I walk left of center along the path we wore through the trees, leaving room for her at my side.
I eat, breaking the ration bar in half automatically before I realize I have nobody to hand it to.
I go back to the mound of flowers, adding fresh ones, taking out those that die each day.
I can’t count the days.
I can’t think.
I can’t focus.
I can’t go into the building. I can’t leave.
I sleep again. I eat again.
I fall asleep each night with the cold metal barrel of the Gleidel against my throat.
I see her again as I duck out of the afternoon sunlight and into the cave, arms laden with another load of wood. She’s standing with her back to me, beside our bed—where her body lay for a night. This time there’s no false sunlight, no vision of my parents’ cottage. She’s wearing the same green dress she was wearing when we crashed, as ragged and ruined as it was when she finally traded it for clothes from the wreck. She always wears that dress, in my memory.
She turns her head, and I feel a sick rush. They’re doing it again. I’m not angry. Just tired and hurting. I don’t want this vision. It feels like they’re trying to force me to keep moving, trying to keep me from giving in. Don’t let her death be for nothing, they’re saying. But it is for nothing. I am nothing, without her.
“I told you to stop.” My voice is a hoarse growl, roughened with disuse. It’s been days since I’ve spoken. I don’t know how many. “I’m not doing anything for you.”
She jerks at the sounds of my voice, turning abruptly to face me. Her face is a pale smear in the darkness, but I hear her gasp, and the hitch of her breath. She doesn’t speak. They never speak, these visions. The voices only came to Lilac on the wind, disembodied, incomprehensible. I never heard them. “Please, don’t.” I don’t know if they can understand me when I speak, but maybe they’ll read the grief in my thoughts.
She lurches backward, stumbling over the pile of supplies and knocking the canteen over to clang against a rock. She clamps her hands over her ears, crying out as she backs up to press herself against the stone wall, her breathing harsh, audible over the echoes.
There’s something wrong. Something different. My mind is sluggish, struggling to understand what’s changed. The canteen. The noise. This vision is solid—it can touch things.
“How did you do that?” I’m asking them, but she’s the one that cringes.
I walk farther into the cave, slow and cautious.
She flinches at every footstep and presses herself back against the cave wall. She’s watching me like a trapped animal, gaze skittering away from me, then drawn back again—as though she can’t quite look at me, and can’t quite look away.
I want to close my eyes at the sight of her. I want to drink her in. “Please.” I’m not sure what I’m asking for.
I’m only a few feet away when she cries out like she’s in pain, lurching sideways and stumbling away from me. She trips over a stalagmite, crashing down onto her hands and knees—she scrambles up with a desperate haste, and I tear after her as she disappears through the cave’s entrance.
And then I see it, a thrill of shock running through me. A smear of blood where she squeezed through the narrow opening.
How could a vision be bleeding?
My tiredness falls away now as instinct sends adrenaline surging through my limbs, and I dodge through the trees after her as she runs along the bank of the stream. I don’t realize where she’s heading until we’re nearly there.
She only halts when she reaches the center of the clearing, stopping sharply at the bloodstained, flattened spot in the middle of it where Lilac died. There, she drops to her knees, chest heaving as she struggles for breath, one hand lifted to shield her eyes from the pale light of the sun.
I stop at the edge of the clearing, resting one hand against the tree beside me. The bark is rough under my fingers, a contrast to the smooth grip of the Gleidel in my other hand. I don’t remember drawing it. “What are you? Where did you come from?”
Her breath catches again, her long shadow quivering as she trembles. It’s only then that I realize my hands are steady, my eyes clear. This is no vision.
She lifts her head to look across at me. Her face is flushed with exertion, streaked with tears. The eyes that gazed up lifelessly at the sky are wide and fearful now. Her mouth moves slowly, haltingly, as though it’s an effort to speak at all.
“T-Tarver?”
“And you didn’t notice anything unusual?”
“Unusual.”
“About the structure, Major.”
“Oh. No. Nothing unusual.”
“Then why did you and Miss LaRoux remain at the station?”
“She believed that rescue teams might be aware of the building’s location, and look for us there.”
“And you?”
“I was tired of coming up with new plans.”
THIRTY-THREE
LILAC
TOO BRIGHT, TOO LOUD. Harsh on my skin, in my eyes. The world tastes like ash and acid, and I am drowning in the air.
He sits opposite, against the stone. He led me here, this cave, made me sit where he could watch. The sun outside has gone while he stared at me, leaving us in darkness. The thing is still in his hand. Gun, my mind supplies. His gaze is burning me.
I press my shoulder blades against the wall at my back and clench my jaw at the pain. Every inch of me is raw. The fabric on my body scalds me, like I have no skin, like I’m only blood and bone and pain.
And he stares, always staring, watching me, waiting for something.
Tarver, I know. I know him. I know—
He shifts, the whisper of his shoe on the stone screaming across the distance between us. I gasp, try to retreat through the stone. But I am blood and bone, and I cannot pass that way.
He jumps as I flinch, the barrel of the gun retraining on me, a cold metal eye in the darkness.
“What are you?”
His voice—I can’t hear it. It’s all wrong. Not supposed to—
“Answer me.”
He’s so angry. So afraid. I remember—I want to take that fear away. But I don’t know how. I can’t move, pinned to the wall by his stare. I can feel him dissecting me, peeling me away layer by layer, trying to understand.
I swallow, trying to remember how to answer. “Lilac,” I whisper, the name sounding strange. I try again, better this time. “Lilac.”
His face ripples, muscles standing out as he clenches his jaw. He leans forward, gesturing with the gun.
“We both know that’s not true. She’s dead.”
Dead.
Dead.
“Tarver.” I try his name again, and it sounds better on my lips than my own. “I don’t—”
“Don’t say it!” He’s on his feet, electrified, blazing in the glare of the dark cave. “You say it like—like her.”
Then I remember. “Your Lilac.”
He’s across the space between us before my eyes can follow him, pushing me back against the wall; his hand grasps my shoulder, sending ribbons of pain down my arm.
“Don’t say that.”
The grief and horror on his face cut deep. I don’t recognize my own hand as it reaches for his face.
“Tarver, it’s me.”
His hand clenching my shoulder shifts, slides up to touch my cheek. Fire. It’s all I can do not to jerk away. Grief and anger battle on his features, banishing the flicker of hope that surges there.
“What are you?” he repeats, whispering this time. I realize the gun was pressed against me only when he lowers it, letting it clatter to the ground.
I wish he had pulled the trigger. It would have been easier.
I make myself look in his eyes, fighting every instinct to flee, to find some way back to the dark and the cold and the quiet.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you and Miss LaRoux wonder why the structure was abandoned?”
“We wondered, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.”
“Why is that?”
“We had no information.”
“And no theories?”
“We had better things to do than speculate.”