by Lisa Henry
My school had been a tin shed in a red-dirt paddock with a single coolabah tree for shade. We all sat under that tree at lunchtime, bare feet paddling the dust, bellies growling as we looked wide-eyed at the kids who actually had something to eat, waiting for the teacher to call us back inside. I asked the teacher how I could get faith, but he hadn’t been able to tell me. Just said something about accepting Jesus into my heart. Wasn’t my heart I’d been thinking with, though, just my belly. Pretty soon I’d figured out the truth: prayer got me nothing because there wasn’t some loving God out there listening in the black.
The only thing out there was the Faceless.
I raised my blurry gaze to the window and stared outside. All my deepest fears came from there. Every single nightmare I’d ever had.
Cam leaned into me, our shoulders knocking together.
“I don’t understand what Kai-Ren wants,” I said, trying to keep my heart from racing. “I just want to understand.”
“Sometimes we don’t get to understand,” Cam said.
I remembered what Chris Varro had said to me that day in his office: “An officer asks you a question, and you answer it. He gives you an order, you obey it. It’s not hard.”
“I’m a terrible soldier.” I snorted.
“You really are,” Cam said and put an arm around me. “Lucky nobody who matters gives a damn.”
* * * *
That night I dreamed of Kai-Ren again. I opened my eyes to find myself on his ship, and the familiar spike of panic lanced my guts. I hauled myself to my feet, wiping my slimy hands on my pants. This time, instead of blindly racing toward Cam, I tried to see if I could actually make any sense of my surroundings. The corridor I was in, glowing and pulsing with weird energy, curved sharply enough that I couldn’t see far in either direction. I wondered if this was even a true representation of the ship, or if it was some kind of dream shorthand. Would the corridor lead anywhere, or would it just turn into a futile circle?
Did I have any power in this place?
Once, Kai-Ren had given me Kopa.
I thought of it now, as hard as I could.
“No,” I said aloud, squeezing my eyes shut. “No. I don’t want to be here.”
I reached my shaking hand out to touch the wall, and instead my fingers brushed a curtain of dry leaves. I crushed one, and the sweet, unmistakable scent of eucalyptus filled the air.
I opened my eyes.
Kopa.
I was sitting on the bank of the riverbed, where the old rusted triangle hung out over the dry red dirt. In summer, in the wet season, all the kids would come here and swing out into the muddy water. In the dry season there was nothing in the riverbed except snakes and lizards, rustling in the dead leaves.
It was hot. A bead of sweat slid down my spine inside my shirt.
“Hey.”
I looked up as Cam sat down beside me. In the sunlight I could see the faint freckles across his nose. His green eyes were brilliant. I could see entire universes in them.
“Hey,” I said and flicked a green ant off the back of my hand before it stung me.
“Did you do this?” he asked.
“I think so. I don’t really know.” I looked down at my boots and began to unlace them. I wanted to feel the dirt under my feet again. I thought of Marcello as my fingers tugged the laces undone. “We had this before, in the pod, so I thought maybe he’d let us have it again.”
“I like it.”
“Pretty sure it’s clouded by nostalgia, LT,” I said, bumping his shoulder. “You’ve seen the real thing.”
A flash of movement through the trees on the other side of the riverbank, and everything else stilled. Even the shrieking cockatoos fell silent. My heart skipped a beat.
“Lucy? Lucy!”
If she’d been with us on the Faceless ship, then why not here? This was just a construct too.
A tall figure clothed entirely in black stepped through the trees.
Shit shit shit.
Kai-Ren.
Cam put a steadying hand on my forearm. “Just a dream,” he murmured.
A nightmare.
I drew in a deep breath and held it for as long as I could. I tried to remember how I wasn’t going to be scared, how I’d sat in our room on Defender Three just hours ago, before sleep, and stared into the black.
Kai-Ren moved toward us. Red dust rose in puffs under his shiny black boots as he strode across the riverbed. The dust didn’t settle on him, didn’t leave a trace on him, and that, more than anything, told me this wasn’t real.
Cam stood to meet him. “Kai-Ren.”
He didn’t even flinch as a narrow, gloved hand reached out for him, and Kai-Ren’s fingers traced his face. He only gazed into Kai-Ren’s masked features, a strange sort of half smile on his lips.
“Cam-ren.” The mask turned to me. “Bray-dee.”
It should have chilled me to hear my name coming from him, but I was just numb. Maybe that was all bravery was: numbness. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
My breath caught as Cam reached up, slipping his fingers around the back of Kai-Ren’s neck. I heard the faint click of a clasp being unfastened, or a button being pressed, or something, and then Cam was taking off his mask.
Kai-Ren’s face was a nightmare, a death’s head.
He had flesh as white and cold as porcelain that was pulled tightly across a sharp, angular skull with prominent cheekbones and brow. His eyes were lashless, the irises yellow, his nose narrower than a human’s. His lips were thin and bloodless. In the sunlight I could see yellowish veins underneath the pallid skin at his temples.
“Why is the connection back?” Cam asked him. “Why are you back?”
“It called me.” Kai-Ren’s gaze flicked between us, lizard-like. “You called me, Cam-Ren.”
Cam’s heartbeat stuttered. “N-no.”
Cam’s denial was hollow. It didn’t matter if it was true, because hadn’t he dreamed of starlight? Hadn’t he felt the pull of it since when he was a kid, watching those model Hawks swinging on fishing line from his bedroom ceiling? And despite everything that had happened to him, didn’t he still ache to go back into the black?
I looked down and blinked my stinging eyes. I stared at the ground. My heart was there, in the warm red dirt I could curl my toes in.
Cam’s never had been.
“Your minds, like static, are heard again.” Kai-Ren hissed gently.
“But why is it back?” Cam frowned. “You said it was broken for good.”
“Your bodies, your chemistry, they are different.”
Cam closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his face was set. “They’re scared you’re going to break the treaty, that you’re going to destroy us.”
Kai-Ren hissed. Maybe it was supposed to be a laugh. “If we wanted you destroyed, you would already be dust.”
“I know that,” Cam said. “But they’re afraid.”
Kai-Ren’s flat nostrils twitched. Disgust?
Cam took his hand and held it up, gloved palm facing the sky. “You hold our lives here.” He pressed his thumb into Kai-Ren’s palm and then curled those gloved fingers closed. “You can crush us so very easily. That is why they are afraid.”
“You are afraid too.”
Cam met my eyes for a moment. “I’m afraid of what they will do to us. To me and Brady, and to Lucy.”
“Lu-cee,” Kai-Ren whispered.
He turned his head, the sun glinting in his yellow eyes.
On the other side of the riverbed, on the crest of the hill, I saw her. Her hair was flyaway on the wind, her blue-checked school uniform dress flapping around her skinny knees. She was there but not there, here but not here, obscured somehow by a distance measured in thousands of miles. She was here, but she was also on Earth. So far away.
As I watched, men appeared as though stepping out of a haze to join her. Five men, all dressed in gray fatigues. They were too faint, too ghostly, for me to make out their features. I knew o
ne of them, though. I knew his height, his stance, the width of his shoulders, and the set of his jaw. I’d known them in my dreams before I’d even met him: Chris Varro.
Holy fuck.
It had worked.
Chris Varro was connected too.
* * * *
I came up from sleep gasping. Beside me, Cam did the same.
“Fuck me,” I muttered. “That happened, right?”
“That happened.” Cam’s heart was racing; I felt it in my own heartbeat. We were synchronous again, our hearts no longer beating in counterpoint. It wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. How long until Lucy’s heartbeat joined ours? How long until Chris’s did, and the others? How long until there was no fucking room in my head at all because it would be full of other people’s memories, voices, fears, dreams, and nightmares?
This wasn’t how people were supposed to be. This wasn’t what we’d evolved to handle.
How long until it drove us fucking insane?
Chapter Ten
Sudden, total silence.
It took me a moment to realize what that meant. On a Defender, even in the middle of the night there was always noise of some sort: the low background hum of the air filtering through the vents from the scrubbers.
“Cam!”
Cam looked up from where he was sitting at the table, picking through his rations and reading his tablet. His gaze went straight to the vent in the ceiling.
“They’ve turned our air off!”
“Don’t panic. It’s probably routine maintenance or something.”
“Cam,” I said in a low voice.
He knew how I felt about asphyxiation. I mean, hell, I guess nobody is a fan of it, but not everyone seemed to be as acutely fucking aware as I was that out in the black your very ability to breathe was dependent on some machine not breaking down.
“Brady.” He set the tablet down. “We’ve got air. We’re okay. It’ll take a long time to run out.”
I got up from the bed and paced for a few moments, then worried about how much oxygen that used. I remembered in excruciating detail the testimonials of pilots I’d read: how they could feel the moisture on their tongues boiling in the vacuum of space. But this was no catastrophic breach. Defender Three wasn’t venting oxygen into the black, hemorrhaging it out like blood. I tried to remember if we’d passed a fire store on the way here. This was the officers’ quarters. There was bound to be one close by—a locker in the bulkhead that had breathing apparatuses in case of fire or other emergencies. Surely Cam and I would be able to break the door down and get to it, if we really had to.
I tried the door anyway. Locked.
It was already warmer in our room. I felt clammy.
“Brady,” Cam said, gesturing at the other chair at the small table. “Sit down and eat something.”
I took the chair and dragged it underneath the vent. Maybe it was an obstruction or something. I’d just gotten my fingers hooked through the vent when a sudden blast of cold, dusty air almost choked me.
“Fuck!” I reeled backward, stepped off the chair, and ended up on my ass on the floor. “Motherfucker!”
Cam raised his eyebrows. “Are you okay?”
I climbed to my feet, rubbing my hip. “Yeah.”
He shook his head and grinned. “I told you not to panic.”
“I wasn’t panicking. I was investigating.”
“And how’d that work out for you?” he asked.
I pulled the chair back to the table and sat. Helped myself to one of his crackers. “Shut up.”
Cam went back to reading.
I glared at the vent. I’d never known one to stop working before. Routine maintenance, my sore ass. There was a secondary system, of course, but usually that was tested on a small section of the Defender, not sleeping quarters. Risk management and all that. The only other thing I’d ever heard of the secondary system being used for was…
“Shit.”
Cam looked up. “What?”
“We’re quarantined,” I said. “For real, I mean. I bet they’ve isolated this section of the quarters and given us our own source of oxygen. It’s possible. Years ago they got a measles outbreak on Defender Seven. Can you believe that? Fucking measles. Anyway, they got so many guys infected that the isolation chambers in the med bay wouldn’t hold them, so they blocked off a whole section of the sleeping quarters and threw everyone in there. Which seems a little excessive in our case, but hey, at least the bed here’s more comfortable than a cot in the med bay.”
We’d shared one of those once too.
I got up and checked the door. This time when I pulled the handle, it opened.
“Told you! Our cage just got a lot bigger, LT.”
Cam followed me out into the passageway. We made it as far as the set of sealed blast doors about five rooms down in one direction, and the elevator in the other. Just for fun, I tried opening one of the doors on our way.
It actually worked.
I went inside and made a beeline for the chocolate bars on the table. “Thanks very much”—there was a pressed uniform hanging from the bathroom door—“Captain Hayashi.”
“Jesus,” Cam said as I ripped a chocolate bar open. “Is looting seriously your first instinct in circumstances like these?”
“Apparently,” I told him, my mouth full of chocolate. “What are they gonna do, LT? Make me a prisoner and send me to the Faceless?”
His mouth quirked up in a wry smile. “Point taken.”
I guess Captain Hayashi was an engineer of some sort, or at least a hobbyist, because he had a half-taken-apart something by his bed. Whatever it was, it had an intricate circuit board showing. I was more interested in the little tool kit beside it, in a slim zip-up case.
“Brady!” Cam exclaimed as I picked it up and shoved it in my pocket.
“I’ll put it back,” I said. “Just as soon as I’m finished with it.”
Because, come on, the brass had left me in a sealed-off area of Defender Three with a tool kit and a vending machine. What did they think would happen?
Cam stood and shook his head while I got to grips with the vending machine in the corridor. Then he gave up and headed back to our room. “They’ll throw you in the brig for this!”
“Can’t!” I yelled after him. “Quarantine!”
The vending machines in the officers’ quarters were easier to break into than the ones in the enlisted men’s quarters. They had better stuff as well. Actual brand-name chocolates, small packets of sweet biscuits, more than one flavor of chewing gum, and—I’d hit the mother lode here—cigarettes.
I was elbow deep in the vending machine, a growing pile of contraband on the floor beside me, when the elevator doors rolled open. I froze as a guy in an orange hazmat suit stepped through.
I was just wondering what I could say to explain myself, when he spoke first.
“Brady Garrett, you thieving little bastard.”
I relaxed. “Hey, Doc.”
Doc moved closer, plastic rubbing on plastic as he walked. “I’ve come to check your hand.”
The hand I currently had in the guts of the vending machine. “Yeah, I’ve got pretty much all my movement back.”
“I can see that.” I couldn’t see his face clearly behind his mask, but I could hear the growl when he spoke again. “I’m also here to tell you how much you’ve pissed off Commander Leonski.”
I pulled my arm out of the vending machine and gathered up my cache of ill-gotten gains. “I guess this is something Cam will need to hear as well.”
We headed back to our room.
Cam was in the shower. Steam was escaping out the open bathroom door, and he’d left his clothes on the bed. I took them into the bathroom and squinted at the vague shape of him through the fog. “Cam! Doc’s here.”
He shut the water off and stuck his head around the partition. “Did you…”
I set his clothes by the sink.
“Thanks. I’ll be out in a second.”
/> I went outside and sat on the bed, and Doc took the chance to inspect my hand. He dabbed antiseptic over it, making me hiss, and checked I had enough anti-inflammatories for a few more days.
Cam came out, his T-shirt clinging in interesting ways to his damp skin. He was still running his towel over his wet hair as he sat down beside me. “Major Layton,” he said.
“Lieutenant,” Doc growled.
“He’s pretty pissed,” I told Cam.
Doc grunted. “Maybe one of you would like to tell me, so I can pass it on to Commander Leonski, exactly why, knowing the connection was back and affecting another person, but not knowing how it was transmitted, you both though you’d just walk on board this Defender without warning anyone you might be contagious.”
I rolled my eyes. “Hey, if HQ didn’t transport us in quarantine, how is that our fault?”
“Because I fucking trained you to know better!” Doc growled. He shook his head and relented a little. “Brady, you should have disclosed this as soon as you realized.”
“Except what would have been the point, Doc? It’s been ten months since I got Lucy back, and you’re right, we don’t know what this is or how it works, but it’s taken that long to affect the one person we’ve had most contact with! And it wouldn’t have changed anything—it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I’ve come into contact with thousands of people since I got back planetside. If they’re infected too, there’s nothing we can do about it. The only thing that would have been different about full disclosure is they would have put Lucy in a fucking cage with us!”
“Still, you knowingly entered a closed environment carrying what might possibly be an alien contagion.”
“Yeah, well, you know what else is a closed environment, Doc? The Earth. And if this is a contagion, we’ve already spent the last ten months spreading it.”
“It’s not a contagion,” Cam said suddenly. “It might share some characteristics with one, but it’s not a disease.” He dragged his fingers through his damp hair. “It’s more than that. I never exchanged bodily fluids with Brady for him to get the connection.”
