“Do we have enough for dinner tonight?” she asks. “I guess we’ll eat the rations you got out of the pod, then we can make camp. It’s getting dark.”
I follow her gaze and realize she’s right—the daylight coming in through the cracks in the ship’s hull is fading out. I should have been the one to notice that.
She starts toward the doorway dragging her bag of laundry, but I swing the flashlight over to where she changed her clothes. “Want me to grab your dress?”
Her eyes follow the beam of the flashlight toward the pile of dirty green satin. The corner of her mouth lifts in a rueful smile, and then she shakes her head briskly. “Leave it,” she decides, turning her back on what’s left of her old life.
We push and pull our laundry bags through the service chute once more and find a place to camp in the lee of a huge, twisted sheet of metal outside. There’s a stream nearby, and if the wreckage has contaminated the water, the canteen’s filter should take care of it.
We haven’t seen any sign of a living soul, but I dig our fire pit deep anyway, trying in vain to keep my hand clean. It’s still throbbing. Lilac busies herself making an elaborate bed, sorting the clothes into piles, then covering her efforts up with a sheet. After a moment’s consideration, she stuffs a few items into the white laundry bags and makes us pillows.
We don’t have a lot of fuel—a little we carried in, and a little we find nearby—but it’s enough to heat a canteen of water and make ourselves some weak soup, and it helps make the ration bars a little more of a meal.
We talk about the things we want to try to salvage from the ship—medical supplies, food, warmer clothes, even a cooking pot—and study the silhouette of the wreck against the stars. I wonder whether we can climb her to get a better look at the terrain around us.
Lilac falls asleep with her head on my shoulder, and I carefully tug the sheets up over us, trying not to use more than two fingers.
No sign of the whispers. I can’t help but wonder what it means. In coming to the wreck, have we done whatever they were trying to communicate? Or are they still watching, waiting? I don’t understand—or trust—their intentions.
I suppose something could be preventing them from reaching us. Maybe now we’re on our own.
“Significant parts of the ship were intact?”
“You’ve got the recon pictures.”
“I’m asking a question, Major.”
“You’re asking a lot of questions you know the answers to. Is there a purpose to that?”
“Is there a purpose behind your refusal to cooperate?”
“I’m cooperating. Is that water coming anytime soon?”
“The ship. Significant parts of it were intact?”
“Parts weren’t incinerated, but I wouldn’t say they were intact.”
“You conducted salvage without incident?”
“I cut my hand. That was about as exciting as it got.”
TWENTY-FOUR
LILAC
EXPLORING THE SHIP IS A MIND-NUMBING TASK. Even though huge portions of it broke apart during its descent or were crushed on impact, it was originally large enough to hold fifty thousand people, with room to spare. Getting through just a fraction of it will take days. For every room we find with useful supplies there are dozens where everything is smashed, or where a fire swept through and left only shriveled plastene and unidentifiable char behind.
Tarver’s been hiding his hand from me. At first, I assumed he was protecting me from the fact he’s not invincible, for fear I’d fall apart.
But the morning of the second day, I know something’s wrong. His face is white, with spots of red on either cheek, and his eyes take longer to focus than they should. He’s too quiet. He’s moving slowly. He doesn’t even comment now when I turn his own foul language back at him. Just grunts and keeps moving.
We break for lunch deep inside the ship, sitting on an overturned cabinet in what was once an administrative office of some kind. There’s no daylight, and we can see only with the help of the flashlight. He gives me two thirds of the ration bar. I give back the extra and he shakes his head, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his head drop between them.
“Tarver,” I start cautiously. “We should take a rest day, maybe. We’re low on rations, but not so low that we can’t put off finding food here for a little while longer.”
He shakes his head again, not bothering to lift it.
“Like we did on the plains, when I needed a break. We took a half day.”
This time he does lift his head, and his eyes wander before coming to rest on me. “No. We need to keep moving.”
“Tarver.” This time my voice is firmer. I don’t think I can bully him, but I have to try. “You clearly need rest. We should take a break, and I’ll go find some of the grasses you showed me on the plains, and we’ll eat those to stretch our food supplies.”
He doesn’t answer this time, but I can tell by the set of his jaw that he’s determined to keep going. Then the fingers of his right hand tug at the grubby bandage covering his left, and suddenly realization hits me.
It’s not the food stores he’s desperate for. He needs to find the sick bay. He needs medicine.
I look at his hand again. It hangs uselessly off his wrist, fingers puffy and stiff. The color on his cheeks is visible in the half-light, and despite the chill in the air, he’s sweating.
“Go back.” I’m speaking fast, white-hot fear driving me. “Tarver, go back to camp right now. Go to bed.”
This summons the first smile in hours. “Sound like my mother.”
For once, I’m not in the mood for his jokes. “I mean it. Move, soldier.” Though I can’t quite inject the barking tone he employs when trying to jolt me into action, I hope the words will be enough.
He looks at me, hollow-eyed, then tightens his jaw as his gaze drifts off again. “Not going to let you wander around here by yourself. You get hurt, there’s no one to help. It would take me ages to find you, if I did at all.”
I get up and kneel on the floor in front of him, reaching up to turn his face toward mine and forcing him to meet my eyes.
“And I’m not going to let you get sick from an infection because you’re too stupid to take care of yourself. I’ll be careful.”
His mouth twists, for all the world like a child refusing to take his medicine. He knows my chances of making any headway by myself are slim. If he weren’t here I’d have died any one of a thousand deaths already on this godforsaken planet.
And then I know how to convince him.
“If you die,” I whisper, my eyes on his, “then I will too.”
By the time I return from the ship to camp again, night has fallen, and Tarver is only half-conscious. It didn’t take long for me to find one of the food stores—but even the sight of dried pasta and spices and sugar couldn’t relieve the knot of tension twisting in my chest. I ought to be relieved—we were on our last few ration bars. But hunger is no longer our biggest problem.
The packets are all stamped with the stylized upside down V of my father’s logo—the Greek lambda, for LaRoux. My father and his stupid fixation on mythology. He told me all the old stories when I was little, of warring gods and goddesses, and I almost imagined he was one of them. All-powerful, all-knowing. Someone to be worshipped unconditionally. But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possesses that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?
I’ve stopped waiting for him to come for me. There are no ships flying over the crash site. No one’s looking for us here. With a jolt, I realize that by now my father must think I’m dead. There are no rescue ships, so they must not know where the Icarus went down—she could have fallen out of hyperspace anywhere in the galaxy. He already lost my mother. I’ve been all he’s had since I was eight years old. I try to imagine him now, knowing I’m gone—and my mind just goes blank.
I wonder if the engineers who designed the Icarus are still alive, or if his vengeance has already destroyed them.
I shiver, tracing the shape of the logo with my fingertips, as I did countless times throughout my childhood. It would be easier not to connect this twisted heap of wreckage, this mass grave, with the flagship of my father’s company.
I make three trips back inside the ship, my last lugging a pot full of spices and boxes of powdered broth. I make a fire, heat some soup, try to get Tarver to drink. He wakes up only reluctantly, and only after shoving me away in his sleep. I get a few spoonfuls of broth down him before he collapses again. I get the camp ready for the night, checking to be sure the fire isn’t visible beyond our little hollow, that our belongings are all close, that Tarver’s gun is at his side, where it belongs.
I lug some water from the stream nearby and use strips of the sheets to wipe his face and throat, which are burning hot to the touch. I’m afraid to unwrap his hand because I have nothing sterile with which to wrap it back up again, but the skin around the bandage is flushed red and painful-looking.
Eventually I run out of tasks and crawl into the bed beside him. He’s so warm that despite the chill, it’s uncomfortably hot under the blankets. Nevertheless, I slip close to him so I can feel his heartbeat and smell his scent, grass and sweat and something else I can’t name. Familiar, comforting. In his sleep, his good arm curls around me, just a little.
I’m awakened in darkness by someone shoving me roughly off the makeshift mattress and onto the hard ground. My mind is slow to wake, and for a few moments I can only think another survivor has found us and is trying to see if we have anything worth stealing. My heart is pumping pure adrenaline, my every nerve screaming.
Then I realize it’s Tarver who shoved me away. As I pick myself up I hear him murmuring to himself, and my heart leaps. He’s awake. Surely this is a good sign. The sky is partially cloudy, blocking the light from the artificial mirror-moon.
I crawl toward the coals of the fire and throw on a few pieces of deadwood until it flares up, letting me see his face.
My heart sinks.
He’s staring right through me, his eyes wild and glassy, and—I would’ve thought it impossible if I hadn’t seen him above the valley with the vision of his house—afraid. His muttering is unintelligible, his lips dry and cracked.
“Tarver?” I crawl toward him. “I’ll get you some water. Let me just—”
I start to reach for his forehead, to feel his temperature, when I’m suddenly knocked over, sent rolling in the dirt, my head ringing and throbbing. The stars overhead weave and waver as my vision clouds, and it’s only with a monumental effort that I claw my way back toward consciousness, dizzily dragging myself back upright.
Tarver’s half sitting up with his gun pointed directly at my face, though his eyes are staring into space. His face is set in a snarl far more fierce than anything I could’ve imagined from him. The spot where the back of his hand connected with my cheek throbs and radiates heat with each pulse of my heart.
“Tarver?” It’s barely a whisper.