Darker Space Read online

  Just another reason he was too good for me.

  “You said the Faceless wouldn’t come back,” I told him, trying to resent him a little for that. If I could blame him for something, then maybe it would be easier to look at that bruise, at that cut lip, and tell myself it was his fault too.

  Except of course it wasn’t.

  “I know.” His voice was soft. He lifted my busted hand to his mouth and pressed his lips gently against it. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “You told Hanron everything,” I said.

  “Yeah.” The guilt bled off him, enveloping both of us. It curled around us like smoke; the connection was getting stronger. “He already knew. The way we acted with the nightmare…what happened with the drug. He knew. I just confirmed it.”

  “Why?” My throat ached, and my breath caught.

  “Because he gave me an ultimatum, Brady. It was either this, or that cell.” He held my gaze. “Because he asked about Lucy as well.”

  The breath that had caught in my throat suddenly punched out of me.

  “He asked about her, so I gave him us instead.”

  I hated myself more than ever. Hated the way I’d let my doubt twist rapidly into blind anger and leave bruises on his skin. I was a piece of shit.

  Cam shook his head slightly and smiled. “No. No, Brady.”

  A few of the recruits were kneeling backward in their seats now, staring at us. They were kids, big-eyed and mostly skinny. I’d bet more than half of them were from refugee townships too, but guys like Chris Varro would always argue that was a statistical anomaly. At least a lifetime of getting fucked over by the government had trained these kids better than four weeks of basic could for spending the next ten years getting fucked over by the military. It was a lesson I was still learning, over and over again.

  “You know that even if we do this, even if we get back, it’ll be the cell again anyway.” I didn’t trust those fuckers to keep their word. Not on anything.

  “Maybe.” Cam closed his eyes. His lashes rested on his cheeks, and I remembered the way he’d looked when I’d first seen him, floating like a corpse in that Faceless pod, an air bubble caught in his lashes. He opened his eyes. “I also told them why I think Kai-Ren let us go the first time.”

  I jerked back so quickly that I hit my spine against the wall. “Fuck!”

  Cam winced as well, then slid a hand behind me and rubbed my back. His palm traced the path of the pain, soothing it away. We both relaxed slowly, and I curled toward him again.

  “Why did he?” We didn’t talk about this. This, I shoved to the back of my mind, where it festered with every fucking nightmare I’d ever had about the Faceless. I was always trying to keep the black at my back, and I was always failing.

  Cam lifted his spare hand to my face and cupped my cheek. “Because you were something new. Something different. When we were connected, all you saw was Lucy, so that became all he saw. He didn’t know people were like that. Didn’t know how it could feel. That intensity. They don’t understand that, but it was you who showed him, not me. It was all you.”

  I closed my eyes and thought of Lucy. She was safe. Jesus, at least she was safe this time. It didn’t matter if my heart broke at the loss. It didn’t even matter if hers did. She was safe. “You never told me that before.”

  “I thought you knew.” Cam shifted his hand and curled his fingers around the back of my neck. He brought our foreheads close together until they touched. “It was always you, Brady.”

  I kept my eyes closed and tried my hardest to believe it.

  Maybe.

  I didn’t know.

  Maybe.

  Cam had spent four years with the Faceless. He’d done everything right. He’d learned to communicate. He’d learned to obey. Me? I’d spent my brief captivity in pretty much a constant panic attack. Yeah, that was something new to them after Cam. I’d been terrified. Terrified of what was going to happen to me, and what was going to happen to Lucy alone in Kopa. Kopa had killed our dad, and it killed kids even quicker. And it had broken me, like nothing ever had, to know that I couldn’t save her.

  Just like now. I couldn’t do this on my own. Cam was wrong. I’d never be the solution to anything, I’d never be the hero. Those songs they played on the radio on lazy weekends when Cam and I ate toast in bed, those soft notes falling like gentle rain on a tin roof, were wrong. Love wasn’t enough. Love had never been enough. But that didn’t matter. Lucy was safe, and that was more of a miracle than I’d ever had the right to expect.

  This time I wasn’t going to panic. This time I was going to do everything right to try to make sure I got home, and not to some fucking underground cell either. This time I was going to get home to Lucy, because she’d be waiting. This time, she had a future, and I’d make sure I had one too.

  This time I wouldn’t be afraid of the black. I wouldn’t try to keep it at my back, because that was impossible. This time I’d look at it, whatever was looking back.

  * * * *

  It was the middle of the night when we docked with the Defender, at least according to the time zone we’d left. Here it was midafternoon, although there was no way to tell. Time was an artificial construct on the Defenders, more arbitrary in the black than anywhere else. I sat in my seat, fiddling with my fraying harness while the Shitbox shuddered and lurched, trying to engage with the docking clamps.

  Cam’s hands were clenched into fists where they rested on his knees, and he shook his head slightly as we lurched against the Defender with a bump, then bounced off it again.

  “Maybe he should give his guide dog a turn,” I suggested in an undertone, and Cam laughed.

  Another few minutes of clumsy maneuvering, and the docking clamps finally locked. The Shitbox gave one last shudder and then powered down. We were attached like a fat little tick to the Outer Ring of the Defender now.

  Our MP unfastened his harness. “We’ll get off first. Let’s go.”

  The recruits stared at us as we headed up the aisle, packs over our shoulders. We stood in the narrow space between the front seats and the door, waiting for one of the pilots to come and open it.

  I couldn’t stop myself from shivering. The first time I’d stepped aboard a Defender, I was sixteen years old and crippled under the weight of my homesickness and fear. I felt the same now.

  A pilot appeared and engaged the air-lock controls. We waited as the air lock cycled through. When the doors opened with a pneumatic hiss, the blast of air from the Defender was as cold and stale as I remembered. Exactly as I remembered. The painted lettering inside the docking bay had long worn away, but the patches on the fatigues of the docking bay crew told me where I was: Def 3.

  Of all the Defenders still hanging in the black, they sent me back to this one. Well, fuck me. A chance to see the guys again. The guys who had beaten me up and literally left me for dead last time I’d been here.

  This just gets better and better.

  Cam shot me a wry smile.

  I was back, and so were the Faceless. Not yet breaching the treaty, but close enough to the Defenders that the government and the war room were getting nervous. The military needed to know that Cam could play the translator again or, if he couldn’t, that I could.

  I had to be the worst backup plan in the history of the universe, but here I was anyway.

  The MP handed us over to the waiting marines.

  I kept my eyes fixed in front of me as the marines led the way to our quarters. I’d known a few guys from the docking bay crews back when I’d been here before, but I didn’t look around for them. I didn’t want to see anyone familiar right now.

  Fuck the old class reunion.

  The marines led us out of the docking bay, down a hallway that ran along one of the arms connecting the Outer Ring of the Defender to the Inner Ring. From there we took an elevator.

  The elevator doors opened onto what looked like the exact same floor we’d left. That was the Defenders all over. Built from the sam
e plan, in sheets of gray metal that had been dug out of the red dirt as rocks in places like Kopa and processed in the stinking smelters there. We reached the end of the passageway and took another elevator.

  The corridors were narrower up here, the floor space sacrificed because the rooms were larger: officers’ quarters. The marines showed us to a room and then locked the door behind us.

  Just like old times.

  Our room in the officers’ quarters was not the same as the one Cam and I stayed in last time we were here, back when I was his human pacemaker. It could have been, since I’m sure it was no different from any other room along this section of the Inner Ring, but the view was different. We were looking inward to the Core this time, not outward to the Outer Ring with its docking bays and incoming Shitboxes. I dumped my pack on the floor and then stood in front of the window, trying to find some reserve of courage as I stared out into the black and watched lights flash in sequence up the side of the Core. Red, then green, then red again.

  “They’re like buoys on the ocean,” Cam said, coming to stand behind me. He slipped his arms around me and rested his chin on my shoulder. “They make a safe channel. They’re to tell pilots which side to fly on.”

  “If they’re flying that close to the Core, we’re all fucked already,” I said.

  Cam turned his head. Pressed his mouth against my throat quickly. “Close-combat training, Brady. If the Defender’s compromised, a Hawk can take the reactor in the Core. But he’s got to get close to do it.”

  “They trained you to do that? Blow up our own Defenders?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was soft. “If it was overrun, yeah.”

  “Imagine that. Blowing up your own Defender. What then?”

  He tightened his grip on me. “Then I guess you’d hope you had enough juice to get to the next Defender in the line.”

  “Hawks don’t carry that much fuel.”

  “No.”

  I closed my eyes and wondered if he’d ever imagined dying like that. Drifting alone in the black, no fuel, waiting for his air to run out. I couldn’t think of anything more horrifying.

  “Oh, but it’d be beautiful,” he whispered, and there it was in just a few simple words: the gaping distance between us that we would never overcome. Cam looked into the black and saw something beautiful. I looked, and the fear crippled me.

  “I wouldn’t like to be alone.”

  “How could you be alone? You’d be surrounded by everything that ever existed.”

  Fuck your philosophy, LT. Fuck your poetry. Nothing nice about asphyxiation.

  He huffed a breath close to my ear. It might have been a laugh. “Don’t worry. I don’t plan on dying that way.”

  “Yeah? How do you plan on dying?”

  “Hmm. How about sixty or seventy years from now? Asleep in bed beside you.”

  “Yeah.” At that moment it sounded more fantastical than anything I’d ever heard. My voice wavered when I spoke. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

  Except everyone died alone, didn’t they? People did, anyway. Maybe the Faceless were different, with their shared thoughts and hive minds. I wondered what that felt like, when one of them died. Was it just a second of static before the minds of the others bled in and filled the space left behind? Did they feel it acutely, or did they not notice at all? Just a grain of sand on the beach, stolen by the wind.

  I peeled away from Cam, and from the window.

  I hauled my pack up off the floor and onto the bed and unfastened it. It had none of my personal items in it. This pack had been issued by the Q-Store back on base and contained all the basics a first-year recruit might need: underwear, socks, T-shirts and fatigues, and a razor and soap. Everything was new, the fabric rough and stiff. I thought about pulling stuff out and putting it in the footlocker, but what the hell did it matter? I had no idea how long I’d be here anyway, and it wasn’t my stuff.

  I took the razor and soap into the bathroom. Stared at my face for a moment in the mirror. Not as pale as I’d been last time. Same dark shadows under my eyes, though.

  Fuck.

  I’d never be free of the black, would I? The black, the Defenders, and the Faceless. I didn’t want any of it. Never wanted to be important. Never wanted a destiny. Just wanted to be left alone.

  I just wanted a small life. A safe one. One free from fear, and from hunger. Why did that have to be such an impossible dream?

  I closed my eyes.

  Felt Cam behind me before he touched me. “Come on.” He tugged my shirt up.

  “Not really in the mood, LT.”

  “You stink,” he said. “Get in the shower.”

  I was too tired to argue. I let him undress me and couldn’t even work up any interest when he knelt on the floor and unlaced my boots. He stood up and pushed me into the shower.

  The spray of hot water across my shoulders jerked me awake. I bowed my head and let the water run in rivulets off the end of my nose, my chin. Let it blind me. The water stung my busted knuckles, and I hissed. Then Cam was in front of me, the soap in his hand, washing me clean.

  “You need to get your hands looked at.”

  I held them up in front of me. The left was still swollen pretty badly. “If it was broken, it’d hurt a lot more.”

  “Still, you should get them looked at.”

  “I will, if they let me.”

  If there was one guy I’d missed from Defender Three, it was Doc. He’d looked out for me when no one else had and, I suspected, looked the other way when he knew it was me lifting the occasional contraband from the drug dispensary. Doc had let me borrow his books and chew his ear off at all hours, and he’d never once made me feel like shit just because of where I came from. He’d always told me he could make an officer out of me—actually train me up to be a real doctor instead of just a medic. Said I was smart enough for that, although even he had admitted my attitude would be one hell of a stumbling block.

  I wanted to see Doc again.

  I grinned at Cam through the spray of the shower. “You blew me first in a shower like this, remember?”

  He smiled. “How could I forget? You were so fucking hot.”

  “So fucking scared,” I muttered.

  “Brave. You were brave.” He tilted my head forward and rubbed the soap over my scalp. He washed the suds away and then maneuvered me out of the spray. Took the razor and scraped the bristles off my face and neck.

  “I figured I was gonna die, so I had nothing to lose.”

  “And now?” He blinked, and a droplet of water slid down his face like a tear. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  “Now I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”

  “Me neither.”

  If it was a lie, I couldn’t feel it.

  I got out of the shower, leaving him to finish up, and wiped myself down with a thin towel. Then I headed back into the main room and hauled out fresh clothes. Everything was all new and itchy and smelled faintly of bleach.

  When Cam came out, he found me staring out the window at the Core.

  “That’s something you wouldn’t have done last time we were here.”

  I flashed him a slight smile. “I know. That was just denial, though, wasn’t it? Thinking that if I didn’t look at it, it wasn’t there.”

  “One day I’ll convince you it’s beautiful.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  He dressed, then sprawled out on the bed with his tablet. I lingered by the window for a little while longer, then crawled onto the bed with him. I lay sideways, with my head on his stomach. He rubbed his fingers over my buzz cut while I stared at the ceiling.

  I resisted the urge to reach up and take his hand. To curl my fingers through his and feel the press of his palm against mine. Once, it would have been electricity sparking between us. Now it was more than that. Now it was solace. It was our history.

  It was Saturday mornings lying tangled in the sheets, the sunlight catching in our
eyelashes and teasing us slowly awake, while Lucy watched cartoons in the living room.

  It was watching a bunch of officers walk across the quad when I was having my shittiest day ever, and then seeing one of them turn and smile, and knowing he had my back.

  It was daring, for the first time in my life, to hope for something more than guys like me usually got. To hope for someone more.

  In the boiling maelstrom of the universe, he was my calm.

  “What’re you reading anyway?” I asked.

  “Chris’s research. He downloaded it for me before we left.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wants me to read it.”

  “Why?” I turned my head to look at him.

  “I’m not sure.” Cam frowned.

  “He thinks he can talk to the Faceless.”

  “Chris was always smart.” Cam’s thumb found the ridge of bone behind my ear and explored it for a while. “If there’s a way to do it, he’ll find it. We did officer training together. Did I ever tell you that?”

  All the memories he’d shared had been on Defenders, I’d thought. “No.”

  “We had a few classes together. It’s how we met. This one class, tactical, they were always throwing these scenarios at you. And it was always pick A, you probably die. Pick B, you probably die some other way. It was to train us to act without getting crippled by fear and indecision, you know?”

  Sounded typical of the military.

  “Chris hated it. We’d go for drinks afterward, and he’d spend hours ranting about it. ‘There has to be a third option, Cam! There’s always a third option!’” He smiled at the memory. “Am I surprised he’s the guy who’s gunning to learn to communicate with the Faceless, instead of just thinking our only options are attack or defend? Hell, no.”

  “Those options do kind of suck,” I pointed out. “We’re only alive today because the Faceless didn’t give enough of a fuck to finish the job the first time.”

  Sometimes I thought that was what rankled most with the military. Not that we were defenseless against the Faceless, but that we were insignificant. Which made negotiating with them pretty pointless too. Kai-Ren’s treaty had been unprecedented, even if he’d only done it to stop the rest of the Faceless wasting resources on swatting insects.