Darker Space

by Lisa Henry

  Those memories caught him again.

  We shared that.

  I shifted my trembling hand from his face to his shoulder. This tall, nightmarish thing.

  “Bray-dee,” he said.

  I closed my eyes as he lifted his hand and ran it over my buzz cut. The gesture was so familiar it could have been Cam touching me. It was, in a way. Kai-Ren had learned it from him, from me, from all the memories that swirled around us like detritus caught in the ebb and flow of a tidal pool.

  He touched me.

  Slid a thumb along my bottom lip, testing the drag.

  Curled his hand around my wrist and pressed the tendons there like they were the frets of a guitar.

  Ran his fingers across my abdomen and watched the muscles underneath jerking as I shivered.

  Scraped a claw down my spine, just like in all my nightmares. Claws sliding down his spine—Cam’s spine. Pulling uselessly at the restraints. My shoulders hurting. Pain flaring down my spine. My bare feet scrabbling on the floor but failing to find purchase. I couldn’t get away. There was nothing to do but take it.

  I forced my eyes open.

  “No,” I told him, my heart racing. “Not that. I will listen. I am listening.”

  “Bray-dee.” The amusement radiated off him.

  “No,” I repeated. “Not that.”

  He’d hurt Cam. He’d raped him. Just another thing that fell outside the scope of Kai-Ren’s comprehension, as strange and alien and as inconsequential to him as any other human concern had been. And Cam knew it. Cam had forgiven it, because Kai-Ren didn’t know, and because it had facilitated the bond between them. Cam had taken that pain, that violation, and sacrificed it for the bigger picture, for understanding. But Cam wasn’t me and I wasn’t Cam. That was something I could never do.

  “We already have a link,” I told him. “Not as strong, but I am listening. You don’t have to hurt me.”

  “Mmm.” Kai-Ren took my hand and pressed it to his chest.

  I splayed my fingers. If he had a heart beating somewhere inside his chest, I couldn’t feel it. Maybe the suit stopped me from feeling it. Maybe he had three hearts like a cephalopod, in different places around his body. Maybe he didn’t have one at all, like an earthworm.

  Cam had touched him like this.

  Cam had touched him without the suit. He’d run his hands over that cold skin, as white and unyielding as porcelain. Afraid, at first, and then curious, and then something else altogether. He’d touched to discover, to explore, and to have Kai-Ren touch him in return.

  Cam had been with the Faceless for four years.

  He’d done what he’d needed to survive. He’d called Kai-Ren his master and played the pet because it pleased him. Because it had pleased them both, in the end. Cam looked into the black and had been unafraid. He’d seen how small he was, how insignificant, and it hadn’t destroyed him. It had freed him. Cam had never thought the universe was unjust. The universe simply was. In the face of the storm, Cam had bent and not broken.

  I wasn’t like him. I’d always found some new way to break, while I howled at the unfairness of it all. Like it mattered. Like my anger could make a difference. Like it could even be heard in the center of the storm.

  I closed my eyes briefly and tried to shed my fear, my anger. I tried to pretend for a moment that my fear and anger weren’t bone deep. I tried to let them flake off my skin like the flecks of dried fluid from the pod.

  “Always fought,” I whispered. “Always kept kicking even when I was down.”

  “Bray-dee.” Kai-Ren put his hand over my small-drawn heart.

  “Please,” I said, my shaking fingers beating an unheard tattoo against his chest. “Please, I want Cam and Lucy. They’re why I fight. Please.”

  Kai-Ren released the word like a low hiss of steam. “Yessss.”

  * * * *

  I followed Kai-Ren though the corridors of the Faceless ship. It was warm and dark. The walls were opaque and mottled. I could see light behind them, and pulsating fluid. I thought of firing synapses, of bioelectrical activity, and blood and lymph. Arteries and veins and capillaries. I thought of being in the belly of the beast.

  My clothes and boots lay in a pile close to what was maybe an air lock. A section of the throbbing wall was pinched as tightly as a pursed mouth.

  The last time I’d been on this ship, I’d woken up naked and stayed that way. Now Kai-Ren gestured to my clothes.

  My T-shirt was stained with blood. Mine, probably, but mostly Devon’s, I guessed.

  “Did you feel it when he died?”

  Kai-Ren turned his face toward me. “Silence. I felt silence.”

  I thought of a redheaded girl and kisses that tasted of coffee. I thought of a million dreams and hopes, all snuffed out in an instant. The sudden silence gaped like a hollow wound. It hurt. We’d hardly spent any time together, but it had also been a lifetime. It had only taken the echo of all his memories, just the breath of them—and the space they’d carved out inside me ached with emptiness like a cavity in a tooth.

  I pulled the shirt on. The blood had dried in hard little patches on the fabric. Tiny flakes of the fluid from the pod fell away from me like dandruff as my shirt pulled over my skin.

  I tugged my underwear on, and then my pants. There was a tear in the right leg from the knee down. The fabric flapped around my calf. I jammed the ends into my sock and then pulled my boots on. I laced them tightly.

  I thought of Mike Marcello.

  His toes dragging back and forth against the tiles as he swung.

  Kai-Ren made a curious noise as the memory settled over both of us.

  “He was scared,” I said. “He had no hope.”

  Lucy had always been my hope and, at my most hopeless, my obligation. If it hadn’t been for her, for my dad, I would have opened my wrists after Wade jumped me. Maybe I would have. I don’t know. I only know I used to look at the guys who did it with something like envy.

  “Fuck it,” Doc had said once, dripping with sweat. Ripping his gloves off and flicking them to the floor, where they landed with a wet splat. “Fuck it!”

  The kid was dead. Doc always took shit like that personally. Got angry about it, called it a waste. Cracked open a bottle of something once the body was tagged and bagged.

  “Jesus, Brady. He had his whole life in front of him!”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I figured that maybe the guy who did it just knew exactly what sort of life it was he had coming.

  And now? Now I had no fucking idea what was coming, but it didn’t matter. As long as Lucy and Cam were still out there, I could face it.

  I could face all my nightmares.

  I might not do it like a hero, but I’d do it all the same.

  * * * *

  I followed Kai-Ren.

  All around me the ship pulsed. I stumbled against a wall, and my hand came back damp and warm. Strange lights appeared and vanished in the membranes of the wall. The air grew warmer and more humid in places. At other times, small gusts of cooler air chilled my sweaty skin.

  Sometimes the walls parted with a sticky sound and closed again behind us. Doors that healed like knitting flesh when we stepped through them.

  And then we were on the bridge, or whatever passed as one on a Faceless ship. There were no panels or screens. There were only alcoves, filled with glowing lights. And for the first time, I saw other Faceless.

  They turned toward me. I heard a symphony of those hissing sounds like steam that made up their language. I couldn’t understand their words. My brain snagged on them, caught just on the wrong side of understanding. Not like they were speaking an alien language, but like I was a step out of sync. Like a radio channel full of static. I understood the pattern of speech, could almost hear it, almost; I couldn’t tune it in properly.

  “Bray-dee,” Kai-Ren said. “Come.”

  His touch should have terrified me. It had, in every nightmare I’d ever had. The reality was different. There was nothing in the big bl
ack, not even Kai-Ren, that could terrify me more than the thought of Lucy and Cam being lost to me forever.

  “How long has it been?” I asked him. “How long was I in the pod?”

  He made a clicking noise.

  “Do you have minutes, or hours?” I asked him, when what I really needed to know was did they? Did Lucy and Cam still have time?

  “They live,” Kai-Ren said.

  “How far are we from the station? Are we close?”

  Kai-Ren ran his gloved hand over my head. “Soon, Bray-dee.”

  Maybe they measured time and distance differently than we did. Maybe they saw no need to measure it at all, or there was just no way Kai-Ren could explain it that would translate into my understanding. Words aren’t always enough. Sometimes you can share all the words in the world, but they still won’t equate to understanding.

  Minutes.

  Hours.

  Distance.

  What the hell did those things mean to the Faceless?

  Rape.

  What the hell did that mean?

  I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, Kai-Ren still had his masked face turned toward me. I took a deep breath. “What do you call yourselves?”

  The sound he made was sibilant, an exhalation as brief as a sigh. It was layered, nuanced. I don’t think I could have repeated it even if I’d tried. I wondered if I was the first human being to have ever heard it, or if Cam had asked the question before.

  I thought of Chris then, and how he wanted to communicate with the Faceless. I wondered if it was possible, when we were like two tribes meeting, reduced to mimicry and mime and marking little symbols in the dirt.

  Our connection hardly scratched the surface.

  We were alien.

  We would always be alien.

  I looked around the bridge. Here I was surrounded by Faceless technology, a wet dream for someone like Chris Varro, and it was pointless. There was no frame of reference I could use to begin to describe what I was seeing to others, let alone to understand it. I suddenly knew why Cam had only smiled and shaken his head when he’d been asked about Faceless technology and weapons. I suddenly knew why he’d lied and said he’d seen nothing. Because it was easier than explaining the truth: that he saw everything, but it had no meaning. Like a monkey with a computer chip in one hand and a pebble in the other, expected to explain the difference when they were both just things.

  “Bray-dee, come.”

  Kai-Ren led me over to one of the alcoves. He stood behind me. He lifted my hand and pressed it against a membrane-like surface that shone wetly between the bones of the wall.

  A rush of images hit me, too hard and fast for my brain to sort them.

  I saw the ship. I saw the insides of it, all the places, and the black hull that seemed to suck the light out of the field of stars behind it. I saw a thousand things that had no meaning. Kai-Ren might have been showing me all his weaknesses, his secret beating heart, but I had no way of knowing.

  The images flashed past as Kai-Ren kept my hand pressed in place. He took his other hand and slid it under my shirt, splaying his fingers across my stomach. Another gesture borrowed from Cam, maybe. Mimicry. But then all communication started with mimicry, didn’t it? It started the first time a baby smiled back.

  Lucy, I thought, and Kai-Ren sent it back as an echo: “Lu-cee.”

  I needed her. Her and Cam.

  I needed it to just be us again, safe and close, spinning slowly on a squealing playground merry-go-round while the stars wheeled above us.

  Home.

  I needed us to go home.

  “Yesss,” Kai-Ren murmured in my ear, like a whisper of agreement. “Home.”

  I shivered as he shifted his hand higher, his touch so light, so familiar, so like Cam’s. I leaned back into him.

  “Bray-dee, do you see?”

  The strange images on the membrane changed, twisted, spun. I fought off a wave of dizziness and found myself looking outward.

  I saw Defender Three.

  Saw it hanging in the black, as tiny as a spinning top, some unfathomable monument to futility. Back home, whole industries existed that shook and rattled the ground, that belched smoke into the sky and poison into the water, to build the Defenders. Men’s backs bowed and broke in the factories and the smelters of the refugee townships. They grew old before they were thirty, died before they were forty, and their hollow-bellied children watched as life wore them down to wrinkles and bones. And the Defenders they died to build were so very, very small out in the black.

  I couldn’t see the damage from out here. Couldn’t see where the Hawk had ripped a hole in Defender Three’s side and torn it apart. I wondered if Cam and Lucy and the others were still sheltering inside that fractured, broken part, counting down the minutes of oxygen they had left.

  I wondered if Commander Leonski had retaken the station yet, or if he and the other higher-ups were swinging from some improvised yardarm. I hoped Doc was okay. Hoped his rank hadn’t made him a target.

  From out in the still waters of the big black, I couldn’t even see the scar on Defender Three. Couldn’t see the chaos under the surface, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still happening.

  “Are we going back?” I asked. “Are we going to save them?”

  “Yesss.” Kai-Ren pulled my hand away from the membrane at last. “We will save them. We will save them all.”

  * * * *

  This room was brighter than the others. Yellowish light made my skin look sickly as I peeled off my clothes. Kai-Ren took my hand and ran his thumb over the bluish veins in the underside of my wrist. Pressed my pulse to feel it push back. Hissed out a laugh when my breath caught and my skin prickled. The fine hairs on my arm stood up.

  “Bray-dee.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined the touch was Cam’s.

  Kai-Ren made a pleased sound, and I opened my eyes.

  “You no longer fear me.”

  “I fear everything,” I told him, shucking off my underwear.

  “Mmm.”

  He led me to the edge of a room, to a tangle of sticky, pulsing things that hung like the roots of a Moreton Bay fig from the ceiling, tendrils wavering in a nonexistent breeze. I’d never seen anything like it before, while at the same time I knew exactly what it was.

  I squeezed my eyes shut as Kai-Ren pushed me toward the middle of the things.

  And this time I was afraid. The pulsing tendrils embraced me and coated my skin with something as thick and dark as sap. It dried as thin and smooth as latex. It dried black. When it covered my face, clinging to the shape of my cheekbones, my nose, my lips, I thought I would suffocate.

  God.

  I sucked a breath in without any idea of how it was even possible.

  The sap seeped into my ears, and Kai-Ren made that sound that was almost a laugh when I shook my head like a wet dog.

  It learned the shape of me. Spread over my naked skin like a creeping warmth.

  When Kai-Ren pulled me free, the yellowish light no longer washed my vision. The mask didn’t blind me. I saw the room in sharper tones. I saw things my own eyes couldn’t. I saw the stark shadow of Kai-Ren’s face through his mask. I saw the flash of his eyes.

  I raised my gloved hands and touched my own mask.

  My heartbeat raced.

  Guess the universe had a sense of humor after all.

  I was Faceless.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We came out of the black like a beast from the deep, a behemoth, a nightmare.

  Kai-Ren put his hand on my shoulder to steady me as we made contact with the Outer Ring of Defender Three. There was no long scrape of metal against metal. No shuddering as the docking clamps engaged. Just a jolt, the force of it barely noticeable because our ship made contact and then yielded and absorbed the impact. It sealed itself to the curve of the Outer Ring.

  Outside, the Hawks buzzed around like insects.

  “We need to get to the Core,” I said, my voice s
wallowed by the Faceless mask. “Cam said if the Defenders were boarded, the Hawks would blow the reactor. We need to make contact with an officer.”

  With an officer, or with whoever the fuck was currently in charge of Defender Three. Someone who could stop the Hawks from blowing the station apart and killing everyone on board before we found Cam and Lucy.

  Kai-Ren dug his fingers into my shoulder. “They will not.”

  My stomach knotted. “Don’t…don’t just blow them out of the black.”

  Kai-Ren said nothing.

  I turned my head to look up at him. “Those pilots, they’re people too. They’re scared. Just don’t kill them, not unless they target the Core.” I thought about pleading, but what was the point of that with the Faceless? Despite the fact Kai-Ren’s interest had been piqued by humanity, by the mercurial forces of our love, of our hate, and the impulsive storms of our emotions, he was still a cold-blooded thing. I drew a breath. “It’s not necessary.”

  Kai-Ren’s gaze met mine. “Perhaps.”

  I walked with the Faceless.

  “Cam, where are you?”

  The pulsing, damp walls gave way to cold gray metal washed in red light. We stepped into the middle of a hallway in the Outer Ring. No docking hatch required. I could dimly hear the Klaxon blaring, and a recorded message, one I’d never heard before, repeating over and over in chilling monotone: “This is not a drill. The Defender has been boarded. Report to your emergency stations. This is not a drill.”

  “Lucy?”

  I wondered if Kai-Ren was using my memory as a blueprint of Defender Three, or Cam’s memory, or the memories of Chris and the other guys from intel. He strode ahead, flanked on each side by two other members of his hive. I could hear them hissing slightly through the link, tiny bursts of static.

  There were five of them, and me.

  Six.

  There were six of us.