we need to keep moving.”
She slumps over to rest her forehead against her knees, and my heart groans under the pressure. I wish I knew what to do, or even what to say. I wish I knew anything useful at all.
“So you’re going to shrug it off again,” she mumbles, fixing her tired glare on me. “I’ve been struggling for anything I could find to show you I’m not crazy, even when my own logic told me I must be, even when you lied to me outright. And now that we both know I’m not, you’re just going to dismiss this?” She’s crying, but the harsh edge to her voice is anger. “Just once, Tarver, just once, I wish you could see what I see.”
She speaks the words like a witch in an old story, laying a curse on me. I look away, down the mountain at the wreckage below us.
“I’m sorry, Lilac. I don’t know what you see. I only know how to keep us moving. I’m just a soldier. Once we get out of this place, you won’t ever have to see me again. But I can’t make myself see what you do.”
She starts climbing to her feet, slow and painful, and if looks could kill I’d be dead and buried. “I hope that one day you’re forced to believe in something for which you haven’t got a shred of proof.” Her voice is taut like wire. “And I hope someone you care about laughs in your face for it.”
She stalks off down the mountain, and I wonder which one of her fancy tutors taught her this—the ability to make an exit without a door to slam, picking her way down the snowy path with her back ramrod straight in furious indignation. I wonder where she finds the strength for it.
“I’m not laughing at you,” I whisper. I adjust the pack and start to make my way down the mountain after her.
She’s learned a thing or two about trailblazing in the time she’s spent following me, and she makes good time at first, though eventually she starts to slow from exhaustion.