Darker Space Read online

  “I found him,” I said, in a monotone. Giving my report, the way Doc had taught me.

  “Garrett,” Hanron said and shook his head again.

  He’d told me the first time he met me that I had anger-management problems, and asked if I’d ever been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder as an adolescent. Because apparently when the world was made up of total assholes, that was my problem. And the fact that Hanron thought medical services in Kopa—even if we’d been able to afford them—had extended as far as psychology was a fucking joke. The entire thing was a fucking joke. He was.

  “You’re ODD.” Cam had laughed later when I told him.

  “Fuck you.”

  Anyway, I could remember how to be professional, even if Hanron didn’t think I had it in me. I kept my gaze on his. “I cut him down. He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse or heartbeat. I stopped when the doctor took over.” My voice shook a little, but that could have been breathlessness. CPR was hard work.

  Hanron narrowed his eyes at me. Tilted his head, like he was looking at some sort of slightly distasteful scientific specimen. Gentlemen, the dung beetle.

  I got my knees under me and hauled myself to my feet.

  “Where are you going, Garrett?”

  “Got floors to mop, sir.”

  The door to the bathroom smashed open. “Brady!”

  Cam. He stood there, wide-eyed, taking everything in. Me, Hanron, Marcello, and the morgue attendant.

  “Brady.” He closed the distance between us and wrapped his arms around me. I loved that about Cam. He didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought about us. If I needed to be held, Cam would always hold me, and to hell with the brass. “I’ve got you.”

  “I’m sorry. He was your friend. I’m sorry.”

  “I tried, Cam. I tried to help him.”

  “I know you did. I know.” He rubbed my back. Soothing. Comforting. “I know.”

  I buried my face in his neck. Wanted the closeness of him, the smell of him, the parts of him that nobody else had. Most famous face on the planet, but all the rest was mine.

  “Lieutenant Rushton,” Hanron said, his voice way too bright, way too sharp for that of a man standing over the dead body of a kid.

  “Sir.”

  “It’s good that you’re here,” Hanron said. “Garrett could use your support.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cam dug his fingers into my shoulder. “Brady, I—”

  “One thing,” Hanron said, and I turned around to stare at him. His smile wasn’t tight and sympathetic now. It was genuinely amused. “How did you know he needed you?”

  A raw blast of panicked static deafened Cam’s thoughts.

  “Sir?” His voice was brittle.

  “Garrett hasn’t left this bathroom.” Hanron stepped forward. “So I’ll ask you one more time. How did you know?”

  Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

  His thoughts or mine?

  In that moment, it made no difference.

  We were fucked now.

  Chapter Six

  The first thing I ever learned as a kid was there are some things you can’t run from. It never stopped me from dreaming about escape, though. In all my dreams, I could run forever and never stop, not even when I reached the ocean. I’d swim then. In all my dreams, there was nothing to weigh me down: not hunger, not fatigue, not regret.

  When I was a kid, when I was running from a flogging with the belt Linda, my stepmother, kept behind the kitchen door just for me, I’d thought I could run forever as well. I used to run behind the house, over the sagging back fence, and onto the track that led up the rise. I told myself I wasn’t scared of the shapes the fig trees made in the night. I told myself they were the same at night as they were in the day when I squeezed in between the thick, twisted tendrils that wove together to make the trunk, and pretended I was trapped inside the tree like some ancient spirit. At night, though, I was too scared to hide inside the hollow spaces. At night I crouched down in the dirt and pretended that I couldn’t feel the trees right there, looming. Pretended that I didn’t believe they had spirits, and that I couldn’t feel them staring.

  I’d wanted to run forever then too, but instead I’d just waited in the trees until the fear of them was greater than the fear of what was waiting for me at home.

  When it was, I’d run back home, back to Linda and her screaming and her belt and the empty bottles on the floor. And when she flogged the shit out of me for whatever smart-ass thing I’d said to her that time, a part of me would be so fucking relieved because at least I was safe from things that waited for me out in the dark: the thick, twisted fig trees with tendrils that swept the ground, and the pale, ghostly eucalyptus that loomed out of the night.

  Can’t run from the Faceless. Can’t run from the military. Can’t run from your nightmares either.

  There were MPs in the doorway of the bathroom before I even heard them coming. They cuffed my wrists behind my back while I watched the morgue attendant struggle to zip up Marcello’s body bag. The zip snagged and caught, snagged and caught, the plastic crackled and billowed, and Marcello’s pale, monstrous face, his neck distended, stared toward me.

  Maybe you could run from your nightmares after all. Marcello had.

  The MPs walked us down the stairs and out of the hospital into the bright sunlight. There was a truck waiting. I clambered up the tailgate awkwardly, some asshole’s hands on my ass to push me up. The ride didn’t take long. I braced my boots on the floor of the truck and leaned forward a little to try to ease the pull in my shoulders. I didn’t bother asking them to take the cuffs off, and they sure as hell didn’t offer. Cam sat opposite me.

  “I’m sorry, Brady. I’m sorry.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to the MPs talk shit about football and girlfriends. I didn’t realize the conversation had come around to me until one of them elbowed me.

  “Isn’t that right, Garrett?”

  I opened my eyes and scowled. “What?”

  “You and the lieutenant here.”

  “Me and the lieutenant what?” Fuckers. Every fucking time. This was another thing that was supposed to get better once we were back planetside. You shove hundreds of guys in a tin can in space, and they’re not gonna be all about embracing the diversity. Nothing but pack animals, ready to turn on the weak in a heartbeat. The weak, the different. Same thing. Planetside, even though we were still in uniform, it was meant to be better than that. People were meant to be better. I didn’t look at Cam, but I could feel his anger coursing through my veins as well, a whispering echo of my own. “Yeah, we fuck. So what? Yeah, he’s my boyfriend, and I suck his dick, and he sucks mine. We do other stuff too. Want me to draw you a fucking picture? Because that’s the only way you’ll ever fucking find out, asshole.”

  The guy snorted. “Like I’d want to.”

  One of the others leaned forward. He had narrow-set eyes and a nose that was too long for his face. “I bet the Faceless know.”

  My guts clenched. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The truck rattled to a stop.

  “I’ve got a friend in intel.” He gave Cam the side-eye. “That what you two do now, huh? Play alien and prisoner together?”

  “Fuck off.” I leaned back and tried not to show them just how upset I was. How every nightmare took me back to the Faceless ship, to Kai-Ren, and to Cam: “Don’t watch, Brady. Don’t watch.” I fixed my gaze on the asshole with the long nose and curled my lips in a smile. “I bet your dick’s so small it’d be a waste of my time to suck it.”

  Getting the insult in was almost worth the punch to the gut as he helped me out of the truck.

  No stockade this time. I had no fucking idea where this was. They took us underground. The elevator doors opened into what looked like an empty warehouse, apart from the big glass cube in the middle.

  Beside me, Cam’s footsteps faltered.

  “I’m so sorry. God, Brady, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”


  It wasn’t, but it also wasn’t his fault.

  The MPs walked us forward.

  The cube wasn’t actually glass, I guess. Something impenetrable, probably. The sort of box where you kept the things you really didn’t want to escape. The dangerous things. The alien things. Us.

  Boots and socks off. Jackets off. Pockets emptied. Trousers off. Left in nothing but my T-shirt and my underwear and my bare feet. Same as Cam. They even took the blue-and-green bracelet Lucy had made me.

  “Fuck you. I could still hang myself with my shirt!” I told the MP who shoved me in the cage. Not that there was anything to hook it onto, it turned out. The only piece of furniture in it was a toilet. Even the cells in the stockade were nicer.

  “I need to talk to an advocate,” Cam said, trying a different tactic from mine. “Listen, Corporal, we’ve got a child we have to look after. You can’t just lock us up here without a charge!”

  The MPs closed the door, sealing us inside. A moment later, cold air began to hiss through the narrow vents in the clear ceiling of our cage. Great. Dependent on a mechanical ventilation system. Another thing I didn’t miss at all from the black.

  “Welcome to the life of the enlisted man, LT.”

  “Brady.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Fuck!”

  I picked a corner and sat in it. Stared out of our glass prison into the surrounding warehouse. Watched as the MPs strode back toward the elevator and the doors rolled shut, leaving us alone. Everything was gunmetal gray, just like on a Defender. Rivets and rust and recycled air.

  Cam sank down beside me.

  “Cam, we need to—”

  “You need to shut up, crewman.”

  In my shock, I didn’t even punch him for that.

  “Cameras, Brady. Don’t say anything you don’t want them to see or hear.”

  “Okay.” I shifted my hand across the narrow space between us, my fingers twitching on the cool, smooth floor. “Does it matter if they see this?”

  I linked our fingers together.

  “No.” He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “No, that doesn’t matter.”

  Good. Because I needed this right now.

  Cam exhaled heavily. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “You were hurting, and I didn’t think, and—”

  “I know.” I squeezed his hand tight.

  We sat. There was no real way to count the passage of time in our cell. The lights in the place were dimmed sometime after the MPs left, and they stayed that way for what felt like hours. Maybe it was. I don’t know. I fell asleep at some point—a restless sleep full of Marcello and Lucy and the Faceless—and woke up shivering from the cold, my head in Cam’s lap.

  He rubbed his hand over my scalp, scraping the prickles of my buzz cut and bringing me out in goose bumps.

  “It’s cold,” I muttered.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” I reached up and laced my cold fingers through his, then brought our clasped hands down under my chin to warm them.

  “Who’s gonna help Lucy color in her maps?”

  Cam squeezed my hand. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.”

  He couldn’t know that, not really, but Cam had been like that as long as I’d known him. Calm, with an unshakable core of steel. Or of faith, maybe. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it had sustained him out there in the black, during those four years he’d been a prisoner of the Faceless. Or a pet.

  My breath shuddered out of me.

  “Why now? Why this again, now?”

  “I don’t know.” A frisson of fear ran through Cam, through both of us. “Jesus. I don’t know.”

  I thought of the base above us, of all those officers and enlisted men scrambling over it like ants. I felt like a kid again. I was cold and I was hungry. The ache in my guts turned into a sharp pain. I hunched over to smother it. I hated being hungry.

  This isn’t hungry, asshole, my nine-year-old self told me.

  He sneered at me.

  Crowed at me.

  Kicked dirt at me.

  More pride than was fucking good for him, that kid.

  When I was a kid in Kopa, I thought I owned the world. The world was only as big as the township and mostly made of tin and red dust, but I was its barefoot king. I wasn’t scared of much. Then, when I was about nine, I went with a bunch of other kids to this clearing out of town. There’d been a fire there once. The trees were blackened stumps. On one of them, this orange fungus grew that made it look like the fire was still burning. Matty bet I wasn’t brave enough to touch it. I did, even though I thought my fingers would get burned.

  That night we sat in that blackened clearing and stared up at the sky, and one of the older kids told us that the Faceless were staring back.

  I’d been scared before, I thought, but this was the first time I’d ever been scared bone deep. That fear crept up on me and slipped its tendrils around my throat, and it choked me before I even knew that it was there. A few of the smaller kids cut and ran, but my fear froze me.

  I wanted to stop looking at the stars, but I couldn’t.

  I was scared I’d see them coming.

  I was more scared that I wouldn’t.

  * * * *

  My head jerked up as the lights flickered on. The ones above our cell first, then in sequence all the way down toward the elevator doors. I craned my neck as the doors slid open and Chris Varro stepped out.

  “Oh, look, it’s the ex,” I said. “Fucker.”

  And just in case he couldn’t hear me, I showed him my middle finger.

  “Brady,” Cam sighed. He climbed to his feet, crossing his arms over his chest and rubbing warmth into his prickling skin.

  Chris walked closer. He looked pissed. When he reached our cage, he hit something on a control panel beside the door. A sudden squawk of static from somewhere in the vents alerted us to the fact that the lines of communication were now open.

  “What the hell, Chris?” Cam demanded.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  I curled my arms around my knees and snorted. Yeah, sure.

  “It was you who miraculously turned up just when Garrett was having a breakdown!”

  “Fuck you,” I muttered into my kneecaps.

  Chris turned his gaze on me. “And given that I’m just about the only person you’ve got on the outside who gives half a fuck about you, Garrett, you might want to keep a lid on the attitude.”

  “I’m surprised I rate that highly,” I said.

  Chris raised his eyebrows. “Me too.”

  “I don’t need your—”

  Chris cut me off. “I called Cam’s parents. Told them to collect your sister from school.”

  That knocked the remaining fight right out of me. Okay, so Chris might have been an asshole of the highest order, but right now he was my fucking hero, okay? I lifted my chin off my knees. “Thank you.”

  He looked a little wary, like he was searching for the sarcasm. “I couldn’t tell them much, just that you’re both being held here for a while.”

  “How long is a while?” Cam asked, voice quiet.

  “I don’t know. It’s not my decision.”

  “Are they going to tell us anything?”

  Chris dragged a hand through his dark hair. “I don’t know. Hell, Cam, they’re not telling me anything.”

  Cam nodded slowly, his jaw tightening. “Okay. So maybe in the meantime you can get us some blankets or something. It’s cold down here.”

  “Yeah.” Chris looked almost regretful, and I wondered if he knew more than he was saying.

  “Bet you wish you could read his mind, huh, Cam?”

  Cam’s mouth quirked in an unwilling smile. “Yeah, that’d be handy right about now.”

  “And some food and water?” Cam asked.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Ask him for my cigarettes.”

  “I’m not asking him for your cigarettes, Bra
dy.”

  “Asshole.”

  Cam’s mouth quirked again.

  Some strange part of me had missed this. Our connection. Not the way we had no secrets from each other—that part hurt—but the way we had secrets from the rest of the universe. All those jokes and smart-ass one-liners even I wasn’t dumb enough to say aloud. Those became ours.

  I’d missed his voice in my head. His thoughts and memories twisting in with mine until I couldn’t pick the threads apart, and it didn’t matter. Until the barriers separating us broke down like enzymes eating through cell walls, and those places at the edges of our consciousness flowed together. I lost a little of myself and that was frightening—terrifying, trying to hold myself together when the walls weren’t there anymore—but look at what I got in return.

  I got Cameron Rushton.

  My heartbeat.

  I watched as Chris left.

  The day dragged some more. An MP delivered two blankets and two ration packs. Cam immediately went all officer on my enlisted ass and made sure I didn’t eat everything at once. I measured out the dimensions of our cell in foot lengths and smacked my hands against the glass like I was playing the drums, just for something to do. I quit when my palms started stinging.

  “It’s not glass,” Cam murmured, and I remembered he’d told me the same thing once on Defender Three.

  I sat down beside him and shivered. Cam slung my blanket around my shoulders.

  “I spy,” I said, “with my little eye, something beginning with T.”

  Cam’s gaze followed mine to the toilet. “Idiot.”

  “Stockade expert, remember?”

  He smiled a little at that.

  I shifted, tugging my blanket more tightly around my shoulders.

  “Cold?”

  “A bit.”

  Cam opened up the crackers on his ration pack and curled his lip. The crackers were soft and stale. I’m pretty sure the ration packs had been thrown together about the same time as my grandfather was born, but food was food, right?

  I helped him out by eating half of his crackers. My belly was full enough that it was making me tired. I was still worried about Lucy, still seeing Marcello lying on the floor of the bathroom, and still angry about this whole fucking bullshit situation, but I’d spent enough time in the stockade to know that anger only ended up with busted knuckles. And I had Cam this time.