And then something jerks me back. I blink again, and it’s gone—and Lilac is there, grabbing at my hand and pulling me away.
“Are you insane?” she gasps. “Don’t you remember what those papers said? If you touch it, you could bring the whole thing to a fatal collapse.”
“What?” I’m still shaking the vision of stars, the sense that I was a hairsbreadth away from understanding.
She gestures at the hypnotizing blue light inside the metal frame. “Don’t you see? This is the rift. It has to be.”
I open my mouth to respond, but before I can, the lights overhead flicker, leaving only the roiling blue electricity to light the room. The lights dim once. Yes.
“Oh, God,” Lilac whispers, her eyes on the portal. She’s sweating, her hand clammy in mine. She feels cold, too cold. I can’t tell for sure in the flickering blue light from the metal frame, but it looks like her eyes have become more sunken, the dark circles under them more pronounced.
“Lilac?”
“It’s them.”
“What—” But I can see her staring at the frame. And I realize what she means.
“The creatures, the subjects. The whispers. They are the power source for the station. This light, this energy—this is my father’s rift. A gateway between dimensions. And they’re here, trapped somehow by this metal ring they’ve built around it.”
The lights flicker madly, and overhead a number of the fluorescent lights burst, showering the metal floor with shards of glass. Within the steel frame containing the rift, the blue forks of lightning fluctuate wildly.
“Energy-based life-forms.” My voice is a whisper.
Suddenly Lilac’s weight sags, her clammy hand slipping from mine as she drops to her knees with a moan.
My heart stops, and I drop to the ground beside her.
Her pale skin is nearly translucent now—I can see the dark veins snaking up her arms. She lifts her head with an effort, gasping for breath. When I lay a hand on her shoulder, a part of her dress crumbles at my touch, drifting away. Like the flower; like the canteen.
Being this close to the whispers is killing her—the symptoms are a thousand times worse. I have to get her out of here. I wrap an arm around her and drag her to her feet, more of her dress turning to dust with every movement. The fabric flutters and flakes away, drifting through the air like ash. I haul off my jacket and wrap it around her, then swing her up into my arms.
They’re the power source, I hear her voice echo.
And they’re running out.
My mind shuts down, and I turn to carry her back out through the doorway. All I know is that I have to get her out of here.
She recovers enough to grab at the ladder a little as we climb back up to the surface, and I help her into one of the chairs in the common room. I’m as gentle as I can be, but she still winces. It’s clear she has a link with the creatures in the rift that I don’t. The energy flowing through the station is the same as the energy flowing through her, the life force keeping her here with me.
She fixes her gaze on the far wall as she tries to steady herself, and for a moment my heart stops as I see her go still. Then I realize she’s staring at the savage paintings we try so hard to ignore.
I follow her gaze to a figure painted in red.
“Tarver, I know what the paintings are.” Her voice is a cracked whisper now, quivering with intensity. “Do you see?” She lifts one hand, the effort obvious, to point at the next in the sequence, also in red, and then the next. “He’s there again. See the handprint beside it? It’s the same. In this first one, he breaks his neck. Here, it’s the spear. Here, he’s burning. It’s the same man, over and over. Tarver, the researchers stationed here did this to themselves.” Her voice is raw, and she’s forcing the words out of her throat. “And then they were brought back, like me.”
“Holy—you’re right.” My mind’s whirling, freewheeling, trying to find something to latch on to. “They came back again and again.”
The figures painted on the wall are clearly distinguishable, and suddenly I can see each individual going through death after death, the pictures surrounded by the handprints, and the LaRoux lambda, painted large and bold beside them. Suddenly the recurring blue spirals scattered throughout the paintings have a new meaning. The rift, and its prisoners.
Her gaze sweeps across the paintings, which become wilder, more frenetic, and slowly degenerate into primitive daubs I can barely make out. At the end of the stream of pictures is a single handprint, smeared.
Then nothing.
I know we’re both seeing the same thing. This is what they found here.
They died, and lived again, and found madness somewhere in between. They came here to study the creatures that gave me Lilac again, or to kill them, perhaps, and discovered a kind of twisted immortality.
Until—what? Until the whispers were too weak to bring them back anymore and power the station at the same time, and the researchers died for good? Until LaRoux Industries pulled them out, and buried this place?
I’m still staring when Lilac brings one hand down against the floor with a dull smack. “Why would anyone choose this? Living in limbo, in constant fear that you’ll crumble away?” Her voice is ragged, broken.
I wish I could reach out, wrap my arms around her. Instead the distance between us feels like a canyon. “Maybe it was different for them, when this place was at full power. We only have the remains, what the company left behind.”
“And when I do fade away, they won’t have the energy to bring me back.”
She sounds as though that’s what she wants. My breath fails me, and I’m left staring at her, aching.
“I just want to sleep,” she whispers, eyes dark in her white face, transformed by her longing. “I wish it—because you’d be heartbroken, and you’d mourn, but you’d—you’d heal. They’d find the signal and you could go home. And you’d have your parents, and the garden, and… Then the station could die, and the whispers could rest. I could rest. That’s all we want. Real rest, not that coldness, that—”
“Lilac, I don’t need to heal. I don’t want to.” My voice is as broken as hers. “I want you. We’ll find a way to stop this, get the power to keep you whole. I won’t lose you a second time.”
“You’re not losing anything, Tarver. I was already gone.” Her struggle’s written all over her face, eyes closing tight, mouth pressed to a thin line that doesn’t keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks.
For the first time I can see this other longing—the desire to stay. For the first time I realize that maybe she insists on us staying apart because she doesn’t want to lose this all over again.
I slide my hand forward a fraction of an inch at a time, until I can slip my hand into hers. She closes her eyes, breath catching. If my touch hurts her, she doesn’t pull away.
“Whatever they’ve done to me, Tarver, whatever I am—I love you. Don’t forget that.”
I gather her against me, her hair spilling over my chest, her face in the crook of my neck. I hold her until she falls asleep, her breath warm against my skin. It should feel like a victory: she’s here, with me, finally coming into herself again. Instead, all it feels like is a good-bye.
The rungs of the metal ladder are cold against my palms as I climb beneath the station once more. Though it’s night aboveground, down here the light is the same harsh, steady fluorescence. My footsteps echo as I walk along the hallway to the humming room.
The rift waits for me, blue light curling about inside the circular steel frame of the containment device.
Whispers rise up, and the metal frame crackles with the electricity of the beings trapped there. There must be a way these creatures can help me save Lilac. The images they showed us come flooding back—a valley full of flowers, my parents’ cottage as large and colorful as life, a single blossom in Lilac’s darkest hour to keep her going. I refuse to believe a species capable of such compassion could be so cruel.
I stare up at the snapping, electric-blue glow of the rift, desperate to somehow decode these beings, to understand why they reached out to lead us here from so far away. Frustration surges up inside me as I stare at the ever-changing blue light. I’m running out of time, and I’m no closer to saving her.
The whispers rush into my ears once more, shapes flickering at the edges of my vision. My heart pounds.
All this way, all this pain, and now they can’t find a way to just give me their damn message?
“What the hell do you want from me?” My voice is hoarse.
The whispers surge, as if in reply. But of course, as ever, there’s no sense to be found there. No answers. No way out for Lilac.
“Go on, then.” I fight the urge to strike at the damned thing with my bare fists, to attack the problem the only way I know how. “You’ve got me here. I trekked all the way across your damn planet. What do you want me to do?”
Silence, broken only by the crackle and snap of electricity, and the humming of the machinery. If I can’t figure out a way to stop this, Lilac’s not going to last much longer. And this time it’s going to happen slowly, and I’m going to have to watch her die all over again.
Like hell I am. Something in me snaps. I wheel around, slamming my hands down on the control box attached to the metal frame around the rift. I hit one of the dimly lit screens, the plasma rippling at my touch. I strike it again, and again, until the plastic cracks and the monitor frame warps and my arm throbs with the impact, and it’s still not enough.
Every step of this journey, every ounce of pain, everything I’ve found in her. It can’t end here. There’s a chair in my hands now, and sparks fly as I slam it into the metal framework. My mouth tastes like copper, and the room reels around me. Someone far away is bellowing grief and frustration, the blood roaring dimly in my ears. I bring down the chair again, and again, caving in the control box and the monitors attached to the rift, sending up sparks and smoke, intent only on destruction.
Then there’s another voice, shouting to be heard over my grief.
“Tarver. Tarver.”
I whirl around, shaking with fury and helplessness. Alec stands on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets. The air goes out of my lungs.
“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.