I open my mouth to respond, but before I can, the lights overhead flicker, leaving only the roiling blue electricity to light the room. The lights dim once. Yes.
“Oh, God,” Lilac whispers, her eyes on the portal. She’s sweating, her hand clammy in mine. She feels cold, too cold. I can’t tell for sure in the flickering blue light from the metal frame, but it looks like her eyes have become more sunken, the dark circles under them more pronounced.
“Lilac?”
“It’s them.”
“What—” But I can see her staring at the frame. And I realize what she means.
“The creatures, the subjects. The whispers. They are the power source for the station. This light, this energy—this is my father’s rift. A gateway between dimensions. And they’re here, trapped somehow by this metal ring they’ve built around it.”
The lights flicker madly, and overhead a number of the fluorescent lights burst, showering the metal floor with shards of glass. Within the steel frame containing the rift, the blue forks of lightning fluctuate wildly.
“Energy-based life-forms.” My voice is a whisper.
Suddenly Lilac’s weight sags, her clammy hand slipping from mine as she drops to her knees with a moan.
My heart stops, and I drop to the ground beside her.
Her pale skin is nearly translucent now—I can see the dark veins snaking up her arms. She lifts her head with an effort, gasping for breath. When I lay a hand on her shoulder, a part of her dress crumbles at my touch, drifting away. Like the flower; like the canteen.
Being this close to the whispers is killing her—the symptoms are a thousand times worse. I have to get her out of here. I wrap an arm around her and drag her to her feet, more of her dress turning to dust with every movement. The fabric flutters and flakes away, drifting through the air like ash. I haul off my jacket and wrap it around her, then swing her up into my arms.
They’re the power source, I hear her voice echo.
And they’re running out.
My mind shuts down, and I turn to carry her back out through the doorway. All I know is that I have to get her out of here.
She recovers enough to grab at the ladder a little as we climb back up to the surface, and I help her into one of the chairs in the common room. I’m as gentle as I can be, but she still winces. It’s clear she has a link with the creatures in the rift that I don’t. The energy flowing through the station is the same as the energy flowing through her, the life force keeping her here with me.
She fixes her gaze on the far wall as she tries to steady herself, and for a moment my heart stops as I see her go still. Then I realize she’s staring at the savage paintings we try so hard to ignore.
I follow her gaze to a figure painted in red.
“Tarver, I know what the paintings are.” Her voice is a cracked whisper now, quivering with intensity. “Do you see?” She lifts one hand, the effort obvious, to point at the next in the sequence, also in red, and then the next. “He’s there again. See the handprint beside it? It’s the same. In this first one, he breaks his neck. Here, it’s the spear. Here, he’s burning. It’s the same man, over and over. Tarver, the researchers stationed here did this to themselves.” Her voice is raw, and she’s forcing the words out of her throat. “And then they were brought back, like me.”
“Holy—you’re right.” My mind’s whirling, freewheeling, trying to find something to latch on to. “They came back again and again.”
The figures painted on the wall are clearly distinguishable, and suddenly I can see each individual going through death after death, the pictures surrounded by the handprints, and the LaRoux lambda, painted large and bold beside them. Suddenly the recurring blue spirals scattered throughout the paintings have a new meaning. The rift, and its prisoners.
Her gaze sweeps across the paintings, which become wilder, more frenetic, and slowly degenerate into primitive daubs I can barely make out. At the end of the stream of pictures is a single handprint, smeared.
Then nothing.
I know we’re both seeing the same thing. This is what they found here.
They died, and lived again, and found madness somewhere in between. They came here to study the creatures that gave me Lilac again, or to kill them, perhaps, and discovered a kind of twisted immortality.
Until—what? Until the whispers were too weak to bring them back anymore and power the station at the same time, and the researchers died for good? Until LaRoux Industries pulled them out, and buried this place?
I’m still staring when Lilac brings one hand down against the floor with a dull smack. “Why would anyone choose this? Living in limbo, in constant fear that you’ll crumble away?” Her voice is ragged, broken.
I wish I could reach out, wrap my arms around her. Instead the distance between us feels like a canyon. “Maybe it was different for them, when this place was at full power. We only have the remains, what the company left behind.”
“And when I do fade away, they won’t have the energy to bring me back.”
She sounds as though that’s what she wants. My breath fails me, and I’m left staring at her, aching.
“I just want to sleep,” she whispers, eyes dark in her white face, transformed by her longing. “I wish it—because you’d be heartbroken, and you’d mourn, but you’d—you’d heal. They’d find the signal and you could go home. And you’d have your parents, and the garden, and… Then the station could die, and the whispers could rest. I could rest. That’s all we want. Real rest, not that coldness, that—”