These Broken Stars (Starbound #1)(85)

She reaches for it, sliding it off my shoulders and upending it, sending supplies and belongings everywhere. The case with my family’s photo goes clattering across the floor along with the ration bars and the canteen—but it’s the journal she reaches for.

“The flower from the plains—I put it here, in these pages.” She flips through the pages, but when she gets to the end she freezes. There’s no flower there.

She starts riffling frantically through the pages, over and over, searching. “It was here, I know it was here.” She’s afraid, her voice starting to shake.

“You left that flower by the river,” I say carefully. She doesn’t remember, and how could she? She’s not Lilac. “It wilted and died, and you left it behind.”

“No,” she gasps. Her sudden distress pulls at my heart—if only I could understand the significance of this. “They brought it back. While you were sick, at the wreck, they brought it back, re-created it like the canteen. An exact copy. They did it to keep me going, to remind me how much I—” She chokes, closing her eyes. “I never told you. But I put it in here to keep it safe, and it’s gone.”

This time when I reach for the journal she lets me take it from her limp grasp, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond me, her body starting to shake. I flip through the pages but see no pressed flower there. She’s mistaken, maybe given a false memory by the beings that created her. But my stomach twists uneasily, instinct fighting against my mind’s attempt to keep her at arm’s length. She remembered that I was sick, that I had this journal. For all I know, the real Lilac did find that flower, did slip it into my journal. Her fear is so real.

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?”