These Broken Stars(98)

Something catches my eye, and my hands freeze. I flip a few pages back. There, hard to see against the backdrop of a poem I wrote on Avon—the faintest of stained impressions. It could almost be the outline of a flower.

In her distress, she forgets her fear of my touch and leans forward, one hand curling around my sleeve, urgent. My heart seizes and suddenly I can’t breathe. The gesture is so familiar I can’t bear it.

She takes the journal again, slow this time, tipping it up on end. A fine rain of dust patters down against our arms, but I’m not looking at the dust, our arms, or even the journal. I’m looking at her face. The way her every emotion is clear, the way her lips quiver, the way her eyelashes shadow her gaze.

“They re-created it, but didn’t,” she whispers. “The things they make are only temporary.”

Clarity flashes like a torrent of ice water. Maybe fear kept me from seeing it, or grief—maybe I had to mourn before I could understand what was right in front of me. I don’t know how it’s possible, or why it’s happened.

But this is my Lilac. And I refuse to lose her again.

We sit there on the floor of the corridor, sharing a ration bar and drinking from the canteen. Lilac isn’t the only one who needs the break. My thoughts are churning so fast I can’t make sense of anything. All I know is that this is her, my Lilac, and I can’t live without her. We inspect the canteen, the only other thing we know the whispers have re-created—aside from Lilac. But it seems just as solid, just as real, as it was the day we found it. The flower is a fluke. It served its purpose and now it’s gone, not worth sustaining anymore.

They wouldn’t take Lilac back. They can’t.

Eventually we’re both calm enough to continue what we came down here to do, locate whatever the power source for the station is. If we can find that, we may be able to restore full power to the communications systems and send out a distress signal.

The corridor stretches away from us on a downward angle, lined with doors on both sides. Each door is stamped with the LaRoux insignia, the upside-down letter V of the lambda. We make our way down the corridor in silence.

I open a few of the doors as we pass, but they only contain more of what we found upstairs—dark screens, unresponsive. It’s then that Lilac stirs from her silence, stepping past me. She points out a few dim orange lights here and there that I missed—the machines are in standby mode.

“It’s like the whole station’s on backup power. When my father’s company pulled out, they must not have shut everything down, not completely.” She steps back, following a tangle of cords that run up the corner of the wall to where it joins the ceiling, and then out to the main corridor. “If we can find the real power source and get it operating fully, instead of on this backup mode, maybe we can send a signal.”

We head back out to the hallway, following the cables on down the sloping corridor. “You’re sure it can’t just be a generator?” I wonder aloud.

She shakes her head without looking up. “There’s too much equipment here for that. There has to be something else here, something powering the hot water and the lights. And how did they power everything else, back when this place was operational? There’s something more. I can feel it.” Her voice is quiet, and there’s a quaver there—weariness, or distress.

“What do you mean, feel it?”

“You mean you can’t?” She pauses, swallowing hard, and presses a finger to her temple. “It’s there. It’s like having a headache—or, no, not a headache. It’s like having something inside, something that shouldn’t be there. Something’s wrong here.”

“You mean like the shakes when they send you a vision? Or a voice?”

She shakes her head. “Close, but different.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “I think whatever’s down here is what the whispers want us to find.”

I try to shake the uneasy feeling that even though our light-flickering friends are quiet now, they’re still watching us as we try to track down the power source.

Lilac does most of the work as we follow the cables through the rooms and hallways. This place must be four or five times as big underground as it is aboveground. Slowly, though, I begin to see her logic, and together we trace a path through a series of rooms along the first hall we saw, and then down a metal staircase to a second basement level.

When we round the corner at the bottom of the stairs, we find the door.

It’s not square and chunky like everything else down here, but a perfect circle, sealed shut. I reach out to run my fingertips along the lines of its seams; it’s made to dilate like the iris of an eye. With the sections interlocked, it’s stronger by far than any normal door would be.