Paint dribbles down from the walls to the monitors. Some of the paintings are orderly, almost artistic, painted with sensitivity and planning. Clearly identifiable. But overlaid on these murals are cruder, savage depictions of death and carnage, of men and animals fighting and dying. Gaudy crimson streams from a gash across one figure’s throat. Another is impaled by a thick slash of black paint, some kind of spear. Red flames stream up from a bonfire laden with bodies.
“They went mad,” she whispers, fearful, and I shove my hands in my pockets to keep myself from reaching out to take her hand.
I know what she’s thinking—something about this planet sent the people stationed here insane. If an entire station of monitoring specialists, researchers, and whoever else was posted here fell apart so completely, what chance do we have? At least we’re starting to get a picture of why this place was abandoned. Why the entire planet stands empty and forgotten. I tear my eyes away from the walls and focus on the lights overhead. We have to keep moving.
I clear my throat, and she startles. “If there’s a generator we could turn it off. Disrupt the power, and if they’re monitoring it, somebody might show up to do maintenance. Or maybe they’re broadcasting updates, we could hack that and try signaling prime numbers to show someone’s here?”
“I think we can do better,” she says, swallowing hard. Her skin’s pale beneath her freckles, but her voice is firmer. I can see it’s still an effort to remain composed. Discussing the circuitry and power sources was the right move—like my Lilac, these things interest her. “I think perhaps we could send a real signal.”
She drags her eyes away from the paintings and walks slowly back to the circuit breakers. Slowly, she closes the cover so I can see the mark stamped on it. It looks like an upside-down V, but everyone in the universe knows that symbol. Even I know it, out in the muddy far reaches of the galaxy. Especially there.
The lambda. LaRoux Industries. Not only was this an abandoned terraforming project—it was Lilac’s father’s.
She says nothing, turning her back on the symbol. We move around the monitoring room, exploring the hatches and machinery, trying to ignore the feeling that the primal figures in the paintings are watching us. We turn for the next door at the same time, and if it had been my Lilac, I would’ve reached down to wind my fingers through hers. Instead I just stand there, motionless, and let her through ahead of me.
The hall leads to a dormitory full of bunks, and a shower—I press the button and wait as long-disused pipes gurgle and groan a protest, then provide a stuttering flow of water. Half a minute later it steadies out, then begins to heat up. We both stare at it like we’ve never seen running water before.
“This isn’t right,” she says. “The lights, the hot water. A generator alone couldn’t be doing this, especially after being abandoned so long. There must be another power source.”
I reach out and hold my hand under the flow, watching hypnotized as the water curves around my fingers and streams off their tips. It’s such a small thing, a shower—and then again, it’s everything we haven’t had. It’s cleanliness and food on plates, and sitting in a chair instead of on a rock. It’s civilization, safety. Of course, safety has come too late.
She crosses to inspect a bunch of cables where they plug into a bank of silent computers. “These cables lead downstairs. We should follow them and see where they go.”
“Downstairs?” I glance around the confined room. “These places don’t usually have an underground level. Are you sure it’s not just wiring under the floor?”
“I’m sure,” she says, tugging aside a panel to get at the keypad below it. “There’s too many of them; there has to be more underneath us.”
Observant and thoughtful, just like Lilac. I can barely look at her, and yet I can’t look away. Her every word and gesture, every look she gives me…they’re all Lilac’s. But this isn’t her. I watched you die, my mind screams at her. I held you while you bled to death.
In the end I have to leave, put space between us, on the pretext of looking for the underground level she insists is here. It takes me twenty minutes of searching the small base, but eventually I find it. The floor in the hallway is faintly worn, but only halfway. When I crouch to pull up the rubber floor mats, raising a small cloud of grit and dust, I find a hatch.
It’s locked, and I try digging my fingers in and prying it out. That doesn’t work, and after a few tries I give up. Time for a little gentle persuasion, as my first sergeant used to say.
I stomp hard on the hinges, the vibrations traveling up through my heel. The plastene cracks, but in the end I have to head out to the shed to retrieve the crowbar. In the main room, all I can see is a flash of red hair vanishing below one of the banks of controls as she tries to find out what’s underneath. She doesn’t look up as I pass by. I yank the hatch cover free. A ladder disappears down into the dark.
I’ve seen a lot of terraforming monitoring stations—this doesn’t come standard.
I take a deep breath. “It’s open,” I call out, and a few moments later she walks through to stand beside me, looking down into the dark. There’s no switch up here—the lights must be operated from down below. I grab my pack—I’ve gotten trapped in half-destroyed buildings before, and I’m not about to explore without food and water. I head down first and then reach up to steady her as she climbs after me, her breathing growing quick and shallow.
She drops down beside me and then steps away from my hand—still loath to let me touch her. I can’t see my hand in front of my face, and the air is perfectly still. It doesn’t feel close and stuffy, but that doesn’t tell me much. It’s bone-achingly cold down here.
We feel around in the dark for the lights and bump into each other, and I wince at the sound of her gasp.
“Where the hell is the switch?” I stumble against the ladder, stifling my curse as my elbow collides with the metal.
As if in answer, a light flickers on overhead. It’s a pale, fluorescent ceiling panel that does little to illuminate anything beyond arm’s reach. We seem to be at one end of a corridor; the rest of it is lost in darkness. We stand frozen by the sudden light, faces turning up toward it, blinking.
“Was that you?” I ask, despite the fact that she’s standing in the middle of the corridor, nowhere near any switch I can see.
She shakes her head no. In the fluorescent light she looks even paler than she does by daylight. “It’s like something heard you.”
The light flickers, dropping us back into darkness for the space of a heartbeat and then creeping back to life again. I turn, searching again for the switch—but she’s found it first. She stands to one side of the hallway, staring at the switch as I cross to her side.
“It’s off,” she whispers, glancing at me wide-eyed in the dim, wavering light.
“But how…”
She suddenly straightens, staring upward at the light. I know that look—it means Lilac’s thought of something. But this isn’t Lilac. It’s a copy. Not real.
“If you can hear us,” she says slowly, “blink the light three times.”
On command the light cuts out once, twice—we wait, silent. I’m holding my breath. Then the lights click out a third time, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
“Once for yes, twice for no.” I swallow, my mouth dry. “Are you trying to hurt us?”
The lights flicker twice. No.
“Warn us?”
A brief pause, then three flickers. Is that a maybe?
“Communicate something else?”
YES.
“Where are you? Why won’t you come out and talk to us?” I don’t trust anyone who refuses to show themselves.
The lights remain even—there’s no answer to that question. I lift both hands to scrub at my face. “Are you able to come and talk to us?”
No.
I look over, catching Lilac’s eye. She looks back at me, face drained of all color. Then she takes over, her voice quieter than mine, echoing down the corridor.
“Are you what’s been sending us visions? Leading us here?”
Yes.
“Did you bring the flower back?”
Pause. Yes. No.
Flower? What flower? I want to ask, but Lilac’s riveted, her eyes on the lights, scanning them for signs of flickering.
“I don’t understand,” Lilac’s saying. “You brought it back…but didn’t? Not completely?”
Yes. “Are you even—” She shakes her head, tries a different way. “Are you capable of showing yourselves? Do you have a physical form?”
There’s a long pause, and then the lights flicker twice. No.
Her voice drops to a whisper. “Are you ghosts?”
No.
She takes a slow, wavering breath. “Are you the ones that brought me back?”
The lights flicker once. Then we’re plunged into utter darkness.
I hear her gasp. “No! Wait—come back! I have questions—what am I? Why did you bring me back?” She hits the switch on the wall and the lights come on for real, steady and cold. The switch clicks as she flips it on and off frantically. I can see her face as if flickering in a strobe light. “Please—come back!”
Eventually I tug her away from the switch. She’s so distraught she doesn’t even notice that I’m touching her for a few moments. Then she comes to life and jerks away, shoulders hunched.
“What were you talking about? What flower?”
She straightens. “Your pack—is your journal in there?”
“Yes, but—”
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.