Starlight (Dark Space Book 3) Read online

  “I thought it didn’t matter, what I felt,” he said at last, his voice so soft it was almost lost to me, almost swallowed up whole by the darkness. “I thought that I could put it aside. Rationalize it. Reframe it so that it wasn’t…”

  I rubbed his back as another tremor went through him.

  “So that it wasn’t what it was,” he whispered. “It was supposed to be different this time, Brady. He was supposed to understand.”

  Unbridgeable.

  Cam straightened up, and I leaned back and slid my arms around him. I splayed my fingers over his heart, as though I could hold that too. Hold it, and stop it from ever breaking.

  Too late for that though.

  Cam let out a shaky breath. “You’re not the only one who wants to go home, Brady.”

  I closed my eyes and held him, and dreamed of sunlight.

  Chapter Eight

  The next time the fear came, and the anger with it, it wasn’t mine.

  It was a night or two after the Stranger had tried to hurt Harry, if things like nights could even be counted in the black. We were asleep anyway, while the ship carried us further into the clouds of the nebula, and farther away from home than we’d ever been before. I don’t know what I was dreaming of—red dirt, probably, and the sun on my back—but I came up gasping for air and I wasn’t the only one.

  “The fuck?” Andre was already climbing down from his bunk. “What… what was that? What is that?”

  It was like ice in my blood. Like my nerve endings were being drawn out like wires, pulled and twisted. There was a high-pitched whine in the back of my skull, like a screech of radio feedback. It was cold fear, and it was burning anger, and it was meeting in the middle in a discordant howling maelstrom, and for once it wasn’t coming from me.

  It was coming from the Faceless.

  My first instinct was to run. Something bad enough to scare the Faceless? You can bet I wanted to be nowhere fucking near it. The moment the frantic urge caught me, I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Because where the hell could I go? Where could any of us go?

  “Brady?” Lucy leaned over the edge of her bunk, her complexion pallid and consumptive in the blue lights of the nebula. “What’s happening?”

  I climbed out of my bunk and reached for her. “I don’t know.” I looked to Cam just like Lucy looked to me. “I don’t know.”

  “What do we do?” Harry asked, swinging down from the bunk above Cam’s. He clenched and unclenched his fists at his sides. “What do we do?”

  Another soundless wave of fear and anger crashed over us, and Lucy whimpered and clung closer to me.

  “Is that…” Doc shook his head as though to clear it. “Is that coming from inside the ship?”

  I looked to Cam again, my throat suddenly dry and my heart racing.

  And Cam looked to Chris.

  And then Chris was moving, striding out of our room and into the core of the ship. He was fucking fearless, I’ll give him that.

  I peeled Lucy off me and into Harry’s arms.

  “Wait here,” I said. “Wait here with her.”

  Because I knew Cam was going to follow him. And I knew I was going to follow Cam. Some things were written in the stars, however fucking dumb they were.

  I caught up with Cam outside our room, and we descended the spiraling corridor together. The air around us seemed to pulse and spike, and my skin prickled with it. The closer we got to the core of the ship the louder the blast of fear and rage was in the back of our skulls. It jarred my bones and set every nerve on edge and sat queasy and heavy in my gut like something rancid.

  We didn’t see the Faceless as we wound our way deeper into the heart of the ship. Not a single one.

  We found Chris standing in front of a wall, his shaking hand pressing against it. He turned when we approached him, his face lit up with the glow of the things that slid through the walls like jellyfish.

  “I think it’s coming from here,” he said.

  “That’s the hatchery,” Cam said. “That’s where Kai-Ren showed us the eggs.”

  Chris swallowed, and closed his eyes, and then pushed through the wall.

  And Cam and I followed.

  When I blinked my eyes open again, slick fluid clinging to my eyelashes and sticking to my mouth, we were standing in the large, vaulted chamber with the shallow pool inside. Except it wasn’t quiet this time. It was…

  It was full of Faceless. The Faceless, and things. Pale, naked things that twitched and writhed on the floor, the skins of their sacs ripped open. They were like twisted, deformed specimens from jars of formaldehyde, and the Faceless were walking amongst them, snapping their necks.

  Their rage was a solid wall of noise in my head now, pushing me back.

  Kai-Ren was in the middle of it. He was standing in the pool and dragging his gloved hands through the steaming fluid like he was trawling for bait. He hauled a sac out of the pool. If it had been a tiny egg containing nothing but a flickering heartbeat a few days ago, it was easily as big as a human now. It was shorter than an adult Faceless. Kai-Ren flung the sac out of the pool onto the floor, and then stepped out after it.

  The surface of the sac writhed and ululated, and Kai-Ren leaned down and tore it open. The pale, naked thing inside slithered free, and I remembered the first time I’d ever seen Cam, bursting out of that Faceless pod on Defender Three in a wave of stinking amniotic fluid.

  Kai-Ren lifted the thing by the throat.

  “No!” Chris yelled, darting forward through the killing grounds towards him. “No! Stop!”

  Kai-Ren lifted his blank, masked face to stare at him.

  “No!” Chris said again. He was a full head shorter than Kai-Ren, but he stood his ground. “Don’t!”

  Kai-Ren tilted his head, and let the twitching thing drop to the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Chris asked him. “Why are you killing them? They’re her children, aren’t they? Her young?”

  Kai-Ren didn’t speak. He hissed, like steam escaping, and projected the word directly into our minds: “Abomination.”

  “What do you…” Chris trailed off as he looked down at the thing. “Oh God.” He twisted back to look at us. “It’s not Faceless. It’s… it’s part human.”

  My blood ran cold.

  “Let me have it,” Chris said. “Please. Let me have it.”

  Kai-Ren stared at him. “Why?”

  “Because I want it,” Chris said, like that was all that counted, and maybe that was the only answer that a cold thing like Kai-Ren could understand. He’d taken Cam that day in the black because he’d wanted, hadn’t he? And that was all the reason he’d needed.

  Chris stood in the middle of the hatchery, stubborn and fearless, and audacious enough to make a demand of Kai-Ren. The expression on his face was the sort they put on statues of heroes and generals. It was hard and unyielding and totally unafraid. But what the hell did that matter to Kai-Ren when he could swat Chris like an insect? Courage was such a human thing, and here, in Kai-Ren’s hatchery, it was totally meaningless.

  Except then Chris began to speak.

  “Abomination?” he asked.

  Kai-Ren hissed.

  “It’s waste,” Chris said. “It’s trash. It’s of no value to you, so let me have it.”

  A whisper passed through the gathered Faceless like a breath of wind through dry eucalypts, hissing and rustling back and forth along our shared connection. If there were words in it, we couldn’t hear them, but Kai-Ren tilted his head as though to listen.

  “Take it then,” Kai-Ren said. “Kill it when it is of no more interest to you.”

  “Thank you,” Chris said, his eyes wide. “Thank you.”

  Cam stepped forward through the twitching bodies of the dying young to help him carry the sole survivor out.

  ****

  The Faceless—the hybrid, Chris called it—was as white as alabaster the way the Faceless were, but it didn’t take more than a cursory inspection in the medbay to see
that it was very different from them. It had a nose, for starters, instead of slits in its face like a reptile. It had eyelashes too, as dark as the patchy fuzz on its head. Its eyes were closed, its heartbeat weak. There was hardly any rise and fall to its chest at all.

  “Jesus Christ,” Doc said as he leaned over the thing. “Look at this, Brady.”

  He tilted the hybrid’s chin back.

  “Shit,” I said. “It’s got a proper larynx.”

  Doc levered its mouth open. “A tongue as well. Jesus. It might actually be able to talk.”

  Chris, leaning in the doorway of Doc’s makeshift medbay, stood up straighter at that, his eyes bright as a million sudden potential scenarios floated in front of him. Scenarios where he could talk to a Faceless. He clenched and unclenched his fists at his sides as though he was fighting the urge to push between me and Doc and immediately start discussing eighteenth-century literature with the hybrid or some shit like that.

  “Don’t count your chickens, Varro,” Doc said. “It might not even survive. Fuck knows how much longer it should have had before it hatched. It might not have any higher brain function. It might be so premature its lungs haven’t developed properly yet.” He paused for a moment. “If it even has fucking lungs.”

  Chris shifted from foot to foot, his brows pulling together.

  At the back of my mind I could still feel Kai-Ren’s rage and fear. It had faded, but what if he blamed us for this? The Faceless ship had come here so it could breed, and we’d fucked that up for it somehow.

  Doc and I had a few theories on that as well.

  The ship—the queen—reproduced asexually. She probably used the genetic material that was floating around in her, like a template or whatever. And we’d been infesting her like ticks for the past few months, feeding and sleeping inside her, and excreting saliva and sweat and blood and waste and —in Cam’s and my case, at least—cum into her. We’d poisoned the well with our human DNA and we’d destroyed an entire breeding cycle.

  There was a very good chance that Kai-Ren was going to kill us for this. We’d caused the queen to produce abominations.

  Doc laid the end of his stethoscope on the hybrid’s chest.

  I looked at the hybrid’s hands instead of its face. I’d rarely seen Kai-Ren without his mask, let alone his gloves. The Faceless didn’t wear clothing, but a protective layer of synthetic goo that that the ship provided that was as thin as latex and as impenetrable as steel. Whatever it actually was it was easier to call them gloves, just like it was easier to call parts of the ship walls and floors and windows. We had to fit everything into our human frames of reference, and sometimes that meant forcing ourselves to forget that everything here was literally alien. The hybrid had four fingers on each hand, and opposable thumbs. Its fingernails were more claw-like than a human’s, but didn’t appear retractable like the claws of the Faceless.

  Its white skin wasn’t as hard like the skin of the Faceless, but not as elastic as a human’s either. It was cold to the touch, like theirs.

  It had a dick too. External genitalia would be the technical term I guess, like a human male’s, with thin patches of dark hair around it that looked stark against that bone-white Faceless skin.

  I couldn’t decide if the fact it looked more human than a Faceless made it less horrifying to look at, or more.

  Doc caught my gaze, and I knew he was wondering the same thing.

  “Will he live?” Chris asked from the doorway.

  “I have no idea,” Doc said. “I can’t even tell if he’s actually dying, let alone treat him.”

  “That’s weird though,” I said.

  “How is it weird?” Doc groused, his bushy eyebrows tugging together. “It’s a fucking alien, son, and way out of my skill set.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we all live in each other’s heads now, and we can feel the Faceless too. This one’s not linked in though, is it?”

  “Mmm.” Doc watched the rise and fall of the hybrid’s chest for a moment. He glanced at Chris, and I felt his unease prickling the back of my mind. “How many of them did you say Kai-Ren killed?”

  I forced down my nausea at the memory of those broken twitching things on the floor of the hatchery. “The rest of them. Maybe a dozen?”

  “Then whatever you’re thinking,” Doc said, and I realized he was talking to Chris now, and not to me, “don’t do it.”

  “You don’t know what I’m thinking,” Chris said quietly.

  “I can read you like a book, Varro,” Doc shot back. “You want to communicate with this thing, you figure out some other way to do it. If Kai-Ren wants it dead, I somehow doubt he’s going to want it hooked up to our connection.”

  A jolt of fear thrilled through me, and I stared at Chris.

  Chris shrugged. “I thought about it. Doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s not worth the risk. I felt his anger too. I wouldn’t make a target of us.” He fixed his gaze on mine. “Not any of us.”

  Lucy, I thought. He means Lucy. Because however much I didn’t like Chris Varro and he didn’t like me, he shared my memories of Lucy, of holding her when she was small, and wearing her in a sling against my skinny chest. Of her heartbeat thrumming against mine.

  Chris Varro didn’t like me much, but he felt the things that I felt and he couldn’t escape that. He might drag the rest of us through fire to learn about the Faceless, but he wouldn’t do it to Lucy. He wouldn’t risk her, because even if his love for her was only an echo of mine it resonated in him. It was real.

  I looked back to the hybrid for a moment, and then met Doc’s gaze.

  “Varro,” Doc said. “Give us some room to work, hmm? I’ll let you know the second anything changes.”

  Chris nodded, and peeled himself off the doorway and left.

  Doc set his stethoscope down and sighed. “You okay, son?”

  “Yeah.” My throat clicked as I swallowed the lie.

  Doc regarded me steadily for a moment. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The resemblance.”

  I looked at the hybrid’s dark hair. At the shape of its nose, its jaw. At the truth I’d been trying to deny since I realized how the hybrid had been made. My heart beat fast in my chest. “Yeah.”

  It was just dumb chance that this was the one Kai-Ren didn’t kill. Just dumb chance that he got to the others first. There was nothing special about this one, except this one was mine. This one had been made from me. Looking at the hybrid was like looking in a funhouse mirror and seeing my reflection twisted up and made grotesque.

  Doc held my gaze.

  “Could have been any one of us,” I said at last.

  “It could have been,” Doc agreed. “It’s not though, is it? So I’ll ask you again. Are you okay?”

  I looked at the rise and fall of the hybrid’s chest. “I wish he’d killed this one too.”

  “That’s fair,” Doc said. “I’d probably feel the same in your shoes.”

  “Anything in your philosophy books about this?”

  Doc’s face cracked with a rueful smile. “Oh, I reckon this is more than your run of the mill existential crisis, don’t you?”

  That pulled an unwilling grin out of me. “Yeah, probably.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Doc said.

  “I fucking doubt it.” I swallowed. “We’re contaminants, aren’t we? We were interesting to him once, but we’ve poisoned the well. What’s to stop Kai-Ren from ripping us all apart like he did to the rest of the hybrids?”

  Doc looked grave. “His word?”

  “What’s that worth though?” I asked. “We’re nothing to the Faceless, Doc. We’re insects. We always have been.”

  “I don’t know what it’s worth, Brady. I wish I did.” Doc stepped away from the cot. He rolled his shoulders and inhaled deeply. “Do you know what I thought when I decided to come with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m an old man, son,” Doc said. “I’ve got almost forty years on you. I’ve lived my life. My kids are al
l grown. And I looked at you, and I looked at Lucy, and I wondered what sort of man I’d be if I let both of you go out into the black on your own. What sort of man I’d be if I let a scared kid do that, knowing there was a good chance they might not come back.”

  My throat ached and my chest was tight. “Lucy was never scared.”

  Doc smiled again. “I wasn’t talking about Lucy, son.”

  I blinked, and my eyes filled with tears.

  “Come here,” Doc said.

  I felt like a little kid as I stepped into his embrace and his arms went around me.

  “I love you, son,” Doc said, and I squeezed my burning eyes shut. “Just so we’re clear, you were never just another recruit to me. I hope you know that.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  Doc rubbed my back. “And I’m proud of you, Brady, for what it’s worth—”

  “Everything,” I mumbled. “It’s worth everything.”

  “I’m proud of you,” Doc repeated, his voice rasping a little. “And your dad would be proud of you too.”

  I dug my fingers into the back of his shirt. I didn’t ever want to let go.

  “Whatever happens here is out of our control,” Doc said. “And I don’t know how this is going to end, Brady, but you’re not alone. Whatever happens, I’ve got your back. I’ve got your back for as long as I can.”

  “Me too,” I mumbled in his shirt. “I’ve got yours too. For whatever it’s worth.”

  Doc’s chest rumbled with a gentle laugh as he patted my back. “Everything, son. It’s worth everything.”

  I leaned back at last, and looked him in the eye. His were as wet as mine. “We’ve got this, Doc.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, and it didn’t matter if it was bullshit. “We’ve got this.”

  ****

  I didn’t want to go back to the hatchery, back into the hidden core of the ship, but I could feel that’s where Cam was. I kept my eyes closed as I passed through the wall and into the warm, viscous fluid that flowed around me. I held my breath, and my lungs burned by the time I pushed through into the hatchery and the walls oozed shut behind me.