Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  Maybe I could even demand citizenship for me and Lucy, so that they couldn’t just send us back to Kopa when my service ran out. Cam would probably find a way to swing it. Cam, and Doc, and maybe even Chris Varro. They were smart and more importantly they knew how to work the system. They didn’t just get angry and punch walls when shit didn’t go their way.

  I could mop floors for six years if Lucy and I got citizenship out of it. And maybe I could use those six years to think of what I wanted to do after. I didn’t have to know now. Maybe Doc thought I should have some sort of ambition burning inside me. Maybe he thought it was a waste that I didn’t. But I’d meant what I’d told him. I was ahead of the curve, and not even mopping floors would change that.

  “We’re okay,” Cam said. He drew another card from the stack. “You and me, and Lucy. And whatever happens, here or back home, we’ll figure it out.”

  And he said it with such calm certainty that a part of me even believed it.

  I studied the backs of Cam’s cards for a while, trying to figure out exactly what he was holding. Found myself looking at his fingers more than the cards. Those steady hands of his. Just watching them made me want to lean forward into his touch. It made something in my chest ache.

  “You’re the bravest guy I ever met,” I said, lifting my gaze to meet his. “Stepping foot on this ship again.”

  He drew his brows together, a faint line appearing at the top of his nose. He tilted his head. “Where’s this coming from?”

  I reached out and took his hand. Pressed it to my heart. “It’s always in here, Cam. I just figured I should remember to say it sometimes too.”

  Cam drew me into an embrace and we sat there, our cards forgotten as stars slipped by the window and the Faceless took us deeper into the black.

  Chapter Four

  In a dark, dappled bay on the Faceless ship a row of pods lay on the damp floor. The pods shone like beetles’ carapaces under the dull lights that slid through the membranous walls of the ship. The pods were large—big enough to fit a tall Faceless inside, and more than big enough to send an abducted human prisoner of war back through the vacuum of space to the nearest Defender. And they were big enough to have once held a scrawny human recruit whose bones had been snapped, whose ribs had been caved in, and whose lungs had been rapidly filling with blood.

  Chris was fascinated by the pods—probably because he’d never been in one. He ran his fingers along the carapace and leaned over the edge so that he could see inside. The pods were empty. When they were in use they were filled with gross milky fluid that was held inside by a sac. Chris’s fingers slid down the inside of the carapace, and I shivered.

  The faint light gleamed on the stubbled planes of his face. “I can’t even see any controls.”

  I thought of how I’d first seen Cam lying in pod, corpse-white with illuminated characters scrolling along his skin.

  Cam was in the room too, leaning against a nearby pod and wearing a faint smile on his face like he was dreaming of the hundred different things the pod had showed him when he was in it. I’d shared some of those memories of floating through the stars. I’d shared a pod with him once too, and we’d both blinked awake in a sun-drenched paddock in Kopa, insects buzzing in the grass around us and cockatoos screeching in the trees.

  It had felt real.

  It had felt so real that it sometimes made me worry that nothing was. That these moments now, and everything that had come before them, was nothing more than a virtual reality the pod had constructed for us. How could I be sure that it wasn’t? How could I be sure that my entire life wasn’t? How could I be sure that I wasn’t just chained up in a cave, watching a shadow play on the walls?

  There was a reason Doc didn’t like me to read his philosophy books. Mostly because my brain got caught up in the nausea of nihilism and never could make the leap to the part that was supposed to be liberating. It was just the way I was built. I’d never been the sort of guy who, when he couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet, figured that he was flying. Plummeting maybe, but never flying.

  And somehow I’d ended up with a fucking pilot.

  I crossed over to Cam and leaned against the pod beside him. Wriggled a bit when his hand slid over my ass and into the back pocket of my pants. I looked to see if Chris was watching, but he was engrossed in his inspection of the pod like if he just stared at it hard enough it would somehow reveal all its secrets to him.

  I tugged Cam’s hand out of my pocket, linked my fingers through his, and led him out of the room.

  I doubt Chris even noticed us go.

  “He wants it to make sense, doesn’t he?” I asked as we walked along a corridor that curved gently upward as it spiraled. “And it’s not going to make sense.”

  Cam’s brows drew together slightly. “I think that he wants to understand it in a way that he can explain to others. And I think that maybe that’s never going to happen. The Faceless aren’t something we can understand on that level. They’re something we have to accept might be unknowable.”

  “There were probably cavemen once who thought that way about fire.”

  Cam’s mouth quirked. “Oh, so you’re on Chris’s side now?”

  “Nope. Because Chris won’t ever think he’s the caveman in this scenario.” I held his gaze. “But some of this is your fault too.”

  “My fault?”

  “When you came back talking about shit like battle regents, and treaties, and hierarchies. You lied, Cam. You made guys like Chris think we had some common ground or something.”

  Cam shrugged. “What was I supposed to say? Oh, the Faceless are almost entirely incomprehensible, but our creepy telepathic link gives me the impression that Kai-Ren couldn’t be bothered killing us all?”

  He had a point, but it went deeper than that too, I knew. I’d never really brought it up with him, but I knew. I wrinkled my nose. “So what’s going to happen when we go home empty-handed?”

  “We’re not empty-handed,” Cam said. “We still have a treaty, and we’re here, alive. We’re already doing something that most people on Earth think is impossible. Just because we might go back without knowing a thing about their tech or their weapons doesn’t mean we’re not laying the groundwork for an enduring peace.”

  “You really believe that?”

  Cam nodded. “Yeah, I really do.”

  “You think that one day we’ll build big cities again?” I’d seen pictures of them before. Cities so huge that they covered hundreds of square kilometers, lights burning so bright that the people who lived there must never have seen the night sky. And those bright burning cities, their networks of blazing lights visible even from way out in the black, had been nothing but targets for the Faceless.

  Cities were smaller now.

  Much smaller.

  “Maybe,” Cam said, and then smiled at the thought. “Why not?”

  I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the idea of that, but Cam was right: why not? My whole life my dreams had been small-drawn, and I’d never been able to get past that before, not even all the way out here, but today was a new day and so why not? Maybe in a generation or two, humanity could be back to where we were before the Faceless came. Maybe people would build those huge cities again, and remember what it was like to be unafraid of the black. And maybe we would never truly understand the Faceless, but we wouldn’t have to fear them.

  It should have been impossible, but what was impossible, anyway? Me and Cam, standing here onboard a Faceless ship—our hands clasped and our heartbeats steady—that should have been impossible.

  Yet here we were.

  “Look out, Cam,” I murmured, leaning in close. “You might even turn me into an optimist.”

  He laughed, his breath warm against my cheek. “See? Nothing’s impossible.”

  Yeah. I’d been slow on the uptake, like always, but maybe I was finally starting to get that.

  ****

  I still had those dreams sometimes at night. The ones whe
re I was back in Cam’s head—in Cam’s body—and I was a prisoner of the Faceless. I was retrained, naked, and Kai-Ren raped me.

  Cam didn’t like that word. He didn’t like to look it in the face. He made excuses for it, for them, as though I couldn’t feel the exact same terror that he had. He rationalized it—the Faceless weren’t like us, the Faceless didn’t know what rape was and wouldn’t understand even if they did—but changing the word didn’t change what had happened. Cam pretended that it did, pretended that it had been worth it because it had facilitated the bond between him and Kai-Ren, as though that bond hadn’t been forged in pain and terror and hurt.

  He still had nightmares too.

  Sometimes I wondered if the only way he’d even held himself together when the Faceless had sent him back to Defender Three was because he’d thought he wouldn’t last a day. That he’d be shot in the head and thrown out the nearest airlock. And instead they’d looked him in a room with a smartass trainee medic who had literally shared his dreams.

  There was this guy once, back in Kopa, whose missus drowned their kids in the creek and then hanged herself from a tree on the bank. They found her swinging there hours later, the rope creaking in the breeze. And for a while everyone kept a close eye on the guy, because he wasn’t some asshole or anything. Then, later, it was like he got better. He wasn’t angry anymore, or drinking, or screaming. He was back to normal, everyone thought, right up until he climbed to the roof of the foundry after work one day, and then jumped off it.

  I sometimes wondered it that had been Cam, back on Defender Three. Calm and quiet and rational, because in his mind the ground was already rushing up to meet him and there was nothing he could do to stop it. I’d never had the courage to ask him though, and I probably never would.

  But at night, when his mouth pressed into a hard, thin line that still couldn’t keep all his noises in, and when his body shook with the things that Kai-Ren did to him, I held him tight and I wondered.

  The nights were sometimes rough but the days passed with the tick-tick-tick of Doc’s wind-up clock. They passed with drawing pictures with Lucy, with pop quizzes on anatomy, and with the stars out in the black slipping slowly past the windows.

  And then one day it changed, with a tendril of color painted faintly across the black, and then another and another as it built up like a coming storm. Clouds slid by instead of stars, and they grew thicker and thicker like a rolling fog. Pink and orange and green and purple; the clouds smothered the stars until they was all that we could see. It felt almost claustrophobic. Lucy crowed with delight at all the beautiful colors and I listened to Harry telling her about emission nebulas and interstellar clouds and ionized gasses and photons and wavelengths.

  Fuck if I knew what he was talking about, but I’d never been able to wrap my head around any of that bullshit. All I knew was that there was a point where light and time smashed together, and that looking at a distant star was exactly the same as looking back in time, and then my brain filled up with static and I was done.

  The clouds swirled by outside and reminded me of this one time when I was a kid and this circus came to Kopa. It wasn’t much, probably. Just a dusty vinyl tent that trapped the heat inside, and flags hanging limply from the ropes, but some of the kids from the school said that there would be ponies and monkeys. My dad didn’t have the money to buy me a ticket so I did what most of the other kids did: hung around the tent and stared at all the people going inside. There were trucks selling food and fizzy drinks too. And in one of them, a man who was making fairy floss: stirring it through and through like he was catching clouds on a stick. Sometimes he made them all one color, but the rainbow ones were my favorite. One of the other kids bought one, and tore some off for me to try.

  We weren’t always selfish, the poor kids like me. But sometimes, when you got a good thing, you wanted to keep it all for yourself. You wanted to hold it tight like a secret so that nobody could take it away.

  “Don’t tell the others,” the kid warned me, his eyes big. “Don’t tell.”

  “I won’t!” I think I was probably small enough that I crossed my heart and everything. Small enough and dumb enough back then that a promise from me still meant something.

  Looking out at the swirling clouds of color, I could almost taste the sugar on my lips, and I wondered what that kid was doing now.

  I hoped he was okay.

  ****

  Our immersion into the nebula brought about a strange shift of mood aboard the Faceless ship. There was a prickling sense of something coming off the Faceless, that felt a little like anticipation. They seemed more alert somehow, more invested in our surroundings. One morning I passed two of them standing by a window, watching the clouds swirl by, and I couldn’t think of a time that the Faceless had ever been more interested in the view than in one of us humans.

  “Something’s happening,” Chris said that day at lunch, his notebook tucked under his arm as he dug into one of our last remaining ration packs. “There’s a lot more activity amongst the Faceless. And the temperature is getting warmer too. Cam, will you talk to Kai-Ren? He takes the time to answer you.”

  It was said without rancor, but it had to smart a bit, right?

  I ducked my head to hide my grin. When I looked up again, Chris was watching me, his expression unreadable.

  “Okay,” Cam said. “We’ll talk to him.”

  But he made no move to get up, and Chris looked at him expectantly.

  “Now?” Cam asked, raising his eyebrows.

  Chris shrugged. “Do you have anything more pressing to do today?”

  “I guess not,” Cam said, and he sounded more amused than annoyed. The canvas of the bunk squeaked as he stood.

  I stared at Chris for a moment longer, trying to figure out if his tone had been teasing, or if he was being a prick. And then I tried to figure out why it felt like something that mattered even though Cam didn’t seem bothered.

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh, or whether I wanted to punch him. Cam must have sensed it.

  “Come on, Brady,” he said, slapping me on the back. “Let’s go.”

  I shot Chris a narrow look as I followed Cam from the room.

  “Was he always such a dick?” I muttered under my breath as we headed down the corridor.

  “Sometimes,” Cam said with a slight smile. “Not always. Come on, we’ll go and talk to Kai-Ren and see what’s going on. Then you can rub it in Chris’s face.”

  I snorted, but Cam was right.

  Humanity was very much beneath Kai-Ren’s attention, but Cam and I stood out just a little bit more than the other buzzing insects. Cam, because he’d been the first, and me because I’d been so different from Cam. That had snagged Kai-Ren’s attention, and still held it for the most part. Kai-Ren humored us, but it only went so far. Fuck, I didn’t know. Most days it felt like he ignored us, but for all I knew he’d told us everything we’d ever wanted to know about the Faceless and we just had no way of understanding. Maybe every hiss, every touch, and every frisson of shared emotion was brimming with information that our primitive human brains just had no way to process. Talking to us was probably like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a housecat.

  There was no bridge on the Faceless ship, or operations center or anything like that, just like there was no mess, no crew quarters, and no rec rooms. But there was a section of the ship towards the core where the alcoves with flashing lights were more concentrated and the twisting roots of the ship’s architecture were thicker and closer together, that we might have considered a bridge if we’d actually known what the alcoves did. The Faceless tended to gather there.

  Cam and I followed the sloping spiral of the corridor downward and listened for that peculiar humming in our skulls where our consciousnesses touched those of the Faceless. It was like hearing cicadas in the distance, or the faint crackle of static between two radio channels.

  Chris was right about the temperature. The ship was more humid now tha
t it had been before, like summer nights in Kopa, twisted in thin sheets, skin slick with sweat. Too hot to sleep, lying awake and listening to the high-pitched drone of mosquitoes that drifted just out of reach. Windows pushed open in the hopes of a breath of cool air, but there was nothing but cloud-pressed heat, still and heavy. If I closed my eyes I might have been in Kopa, with the salt taste of sweat beading on my upper lip, and my shirt stuck to my back.

  Halfway across the universe, and it was closest to home I’d felt in a long time.

  Lights pulsed in the walls as we followed the corridor down into the heart of the ship, and the humming chorus that was the shared consciousness of the Faceless washed up against our own. It always brought a moment of wrongness, a faint psychic scrape in the back of my skull like a nail against a chalkboard. It was just enough to make my flesh prickle, but it vanished again in the space of a heartbeat.

  We passed one of the Faceless, and then another.

  They all looked the same under their sleek black body armor, like insects in a hive, but we could tell them apart now, or at least tell which one was Kai-Ren. It was chemosignals, maybe, because we were insects in the hive as well now, weren’t we? We weren’t just observers anymore. Maybe we never had been.

  We found Kai-Ren in an alcove lit with muted orange lights that flickered back and forth through the veins in the ceiling. He loomed over us, his shining black suit reflecting the lights. “Cam-ren. Bray-dee.”

  He reached out, and his black-gloved fingers slid along my collarbone, where the neck of my T-shirt sagged and gaped. I felt his interest sharpen as he touched my skin and found it damp with sweat. Then his fingertips snagged on the fabric of my shirt as he sought out my heartbeat with his palm.