by Lisa Henry
Cam didn’t say anything when I climbed into bed beside him in the middle of the night, stinking of cigarettes and remorse.
“I know you’re awake,” I told him.
Lucy snored and snuffled on his other side.
Cam twined his fingers in mine. “I would have picked you. I would have.”
“Kind of academic now, isn’t it?”
His silence said more than he could.
“You’re a better person than I deserve,” I told him. “I’m trying to be better, but I guess I’m a work in progress. So, you know, thanks for putting up with me in the meantime.”
“I love you,” he whispered and brushed his lips against mine. “You stink, though.”
“I smoked a lot,” I told him.
“Go and brush your teeth,” he mumbled.
“Fuck you. I’m tired.”
“So that whole better-person kick lasted what? Ten seconds?” He scrubbed his knuckles over my buzz cut.
“Fine,” I said and hauled myself upright again. “But you’d better make it worth my while, asshole.”
He snorted.
I flicked the bathroom light on and grabbed my toothbrush from the sink. I brushed my teeth and leaned over the sink and spat. When I straightened up, Cam was standing in the doorway. I stared at his reflection in the mirror as he shut the door and turned the lock.
Guess he was intending to make it worth my while right now.
I suddenly wasn’t tired anymore.
Cam moved up behind me and held me by the hips. Met my eyes in the mirror. “I want to fuck you so hard right now.”
I swiped my tongue over my bottom lip. “What are you waiting for, then?”
His hands slipped around to my fly and popped the button open. The rasp of the zip made me shiver. How long had it been since we’d done this? It felt like years. Felt like we’d forgotten some part of us that we were only just now remembering. It felt like it had been too long since we’d fit together, our hearts beating in sync.
I reached out for my bag of toiletries and snagged the bottle of lube from it. Cam tugged my pants down, then kicked his bare foot against my ankles to make me spread my legs.
“You fucking me or arresting me?” I asked.
He met my gaze in the mirror. “I said I wanted to do it hard, Brady. You okay with that?”
“Yeah.” I braced my hands on the edge of the counter.
He slicked his fingers up with lube and pushed them into my hole. I winced at the cold, at the sting, but it felt good too.
“Yeah, LT. Just like that.”
He twisted his fingers around.
Fuck. It had been so long since we’d done this with the connection in place that I’d almost forgotten how weird it was, and how incredible it was. I could feel his fingers inside me, opening me, dragging against my prostate in just the right way, and lighting me up from inside. But I could feel what Cam was feeling too; his blood heating, his heartbeat quickening, his dick swelling. There were no boundaries between us, no spaces. Just an echo chamber of sensation and emotion.
“Come on,” I whispered, holding his gaze in the mirror. “Come on.”
We shuddered as the head of his dick breached me. My nerves spiked and sang; his answered. That first long, slow thrust, the one that prickled my skin and sucked the breath out of my lungs, was so good.
His gaze was locked on mine. He splayed one hand over the muscles jumping in my abdomen. He moved his other hand up and hooked his arm around my throat just how I’d done to Chris. I tilted my head forward to feel the pressure. My head swam a little.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Yeah.”
He flexed the muscles in his arm.
“Fuck, yeah, LT.”
He fucked me hard then, exactly how I wanted it. I wanted him to stamp his ownership into my skin. I wanted him to mark me, to bruise me, to make me remember that I was his, always.
I needed to know it.
So did the other consciousnesses touching at the edges of this moment. Chris and the other guys, who were drawn into this moment as surely as if we were fucking in public. Let them watch, hooded eyes dark with envy. Let them feel everything, squirming alone in their beds. They might have been sharing this moment, but it wasn’t theirs. This was all Cam and me.
Lucy was still asleep, thank fuck, and wherever her dreams took her, she wasn’t here with us.
“Brady. Fuck, Brady.”
Even in my head, Cam sounded breathless.
“You’re so fucking tight.”
Let them hear that.
“Brady, I love you.”
Let them feel that.
Let them feel how the entire universe shrank right down to this moment, to those words. Let them see how it was brighter than starlight, what we had.
“Love you,” I whispered as he thrust again.
Cam didn’t even touch my dick. He didn’t have to. I could feel what he was feeling, and the echo was more than enough. I squeezed tight around his dick so that we both gasped, and then I was coming, leaving a mess all over the bathroom counter.
Cam released my throat and gripped my hips instead, his fingers digging in. He thrust a few more quick times before he was coming too, and then he was leaning on my back, his breath hot against my sweaty skin.
“Jesus, Brady.”
I reached back and tugged his hair gently.
Cam peeled himself off me eventually and cleaned us both up with a warm washcloth. Every muscle ached as I bent down to hitch my pants up. I didn’t care.
“Brady,” Cam said, kissing me, then breaking it with a huff of laughter. “Jesus.”
“That all you got to say, pretty boy?” I asked. I rubbed my thumb along his collarbone. “Did I break your brain?”
“Brady,” he whispered against my lips.
Must have.
“Brady, Brady, Brady.”
And then, like a sudden screech of static: “Bray-dee.”
A phantom claw scratched down my spine.
My heart froze.
Mine wasn’t the only one.
* * * *
I could feel it all around me, their fear and mine swirling together like seawater rushing into tidal pools. Crashing up against the rock walls, sucked out by the pull of the tide only to be pushed in again a second later. A constant maelstrom. Push and pull and give and take. Filling and draining, hissing and bubbling, and always, always moving.
Who was that guy who said the universe was in a constant state of flux?
We were all of us, I guess, dragged along by the chaos, pulled in its wake; we were all of us buffeted by the waves, and there wasn’t a single thing we could do to stop it.
Kai-Ren was coming.
* * * *
Nobody slept much that night. I didn’t need to be sharing a room with Chris or the other guys to know it. I could feel their restlessness, their anxiety, as much as I could feel my own. I slept a little, though, or dozed or something, because I woke up to the sound of Lucy squealing and giggling.
I staggered out into the corridor, my throat sore and my chest tight from smoking too much the night before, and found Lucy playing chasey with one of the officers. Harry. Redheaded. Flashes of his life came to me. A dog. A school yard. A teenage heartbreak. The useless fucking detritus of someone else’s life, washing up against mine, entangling.
I saw my own unease reflected in his eyes.
“Hey, um, Garrett,” he said. “Brady.”
I ignored him. “Lucy?”
She looked between us.
“Lucy, come here. I don’t want you playing with these a—with these guys.”
She frowned at me. “Brady!”
Harry stepped away from her. “I get it, okay? I get it. I know what you went through, man. I feel it.”
It was the truth. Every minute I’d spent thinking I’d failed my dad, failed Lucy, every time my heart found a new way to break because I thought she’d die without anybody to protect her, he felt. Every moment of abject fuc
king misery when I’d thought I was alone in the vastness of the universe, that nobody would ever help me, that nobody could ever understand, he felt. He did, and Chris did, and the others did too. My whole dismal fucking existence, laid out like the world’s most depressing picture book for these assholes to inspect at their leisure.
Chris and Harry and Kyle and Devon and Andre.
I knew all their fucking names, because they were already inside my head.
It made me sick that they could look at me, that they could judge me, when I’d never even figured out how to judge myself.
“Doesn’t matter what I went through, man,” I told him. “Only matters what’s coming.”
“Kai-Ren is coming,” Lucy said, looking at me with wide eyes.
“Yeah,” I told her, my voice rough. I took her hand. “Kai-Ren is coming.”
* * * *
The elevator doors swung open at their usual time. There was nobody inside, but there was a box of ration packs and other supplies on the floor. Cam and I dragged it out, and Cam passed a few ration packs back to Chris and the other guys. They were still keeping their distance from me.
There was a plastic bag inside the box as well, the end folded over and taped shut. It had Garrett written on it. I ripped it open to find a few medical supplies. Some bandages, a tube of antiseptic cream, and a jar of vitamin supplements. Weird. There was nothing in the bag that we didn’t already have in the first-aid kits in the officers’ bathrooms.
I picked up the vitamins, expecting the jar to rattle from the pills inside. It didn’t. I unscrewed the lid and turned the bottle upside down. A tiny scroll of paper fell out into my palm. I opened it up.
Watch yourself. A lot of the men are very unhappy that you’re connected with the Faceless. They think the only way to stop the Faceless coming is to kill you all. Doc.
Cam took the note out of my shaking hands. He frowned as he read it, then passed it back to Chris.
“This is bullshit,” Chris said. “This operation has been approved!”
“Approved back home,” Cam told him. “But right now we’re locked in a tin can with six hundred guys who may well want to kill us if they get the chance.”
Chris’s expression was stony, but we all felt the sudden spike of fear that cut through him.
I picked up an armload of ration packs and headed back to our room. I sat at the table with my back to the black and watched Lucy draw pictures.
Back when I’d first met Cam, what had I thought? I’d thought he was hiding information about the Faceless. I’d thought he’d been compromised. I’d thought he was a traitor. Even though I knew it wasn’t his fault—the whole world had seen the footage of his capture—I’d thought he’d betrayed us all. Even when I should have known better, the doubt had still been there, settling in the deepest parts of me like dirty water. If I’d thought that about Cam, then I could easily see why, now, most of the men on Defender Three thought that about us, and about the stupid fucking assholes who’d voluntarily rolled up their sleeves and been injected with our blood.
Traitors.
We were all traitors.
Lucy hummed to herself as she picked through her pencils for the color she needed.
Outside, I could hear Cam and Chris and the others talking. No raised voices yet, but they were getting close.
Chris’s problem was that he didn’t know how enlisted men thought. We were kept in the dark by the brass. We were fucked over time and time again. We were cannon fodder, and we knew it. We hated the officers. We outnumbered them too. Push a man too far, or a group of them, and one day they might just push back.
Chris had never sat around getting drunk and talking shit with a bunch of enlisted guys. Never wondered aloud what’d happen if that officer you really hated, the one who treated you like a piece of shit, walked face-first into your fist one day. Never wondered what’d happen if one night you took a knife and jammed it into that asshole’s throat. And why stop there? Why not just take the entire fucking brass out? They all deserved it.
Idle talk.
Idle talk with an undercurrent so strong it threatened to sweep you away.
And sometimes, you wanted to let it.
I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples to try to massage away the headache that was building there.
“Brady?” Cam sounded stressed.
“Cam wants you,” Lucy told me.
I snapped my head up and stared at her. “You heard that?”
She chewed on a pencil and swung her feet back and forth as she worked. “Uh-huh.”
“Does it scare you?”
She gave me the look she usually reserved for when I’d done something stupid. “Why would it?”
“Does Kai-Ren scare you?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice from cracking.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Because he scares the living shit out of me, Luce.”
“I know,” Lucy said. She showed me a hesitant smile. “He’s kind of scary, I guess.”
My eight-year-old sister was trying to humor me.
I pulled myself to my feet. “I’m going to see what Cam wants.”
Lucy went back to her coloring.
When I stepped outside into the corridor, it was empty. I could hear the sound of arguing coming from Captain Hayashi’s room. I headed that way, not sure if I’d be more of a help than a hindrance to Cam, but fuck it, I had to try, right?
The soles of my boots squeaked on the floor.
Some guys are meant to be heroes.
Not me, though.
Never me.
When the Klaxon started wailing and the all the lights plunged off, it wasn’t thoughts of heroism that rose in me. It was fear, as thick and sour as bile, threatening to choke me.
The emergency lights came on, red, like the entire universe had been washed in blood.
I spun around and headed back to our room, back to Lucy.
She came running out to meet me. “Brady? What’s happening?”
I wrapped my arms around her. “Just a drill. They do it sometimes. It’s just a drill.”
But it wasn’t. There was no accompanying audio: This is a drill. Proceed to your evacuation point. This is a drill.
Because this wasn’t a drill.
This was the real thing.
* * * *
“We need to talk to Commander Leonski,” Chris said. His face looked strange in the red light, almost devoid of expression. I could feel the tension in him, though; we all could. “We need to find out what the hell is happening.”
Harry’s freckles had vanished in the light. “We’re locked in, sir. We don’t even have comms.”
“There should be radios in the fire store,” Devon said. “Shouldn’t there?”
Jesus. Had any of these guys actually served on a Defender before? Even I knew there were radios in the fire store. Whether they worked or not, well…welcome to life in the big black. It’s never as shiny as the brochures promise.
I headed down the corridor to the doors of the fire store and wrenched them open. The metal squealed. One side of the space was taken up with a massive hose reel and a rack of fire extinguishers. The other side was full of breathing equipment. More than enough for all the officers who lived in this section. Down in the enlisted men’s quarters, survival was strictly on a first-come-first-served basis, naturally. I hoped we wouldn’t need this stuff. I wasn’t sure the masks would fit a kid.
There were handheld radios, as promised, in a box below the breathing gear. I pulled the lid off the box and pulled a radio out. I flicked it on, and nothing happened. Tried the one next to it and got a burst of static for my trouble. I flicked through the channels: nothing but static.
“Maybe the signal’s being blocked,” Devon suggested, “for security.”
“Why the hell would they block the signal?” I asked him. “We can communicate with the Faceless in our thoughts, for fuck’s sake. Giving us radios that work is hardly going to compromise the s
tation’s security.”
This was just the reality of life in the black: shitty equipment that didn’t fucking work. I flicked through the radio channels again and finally settled on one. I squeezed the button down with my thumb. “Garrett to, fuck, I don’t know, anyone?”
Nothing.
“That’s great radio procedure, Brady,” Cam said, patting me on the shoulder.
I tossed the radio back to him. “You’re welcome to try instead, asshole.”
“Lieutenant Rushton to anyone monitoring this channel, please respond.” Cam waited a moment in silence, then changed channels and tried again. He walked a little way down the corridor, repeating his message and getting nothing but dead air.
Lucy tugged on my sleeve. “What’s happening, Brady?”
“Dunno,” I said. There was no point in lying to her, not when she could feel the panic building in me, starting to coil tighter than a spring in my guts. “Just stick close, okay?”
“Okay.” She slipped her hand into mine.
Kyle brushed past us to check the fire store. “Maybe the Faceless are getting closer. Maybe that’s what the alert is for.”
And maybe he was clutching at straws. If Kai-Ren was closer, he’d be in our heads, and there’d be no way to shut him out.
“No,” Chris said. “If the Faceless were approaching, we’d know.”
I met his gaze and nodded.
“What, then?” Kyle asked, frowning.
“I don’t know,” Chris said, but we were all thinking of the note Doc had slipped into that bottle. “We need to get to Leonski and find out what the hell is going on.”
