by Lisa Henry
I headed toward the house, passing Cam, who was almost buried in newspaper as the kids played some game where they had to unwrap a layer off a parcel whenever the music stopped. Ever since Cam had explained it to me, I couldn’t remember what the name of it was, and he laughed whenever I called it the parcel-wrapping game.
Fuck this place, and these people, and the fact that I didn’t know what their stupid game was called because when I was growing up, I’d been shit-poor and hungry. Or lazy, according to most of these fuckers.
The house was quiet and empty. I headed straight for Cam’s old room, figuring nobody would bother me in there. I sat on his bed. I could see marks on the wall where posters had hung once, but this was a guest room now, so there weren’t any real traces of teenage Cam left. He’d told me he’d had models of Hawks hanging from his ceiling that he’d made when he was a little kid, and known since then that he’d pilot one in the black one day.
Outside I could still hear kids shrieking and laughing. It sounded like they were a long way away.
The door squeaked open. “Brady?”
I sighed and scrubbed my knuckles over my head. “Sorry.”
Cam sat down on his bed next to me, all long limbs. Weird to think of him sleeping here when he was just a kid. I watched his gaze track around the room, as he looked past the things that were in here all the way through to his memories. The quirk of his lips made me feel a million miles away from him.
“What happened?” he asked after a moment.
“Nothing.” I shrugged. “Some asshole.”
Cam reached for my hand and threaded his fingers through mine.
I made a face. “All reffos are lazy.”
“Asshole,” Cam murmured in agreement.
Sometimes I got scared that we were just playacting, Cam and me. Like what were we supposed to do now for the rest of our lives, or for as long as this thing between us lasted? In the black it hadn’t mattered, but back here, now the dust had settled, it was like everyone could see the flaws in us, the cracks in the thing we called a relationship. I didn’t fit into Cam’s world, and he sure as fuck didn’t fit into mine.
I knew what people thought about us. They thought the only reason we were still together was because Cam felt responsible for me and Lucy, and that I was just using him because I couldn’t support a kid on my wage alone. And all that shit—from other people, but from me too—got in the way so much that I was sometimes afraid I couldn’t even see Cam anymore.
I knew nothing about relationships. I only knew that it had been easier to love him when I was sure I was a dead man. Now I sometimes felt like we’d backed ourselves into a corner, except neither of us wanted to admit it.
Or maybe that was just me.
Ungrateful dirty reffo scum.
“You don’t need to babysit me,” I said at last.
He smiled. “I needed a break as well.”
“Are you saying that just to make me feel like less of a loser for sneaking in here?”
“What?” He snorted. “Jesus, Brady, no.”
Of course. Most famous face on the planet. Sometimes he needed to get away from all that shit too.
I shifted so that I was facing him and brought my free hand up to press my palm against his cheek. “You know I love you, right, Cam?”
Worry flickered through his eyes. “I love you too.”
“Good.” I swiped my thumb over his cheekbone. “Because I know I’ve been an asshole today, and I’m gonna be even more of an asshole by the time we’re done, because things like this suck balls, because everyone out there is smarter than me and has a better job than me and looks down on me the second they know where I’m from, and I fucking hate it.” I pressed a finger over his lips before he could talk. “But I love that you and your parents did all this for Lucy. And not just the presents and the party, but everything you’ve done. And I really was trying to be sociable and shit, but I kind of had to get out of there before I wrecked it by throwing a punch.”
“You’re not an asshole.”
That’s what he took away from that? “I kind of am.”
He wavered. “Not always.”
That made me smile and lifted some of my bad mood.
“Would you really have thrown a punch?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “You know us reffos, LT. We’re lazy as fuck, but we can fight dirty if we want.”
Cam’s grinned. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”
I leaned in for a kiss. “Fuck, no, you wouldn’t. Someone’s gotta keep you city boys on your toes.”
“So come back outside with me,” he said, his fingers curling behind my ear, “and keep me on my toes.”
* * * *
After the party, Cam’s mother offered to take Lucy for the night.
“You know she’s always welcome to stay.” Her smile was a little too bright. “And I’m sure you two could do with a night on your own.”
“Can I?” Lucy asked, eyes wide with hope. “Can I stay?”
Catherine looked at Cam, not at me, like she knew she wouldn’t like what she saw in my face.
Cam didn’t need to ask me what I thought.
“Maybe another time,” he said.
“Okay,” Catherine said, that too-bright smile faltering.
I think she thought I didn’t trust her and David, but it wasn’t that.
I’d promised my dad I would look after Lucy.
More than that, when I was in the black, I’d felt the loss of her so fucking profoundly that the ache had never left me. I could feel it even now, even when she was right in front of me. Even when her hand was clasped in mine, I could feel millions of miles stretching out between us. Once, I’d been so sure that I’d failed her, that she would die alone and afraid, that I couldn’t let her go now. What if she needed me and I wasn’t there?
“It’s not fair!” Lucy scowled at me. “You’re not being fair!”
I ushered her out the door so I wouldn’t have to see Catherine’s disappointment, and left Cam to make whatever excuses he could for my overprotectiveness.
It was already dark by the time we reached the station and caught the train. The carriage was mostly empty. Lucy picked a seat near the window, and I sat next to her. She huffed and ignored me. Cam sat across from us, the bag of Lucy’s presents balanced between his feet.
I don’t think I’d ever gotten a birthday present in my life before I met Cam. Hell, the only surprise I ever got was the letter when I turned sixteen saying that I’d been conscripted. It was good that Lucy was learning a different way to grow up. A better way. At least when she grew up and shacked up with someone, when she walked out to breakfast one morning and got a box wrapped in colorful paper shoved under her nose, she wouldn’t screw it up by asking, What the fuck is this?
I mean, I hadn’t remembered it was my birthday. Why would I? Cam had, though, because, well, that was Cam through and through, wasn’t it?
“What?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“Nothing.” I couldn’t stop my smile, though.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Just wondering how I got so lucky,” I admitted.
“You haven’t yet,” Cam said. “But play your cards right, and who knows?”
I shot a look at Lucy, but she was dozing against the window. “You’ve got a dirty mind, Cam.”
“You’re a bad influence on me.”
Yeah. Pretty sure that was the general consensus.
I showed him my middle finger, and he just grinned.
I shook Lucy awake as we got to our station. She was clumsy and drowsy with sleep. Cam and I held a hand each until we’d crossed the pedestrian overpass and taken the stairs out of the station onto the street. She’d woken up a little by the time we got to the park we used as a shortcut.
“Can we go on the swings?”
“It’s dark,” I told her. “We’ll come tomorrow after school.”
“Please, Brady!” She tugged at my hand. “I didn’t get to sleep
over at Catherine and David’s like I wanted, and it’s my birthday!”
I looked at Cam.
“It’s her birthday,” he said with a shrug.
The lights in the playground area were on. They were bright enough to let us see our way, but not bright enough to swallow the starlight. I kept my eyes fixed on Lucy’s back as I pushed, fighting the tiny ripples of nausea that tickled at the edges of my mind whenever I glimpsed the stars.
Lucy squealed with laughter as she swung higher and higher into the night.
Then somehow we all ended up on the merry-go-round, Cam and Lucy sprawled in the middle while I sat on the side and pushed us slowly around. Cam had his arms folded behind his head. Lucy was resting her head on his stomach, lying crossways to him.
“The two bright ones,” Cam was saying, “are called the Pointers, because they point to the Southern Cross.”
“Which two ones? They’re all bright!”
Cam raised his hand. “Those two. See?”
Lucy craned her neck. She wasn’t scared to look at the stars, not like me. “Do you know all the stars, Cam?”
Cam’s eyes were dark in the gloom. He smiled slightly. “Not all of them.”
“Brady, do you know all of them?”
I pushed my heels against the ground, giving us another tiny burst of speed. “I don’t know any of them.”
I’d spent most of my life not looking at the night sky, and three years of it stuck on a Defender where I could feel it crawling at my back every minute of every day. I’d been scared of the black enough as a kid—every horror story I’d ever heard and nightmare I’d ever had came from there—but after coming back, it was even worse. I’d seen the Faceless now. I’d heard Kai-Ren’s voice in my head. I could still feel his fucking touch on my skin.
Cam reached and took my hand. He stroked it with his thumb. “Brady’s not a stargazer, Lucy.”
Lucy huffed at me.
“I don’t even like Jump the Moon,” I said.
“What’s that?” Cam asked.
After today, I was weirdly pleased to have found a party game I had to explain to him. “We used to play it back home. First, you get really smashed. Then you take a broomstick, and you hold it up at the moon. Then you spin around ten times, and then you put the broomstick down and try and jump over it.”
“You do that?”
I poked him in the ribs, making him flinch and Lucy giggle as her head got jostled. “Well, not anymore. I grew up and got cultured.”
“I’m not sure I’d agree with either of those,” Cam said, the smile evident in his voice.
“Faking it until I make it, LT.”
He laughed. “Okay. Good luck with that.”
We spun in slow, lazy circles for a while longer, Cam and Lucy staring at the sky while I watched their faces.
Lucy gasped suddenly. “Cam, look! Look! A shooting star!”
I twisted my neck before I could stop myself, and saw the flare of light across the field of stars. My heart stammered, and my breath caught in my throat.
“Make a wish!” Lucy crowed. “Make a wish!”
I wished I’d never fucking looked.
I don’t know how much time passed. The entire universe had contracted in that moment and left me small and terrified, nothing but a heartbeat, at its core. I was on Defender Three again, feeling the black at my back. I was on the Faceless ship again. I could hear his voice in my head— “Bray-dee”—and the prickling drag of a claw down my naked spine.
I was just a fucking bug to him, an insect.
He’d liked the panicked noises I made.
“Brady.” Cam’s hand on my shoulder startled me. “Let’s go. Let’s go home.”
Lucy was quiet as we left the park, and I felt like an asshole for ruining her fun. I didn’t feel guilty enough to insist we stay, though.
Cam held my hand the whole way home.
I had another nightmare that night.
Chapter Two
The military was never going to let Cam go. Me neither, probably, except I wasn’t a valuable asset to intel so much as I was a dead end. I’d spent my captivity by the Faceless curled up in the fetal position, whimpering and panicking, in a dark room on Kai-Ren’s ship. So yeah, a dead end. But I didn’t care if I spent the rest of my life in fatigues and boots that didn’t fit right as long as I had the sun at my back. As long as I got to keep Cam and Lucy, I didn’t care how many ways the military had its claws in us, or how many floors I had to scrub.
Once upon a time, back on Defender Three, I’d been a trainee medic. Here, planetside, there were enough real doctors and nurses and medics that they didn’t need to scrape the bottom of the barrel for guys like me, so I was an orderly at the base hospital. I didn’t mind. It meant a lot of hours leaning on a mop, but there were worse jobs. And just like on Defender Three, I got to finish off the meals the patients couldn’t.
This one kid, Mike Marcello, had gotten hurt in a training exercise. He copped a face full of explosives, and now he could really only eat pudding and whatever had gone through a blender first. But he always asked for biscuits with his meals, and then gave them to me because I played cards with him in the afternoon and didn’t freak out about his face. So I guess I still had the bedside manner Doc had praised me for back when I was still a trainee medic, or at least I had a thing where I liked food more than I hated looking at the way Marcello’s jaw hung slack from his face with titanium staples and wires.
His good eye lit up when I walked in to visit him, and he gave me what was probably a smile but looked more like the grimace of a death’s head. “Ay, Arret.”
Hey, Garret.
His speech was pretty fucked up too.
“Hey, Marcello.” I pulled my cards out of my pocket. “What’s up?”
Because of the way he talked, he didn’t get many visitors. Most of his mates, the guys he’d been in training with, were orbiting the planet on Defenders now anyway, which at least saved him from having to find out the hard way they were assholes.
But I don’t know. Maybe they would have visited him.
His parents lived in Murray Bay. The military was going to ship him back there as soon as they gave him a jaw he could chew with and some more reconstructive surgery so that when he closed what was left of his mouth, there was enough skin to give him a cheek.
“Yor ate.”
Late? Every day it took a little while to attune my ear to the way Marcello spoke.
“Fuck off.” I pulled up a chair and dealt the cards. “You got any idea how these assholes are riding me?”
Marcello rolled his eyes, and I told him all about Lucy’s birthday party. Marcello was from a refugee township too. He didn’t know about Pass the Parcel either. We played cards for an hour before some nurse came looking for me to clean up a patch of vomit in the hall.
“See you, Marcello.”
“Ee you.”
I cleaned up the vomit and headed down to the basement to get a fresh mop and a cigarette.
My boss at the hospital was a dickhead of a lance corporal called Lingard. He didn’t like me much, and the feeling was absolutely mutual. He was a pinch-faced, petty-minded fucker who thought I was the one with the attitude problem, when what really got his goat, although he didn’t have the balls to admit it, was that I was twenty years younger than him, twice as smart, and had actually seen some service in the black that didn’t involve pushing a mop.
“Think you’re better than me, Garrett?” he’d asked once, squaring up to me.
My smirk told him I knew I was.
I mean, what could he do to me, really? Make me clean up twice as much vomit?
The rest of the orderlies were okay. We didn’t talk much and usually only saw one another at the beginning and the end of every shift when we stowed our gear in the basement. Or maybe they talked to one another but not to me; I don’t know. Even though what had happened out in the black wasn’t public knowledge, this was the military, and gossip traveled fast.
Everyone knew I was one of only two guys who’d been taken and then returned by the Faceless.
I was a horror story, probably.
Just like Marcello.
When I got to the basement, a few of the other guys were there too, hanging around.
“Hey.” Jones nodded at me as I passed him.
“Hey.”
He followed me into the locker room. “You hear anything about the Shitboxes?”
“Nope.” I opened my locker to grab my cigarettes. “What Shitboxes?”
“Three of them in the last week. Landing at night.” Jones tapped the side of his nose. “I’ve got a buddy in the motor pool. Says he got sent out each time to collect brass from the runway.”
Shitboxes were shuttles. They were mostly used to ferry men and supplies between Defenders, but they could break atmo as well. Well, hit it like a fucking brick wall first. If Shitboxes were landing, they were coming in from the black, not from planetside.
I slammed my locker door shut. “Why the hell would I know anything about it?”
Jones scowled at me and showed me his palms. “I was just asking!”
“Yeah, just asking because if something weird’s going on, it’s gotta have something to do with me, right?” I pulled a cigarette out of the pack. “Fuck you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Whatever, asshole.”
“Yeah. What-the-fuck-ever.” I hadn’t even guessed before Jones had started talking that I was wound up tight enough to be itching for a fight. Jones didn’t give me the satisfaction, though. Just shook his head and walked away.
I don’t know.
Maybe he wasn’t making anything of it except conversation, but I’d only look like a dick if I asked, so I didn’t say anything. Just let him walk away.
“Garrett!” Lingard shuffled into the locker room. He looked to be in a foul mood. Fouler than usual, which, considering he’d been born an asshole of the highest order, was really saying something.
“Where the fuck are the syringes? The med director is all over me because there are no fucking syringes, and they ordered them three weeks ago!”
