“Us,” I echo aloud, halting on the threshold.
Tarver stops a few steps into the room and looks back at me. “Lilac?”
I swallow, shake my head. “Please. No. I’ll sleep out in the common room.”
Tarver turns and reaches for my hands. I manage to stop myself from jerking them away, but he senses the buried impulse in the way my skin twitches, and he lets them fall again.
“Why?” he says softly, his face bearing all the lines of grief and exhaustion and pain.
And why can’t I grant him this? I shiver. I must seem so cold to him now. How can he think I’m the same as his Lilac? He doesn’t know what I remember. He doesn’t know how hard it is to inhabit my own body, to make myself speak, walk, eat. How much I feel like I’m a prisoner, able to see and hear but unable to do the things the old Lilac would have done.
“I can’t. I told you—your touch, it burns. I can’t, not yet.”
He presses his lips together. Pain. The urge to go to him is so strong I think I must be tearing apart. I can’t let it go on like this.
“I lied to you,” I whisper, turning to lean back against the door frame. At least the pain of that pressure on my body is physical, distracting. “I let you think I don’t remember anything from the time I was—gone.”
I hear his intake of breath. “What—how—”
“I remember it all.” The cold is leaching my voice away, frost trickling through my limbs, crackling in my lungs.
“You mean—when it happened?”
He doesn’t deserve to know this. Kinder to let him think I just woke up myself again. Maybe the old Lilac would have protected him from this.
“I mean after.” I close my eyes. For a moment all is quiet and I can almost believe I’m gone again, to the silence. “Cold and dark don’t begin to describe it. Cold is just an absence of heat, dark an absence of light. There, it’s like—light and heat don’t exist, ever.”
The scrape of his shoe on the cement floor. He’s trying not to go to me. He’s trying to hold himself back.
The frost in my chest creaks, something else trying to come through. “I remember being dead, Tarver.” I swallow, and my breath comes out like a sob. “How do you live again, knowing what waits for you in the end?”
“You don’t sound like you believe me.”
“It’s our policy in such cases to maintain a certain amount of healthy skepticism.”
“You have a lot of precedent with survivors of serious trauma making things up as they go?”
“Considering the circumstances in which you were stranded and subsequently rescued, we don’t have a lot of precedent for anything.”
“What reason would I have to lie?”
“Now that, Major, is a very interesting question.”
THIRTY-SIX
TARVER
WHEN I WAKE AGAIN THERE’S light creeping in through the shutters, and I roll over to squint at the illuminated clock built into the wall. I’ve learned from it that this place has twenty-six-hour days. I haven’t mentioned that to Lilac. It might seem a little too much like validation for every time she’s told me the day really does seem to go on forever here.
The last thing I remember was thinking that I’d never get to sleep on this damn bunk. The mattress is narrow and confining, and there’s a discomforting sense of being too far above the ground and in an unfamiliar space. I dragged the beds apart for her again and retreated to the top bunk, the frame screeching a protest as I hauled it across the floor.
The clock announces that it’s not too early to rise, and I shove the blankets aside so I can lean over the edge of the bunk and check whether Lilac’s still sleeping below.
She’s gone.
A thread of ice runs through me, bypassing rational thought completely—somehow I make it from the top bunk to the floor, banging my shoulder against the door as I hurl myself through it, out into the comms room. No sign she was ever there.
An image flashes through my mind of the outline of the flower in my journal—the flower she said they created, the flower she said disintegrated. Why didn’t I listen to her?
No, please.
I nearly trip on my way through the blasted entrance, stumbling out into the clearing and looking around wildly. She can’t be gone. They wouldn’t. They can’t.
I’m only a few steps out into the clearing when she emerges from the trees, smoothing down the ruined dress she refuses to replace. I pull up short, and we stare at each other across the space for a long moment. My chest is heaving as I try to push the panic back down again.
“Tarver?”
“I thought—I woke up, and you were—”
Her mouth opens a little as she understands, and though I find myself rooted to the spot, she closes the distance between us and halts within arm’s reach. When I hesitate, she reaches out to touch my hand, brushing it with the tips of her fingers. After so long without her touch, that little gesture is electrifying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m here. I went for a walk. I’ll leave a note next time, or a sign. I’m so sorry.”
I want to turn my hand and wind my fingers through hers, to tug her in closer so I can fold my arms around her, tuck her in underneath my chin, stand in this place and on this spot, and hold her until the sun goes down and it’s dark again.
Instead I nod, and clear my throat, and nod again. I’m realizing that my bare feet are stinging with the cold of the dew, and from sprinting across the debris by the entrance. I’m shivering without my shirt.