These Broken Stars (22 page)

It’s Lilac who finds the fault line that lets us in. A sheet of metal has eased away from the unbroken wall a fraction, rivets showing, only darkness within. We don’t speak as we get to work, lining up side by side to take hold of it and lean back, muscles straining to bend it and make the hole a little bigger. I feel like telling her to take a rest, but when I glance down at her, her jaw’s squared and her frown is determined. Maybe she’s not quite as weak as I thought—and maybe I’m not as strong or as heavy as I was when we landed.

An instant after I finish that thought, red-hot pain cuts across my palm, and I let go, stumbling back from the metal sheet and whipping my hand free. The metal springs back into place and Lilac nearly gets her own fingers trapped. I should have been concentrating, heeding my own advice. Now there’s an angry red line across my palm, and a moment later there’s blood, oozing, then flowing freely.

“Tarver, are you—oh.” She curses admirably, then turns businesslike, hauling the pack off my shoulder and dropping to the ground to dig out our pathetic first-aid kit. All I can do is lift my bleeding hand above my head, and use my free hand to squeeze the wrist, trying to limit the blood flow, but it’s deep. I can tell already.

“Where did you learn to say that, Miss LaRoux?” I try, keeping my 
voice light.

“You just wait until it’s my father asking that same question, Major.” She pulls out the little kit and starts to unpack it. “Then you’ll know what real trouble is. Come down here, I’ll try and bandage it up.”

“I plan on being far away by the time the subject arises.” I carefully 
sink to my knees. “Exiled to some far colony to fight the rebels, in punishment for making eyes at his daughter.”

“You keep your eyes to yourself.” The wound’s bleeding properly now, and she wads up one of our bandages with our only gauze pad to press it against my palm, then straps it all into place with the other bandage. I wince as the pain begins to register properly, burning its way up my arm.

“Baby,” she teases, wrapping the bandage around my palm. Despite 
her best efforts, though, the blood starts showing through the bandages 
while she’s still packing away the nearly empty first-aid kit.

It turns out we’ve bent the metal far enough that she can wriggle in, and I wait anxiously as she turns herself sideways and squirms, pulling herself inch by inch into the darkness. “Keep checking you can move backward,” I say, squatting down to try to get a better look at her progress. “You don’t want to get stuck. And check with your fingertips before you grab anything.”

Her legs disappear, and I hold my breath, waiting. My heart hammers in my chest. There’s a clang, and the metal sheet shudders as she kicks from inside, then kicks again. It bends more easily with force in that direction, and once the gap is wide enough, I stoop to crawl in after her.

The air inside the ship is cold and still, but it smells okay. It’s not as dark as I’d feared—small breaks in the hull let in speckled daylight, though it won’t be much good once we go deeper. I keep my hand tucked against my body, hoping the bleeding will slow.

“We should be in a storage area.” Her voice startles me. “Cargo, luggage maybe. Some services as well.”

“There were a lot of troops on board. I’d love to find some rations. They taste like cardboard, but they’re nutritionally complete and they’ll keep forever.” I feel like biting my tongue as soon as I’m finished. I’ve been trying hard not to mention the possibility that forever is exactly how long we’ll be stuck here.

“There’s a proper hallway up ahead.” She disappears from view again, and then I realize her body was blocking the light as she climbed out of the service duct we’re in and into a passage. It’s tilted at a forty-five- degree angle, but we can keep our footing if we’re careful. I hold open the pack so she can fish out the flashlight, and suddenly we can see.

The first two doors we try are jammed shut by the warping of the 
ship, but the third one swings open. The room’s full of crates that have 
tumbled and smashed, and piles of circuitry litter the floor. Useless.

Lilac pushes open the next door, and I try the other side of the hallway.

“No use,” she calls as I push my door open.

Inside, there are piles of fabric everywhere, sheets and clothes all down one side of the room, lying together where they fell. I’ve hit the mother lode. It’s got to be the laundry. I don’t know if the stuff in here is clean or not, but it’s got to be cleaner than we are.

“Remember that ladylike behavior of yours?” I call out, letting her hear the smile in my voice. “This is the time for it. No pushing, shoving, screaming, or—”

I don’t get any further. She’s heard the shift in my voice and crossed the hallway in a heartbeat. She wastes only a moment in gaping, then shoves past me to dash across to the pile of clothes, laughing.

“Tarver,
Tarver
. There are—can you see them all?” She’s running the 
flashlight over the offerings, revealing swaths of fabric of every color.

I’ve got my mouth half open to reply when she starts unzipping the mechanic’s suit, and then my mouth falls the rest of the way open by itself. It’s dark inside the room, but I catch a quick glimpse of pale skin beneath the remnants of her dress before I remember myself, and decide to take a good, hard look at my boots. To judge by the sounds over on the other side of the room, she’s forgotten I exist. The mechanic’s suit must have been
really
uncomfortable, even wearing it over her dress, if she’s that eager to get it off while I’m standing right here.

“There’s dresses,” she whispers, and I catch a movement in my peripheral vision. Oh, God, come
on
. It’s the mechanic’s suit and the ruined green dress being kicked across the floor away from her. So what does that mean she’s wearing right now? She didn’t actually
say
I couldn’t look.

“Don’t look,” she cautions me, as though she just read my mind.

Dammit.

I turn away and hold my palm out to examine it in a small stripe of light that falls near the doorway. The bandages are red, and it’s throbbing to the regular beat of my pulse. I wish it would stop. The scratch itself is nothing, and I’ve had far worse in the field, but never without any hope at all of a medic or stitches. It’ll just have to be all right.

“There are sheets, we can make a bed. A proper bed, imagine. We 
won’t know what to do with it.” She’s laughing as she speaks.

Oh, trust me, Miss LaRoux. I’d know what to do with it. I can think up a whole list of things, if you like.

“You can turn around now.”

I turn slowly, sure I’m going to see her clad in something frilly and impractical, but I can’t make out a thing because she’s got the flashlight pointed at me. Then she changes the angle of the light so I can see her, and I find myself staring.

She’s picked out a pair of jeans and a pale blue shirt, and standing there barefoot with her hair hauled back out of her face, freckles dusting her nose and cheeks, she looks perfect. She looks nothing like a princess, but she looks exactly like a girl from home. She smiles, and her dimples show, and my words get stuck in my throat.

She seems to take my slack-jawed silence as approval, and hands over the flashlight, politely turning to face the doorway so I can pick out some clothes for myself. I spare a thought for the man whose fatigues I find, but I’m most comfortable in khaki, and he was about my size. I find a new pair of pants and a T-shirt and ease into both using one hand, then call out to her so we can gather up some spares and extra layers.

I show her how to tear up a sheet to make bandages—I can’t use my hand for much at all now—and we make up a better dressing for my gash. She works carefully, using a pillowcase to wipe the blood away, then emptying what’s left of the tiny bottle of antiseptic over my palm. We’ve used most of it on scratches and scrapes, and now I’m regretting that. Once she’s finished, she sets another pad gently against the gash, then swathes my hand in bandages, so my fingers poke out the top.

We fill the canteen from one of the water tanks in the laundry, then find big white bags and fill them to bursting with spare clothes and a pile of sheets to make up our bed, carrying one each as we make our way back out to the hallway.

“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.”

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.