Starlight

  STARLIGHT

  Lisa Henry

  Dedication

  To all the readers who wanted more of Brady’s story.

  Starlight

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Henry

  Smashwords edition

  Cover Art by Mayhem Cover Creations

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my awesome beta readers, Sofia, Katey, and Infinite World, for all your help.

  And a huge thank you to Sylvia and Kat, who bullied me until it was done kept me motivated the entire way through!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Chapter One

  Some days gliding through the black was quiet and peaceful like night swimming, when the universe felt like warm water lapping around my skin and left the remembered taste of salt on my lips. Some days turning my face towards the nearest star felt almost the same as turning it towards sunlight, eyes closed and toes digging in red dirt, my body warm and my heartbeat steady.

  Then, other days, shit just exploded in my face with barely any warning at all.

  The sudden low hiss of escaping pressure sounded like the voice of a Faceless, and then Cam was yelling:

  “Brady! Get down!”

  I hit the floor and the blast felt like it shattered my eardrums. A wave of heat washed over me, like a heavy blanket thrown over my back and then pulled instantly away. The air tasted like scorched metal, like burning, like Kopa. It was enough that for a second I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t hear anything except a high-pitched whine vibrating in my skull. I was unanchored, caught in that place between asleep and awake, in that blank empty place that’s filled with nothing—no time, no place, no self—right before awareness came slipping back in. Then Cam was crouching over me, hands running over me as he checked for damage, bringing me back.

  The med bay. We were in Doc’s med bay on the Faceless ship, and I was lying face-down on the floor, Cam’s hand on the back of my neck, squeezing just tight enough to keep me anchored there.

  “Are you okay?”

  I rolled onto my back and blinked up at him. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “The tank blew,” he said, helping me to my shaky feet.

  “Fuck.” I stared around the room, my heart doing its level best to force its way out of my ribcage.

  Andre and Doc were staring back at me. Andre was as big-eyed as an owl. He was still hugging the second tank to his chest. At least it hadn’t been that one that had blown.

  The oxygen tanks had been part of our supplies when we’d come aboard the Faceless ship. But the seals had degraded quickly in the humidity of the ship, and then yesterday it had been hot. Hotter than usual. The light inside the ship had taken on a strange reddish tint as we’d swept close to something that might have been a supernova. Might have been fucking anything, for all I could tell.

  And close was relative, but what were a few million miles out in the endless black?

  “You okay?” Cam asked me again.

  “Yeah,” I said, huffing out a breath and shaking my arms out to get the blood back into my fingers. “But I’m not fucking going near the tanks again.”

  It had been a close call, probably. Of the two tanks stored in Doc’s makeshift med bay, Andre had already taken one from the rack and was almost at the door when I’d reached for the second one. We’d been trying to dispose of them safely by walking them to an airlock. Turned out we were a little late.

  Andre carried his tank very slowly away, holding it as gingerly as though it was a newborn.

  “Hell,” Doc said mildly.

  I followed his gaze.

  A ragged piece of metal from the tank was sticking out of the damp, porous wall. As we watched, it was slowly sucked into the wall, like the ship was devouring it.

  Walls. Rooms. Windows. Jesus, we didn’t even have words for what those things were on the Faceless ship. Our words brought to mind right angles and hard edges, spaces measured out in cubic meters, but that’s not what they were. Nothing here spoke of manufacture as much as it did of life, or maybe of mutation. The walls of the Faceless ship pulsed. Things moved behind the membranes of the walls like platelets in a bloodstream and bloomed from the walls like algae. Sometimes noises thrummed through the humid air and it sounded almost like whale songs. The ship wasn’t a machine. I didn’t know what the fuck it was, but it wasn’t a machine.

  I heard hissing again. In my skull this time. The sound of it ended on an upward note just like a question. I think they’d learned that intonation from us.

  Cam rubbed his thumb over my cheekbone. “We’re okay,” he told the ship, told the others, told the Faceless. “We’re all okay.”

  The Faceless had weakened the psychic connection we shared, but not severed it. We could still understand them when they spoke, but we were no longer overwhelmed by hearing every fucking random thought that slid into each other’s skulls. There was an echo, though. Blowback, or something. If I cleared my mind, I could sense Andre nearby. I could sense Chris and Harry. I could hear the faint whisper of their distant conversation, and Harry’s relieved laugh. A bright echo of it washed up against me, even though their words were indistinct in my mind. Cam was closer. His touch still anchored me. I could feel his concern bleeding into me, layered through with a hundred different emotions: the residual sharp edge of fear left over from the blast, his competing relief, his protectiveness, his love.

  The connection wasn’t as invasive as it had been back when I’d had half of fucking intel living in my head, or even back when it had just been me and Cam. It was only the faintest echo of the original that the Faceless had been unable to excise, because without it we wouldn’t be able to communicate with them at all.

  “How many tanks have we got left in storage?” I asked.

  “Eight.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.” Cam sighed. “We’ll suit up to do the rest.”

  I knew he didn’t mean atmo suits. He meant Faceless body armor, that strange liquid film that molded itself to the wearer. It was impenetrable as far as we could tell. In the generations we’d been at war with the Faceless—a strange word for what amounted to the Faceless swatting us like insects whenever they found our buzzing annoying—the military had sure as shit found nothing that could breach it, anyway. Like everything to do with the Faceless it remained a fucking mystery.

  We’d been with them for three months now, as best as we could tell, and we still knew next to nothing about them.

  “Give us a few minutes,” Cam said to Doc, and drew me outside into the hallway where we were alone as we could be in this place where the walls between us were so porous, where we could still experience each other’s emotions. “You okay?” he asked me again, curling his fingers through mine
.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. Grinned. “Scheduled daily freak out, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Cam leaned in close. He knew it wasn’t really a joke. Cam always knew. “That was a close call though.”

  “I think...” I closed my eyes. “I think that maybe I don’t have the right sort of brain for this.”

  When I opened my eyes again he was smiling and shaking his head.

  “I mean, you guys all look at the black and you’re fucking fearless, you know? You’re just itching to see more, to learn more. And I just think about all the shit out here that could kill us.”

  His smile faded. “I think of that stuff too, Brady. It’s just, on balance, I think it’s worth it.”

  “Yeah. I get that. I just can’t make myself believe it, you know?”

  “I know,” Cam said.

  I squeezed his hand tighter. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “Brady Garrett doesn’t apologize.”

  That pulled a smile out of me. “You’re right.”

  He laughed and kissed me.

  So maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe this fear I had inside me had nothing to do with the Faceless or with the big black. Maybe, back on Earth, I’d be just as scared of not knowing what was coming next. Because nobody knew that. I learned from the time I was a kid that there were no certainties in life and no solid ground under my feet. I’d been scared of falling ever since, of losing the few people I had.

  But also, this one time I made a deal with myself that I was done with being scared. I was still working on that, I guessed, and maybe I always would be, but it could only cripple me if I let it. And I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Neither was Cam.

  Cam circled his arms around me, and hooked his fingers through my belt loops. “Whatever happens, Brady, we’ve got this. We’ve got each other. And that’s more than a lot of people get.”

  “Yeah.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and leaned back into his warmth. Borrowed a little of it, like always. “I know it is. I know.”

  He brushed his lips against the hinge of my jaw.

  I kept my eyes closed.

  From somewhere nearby, I heard Lucy shriek with laughter. The sound receded as she raced away with Harry chasing after her. Lucy’s sudden happiness burst as bright as sunlight against me. For a fraction of a second it lit up my whole universe and it left me smiling.

  I felt the curve of Cam’s lips against my jaw as he smiled too.

  He kept holding me though, and I didn’t tell him to stop.

  Cam splayed his fingers over my chest, over my fast-thumping heart. “I’ll get Chris and Harry to help with the other tanks if you want a break.”

  Sometimes it was still hard for me to read his expression. Or to at least not read his concern for me as pity, like I was just a weak kid totally out of my fucking depth. Because I struggled with that shit every damn day. It was bad enough when it came from the voice in my head. I didn’t need it coming from Cam as well. It was hard, sometimes, not to throw it straight back in his face like it was an insult. But I was learning.

  “Yeah.” I was still shaky from the blast. “I could use a break.”

  He moved his hand and curled it around the back of my neck. Squeezed gently, but it was enough to fill me with warmth. “I’ll come find you when we’re done.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  “Always.” He flashed me a smile, and I headed back toward our quarters.

  Walking through the strange pulsing corridors of a Faceless ship like they were almost home.

  Jesus.

  There wasn’t a day when it didn’t hit me in some way.

  I never had any big plans for my life. Never had any ambitions apart from survival, and what was that except the craziest fantasy of all? But somehow here I was, caught up in a story far too big for a reffo from Kopa, half a universe away from the red dirt and the taste of salt on my lips. On a Faceless ship, with starlight in our slipstream.

  There were no words for the wonders of the black. The horrors. Same thing. Both so massive in scale, so beyond our comprehension that we hadn’t yet invented the language to describe the things we saw. And the words we had could only fail.

  Every day—

  Even a simple little word like ‘day’ lost all point of reference in space, in that weird place where time and speed and light become the same thing, and all mashed up together until they were meaningless.

  Every day Cam and Chris and the others tried to chip away at the swirling universe with their words. Sometimes they wrote reports filled with the dry, precise language of science. Sometimes that wasn’t enough and so they slipped a little into poetry. But even poetry couldn’t reach the heights it needed to snatch understanding, to snag onto starlight and to hold it.

  Every day Lucy drew pictures of space, sighing unhappily because the collection of pens she’d got on Defender Three didn’t run to enough colors. At least she knew her limitations. Cam and Chris and the others kept knocking their heads against the wall without even knowing they were doing it.

  Pushing that big rock up the hill day after day, or whatever.

  It was very much an exercise in futility. Even if we got back to Earth, how could we translate the wonders? The horrors?

  When I was a kid I saw a magic show on television. The guy made a rabbit disappear. It’s always a rabbit, right? Always a rabbit, always a top hat, and always a too-wide smile when he shows the empty hat. Even when I was a kid and had never seen the trick before, I knew what to expect. Tap tap tap on the hat with his wand, some magic words, and the rabbit was gone. What I didn’t expect was the sudden sick feeling I got inside my stomach when the magician showed the inside of that hat. You shouldn’t get applause for revealing an empty void and making little kids stare into it.

  That night I had a nightmare and woke my dad with my screaming.

  I was still having nightmares, only this time I didn’t always have to close my eyes.

  I walked into our quarters and found myself drawn to the window, to what lay behind it. I stared past the filmy membrane of the window into the black, into the swirling void, and imagined what it would feel like if the stars suddenly began to blink out, one by one.

  The seven of us shared a room. I mostly hung around there all the time, when everyone else was off learning everything they could and staring in wonder at the universe that washed past us in tendrils of bleeding color. I had to dig deeper to find the wonder. I had to get through the horror first. I was trying though. Every day I was trying.

  “Brady?”

  I turned around.

  Harry was standing in the doorway, Lucy hanging off his back like a long-legged monkey.

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Harry just raised his eyebrows.

  Right. The explosion.

  “I’m good,” I told Harry. “Just, whatever.”

  Lucy slid off his back. “You’re looking at the stars. You don’t like the stars.”

  “I like the stars,” I told her, slinging an arm around her when she got close, and pulling her even closer. “It’s the millions of miles of black between them that fucking scares me.”

  “Swear jar,” Lucy said, and held out her cupped hand.

  Who the fuck told her about swear jars anyway? She sure as shit didn’t learn it from me.

  “Your hand is not a jar,” I told her. We didn’t have a jar, but that wasn’t stopping her.

  She shoved her hand in my face. “Close enough.”

  Lucy was my little sister. She was eight years old, and smarter than I’d been at that age. Smarter than I was now, probably.

  I felt in my pockets for something to give her and found a leftover cracker from breakfast that only had a bit of fluff stuck to it. Lucy beamed as I dropped it in her palm. Three months—more or less, but who could count the days out here?—on a Faceless ship and she thought a cracker w
as a prize.

  Still, Lucy had adapted better than I had. She didn’t complain when we ran out of chocolate and she was one of the first to try the food the Faceless ate. Or not ate, exactly. They didn’t eat. When they were tired or hurt or hungry they stepped into the little alcoves hidden all around the ship, and the ship rested them and healed them and fed them. They were like ticks burrowing into the flesh of an animal, feeding on its blood. And Lucy hadn’t freaked out or anything when Kai-Ren showed her the alcoves. Just stepped right in and let the walls of the ship ooze closed around her.

  And I’d just stood there and stared, and waited for the magician to show me the void where the rabbit had been.

  Since then I’d screwed my courage and used the alcoves as well. It was like sinking into warm water when the walls closed, but I still preferred to eat the human way. If I didn’t chew and swallow, my brain still thought I was hungry, even if my stomach didn’t.

  Lucy snapped the cracker in two and offered half to Harry.

  He flashed a grin at me as he ate it.

  Asshole.

  We’d run out of supplies soon, and there’d be no more crackers, just like there was already no more chocolate. I was rationing myself to only a few cigarettes a day as well, and it was fucking killing me. I got an itch under my skin just from thinking about running out.

  Everyone else had adapted better than I had. Chris and Andre and Harry had trained for this shit, as much as anyone could train for the unknown, and Cam had lived with the Faceless before, but even Doc and Lucy were doing better than me. And Lucy was fucking eight.

  “Cam wants me to help get rid of the rest of the tanks,” Harry said. “That seem like the sort of thing that could come back and bite us in the ass, to you? Jettisoning our emergency oxygen?”

  I shrugged. “Better it bite us in the ass in the future than literally blow up in our faces today.”