She stalks off down the mountain, and I wonder which one of her fancy tutors taught her this—the ability to make an exit without a door to slam, picking her way down the snowy path with her back ramrod straight in furious indignation. I wonder where she finds the strength for it.
“I’m not laughing at you,” I whisper. I adjust the pack and start to make my way down the mountain after her.
She’s learned a thing or two about trailblazing in the time she’s spent following me, and she makes good time at first, though eventually she starts to slow from exhaustion.
I can almost see my younger self, marching along, trying to keep up with his big brother as we trekked near home. I think of my parents, and my throat closes as I conjure up our cottage in my mind’s eye. My sanctuary, the place that’s always safe. No matter how I try to stay focused on what’s real, what’s in front of us, I can’t resist the thought of home.
The path—maybe a path, anyway—that we’re following curves around the side of the mountain. As we clear an outcropping and a secluded valley becomes visible below, Lilac’s head snaps up. She draws breath to speak, her eyes widening. Then it’s gone, stamped out, and she’s quiet again as she turns away to start working her way around a boulder. She has one last longing glance over her shoulder, as if whatever she sees, it’s something far preferable to our reality. On cue I see her start to shake, shivering as though cold, fingers twitching before she shoves them into her pockets.
Another vision, then. A wave of dizziness washes over me, like a sympathetic reaction—I clench my jaw before my own teeth can start to chatter. At least she knows the difference now. I ignore the part of my brain that points out that if she knows the difference between visions and reality, she can’t be that crazy. I follow in her wake, and I glance down into the valley below us.
It feels like the air’s been sucked out of my lungs. I’m caught gasping for breath, grabbing thin air for something to support me.
There’s a cottage in the valley. My parents’ cottage. It’s all there—the white walls, the rich purple of the lilac, the curving path and the red flowers in the field behind it. The faint wisp of smoke from the chimney, the black smudge to one side that must be my mother’s vegetable garden.
The path winds its way out of the valley, vanishing into the distance, through the hills toward the wreck.
It’s perfect, to the last detail. It’s my home. It’s not really there.
I can hear her voice in my head. Just once, I wish you could see what I see.
I feel her presence beside me, and she reaches out to slip her hand silently into mine. It isn’t until her fingers wind through mine that I realize I too am shaking violently.
I’m going mad.
“As a member of the military, you’ve been trained to withstand a certain degree of shock.”
“If we weren’t, I don’t think we’d last long on the front lines.”
“At any point while you were on the planet’s surface, did your training…falter?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”
“Did you ever experience any side effects from your exposure to such harsh conditions?”
“I think I lost a few pounds.”
“Major, did you ever experience any psychological side effects?”
“No. Like you said, we’re trained not to let that kind of thing happen. Solid as a rock, and just as dense.”
TWENTY-TWO
LILAC
NEVER PUT YOUR HAND OUT TO A DROWNING MAN. I saw that on an HV special once. If you do, they grab on to you and pull you into their panic and hopelessness, dragging you both into the same watery grave.
But I don’t care. I step close to him and slip my hand into his. His fingers tighten around mine with a strength born of desperation. Which of us is shaking more, I can’t tell, but where our hands are joined, we’re steadier.
He’s drowning. And I’ll drown with him.
It’s a long time before he speaks.
“I can’t—” He breaks off, voice cracking. His eyes close against the vision of his family home in the valley. A vision both of us can see. The cottage looks just like it did in his picture.
I know from experience that he’ll be dizzy, disoriented, tasting metal and feeling cobwebs on his face. I know from experience that he’ll think he’s mad. My own ears are buzzing, my body trembling, but I push it aside, force myself to focus. He needs me.
“I’m exhausted,” he goes on. “I’ve had training on this. Your mind can—when you’re tired enough…”
He thinks he’s hallucinating. Maybe it’ll be easier if he believes that. I squeeze his hand, wrapping my other around his arm. “You should rest, have some water. I’ll sit with you.”
He nods, eyes opening to fix on the house below like a starving man would stare at a banquet. He lets me pull the pack from his shoulders, doesn’t protest as I tug him down to sit on the edge of the cliff, his face haggard and strained.
I’ve never seen him afraid.
I could be smug. I could rub his nose in the fact that he has no choice now but to believe me. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But now, one look at him is enough to kill that desire. He doesn’t deserve it. And I know what it feels like to think you’re going insane.
I sit beside him, quiet, waiting. This isn’t like the silence of the past two days. For once, it’s simply that there’s nothing to say, not that there’s no way to say it. I’d wanted him to see what I see—but now I wish I could take it all back.
“I don’t know what to do.” Tarver’s voice, rough with emotion and exhaustion, trickles into the quiet.
I summon my steadiest voice. “I do. We’ll stop for the day here, and you’ll get some rest. I can make camp, I’ve watched you do it enough times. We’ll have some dinner and sleep and in the morning we’ll make for the wreck. We’ll keep going, and figure out a way off this planet, so you can go home for real.”
Tarver only swallows, the muscles in his jaw standing out briefly as he clenches it. He lets go of my hand and rakes his fingers through his hair in a quick, jerky movement. I stifle the urge to touch him again, and get quietly to work.
I don’t do anything as well as he would’ve done it. I’m still shaking from the side effects of the vision, still fighting dizziness and nausea. The cottage is the most vivid, longest-lasting vision yet—and the side effects are worse. The fire burns dangerously low because I can’t find much fuel, and the bed is lumpy. I pull out the food we have that doesn’t require boiling, since we lost our canteen. Cold dinner, cold snowmelt, and it’ll be a cold night, with no blankets. But if we have one night where nothing is right, at least it will be one night he doesn’t have to be responsible for it all.
“You see it too, don’t you?”
His voice after such a long silence makes me jump. When I look, he’s still watching the valley. The house has faded, shimmering like an afterimage as the sun retreats behind the mountain ridges. It’s a beautiful sight, even more so than the picture in his pack suggests. I would have loved to see it for real.
I gather up what I’ve pulled out for dinner and move back to Tarver’s side. “Your parents’ house?”
“Then it’s not madness. I don’t know what it is, but if we’re seeing the same thing, I’m not crazy. And neither are you.”
For a moment I want badly to remind him that I’ve been saying that all along. But I just nod, and drop down beside him to sit a few inches away. “Have something to eat.” I offer him the larger half of a ration bar and a few of the grasses that taste okay raw. We only have two ration bars left.
Finally, he looks away from the vision and blinks at me. His pupils are huge—suddenly I can see what made him look at me the way he did, like I was mad.
He’s quiet while he takes a few bites of the ration bar, and we settle into silence with the ease of familiarity. When he speaks again, his voice is soft. “We have to deal with a lot of crackpots who accuse the military of playing with mind control, telepathy. As cadets we would all joke about it, that the brass was in our heads, telling us to keep our bunks tidier. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe this place is an experiment—something in the air, or the water, that makes us see things. Some artificial, psychological connection.”
After days of silence with only my own thoughts for company, I have more than a few ideas about what we’re seeing. And I don’t think it’s so simple. But just hearing him try to work it out, without suggesting I’m simply insane, is such a relief I almost don’t want to contradict him. “But what about the cave-in? Neither of us could have known that was going to happen.”
“More than once I’ve moved from a spot that was blasted out of existence a second later. Maybe you did know, subconsciously.”
But he doesn’t sound convinced.
“Can I share a theory?” I’ve known this wasn’t a haunting since the cave-in—and now that Tarver is seeing it too, I can’t dismiss the thoughts that keep coming to me.
“Of course.”
Now I’m cursing myself. He’s going to think I’m insane again. But when I don’t reply right away, he turns to look at me as if seeing me for the first time.
“I think—there’s something here.” I lick my lips, anxious, trying to articulate it. “Life. On this planet.”
His brow furrows. Skeptical. But he’s not calling me insane—yet. “Like the cat? There’s no way that thing belongs here.”
“No—I mean, intelligent life. Maybe even something that was here before the terraforming. If it were only the visions, maybe it could be some kind of shared hallucination. But the cave-in? Neither of us could’ve known. I think something is watching us.” The words alone cause a shiver down my spine, and I see his lips twitch as though he wants to dismiss me. I scramble to speak before he can. “There are whispers, everyone knows it. Even if nobody’s ever proven anything, there are always stories about what lies beyond the edge of explored space. Even on Corinth, we hear them. The corporations that built this place must have abandoned it for a reason. Something had to drive them away.”
He’s looking less skeptical and more thoughtful now, watching me—the way he’s looking at me, I’m not even sure he’s listening to what I’m saying. The shock of seeing his parents’ house must have been worse than I realized. He clears his throat. “Don’t you think, if a corporation discovered intelligent life here, it would’ve been all over the newscasts?”
“Unless they’re keeping it hidden for some reason.” I try not to think of my father, of the rooms upon rooms of isolated, secret servers and data cores. I asked about them often as a child, but he had always managed to distract me with a gift or a story, until eventually I wasn’t even curious anymore—his secrets were just a part of who he was.