Starlight Read online

  I lit the cigarette. “I’ll be your worst nightmare.”

  “You already are, son.” His eyes crinkled when he grinned. “Guess we’re quitting together then.”

  I inhaled, and held the burn in my lungs for as long as I could. “Guess we are.”

  It was going to be hell.

  ****

  Days bled together on the Faceless ship, however hard Doc tried to distinguish them with his little wind-up clock. Doc, like me, didn’t actually have any specific duties to perform or reports to write, but he made us debrief every day and he kept a diary. He wrote in it and made sketches and, in his own way, tried to describe the Faceless and their ship and the universe they showed us in words that would probably always fall short. Doc seemed to have come to terms with that though. His brow didn’t furrow in frustration every time he tried to get something down on paper the way that Chris’s did.

  He also made me read at least ten pages of General Physiology a day, and tested me on the content. We both knew it wouldn’t go anywhere—if we ever made it home I’d be mopping floors again—but it kept us both from going stir-crazy, I guess.

  “You remember when you wanted to recommend me for officer training?” I asked him one day, flicking through the pages of the textbook.

  He fixed me with a stare. “I meant it. You were a good trainee medic. You’d be a good paramedic as well, and that would get you your foot in the door to becoming an actual doctor.”

  “I quit school when I was twelve, Doc.”

  “So? The military would have caught you up.”

  “It’s a moot point now,” I told him. “No fucking schools out here with the Faceless. Anyway, the military was never gonna get more than ten years out of me. Not for nothing.”

  I was good enough to get conscripted and sent to a Defender hanging in the black, but I wasn’t a citizen. I didn’t even get to vote for the government that had told me when I was sixteen that they owned the next ten years of my life. So fuck them. Fuck all of them.

  I met Doc’s steady gaze, and felt the warm glow of his sympathy brush up against all my old anger. I was an open book, and it made me want to hunch away defensively.

  “Maybe back on Earth,” I said at last, mostly to dodge Doc’s concern. “If me and Cam hadn’t ended up back out here. Maybe, if someone there had asked me.”

  Except back on Earth nobody had looked at me and thought I was a doctor and an officer in the making. They’d just put a mop in my hands and pointed me toward the nearest puddle of vomit on the hospital floor. You make reffos into officers, and who the fuck knows what might happen next? They might even want to be citizens or something, and who’d die in the factories and smelters of the refugee townships if suddenly every reffo was allowed to just get up and leave?

  Doc tilted his head curiously. “What do you want, Brady? If money was no object, if your background wasn’t, and if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve got Lucy and I’ve got Cam. Seems to me like I’m already way ahead of the curve, Doc.”

  I’ve got you too, and you’re another thing I never deserved.

  He smiled, and I wondered if he’d heard that thought or if he’d just read it in my face. “Your dreams aren’t even a little bigger than that, son?”

  “No,” I said, but I felt a stirring of unease in my gut as I said it, like it was the wrong answer, or like there was something wrong with me since I thought it was the right answer. I shrugged, staring down at the book so I could dodge Doc’s gaze. “I don’t know.”

  And what did it matter anyhow? I still had six years left in the military, and that was provided we even made it back to Earth, and provided the military didn’t decide to somehow extend my period of conscription because they were a bunch of fucking assholes who could do whatever the hell they wanted, and provided the Faceless returned us like they said they would.

  Jesus. Didn’t Doc know that I couldn’t make dreams for the future because the present was already a miracle? I was alive, and Lucy and Cam were alive, and we were together, and we were safe for now, but nothing was certain. Nothing.

  I’d had dreams once where I’d open a letter and it would be from my dad, and he would say that he’d been misdiagnosed, and that he was okay, and that he wasn’t going to die. But those weren’t the sorts of dreams you built a future on. Those were the sorts of dreams that took you with them when they crumbled into pieces. I’d had dreams once too where I was just a normal guy with a normal life, never hungry, never broke. Maybe that was the kind of dream Doc was talking about, but I never did figure out how to tell those dreams apart from the crazy fantasies. They were all the same from where I was looking. Or they had been, not so long ago.

  “I’ve got Lucy and Cam,” I said again, forcing a smile. “I already told you, Doc, I’m ahead of the curve.”

  Don’t make me look at it too close, Doc. I only just started to believe in miracles. Don’t make me think I can get more than this one.

  Doc had that steely look in his eye like he could spent the next hour telling me all the ways I was wrong, but he must have caught an echo of the anxiety that was gnawing at my gut because he grunted and then he let it go.

  He tugged his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and held them out of my reach. “Finish chapter four,” he said. “If you get all the answers right, you can have one.”

  This was an old familiar pattern, where Doc was my gruff teacher and I was the recalcitrant student he had to bribe to pay attention.

  It was more than that too. It was Doc letting me off the hook, and offering me a reprieve. I liked that about Doc. When Cam saw the gulf between us, he tried to bridge it, tried to make me feel like we were standing on the same side. Doc knew better.

  I hunched over the textbook, and flashed him a cheeky smile that we both knew was only surface thin. “You just wait, Doc. You’re gonna owe me that whole pack by the time I’m done with this book.”

  He grunted, and cuffed the back of my head. “I bet I will, son. I bet I will.”

  ****

  That night I woke up with a start.

  Cam made a soft noise beside me, and kept sleeping.

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bunk. The floor was damp and sticky against my bare feet. I didn’t care. Barely noticed it anymore. I just reached under the bunk and dragged my footlocker out. Opened it and found my cigarettes.

  “Bad dream?” Chris Varro asked in a low voice from the bunk on the opposite wall.

  I hadn’t known he was awake.

  I lit my cigarette. “Hot dream,” I lied.

  “Was I in it?”

  “Fucker.”

  He laughed quietly.

  I’d had my fair share of wet dreams about Chris. And they weren’t just when I’d shared dreams with Cam. Pretty sure I’d come up with some all on my own. And I wish I could say that was the weirdest thing about my life, but it barely made the list. And if it was weird for me to be sharing a room with my boyfriend’s ex, how fucking weird was it for him to see us together? At least he didn’t try to pull rank on me anymore, and I didn’t try to stab him in the throat with a screwdriver. We were a work in progress, Chris and me.

  Chris’s bunk creaked as he rose to his feet. He walked to the doorway, and beckoned me to follow.

  I did.

  “Those damn bunks,” he said, rolling his shoulders as he led me down the slope of the corridor towards Doc’s medbay. “I don’t know how you and Cam can fit in a single one.”

  “We make it work,” I said. Cam slept in the bunk next to mine in theory, but in practice we usually ended up wedged close together in the one. I wondered if Chris was jealous. I would have burned with it if I’d had to see Cam with another guy. It was bad enough I’d seen it in his memories.

  Chris regarded me silently for a moment, a sort of half smile on his lips, and I remembered—I felt—exactly why Cam had fallen in love with him. Chris was a good-looking guy, but more than that, he
was smart and he was ambitious, but not in the way a lot of military guys were. Chris didn’t give a fuck about rank or prestige or how many medals they gave him. He was driven by something outside of all that. Chris wanted to unravel all the mysteries of the universe. No wonder that Cam, chasing starlight, had fallen so easily into his orbit.

  They’d been perfect together, at least for a while.

  “I like you, Brady,” he said. He reached forward and plucked my cigarette from between my fingers. Took a drag on it, and gave it back. “You don’t like me, but I like you.”

  “You steal my fucking cigarettes and of course I don’t like you.”

  His smile widened. “We both know that’s not the reason why.”

  I shrugged, because there was no point denying it.

  “You’re good for him,” Chris said at last. Glowing platelets slid past in the wall behind him and illuminated his face for a moment. “You’re good for each other.”

  “I know we are,” I said, trying not to bristle, because I couldn’t quite read him. I couldn’t tell if he was being friendly, or if he was being a condescending prick and implying Cam and I needed his fucking approval or something. Usually I thought the worst of people and usually I was right, but lately I was trying to, I don’t know, be a better person or some bullshit. I at least wanted to set a better example for Lucy, so that she didn’t have to look at me and then look at all these other guys and wonder why I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want her to like them more than me because they weren’t angry and afraid all the time.

  Chris stared at me for a long moment, and I wasn’t sure what he was looking for. “Whole universe out here,” he said at last, “just like Doc says, and you’re still living in your own head.”

  “So what if I am? No fucking law against it.”

  His mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Don’t forget I’ve been inside your skull, Brady. How do you even stand it? It’s so loud in there.”

  I blew smoke in his face and ignored the way my stomach twisted.

  He smiled again and shook his head. When he spoke his voice was tempered with sympathy, and that’s what made me hate him the most. “Whole universe out here, Brady, right in front of your eyes, and you’re still too afraid to look at it, aren’t you?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  I left the asshole standing there, wreathed in the pulsating lights of the Faceless ship.

  ****

  Back when I was first in Cameron Rushton’s head I saw the things that he had seen in his captivity. I felt them too. I saw the inside of the Faceless ship. I felt Kai-Ren’s claws on my spine, and heard the hiss of his alien speech in my ear. I saw twin suns and, once, a strange city built of twisting towers underneath a purple sky.

  Back when I first met Cameron Rushton, I was corpse-pale from living for three years on a Defender but Cameron Rushton—who should have been the dead guy—had a tan.

  Some days I liked to run my fingers along his skin and remember that tan. Back home he’d had a tan too. More of one than the Faceless had given him with their twin suns on their strange planet. Sometimes, on weekends, we’d caught the train to the beach. It wasn’t like the beaches in Kopa with their rusted croc traps half-sunk in water, mudflats and mangroves. This was a white-sand beach with waves that broke in crisp sparkling lines off the shore and then chased each other up onto the sand. Once I got so sunburned that my nose was flaking for days afterward, and Cam, laughing, would put cool lotion on it for me. I went red and peeled in the sun. Cam tanned, because of course he did. Handsome fucker.

  When we kissed on that beach, we tasted like salt.

  Now, after three months in the black, Cam was almost as pale as me. The glowing lights in the wall tinged his skin blue as they pulsed by.

  We were playing poker on my bunk. I was the better player, mostly because what the hell were conscripted guys meant to do to kill time out in the black? Playing against officers was like playing against a batch of homesick sixteen-year-old recruits off the latest shitbox. They were hopeless.

  Also, I cheated a lot.

  Cam probably knew it, but what did it matter? Not like we were playing for cash. We weren’t even playing for rations. We were just playing to pass the time. And we’d done it so often that even cheating was losing its shine. Pretty sure I could recognize all the cards by the way they were bent or creased, or by the mottled patterns of damp fingerprint marks on their backs like snakeskin.

  “When the Faceless took you, how long did it take to get to their planet?”

  There was a flash of something unsettled in his eyes. It wasn’t quite sharp enough to call fear, but even Cam wasn’t as stoic about that memory as he wanted to be. How could he be? It didn’t matter that the Faceless hadn’t been acting with any cruel intent. Didn’t matter that they were just that cold-blooded. They’d slaughtered everyone on that shitbox like they were nothing. Guys Cam must have been talking to, joking with, moments before it happened. And then Kai-Ren had taken Cam.

  The nightmare had gotten worse before it had gotten better.

  Cam looked away for a moment, and when he looked back his mouth was quirked. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a wind-up clock. I think that my sense of time was one of the first things I lost.”

  Not the last thing though. Not by a long shot.

  It was unthinkable to me that Cam had been able to bring himself to step foot on a Faceless ship again, but he’d always been braver than me. Smarter. Better. And the thing I loved most about him was that he never even saw it.

  I felt a prickling presence at the edge of my consciousness, and turned my head to look. There was a Faceless standing in the doorway. It didn’t feel familiar in the way that Kai-Ren did. It stood watching us silently. Nothing threatening about it at all, apart from its appearance. And that was still the hardest thing for me to separate in my mind: that the things that loomed out of the darkness like nightmares maybe weren’t. And it wasn’t just the propaganda that had been shoved down my throat since I was a kid, or even the fact that the Faceless had almost destroyed humanity a few generations ago. It was something on a deeper level than that. It was something instinctive. Primal. It was their faces, formless and blank because of their inky-black masks. It was because they were unknowable.

  The Faceless watched us for a moment longer, and then moved away.

  I fanned my cards out in my hand, and stared at them without really seeing. “Where are they taking us, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Cam said softly. He smiled faintly. “You’re not getting stir-crazy like Chris, are you?”

  “I was born stir-crazy, LT,” I reminded him. “But no, not really. I mean, it would be nice to know how long this will last, you know? Even back on Defender Three I at least had days to count down. I’m not good with just being, you know?”

  Cam huffed out a breath at that, and I wondered if he was remembering the time intel threw us into a shared cell back home. “I know.”

  “Last night Doc asked me about my plans for the future,” I said, unsure why I’d even let those words tumble out of me. My chest felt tight because of it. “He asked me what I wanted for myself, if I could have anything. Is it weird that I don’t know?”

  There was nothing in Cam’s gaze but understanding. “I don’t think that’s weird.”

  “What will you do?” I asked him. “When we get home.”

  He showed me that soft smile again, which maybe had less to do with his own dreams and more to do with the fact that I was finally entertaining the idea we actually had a future. “I’ll stay in the military, probably,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Seriously?”

  “For a while,” he said. “When we get home, Brady, things are going to be different. Whatever happens, the military and the government are going to have to come up with a new approach to dealing with the Faceless. I’ll see which way the wind is blowing, I guess, and see where I can do the most good. Maybe that’s staying in
the military, or maybe it’s quitting and working for some government body. There are seven of us on this ship. When we get back, we’re going to make sure our voices are heard.”

  “You’re counting me and Lucy in that seven?” I snorted at that. “We’re reffos, and she’s a kid. And it sounds like you’re counting on the idea that we’ll actually learn something about the Faceless.”

  “We already have,” Cam said. “When I was taken, it was unthinkable that I’d survive. And here we are. Voluntarily. It’s a huge step forward, Brady. And it’s messy and experimental, but can you imagine what it’ll be like at home when they find out what we’ve done? When they find out we went with the Faceless, and came back unharmed?”

  “They’ll think we’re traitors and hang us in the streets.”

  Cam shook his head, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You have a very bleak view of humanity, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. It’s called the voice of experience, asshole.” I was only half-teasing, I think. “So you’ll be part of some government department, probably flying to all sorts of exotic locations and dealing with officials from districts all over the world. What will I be?”

  “Whatever you want,” Cam said, like it was that simple.

  “What if I want to hang around at our place all day just waiting for Lucy to get back from school?”

  “Brady.” His tone was suddenly serious. “Whatever you want.”

  “I’d get bored,” I muttered.

  “Then do it until you get bored,” Cam said. “And then find something else to do.”

  It wouldn’t be that simple. Even if we made it home—when we made it home—the military still owned my sorry ass. But six years of mopping floors suddenly didn’t seem so bad. Cam and I had proved last time that we had at least some leverage over the brass. They’d let us live together even though fraternization between officers and enlisted men wasn’t allowed. They’d let us bring Lucy down from Kopa, even though she was a reffo. And I’d hardly ever been thrown in the stockade, even given the number of times I’d mouthed off to someone I shouldn’t have. And maybe Cam was right. Maybe this time we’d have even more leverage, which would translate to even more leeway.