It doesn’t matter that being rescued means the end of us—that it means a return, for me, to a life unlived, watched every moment and kept apart from anything that could touch me. All that matters is that he gets home. That his parents don’t have to suffer the loss of their second child.
We have to get inside that building. By the time Tarver returns to me, I am smiling, and I wrap myself around him. But even as he murmurs in my ear, kisses my shoulder, twines his fingers in my hair, my mind is working. I’ll think of a way.
It isn’t until late afternoon that we finally drag ourselves from bed, and only then because we need to refill the canteen from the spring. We locate clothes and take a walk through the woods afterward, making our way back toward the building.
I try the shutters again; he taps at the door to gauge its thickness. We share a few ideas, each more improbable than the last. Tentatively we think about some sort of battering ram, but even if we use the rusted tools to chop down a tree, there’s no way the two of us could lift and swing a log big enough to break a steel door. Whatever supplies or equipment might be inside stay firmly locked up.
I hear whispers of sound at the edge of my hearing, rising like rain hissing across the grass toward me. There’s an urgency in the voices that moan in my ear, pleading, pained. They’re always coming from the station itself—we’re not the only ones who desperately want to find a way to get the station open. The whispers have been leading us here all along, and now they’re beseeching us to come inside.
Eventually, as dusk approaches, we give up and return to our cave to rekindle the fire and reassemble our bed, which, over the course of last night, got scattered about the place. As I’m rebuilding pillows and settling blankets, Tarver’s crouched by the fire. Tonight he’s building it up high. Easier to be naked, he says, when you’re not freezing.
“Slumming’s not so bad, is it, Miss LaRoux?” he teases, flopping onto our makeshift bed and pulling me down on top of him.
Frustration flares, despite the urge to let it slide under the circumstances. “Do you really have to do that, after everything? Act like you’re beneath me?”
He smiles again, shrugging, dismissive. “The whole universe knows I’m beneath you, Miss LaRoux. It doesn’t bother me.”
“Fifty thousand people on that ship, give or take.” I choose my words carefully. “Three thousand of them soldiers. At least a dozen decorated war heroes. I looked at you.”
He starts to speak, but I run my hand along his arm, and this is enough to make him hesitate, voice catching in his throat at my touch. This newfound power is intoxicating.
“Do you think I like you just because you saved my life? Because you know what to do and I don’t, because you make sure I eat enough and you keep me from losing my mind? Because you’re the only man on the planet?”
He protests, but I see it in his face. I’m not completely wrong.
“It is,” I whisper. “It’s because of all those things. It’s because of your strength, but it’s because of your goodness too, and your softness. You act like you inherited nothing from your mother, but that’s not true. There’s—there’s poetry in you.”
He inhales sharply, the arm around me tightening and his fingers twisting into my hair, tugging at it, tugging me close. I can’t breathe—I don’t want to. When he speaks his voice shakes a little, the way it did right before he kissed me for the first time.
“Sometimes you take all my words away from me.” He leans back onto his elbow, then pulls me down to him so he can stop me answering with the press of his lips. When he breaks the kiss I end up blinking down at him, breathless.
“I’m still not sure you’re right, Miss LaRoux,” he murmurs. “I am beneath you.”
It takes me a few seconds to see the spark of amusement in his eyes as he looks up at me. I realize he’s laughing, in his way, not at my expense but because he’s happy too. So I blurt one of the words I learned from him in his fever, and reach for the laundry bag that serves as our pillow to swing it at his head.
He catches my wrist before I come close, moving with such speed that I’m left gasping, laughing as he pulls me back down into our nest. He stops my laughter with his mouth, sending electricity crackling down my spine, like sparks resting in my belly.
Tarver tilts his head to kiss me behind my ear, teasing. I lift my chin and he makes his way down my throat, the softness of his mouth at a sharp contrast to the roughness of the stubble on his face.
Sparks, I think, something in the back of my mind stirring. The seed of an idea, the one I’ve been trying to ignore, leaps into a fully fledged plan.
“We should blow the doors off the station.”
Tarver stops mid-kiss, lifting his head and looking absolutely baffled. “We should what now?”
“The doors! They’re too thick to break open with any battering ram we could lift, but an explosion? That would do it, wouldn’t it?”
He’s blinking at me, half confused, half cranky. He doesn’t like being interrupted. “You’re being even more bewildering than usual.”
I laugh, reaching up to run my fingers through his hair. “The hovercraft, in the shed? There are fuel tanks in the back. Stack a few of those up against the door, make a fuse out of some string, and we’ve got ourselves a party.”
His expression is shifting from cranky to cautiously impressed, and I can’t help but feel a thrill of excitement that he’s impressed with me. Genuinely, without sympathy or surprise. Like equals.
“Who are you,” he says eventually, “and what have you done with my Lilac?”
My Lilac. I want to stop and revel in that, but I’m too excited by my idea. “Anna has older brothers, and when I was little we’d blow things up all the time on our tennis court. My father had to have it resurfaced so many times.” The memory causes a pang, my throat closing a little. For the loss of my cousin, for the loss of the way things were when we were children—for the loss of my own childhood.
Tarver’s eyes soften, seeing my face. “We’ll have to be careful. Clear the trees from the door, minimize the debris and the danger of a fire afterward.”
There’s an electricity in the air, a nearly tangible sense of purpose. We have a plan. I ignore the stab of pain that lances through me—now there’s a limit on our time together. A countdown clock, set to some finite amount I can’t see. Each moment is one we’ll never get together again.
“Could we use your gun to set it off?”
His lips purse, thoughtful. “The Gleidel was designed to interact with organic matter—not metallic. Meant to prevent anyone dumb enough to fire it on a ship from breaching the hull. Wouldn’t so much as scratch the tank.” He reaches out to trace his fingers along my lips.
“A fuse, then. Like we used as kids.” I close my eyes and kiss his fingers as they wander across my mouth. “I’ve never used fuel as an explosive, but the principle’s bound to be the same. A sudden impact like that should blow the doors right open, leave the rest of the station intact.”
Tarver makes a low sound in his throat, making me shiver. “Keep talking about blowing things up,” he suggests, bending his head to resume what he was doing before I interrupted him.
It takes nearly an entire day to clear the area in front of the station doors. The power tools have long since lost their charge, so we’re using rusty saws and a big pair of shears from the shed. We probably would have finished earlier, but I keep finding myself at his side without remembering the impulse to go to him. I keep demanding kisses, and he keeps dropping what he’s doing to oblige. We don’t make a very good team, distracting each other from what we’re meant to be doing. We cut down the young trees, clear away the brambles, stack four of the fuel tanks against the doors.