Starlight (Dark Space Book 3) Read online

  ****

  We met Chris and the hybrid coming up the corridor as we were heading back down. Chris was half-leading, half-carrying the hybrid. Its eyes were open, and its mouth was, but it still looked as weak as hell and half dead.

  “What’s going on?” he asked us. “Where’s your armor?”

  So he’d had the same thought to get to an alcove.

  “They don’t work without the Faceless,” Cam said.

  Chris raised his eyebrows.

  Another hurried trip to the alcove and we learned that they didn’t work with the hybrid either. So much for that.

  We headed back up, away from the fighting and, we hoped, away from the attention of the hostile Faceless who had boarded the ship.

  ****

  It was a tight squeeze in the recess Cam and I frequented, with all of us and the hybrid, but it was about the farthest we could be from the core of the ship, and as far as Cam and I had figured in the past there was no real reason for any of the Faceless to come up here. Kai-Ren did sometimes, but that was to find us. To talk to us sometimes, and sometimes just to watch us. He was interested in the things we did when we were together. Or, more precisely, he was interested in the things we felt when we were together. He drank in our emotions like they were an intoxicant. Humanity fascinated Kai-Ren, and look where it had led him.

  Did the Faceless feel regret?

  I sat on the floor, my back against the wall, with Lucy wedged between me and Cam, and wondered how long the battle would last. I also wondered if there would be a time, looking back, when I’d regret my impatience. Because right now I didn’t know if Kai-Ren was winning or not. An hour in the future, or two, or three, and maybe I’d know for sure and wish I was still in a place in time when I didn’t. Sometimes it felt like I’d spent my whole life just waiting for things to be over, only to find out that shit was a hell of a lot worse on this side of them.

  Lucy curled up against me, and I put an arm around her skinny shoulders. I thought of that song she liked when she was a baby. The one my dad sang to her as a lullaby. Lucy called it the sasi sasi song. It was in a language we didn’t know. I don’t know where Dad had learned it.

  I hummed a bar of it and Lucy hugged me tighter.

  Across from us, the hybrid tilted its head and looked at me.

  I looked away. I looked at Cam instead.

  The first time I saw Cam I thought he was a corpse. Crazy, how much he’d given me. How well he knew me, how much he saw when he looked at me, and yet he’d never taken a step away from me, not even when I’d pushed. Not even when everyone who even cared for him a bit must have told him he was fucking insane for staying with someone like me. Cam was a rock, and I was the ocean that broke over him again and again.

  Chris had said that Cam had found the thing he was looking for.

  Crazy that it was me.

  I love you, Cam, I told him silently, and didn’t give a fuck if the rest of them heard it too. Wasn’t like it was a secret anyhow. You’re my heartbeat.

  It washed back to me like an echo: Love you too, Brady.

  There were worst things than facing the end with the people you loved, right? And here I was with Cam and Lucy and Doc. That was more than a lot of people got. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt, and I hoped that Lucy wouldn’t be afraid, but there were worse things. I’d already got a story much bigger than I’d had any right to. Kids from Kopa weren’t supposed to end up floating in nebulas. Kids from Kopa weren’t supposed to lift their gazes from the red dirt to begin with, but here I was.

  “We’re going to make it,” Cam said. “We are.”

  And he sounded so certain.

  I would never understand where Cam found his faith, not if we were together for an eternity.

  When I was a kid, the school in Kopa was run by some religious group, because the government was done throwing money at the reffos. Every morning we had to press our hands together and pray. Mostly I prayed that someone would share their lunch with me. Anyhow, I learned to shut my mouth and bow my head, and listen to the words the teachers said that promised that somewhere out in the universe, someone was watching us, making sure things turned out the way he wanted, making rules for us to follow. Rules and order, so that everything made sense.

  Which was the gap between religion and philosophy.

  Which was the gap between hope and experience.

  Which was the gap between Cam and me.

  Then again, I’m pretty sure Cam’s introduction to faith hadn’t been the same as mine.

  “Usually I’d tell you that was bullshit,” I whispered to him over the top of Lucy’s head.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Usually?”

  “Yeah. But it turns out you’re a lot smarter than me, LT, so maybe this time I’ll believe you.”

  His mouth quirked. “Good.”

  “Good,” I echoed, and if there was some higher power up there who was really directing all the bullshit in the universe, I hoped it was watching out not just for those of us jammed into the dark little recess at the top of the Faceless ship—I hoped it was watching out for Kai-Ren too, because Kai-Ren was our only way home.

  ****

  “We need a plan,” Chris said after a while. Always the officer, always the leader. Always thinking three steps ahead. “If Kai-Ren loses this, then they’ll come for the hybrid, and then they’ll come for us.”

  Contaminants and abominations.

  “We can’t use the alcoves,” Andre said. “And we don’t have any weapons. If the Faceless have sidearms, we don’t know where they are, and we don’t know if we could even use them.”

  “I’m not taking about weapons,” Chris said. He nodded toward Lucy. “I’m talking about armor.”

  “We already tried that,” Harry said, his forehead furrowed.

  “No, I’m talking about the best armor on this ship,” Chris said. “Something that can withstand the vacuum of space for extended periods of time. I’m talking about the pods.”

  The pods. Cam had been sealed in one once, and it had carried him through the black all the way safely back to Defender Three. And I’d been in one once, and it had healed my broken, shattered body.

  “We can’t get the alcoves to work,” Cam said. “What makes you think we could get the pods to work?”

  “Because the pods are different,” Chris said. “Nothing else here has writing. Look, nothing else here looks manufactured, right? Nothing looks like tech. It all looks like, well, evolution. But the pods are tech, aren’t they? Writing doesn’t just spontaneously occur in nature.”

  I thought of the first time I’d seen Cam. Or rather, the first time I’d heard about Cam from Branski, that fucking asshole. How his eyes had lit up like he was sharing a horror story that he knew would give us all nightmares for years. “He’s in water or something… And, Jesus, his skin! They wrote all over it. Like tattoos or something. And it fucking glows.”

  And later in Doc’s medbay on Defender Three I’d seen it for myself. How the letters shone against his skin. How—the most terrifying thing of all—when I’d touched the opaque surface of the pod Cam, pale as a corpse, had mirrored my movement and pressed his hand against mine. The slimy skin of the sac had slid between our palms. And the writing on his skin, we learned much later, hadn’t been tattoos at all. It had been projected there by something inside the pod.

  I gazed across the recess at Chris.

  “He’s right,” I said. “The pods are different. But that still doesn’t mean we could use them. They might be locked to us.”

  “But they aren’t,” Doc said slowly. “Not necessarily, anyway. We fucked the pod up back with Cam because we didn’t know what we were doing. But it had been designed that we could operate it.”

  “Yeah, but we still don’t know what we’re doing,” I pointed out. “We don’t know how to work them at all.”

  “It’s better than waiting here to get killed,” Chris said.

  “Is it?” I asked. “Because what if we manage
to open then, and use them, and somehow not drown ourselves? What if we even managed to use them to get off this ship? Do you know the way home, Chris? Because I sure as shit don’t.”

  We’d be adrift.

  How long would it take until the pods couldn’t sustain us anymore?

  How long would it take to die out there?

  Which was stupid. It’d be like me climbing into the cockpit of a Hawk and worrying about crashing it, when I didn’t even know how to start the fucking engine.

  Cam shifted beside me. “Maybe,” he said, holding Chris’s gaze. “If things go bad, we might as well try. But only as a last resort, because Brady’s right. The chances it would work would are so small it wouldn’t even be worth it unless we were sure our only other option was dying.”

  Chris was silent for a moment, and then he nodded. “Yeah. Worst case scenario. But it won’t do us any good to debate it from here if things go badly. We need to be with the pods, to at least see if we can ever power them up.”

  “How many Faceless between us and the pods?” Harry asked, his voice rasping.

  Chris shook his head and shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  ****

  The Faceless ship was silent, but the anger and the adrenaline rush of the battle ran on a constant feedback loop in our skulls. Spikes of pain, of fear, were like blasts of static in our heads. And sometimes, more than once, we felt that same dizzying sensation of sudden loss—and of that hole immediately being filled in again. The Faceless felt no grief for the fallen. The hive barely even noticed the loss of one drone.

  I thought of my dad and how acutely I still missed him and how his loss was written in my bones, and in everything I did. A day didn’t go by when I didn’t think of him. And I thought of how my grief and my fear for Lucy had captured Kai-Ren’s attention in the first place.

  I wondered which one of us was the most incomprehensible to the other. The most alien.

  We made our way carefully down toward the core of the ship. Everything seemed dimmer. There were fewer lights drifting in the walls, and the fluid itself seemed darker than usual. The ship was hurt. Was she dying too?

  Chris and Doc carried the hybrid between them, his thin arms held across their shoulders. His pale feet dragged more than stepped, but his eyes were open now. They were dark and wide and fearful, just like mine.

  Cam and Harry led the way, and Andre and I brought up the rear. I held Lucy’s hand tightly. It was warm and damp with sweat. She was quiet. Her face was pinched. But she didn’t even stumble as we moved forward through the dimly-lit curving passageway of the ship.

  As we moved toward the fighting.

  “If anything happens,” I whispered to her, “run back to where we just were, okay?”

  She nodded, and squeezed my hand more tightly.

  We kept moving, right up until we didn’t. Cam and Harry had stopped, and I craned my head to see.

  “It’s okay,” Cam said. “Keep moving.”

  There was a dead Faceless lying in the corridor. His mask had been removed. His eyes were covered in a white film. His yellowish skin was stained black around his throat, and over one cheek, like someone had spat ink over him. And then I realized that no, it wasn’t a stain. It was necrosis, or something like it. His skin had been ruptured in several places, punctured, and the flesh around it had turned black.

  Venom. It had to be venom.

  I looked at Doc and Chris, and at the way the hybrid was slung between them. The hybrid’s fingers curled around their shoulders, and I thought of claws digging into their flesh and wondered how long it would take Faceless venom to kill a human. And then I thought of every time that Kai-Ren had run his hands over my skin, and of how the Stranger had prodded my stomach, and how each time I’d been staring death in the face. I’d thought of Kai-Ren as a god once, hadn’t I? A god who could strike any one of us down on a whim.

  I held Lucy’s hand tightly as we passed the dead Faceless.

  There was a voice in the back of my head—mine, for once—that told me we weren’t going to make it to the pods. That told me we’d be caught here, in a curving corridor with nowhere to take cover and that the Stranger’s Faceless would kill us, but whatever was happening in the rest of the ship was keeping all the Faceless busy.

  My heart was beating out of my chest by the time we descended to the bay where the pods were kept, and the doors shut behind us, the sticky seams sealing closed.

  There were six pods here, and seven of us plus the hybrid. It didn’t matter, because Cam and I had shared a pod before anyway. There was plenty of room. But mostly it didn’t matter because we had no way of getting the pods to work, let alone launching them.

  And then it really didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t be launching them into some tranquil sea anyway.

  “Holy fuck!” Harry exclaimed from the one of the windows that looked out into the nebula.

  I look past him just in time to see a Faceless ship being torn apart by a massive explosion. It was colossal. It was blinding.

  And it was close enough that the shockwave hit us like a tsunami.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Brady? Brady!”

  The blood roared in my skull as I forced my eyes open to find Cam on his knees beside me, his hands hovering like he was afraid to touch.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Gimme…gimme a second.” I blinked, and the bay slowly came back into focus. It didn’t look like anything had changed, except I was lying on the floor. I took a slow breath, testing for pain, but there was nothing sharp. Just a dull ache. I was winded, that was all.

  I turned my head to look for everyone else. Harry had a bright ribbon of blood sliding down his temple, and was wincing as Doc prodded at him, but everyone else seemed okay. The hybrid was on the floor as well, skinny limbs twitching like spider’s legs as he drew them back toward himself and huddled over.

  “Lucy?” I asked.

  She appeared over Cam’s shoulder. “I’m okay.”

  “Okay.” I gave Cam my hand, and let him pull me up. I fought against a wave of dizziness, and held on to Cam until it faded. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “There was another ship coming,” Lucy said, eyes wide. “Then it exploded!”

  I held Cam’s gaze.

  We were in serious trouble here. If the rest of the Faceless were turning against Kai-Ren, how long could he hold them off? How long would we survive this?

  “Did we do that?” Chris asked, his gaze fixed on the window of the bay where, outside, the Faceless ship drifted like an asteroid field, broken apart into dark jagged pieces against the soft cloud of the nebula. “Did our ship do that?”

  He turned back to face us, a crazy half-smile on his face like he’d just seen something wonderful. Faceless weaponry. He’d wanted to know about it from the start, and he’d just been given a front row seat to the light show. The same light show that had destroyed most of the major cities on Earth, but Chris wasn’t seeing anything except fireworks, was he?

  “We’ve got more incoming,” he said. “I hope our ship’s got more where that came from.”

  Here we were in the target zone for every other Faceless ship in the fucking nebula, and he was talking like he was a spectator. How did he do that? How did he put enough distance between himself and what was happening? I envied him that, and it was a sudden, sharp emotion that I didn’t like. Because I froze when the universe was exploding around me, but somehow Chris Varro stepped forward to watch in wonder.

  “A plan would be good, Chris,” Cam said, reaching out to squeeze my hand for a moment.

  “Right,” Chris said, moving away from the window at last. “The pods. The pods are the back-up plan, right?” He touched one, running his fingers down the shiny black carapace. “If we can get them to work. Otherwise, they’re useless to us. Harry?” He nodded at the pod.

  Harry clambered up into one, lying back so that he was lower than the carapace.

  Nothing happened.r />
  No skin grew over the pod. No fluid filled it. No lights shone.

  “There’s no buttons or anything in here,” Harry said, his voice echoing from the confines of the carapace.

  Great. We couldn’t get armor, and we couldn’t get the pods to activate.

  Andre began to feel around the seams on the exterior of the pod.

  “So much for the back-up plan,” Chris said. “We need Kai-Ren.”

  Andre helped haul Harry out of the pod. “I think Kai-Ren’s a little busy right now.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “Well, we’re locked out of everything on this ship, and we need armor, and we need those pods operational, so we need Kai-Ren.”

  Always so fucking focused, Chris Varro. Always the guy who knew what the goal was, what the objective was. Didn’t matter how many obstacles were in the way—Chris would just push right through them, wouldn’t he, with a dash of that arrogance they handed out in spades in officer training and a hell of a lot of cocky self-confidence that was his and his alone. And he’d do it with a smile, even if he got everyone else killed on the way.

  Except as much as I hated to admit it, he also had a point. We needed Kai-Ren. Our chances of surviving this without him, and without Faceless technology, weren’t exactly stellar.

  “So what’s the plan?” Cam asked, his gaze steady.

  Chris exhaled slowly. “We split up. Andre and Harry, you guys stay here in the bay with Doc and Lucy and the hybrid. Keep the doors shut, if you can.”

  “And if we can’t?” Harry asked.

  Chris just shook his head slightly and didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to. He looked over to Cam and me. “Cam and Brady, we’ll go and find Kai-Ren. Your connection with him is stronger than mine. And he listens to both of you. We might need that.”

  “You think?” I asked. “Middle of his ship exploding and we’re going to ask him to worry about his fucking house pets? Yeah, that’ll go down well.”

  “With that attitude, sure,” Chris said. He’d learned Cam’s trick of not rising to my bait. “We need to find Kai-Ren and help him win this.”