“Alec, you can’t be—”
In the next instant I realize he’s blurred at the edges, not solid.
My hands are still trembling, and I drop the chair with a clatter, swallowing hard against the sharp taste of metal in my mouth.
Alec steps forward. His walk, the slight cant of his head, the thoughtful look on his face: it’s all so familiar, so hauntingly real. My heart shudders, constricting painfully in my rib cage. He doesn’t answer me, but looks instead at the rift, at the swirling energy inside. With a jolt, I realize that his eyes aren’t the brown that I remember. They’re blue—bluer than Lilac’s, bluer than the sky. They match the color of the rift perfectly.
“You’re not my brother.” My hands grip the edge of the console, holding me up.
“No.” He hesitates. “We came here through the…” He looks past me at the blue light.
“The rift? How?”
He nods at the smashed console. “You broke the dampening field. We can reach more easily inside your thoughts now. We can find words, and this face. It’s always somewhere in your mind.”
I suck in a slow, steadying breath. “What are you?”
Alec—or the thing wearing Alec’s face—pauses in a way so human I have to keep reminding myself he’s not who he looks like. “We are thought. We are power. In our world, we are all that is.”
“Why did you come?”
Alec’s mouth tightens, as if he’s in pain. “Curiosity. But we found we were not the only ones here.”
“LaRoux Industries.”
Alec nods. “They found a way to sever us, to cut us off from each other.”
“But why don’t you leave?” I ask. “Return home?”
“This is the cage they built around us. We cannot fully enter your world or return to ours.” His face—my brother’s face—is taut with grief. His image flickers, and fear snakes through my gut. Their strength—Lilac’s strength—is running out.
“Please! How can I help you? I can’t lose Lilac again.”
Alec’s face is awash with sympathy. “This cage keeps us here, but we are stretched too thin. There isn’t much time left. Less, now. If we could trade our—our lives for hers, we would. To find an end, to sleep.”
“Why less?”
“Her signal.
“The distress signal? That’s draining you?”
“Soon there won’t be enough left.” Alec flickers again, fading as his image sputters out. The next moment there’s only me in the room, and I’ve never felt more alone.
I jog over to the bank of monitors where Lilac rigged her distress beacon, watching the signal jump brightly across the screens as I search for any way I can find to shut it down. In the end I simply yank out a handful of leads. The screens go dead, and for an instant the rift swirls a little brighter.
Alec’s voice—the whisper’s voice—is still ringing in my ears. We are stretched too thin. Lilac’s only hope is tied to these creatures, and they’re fading.
I walk back toward the ladder. I need air—I need space to move. Deep within me, I feel the weight the whispers carry.
They’ve poured what energy they have into reaching out to us, drawing us here with visions and whispers, giving us what we need—giving me my Lilac—so we could find them. Now they can barely keep her here.
I understand now why they brought her back. They needed me moving, exploring, trying to understand the mystery of the station. They couldn’t risk me blasting my brains out in the cave, when I was their only hope at release. But they’re still trapped, and I don’t know how to give them the end they want. My head’s spinning.
The fresh air outside the station is a relief as I step over the rubble in the doorway and out into the clearing. I tip my head back to stare up at the now familiar stars, tracing out the shapes I’ve come to know. I blink as my vision blurs for a moment, the stars shifting. Another blink, and I know what I’m seeing is real.
One of the stars is moving. No, not one—there’s another. And another.
I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it on every planet I’ve been posted to. Those are ships in orbit. They must have picked up on Lilac’s distress signal and come to investigate.
Panic hits me like a body blow. If they find us—if they find Lilac—they’ll take us on board, and if they take her away from the whispers sustaining her—
My body flows into action before the thought’s complete, and I pound back into the station. We have to hide. If they drag us off this planet before I can find a way to save her, she’ll die, and I’d choose any length of time here with her over a life at home, alone. I choose her. I choose whatever world has her in it.
I burst into our bedroom, and a moment later she’s sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and bewildered. “Tarver?”
“Quick—” Panic steals my breath, and I’m gasping. “There are ships in orbit. I don’t think they know exactly where we are yet. We have to—”
She’s scrambling to her feet before I’m finished, and I grab my bag and my gun as we bolt for the trapdoor that leads below the station. I’m praying they’ll think that if we were once here, we’re gone now.
She falls down the last few rungs into my arms, and I half carry her along the hallway to the control room. She breaks away from me, stumbling past the rift to the bank of monitors. I hear her horrified gasp as she realizes the distress signal is shut down, and next moment her fingers are dancing across keys and screens. An instant later a shrill alarm pulses, red displays flashing.
“Lilac, what the hell are you doing?”
She looks up at me, eyes huge, shadowed, gaze wild. “I’ve got it back up. I can overload the system. It might create enough electrical activity for us to show up on a scan.”
My heart stops. She’s trying to show them where to come and find me, using the last fragments of power that remain. The last fragments keeping her alive. I lunge for her. “Lilac, stop—”
She slaps at a screen, and another alarm starts, screaming an alert at us. Blue light flares in the rift, then fades to nearly nothing. I wrap my arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides, dragging her back from the screens.
Lights flash from screens, and the alarms scream their chorus.
I’m going to fail them all. Lilac’s energy will drain away, and she’ll crumble to dust. The aliens will stay trapped in the rift, neither alive nor dead.
There must be a way out. The blue light in the rift is twisting and pulsing, weaker than before, but trapped by the steel ring, the cage, unable to tip into nothing. My eyes light on the signs plastered to their steel cage. Contact with subjects forbidden. Risk of rift instability.
And then I remember the charred papers, the first time we found any sign of the rift’s existence. The rift collapse would release energy, they said. The word fatal leaps up in my memory.
Fatal to an ordinary person, perhaps—but Lilac isn’t, not anymore. Lilac is something different, created by the very energy inside the rift. All this time the whispers have been helping us—all this time we’ve only had to trust them.
Of all the people they could have chosen, they used Alec to speak to me. The one person in the universe I trusted more than my own self. The one person who always knew what to do.
I tighten my grip on Lilac and pull her away from the console. She cries out, fighting me as I drag her toward the blue light of the rift. It’s like she senses my intention, using every last scrap of her remaining strength to pull away. In the end I wrap both arms around her and leap, sending us both plunging into the heart of the rift.
“LaRoux Industries has suffered huge losses as a result of this venture, Major.”
“I didn’t crash the ship.”