Darker Space

by Lisa Henry

  DARKER SPACE

  Lisa Henry

  Darker Space

  Copyright © October 2015 by Lisa Henry

  This edition Copyright 2018.

  Smashwords edition.

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission.

  Editor: Katriena Knights

  Original Cover Artist: Mina Carter

  Cover Artist for 2018 edition: Bree Archer

  Published in the United States of America

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgment

  To Marc F. and Marco M., for loving Brady as much as I do.

  And to my awesome beta readers, J.A. and Sofia, for doing the thing that they do.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter One

  Some guys are meant to be heroes. I was never one of them.

  There was probably never a time in my life when I didn’t want to try to become a better person, while at the same time seeing the sheer fucking impossibility of striving for anything at all, so fuck it, right? Disappointment was always easy enough to get used to, whether it came from my dad’s quiet, rueful smiles, or from that hot, angry place inside me that knew exactly how worthless I was, how pointless, and how I’d never be anything better than the reffo piece of shit I’d been born.

  I stole. I lied. I got in fights.

  I dropped out of school to look after my baby sister.

  Kept stealing and lying and fighting, because even though I wanted to be better, those things had become the pattern of my life. The wanting came late at night, in the quiet moments, in the dark, and the certainty came with it: I could change. I could be better. But all my certainty, all my dreams, were as fragile and ephemeral as moments captured on old photographic negatives, created in the darkness and the quiet. Light and rough handling destroyed them. The daylight killed them.

  In the daylight I wanted to be better still—I wanted a better future—but I discovered I had nothing in me but resentment and nowhere to direct it.

  My dad’s job in the smelter ate his lungs away, day after day, but I didn’t know that yet.

  Stole. Lied. Fought.

  Drank.

  When I was sixteen, I was conscripted. After four weeks of basic training, I was sent to Defender Three, into the black, to sit and watch for the Faceless. To protect the people back home, except nobody ever said how being cannon fodder for aliens helped anyone at all. The Faceless could rip through our Defenders like they were rice paper if they wanted. If they ever came back.

  Then, one day, they did.

  First they sent Cameron Rushton, captured years before, as their messenger, harbinger, or whatever. I was his medic, his pacemaker, or whatever. When I touched him, it happened. Suddenly, we shared a heartbeat. We shared our thoughts and our dreams. I saw everything the Faceless ever did to him. More than that, I felt it. Claws sliding down his spine—my spine, as he—I—pulled uselessly at the restraints. Everything they did to him, I shared. I relived it every fucking night.

  I still did.

  I came up from sleep like from under water, gasping.

  I sat bolt upright, shivering in the darkness as the tendrils of the dream slipped away.

  More nightmares.

  I couldn’t remember the specifics of the dream, but I didn’t have to. Fucking Faceless. Fucking Kai-Ren. My skin crawling as he touched me.

  It took a little while for the unease to fade, and then I couldn’t sleep anyway. I lay back down and pulled the sheet up again and watched the blades of the ceiling fan cutting through the night. In the darkness they were hazy, and I didn’t know if I could actually see them at all, or if I only imagined I could. If I squinted, they seemed to stop altogether.

  Beside me, Cam dreamed on.

  I was still trying to be a better person. For Cam, for us. Still trying, and still falling short by miles. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard, was it? The happy-ever-after bullshit.

  I turned my head and looked at the book on my nightstand. It was an old hardcover, the title long ago worn off the cracked spine. The cover was stained. The pages were so worn the edges felt as soft as velvet.

  I’d learned to read from that book. It had been my mother’s, when she was a kid. Why she’d kept it, I don’t know, but she’d written her name in the inside cover in uncertain, childish letters: Jessica. Underneath that, separated by a few inches and about twenty years, was my name: Brady. And under my name an uneven scrawl put there by my little sister that was supposed to say Lucy but was mostly just a scribble.

  I didn’t remember my mother, not really. Sometimes I imagined I did, but most of the stuff I knew about her didn’t come from my memory, but from what my dad had told me about her. Her dark hair, her crooked smile—both things I’d inherited—and the way she could light up a room just by walking inside. I missed out on that one, I guess. Anyway, she’d died before I could make any memories of her that belonged just to me, so I borrowed my dad’s, and I took the book as well and learned to read by listening to Dad’s voice and following the words along the page.

  It was a book of fairy tales.

  When I was a kid, I’d loved those stories. Maybe there was something in them that I recognized. Hungry, dirty kids—though never as hungry or dirty as in real life—getting saved by magic, by love, because they were good and clever and brave. They deserved it; they deserved not to be poor.

  I got conscripted when I was sixteen, and my dad packed the fairy-tale book in my bag. The book went all the way into the black with me, to Defender Three, where I hardly looked at it, because I didn’t want to get laughed at or have the pages ripped out by some asshole who hated me, but mostly because it hurt so much to think of home and leaving Dad and Lucy behind. And later, when I found out Dad was sick, I hated even thinking of those stories he’d read to me in his gravelly voice, from the book my mother had once held.

  Everything in my life then was loss and darkness and fear.

  And then there was Cam.

  If I were still a kid, maybe I’d say that Cam was like my fairy-tale prince, come to rescue me from my shit life. Except I’d never been good enough or clever enough or brave enough to deserve a handsome prince, and fuck it, life is not a fairy tale. Love isn’t.

  I turned my head again to look at Cam’s profile in the darkness.

  We weren’t a fairy tale, but he’d saved me all the same, and I was trying my hardest to be the sort of guy he deserved.

  Sleep eluded me.

  After a while I climbed out of bed and crept through the dark apartment. I checked on my sister, Lucy, first. She was sleeping, curled up in a tight little ball in her bed with her blankets pulled all the way up to her chin. I shut the door quietly and headed back to the kitchen. Lucy’s birthday present was sitting on the kitchen counter, shiny paper gleaming dully in the scant light, loops of ribbon cascading off it. I took my cigarettes from the top of the refrigerator, then slid open the do
or to the small balcony. I leaned on the railing and smoked, and tried not to look at the stars.

  I looked at the city instead, across the road to the apartment buildings that receded down the hill. Most of the windows were black at this late hour, but the city was never truly dark, not like Kopa had been. People like me were still awake, I guess, watching their flickering blue television screens or moving in silhouette across the occasional tiny, illuminated squares of their windows. During the day I could see all the way to the park by the river if I leaned out over the balcony. At night the view was hidden by the darkness.

  At the end of the street, on the crest of the hill, a steady stream of headlights swept by.

  Cities were bigger once, bigger than anything we had left, but only the smaller ones had survived the coming of the Faceless. That was a long time ago, three generations past, but the Earth still had the scars: huge, empty charnel grounds of twisted metal and concrete, where tens of millions of people had died. A number like that, it isn’t real. You don’t see the faces when there are that many of them. They become less than they ever were. Just a blur. Just a number too big to really visualize. Too big to mourn.

  Nobody rebuilt.

  How could they?

  And why would they?

  Those big glowing cities of glass and steel, shining like beacons even in the middle of the night. Whole countries lit up. Whole continents. They were nothing but fucking targets, and the Faceless had burned them off the surface of the planet.

  Sometimes I wondered if there was any time when people looked up into the sky and didn’t think about the Faceless. If we ever looked at the stars and weren’t afraid.

  If the Faceless came once, they could come again. And all the Defenders hanging in the black couldn’t stop them. The Defenders were just as fragile, just as useless as the treaty that Cam had devised and Kai-Ren had signed.

  I flicked my cigarette butt over the railing, watching as it arced through the darkness and landed in a burst of embers three floors down. I lit another one and closed my eyes, and waited to feel tired enough to drag myself back to bed and sleep.

  The nightmares had been bad this whole week. They usually were when I was worrying about stuff, even dumb stuff like tomorrow.

  The door slid open, and I turned around.

  Cam blinked at me. “Brady. You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you quit,” he said, nodding at the cigarette.

  I considered blowing smoke in his face just to be a prick about it. “I’m going to.”

  “Okay.” He was obviously too tired to give me the whole lecture. “Just don’t throw your butts in the garden. It pisses off the rental association.”

  “Fuck the rental association.”

  Cam wiped his eyes. “You won’t say that when we’re living in a box in an alley.”

  “I could handle it, city boy.” I turned back to the view.

  Cam slid his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. “I know you could.”

  The warmth of his body crept through me. I let the cigarette burn down to my fingers, then flicked it over the railing.

  “Brady.” Cam sighed.

  “You’re not the boss of me, LT.”

  Cam slid one hand under the elastic of my pajama pants, his fingers moving against my abdomen. “Is that so?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “If the rental association doesn’t like cigarette butts, I bet they’ll really hate if you jerk me off on the balcony.”

  Cam snorted. “Fuck them, right?”

  “Fuck ’em,” I agreed and waited for his hand to slip lower. It didn’t. Cam was all talk tonight. I leaned back against him. “Thought I was on a promise, LT.”

  He laughed lowly, and his breath tickled my ear. “Tease.”

  “Me? I’m not the tease, asshole.”

  He kissed my throat. “You are. Every day you are.”

  My grin faded as I looked up at the stars again. A shiver ran through me.

  “Are you cold?”

  “A bit.”

  He knew it was a lie. He tightened his arms around me, and for a while we stood there. I watched the city, and he watched the night sky. Both of us waiting for something, maybe, or for nothing at all.

  * * * *

  Lucy’s party dress was pretty. She didn’t want to sit down on the train because it might squash the ribbons at the back. So she stood instead, twirling around to watch the way the dress flew up and then settled again, like a parachute.

  We were having Lucy’s birthday party at Cam’s parents’ place because they had a backyard and space for kids to run around. Their house was really nice. It was the sort of place where I was always worried about touching stuff or leaving scuff marks on the wall or something. The sort of place that always made me feel dirtier than I was. Today there was a bunch of colorful balloons tied to the fence beside the letter box. Lucy was tugging at my hand from the moment she saw the balloons rolling and dipping in the breeze.

  “Brady! Brady, look!”

  It was Lucy’s eighth birthday, but her first birthday party. Mine too. Kids from Kopa didn’t get much experience with shit like that.

  Lucy pulled away and raced toward the gate, her face flushed with excitement. Meanwhile, something about those balloons was fucking terrifying me.

  Cam’s parents, David and Catherine, met us at the front of the house. Catherine was already fussing over Lucy, but she gave me a quick smile and a wave, and David shook my hand.

  I followed Cam inside and then out into the backyard. The backyard sloped a little, down to the fence. There were more balloons tied to bushes and branches, and a trestle table with plates full of tiny sandwiches and fruit slices and lollies.

  “Brady!” David waved me over to the barbecue. “Want to give me a hand here?”

  “Okay.” I made an effort not to look around for Cam. I didn’t want him to think I still needed him to hold my hand around his parents.

  I liked his parents, but they didn’t like me.

  Wait. That probably wasn’t true. Cam’s parents liked me, but they did it in a way that felt weird. David talked to me about fishing and football, I think because he thought they were the sort of things I should have liked, and Catherine bought me clothes she thought I might need, and they asked how I was, and every single time, with each of them, all I could think was how fucking weird it all was. Playing happy families with the Rushtons.

  There was always a lot of smiling and small talk, but I knew they were all thinking it because I was thinking it too: Your son and I, we fuck. And maybe they could have got over that except for that other thing: I’m a feral reffo from the gulf. I left school when I was twelve, and you’ve got so many diplomas hanging on your walls you don’t need fucking wallpaper.

  Cam came from smart people. I came from Kopa.

  It was dumb. Dumb how much I sometimes resented them for being everything I wasn’t, and for being so fucking nice on top of it. I hated how I tried too hard, even though Cam said I didn’t have to, and how it didn’t matter anyway because I’d never be good enough for them.

  I reckon we all knew that.

  David put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed a little. He had Cam’s smile. Cam’s eyes as well, except I could never read what was behind them. “Do you want to get this thing fired up? I’ll go and get the sausages.”

  “Okay.” It was actually a relief to be given a job I could get distracted by. That way, when kids and parents started arriving, I had a reason not to talk to them.

  Gradually, the backyard filled up with kids. Mostly little girls in pretty party dresses, but a few boys as well in bright-colored shirts. Every little kid came bearing a wrapped gift. Cam was good with the kids. He rounded them up for games and made sure none of them got left out. He was good with the parents too, talking easily and remembering names, and pretending he didn’t have one of the most famous faces on the planet.

  Join the Military and Save the Earth.

  Mos
t of the posters were gone now that Cam was back—his handsome face and heroic sacrifice didn’t invoke the same useful patriotism since the Faceless had returned him—but there were still a few around, and Cam’s face was still stamped firmly into people’s consciousness. Gazes followed him even here, when he blindfolded kids and spun them in gentle circles, then pushed them toward the picture of the tailless donkey stuck up by the trestle table.

  I turned sausages on the grill and listened to David talk to people.

  “No, we’re not the grandparents,” he explained to some parent who’d obviously never met us before. “Lucy is Brady’s sister. Brady is my son Cam’s partner.”

  The guy looked confused for a second, as though he didn’t know what that made us. Join the club, right?

  Somehow all the dads had congregated over near the barbecue and talked about sports and politics and their day jobs. The mothers sat in chairs in the shade. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but I figured I wouldn’t fit in any better over there.

  “Look,” one of the dads said, “I’ve got no problem with paying a higher rate of tax, but why the hell should my money go to support some reffo in some shithole township who just doesn’t want to get a job?”

  I froze with the tongs against the grill.

  “Well,” David said, his voice calm. He didn’t look at me. “Respectfully, I disagree with that. I believe most people want to work, if given the chance. And I believe the refugee townships need more support than they’re currently getting.”

  One of the other dads chimed in. “I knew a few reffos when I did my service. They weren’t all lazy.”

  With advocates like that, who needs enemies? It was time to walk away before I started calling them assholes and throwing punches.

  “That’s just it,” David said, taking the tongs off me as I held them out to him. “They’re good enough to be conscripted into the military for us, but not good enough for all the benefits of citizenship like health care and education?”