Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  I leaned back at last, and looked him in the eye. His were as wet as mine. “We’ve got this, Doc.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, and it didn’t matter if it was bullshit. “We’ve got this.”

  ****

  I didn’t want to go back to the hatchery, back into the hidden core of the ship, but I could feel that’s where Cam was. I kept my eyes closed as I passed through the wall and into the warm, viscous fluid that flowed around me. I held my breath, and my lungs burned by the time I pushed through into the hatchery and the walls oozed shut behind me.

  Kai-Ren stood by the steaming pool. Cam stood in front of him, his chin tilted up. Kai-Ren held him in place with a finger under his jaw. The tension in the hatchery was thick, but I couldn’t read any anger coming off Kai-Ren, or any fear from Cam. This display of dominance though, if that’s even what it was…I wondered if this was Cam paying some price for Chris’s earlier rebelliousness.

  Kai-Ren saw me and dropped his gloved hand, and Cam turned his head to watch me approach. His face was drawn, his expression grave.

  I couldn’t look at the bodies on the floor. I was too afraid I’d see a face I knew. I only glanced down once, to pick a path over to the pool without stepping on them. The floor was sticky and wet underneath my bare feet, and my stomach roiled even as I tried to tell myself that this was no different than any other room in the Faceless ship. It wasn’t blood. It was just the amniotic fluid that had surrounded the hybrids in their sacs. It was probably the same stuff from the pods, or from between the walls. It wasn’t a horror movie if I didn’t look.

  I kept my gaze fixed on Cam as I closed the distance between us.

  “Brady,” he murmured, and held out a hand for me.

  Most times when we stood together in front of Kai-Ren, I curled into Cam. Not today. Today I faced him—god, demon, savior, scourge—and stared at his black featureless mask. There was no part of me that was hidden to Kai-Ren, no corner of my brain he hadn’t seen into, and yet he was still utterly unknowable to me.

  Chris thought we could understand the Faceless one day. Even Cam thought it. But here we stood in a room full of the bodies of the living things he’d killed, and Kai-Ren was as cold-blooded as always.

  “You don’t have children,” Cam said, his voice quiet. “These were hive mates, not children. Do you feel anything for them?”

  Kai-Ren gave a low hiss, and the word echoed in our minds: “Abominations.”

  “Do you blame us for that?” Cam asked him.

  Another low, disgruntled hiss.

  “We didn’t know,” Cam said. “When you brought us aboard, we didn’t know this could happen. You didn’t know, so how could we?”

  Cam had been humanity’s advocate before, alone in the black when those who loved him had already mourned him. He’d been fighting for humanity when we’d all thought he was a dead man. He’d been alone the first time he’d argued that we deserved to live. He wasn’t alone now.

  His fingers tightened around mine. “We didn’t know. This isn’t our fault, master.” His voice hitched on that word he hadn’t used in months, and I wondered if it was a title Kai-Ren had given himself, or one that Cam had fashioned, like battle regent, to make sense of the Faceless. To attempt to shape order out of chaos. “You swore a treaty. You said there would be peace. You promised you’d take us home again. Tell me that nothing has changed, please.”

  Kai-Ren stared down at him.

  “Master,” Cam repeated, and tugged his hand free from mine. He raised it, resting his fingers on Kai-Ren’s shoulder for a moment before he stepped closer and curled his hand around the back of Kai-Ren’s neck.

  The mask fell away, and Kai-Ren’s white, corpse-like face turned toward mine. His eyes were yellow.

  I wondered if he looked at us and thought we were grotesque.

  Did the Faceless have nightmares about humans?

  “This wasn’t our fault,” Cam said. He pressed his hand to Kai-Ren’s cold, sunken cheek. “Please, master.”

  Kai-Ren curled his fingers around Cam’s wrist and held his hand there. Cam’s name escaped him on a low wheezing rasp. “Cam-ren.”

  “Please.”

  The complicated sounds we made were impossible for him, so Kai-Ren sent the words down our connection: “I will take you back.”

  I hadn’t known how tense I was, how frightened, until relief washed over me.

  Home.

  Kai-Ren would take us home.

  Even the thought of a rust-bucket of a Defender sounded like fucking heaven right now. Stale ration packs and cold showers. The stink of hundreds of guys stuck in close quarters. Asshole officers everywhere. Fuck, I wanted it so bad. I’d hated every minute I’d spent on Defender Three as a conscripted recruit, but I’d give anything to be back there. Irony’s a fucking bitch, right? But as long as the bitch was on my side in the end, I’d laugh right alongside her. I’d tried to be brave out here. I’d tried to put my fear aside. And maybe once or twice I’d even convinced myself I’d done it. But Jesus, I just wanted to go home.

  Kai-Ren released Cam’s wrist and hissed again. It was a low sound, and possibly it was meant to be comforting. There was no real way of knowing, and wasn’t that what bit at Chris the most? That in three months aboard this ship, inside this Faceless queen, there was still no real way of knowing.

  We’d go home as ignorant as we had been before.

  I closed my eyes as Kai-Ren reached toward me and tried not to flinch away from his touch as his gloved fingers, slightly damp, ran down the side of my face.

  But we’d go home.

  Chapter Nine

  The hybrid didn’t die in the night like Doc thought it might. It breathed shallowly as the light from the nebula shone on the walls in swirls of blue and green. Its eyes were open in thin dark slits though it was impossible to tell if it was actually conscious or not. Doc took its pulse every hour, and listened to its heart, and nothing much seemed to change.

  “You oughta go get some sleep,” Doc said at one point.

  I shook my head.

  “Some food then.”

  “We’re out of food.”

  Doc grunted. “You know what I meant.”

  Yeah, I knew, but I didn’t want to step inside the alcoves again. Not until I had to. Not when the result of us relying on the ship to live was lying on a cot in front of me wearing a grotesque approximation of my face.

  “What about it?” I asked. “How long until it starves to death?”

  Doc shrugged. “I have no fucking idea, son.”

  But of course Chris had a possible solution for that. He turned up in the middle of the night with two tin cups full of fluid he’d taken from inside one of the alcoves. He painstakingly dribbled the contents of one cup into the hybrid’s mouth, holding its head up so it didn’t choke and massaging its throat until it bobbed and swallowed.

  We had no idea if it would work, but Doc didn’t object. It wasn’t as though we had any other options. It was literally this or nothing. I would have voted for nothing if it had been my choice. But since when was it my choice?

  After the hybrid drank, Chris took the other cup of fluid and rubbed it over the hybrid’s skin.

  “Is it even the same stuff from inside the sacs?” I asked.

  “Stinks the same,” Chris said, which was about as accurate as we could get, I guess.

  His words were dismissive, but his touch, as his hands slid over the hybrid’s body, was strangely gentle. I watched those hands, strong and square, sliding through the fluid and remembered all the times I’d dreamed about them before I’d even known him.

  A flutter of memory that wasn’t mine: a litter of kittens, blind and mewling, and a twelve-year-old kid who’d set his alarm to wake up every two hours to bottle feed them. Even then Chris hadn’t backed down from a challenge. I don’t think he knew how.

  I watched him for a moment longer, then looked over at Doc. “I’m going to go to bed.”

  Doc nodded at me as I left.<
br />
  I wasn’t tired, but I went to our room anyway. I checked that Lucy was sleeping, and then lay down on my bunk. I stared at the way the canvas dipped under Lucy’s weight above me, and remembered that time on Defender Three that I woke up to the sound of old canvas ripping, and suddenly O’Shea was landing right on top of me, all knees and elbows and hard skull thunking against mine. We’d both got cracked ribs out of that, and I’d been angry at O’Shea for weeks, even though it wasn’t his fault. It was easier to be angry than to show I was hurt, I think, in case someone thought I was weak.

  I’d hated Defender Three and every day I’d been stuck there breathing in that stale, recycled air, with nothing between me and the vacuum of space but a few flimsy walls. I’d never made friends—not close ones, at least. There were guys I talked shit with, and drank with, and played cards with, but they wouldn’t have cared if I’d fallen out an airlock, and vice versa. Doc had been the only guy who’d really looked out for me, and back then a part of me had hated it because I thought it was just pity.

  Cam was the first person who ever made me feel that maybe I wasn’t weak. That it was okay to feel things. That it was okay to be angry, and hurt, and sad, and frightened, and it didn’t make me small. It didn’t make me less. He saw past all that, because there hadn’t been a single stray thought that crossed my mind that he couldn’t hear. There hadn’t been any walls between us, and it had been terrifying.

  I wasn’t that same guy now that I had been. Maybe. He was still there, and he was still scared and angry, but he had Cam, and Lucy, and Doc. He had Harry and Andre as well. He even had Chris Varro. He wasn’t alone, and that counted for something. That counted for more than I’d known. I’d taken some big steps since the first moment I’d met Cameron Rushton. And maybe from the outside it looked like I’d hardly moved, but it was a question of scale. My universe was a very small one. Those steps still counted.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, and I was back in Kopa. I was a kid, and I was watching Lucy take her first steps in the dusty front yard of our shitty house. I was leaning on the sagging wire fence, and the sun was blinding me, and Lucy stood up and staggered a few steps, and then fell back down on her ass again. Tiny, tiny steps, but suddenly she was in a whole new world.

  The canvas above me creaked as Lucy rolled over in her sleep.

  Jesus, if Dad could see us now! His dirty reffo kids, floating in a nebula a million miles from Kopa. But we were coming home now. We were coming home. We’d been further than any humans had ever been before, but we were coming home.

  I watched the strange lights from the nebula playing on the wall, and then closed my eyes again and imagined what it would feel like to wake up again with the sunlight on my face.

  ****

  It was dark when I awoke.

  The whirls of blue light that had last illuminated the room had been swallowed by blackness. I turned my face toward the window and saw that the clouds of the nebula had vanished. So had the stars. Only the faint shifting light of the strange pulsing things that moved between the walls of the Faceless ship remained.

  There was someone standing by the window, although maybe it was only a trick my eyes were playing on me—pulling inky shapes out of the darkness and attributing form to them. There was a word for that, but I’d forgotten it. It was an instinct hardwired into us by evolution, a rush of adrenaline when we stared into mottled leaves and thought we glimpsed a face staring back, or saw the shape of a predator in the shifting shadows. Humans had thought we were the top of the food chain once, but even now our biology reminded us of what we really were: prey.

  I climbed out of my bunk, the canvas creaking, and shuffled over to the window.

  There was a man standing there. Chris. He turned to look as me as I approached. He didn’t say anything. He just stepped aside to make room for me at the window.

  I looked out into the black, and that’s all I saw.

  It was as though the universe had blinked entirely out of existence and left absolutely nothing behind.

  A fear deeper than any one I’d ever known took root in my gut.

  “It’s a ship,” Chris said, and I knew he could sense my fear and that he needed to soothe it before it poisoned him as well. “It’s another Faceless ship. It’s drawn up alongside us, that’s all.”

  I exhaled, and let my nascent fear go on that shaky breath.

  Chris stared out the window again. “It was like watching an eclipse.”

  Of course he’d watched fearlessly as the dark ship had swallowed our light. I’d once thought Cam was chasing starlight, but Chris seemed to be chasing something altogether more intangible than that. I wondered if there was anything in the universe that would ever satisfy him.

  He smiled in the faint light, and nodded his head toward the door. “Come on.”

  I looked over at the bunks, but I couldn’t sense anyone else awake.

  I followed Chris out into the corridor and, unsurprisingly, down into Doc’s medbay where the hybrid lay on a cot. Doc was sitting on one footlocker, his feet propped up on another. He was leaning against the wall, his head tilted back. He was snoring.

  The medbay was as dark as our room had been.

  I crossed over to Doc and shook him awake. “Go to bed, Doc.”

  He stretched, his old joints cracking. “What?”

  “Go to bed,” I said. “I’ve got this.”

  He hauled himself to his feet. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Hourly obs, and it’ll probably die anyway.”

  “That’s about the gist of it, yeah.” Doc clapped me on the shoulder, and then squinted around the room. “Why the fuck is it so dark?”

  “There’s another ship blocking out the windows from this side,” I told him.

  “Hmm.” Doc didn’t ask if that was anything we should be worried about, because what the hell was the point of asking? Chris wouldn’t be able to give him an answer, and I sure as shit didn’t have a fucking clue. “Okay. Call me if his condition changes.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Doc had once said he liked me for my bedside manner, but what he’d really meant was that I could sit beside a guy with half his face burned off, a guy who was crying in pain as he died, and I didn’t even flinch. Why would I? I wasn’t the one dying.

  I’d liked the medbay because sick rations were better than regular rations, and half those guys couldn’t finish their meals anyway. The medbay had also meant access to drugs, which were worth a shitload on the station black market, but I only did that a few times. The trainee medic gig had been a good one and I hadn’t wanted to fuck it up by getting caught.

  Point is, I knew the drill when it came to sitting beside guys and taking their vitals so Doc could go deal with other stuff or catch some sleep. I knew when it was worth bothering him with some change or not. Doc had trusted me with that a long time before now. He trusted me with it to the ends of the universe, it turned out.

  “Get some sleep,” I told him. “It’s your turn.”

  Doc squeezed my shoulder and left the medbay.

  I sat down on his footlocker and picked up his notes. Checked the hybrid’s vitals. They were stable, I guess, but whether they were good or not there was no way to tell.

  Chris sat down on the other footlocker and stared at the hybrid in the gloom.

  I set the notes aside, and didn’t look at the hybrid. Fucking thing creeped the hell out of me. I stared at the floor instead, and tried to not let the silence get to me. I’d never liked silence. Silence gave me too much room to think, and that usually led me into some fucked-up headspace that was impossible to escape. It usually led me to blurting out some bullshit too, just to try to get a reaction. I’d once had a shrink ask if I’d ever been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. I was just allergic to assholes, I think, and the problem in the military is that you’re surrounded by them, day in and day out. That shrink had been an asshole too. Most officers were.

  I lifted my gaze and
looked at Chris.

  I wouldn’t have been so conflicted once, but I couldn’t hate Chris. Cam had loved him, and there was an echo of that feeling still there, or at least the realization that it had been true once. And he’d loved Cam too. So he was still an asshole, probably, but not a total asshole. And I’d seen inside his head too often to pretend he was easy to categorize.

  “You’re jealous of me,” I said at last.

  Chris snorted. “I had him first.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Cam,” I said. “I’m talking about everything else. I experienced the Faceless connection before you did. I met Kai-Ren before you did. No fucking way did I qualify for this mission, but here I am. Everything that you would have given your right hand for, I got thrown into and I didn’t even fucking want it.” I nodded at the hybrid. “And that’s my DNA in that thing there. That’s a new form of life that the universe has never seen before, and it exists because of me, not you. It’s killing you, isn’t it?”

  Chris smiled and dipped his head to hide it.

  “Fuck you. I’m right, and you know it.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m not jealous of you, Brady. I’ve seen inside your head.” He looked up at me again, his smile gone. “I might be jealous of Cam though.”

  A sharp emotion I couldn’t name sliced through me, as hot as sudden anger, and then it was gone again, leaving me unbalanced and unsure of the ground underneath my feet.

  “We were good together,” Chris said, his voice low. “We were both ambitious, both smart, both going places. We were perfect, on paper.” He exhaled slowly. “But we couldn’t make it work. I mean, neither of us cared enough to make it work, to compromise or to make changes, you know? And that was fine. That was okay. We were young, and I guess a part of me always figured we’d get a second chance at some point, but it’s not like I’d lose sleep over it if we didn’t. And then he met you and it all changed.”

  “No,” I said, swallowing. “He met the Faceless.”