Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  “No,” Chris said. “I’ve been in his head too, remember? It wasn’t just the Faceless. He met you, Brady. The universe wasn’t big enough for Cam back when I knew him, but then he met you and now all of that has changed. He’s changed. He’s found what he was looking for, Brady, and it turns out it was this unmitigated fucking disaster of a human being. No offence.” His teasing smile was back briefly, and then gone again. “And for some reason you make him happy. So yeah, I think that maybe I’m jealous of Cam.”

  “I knew it,” I said, my heart thumping. “You think I’m hot.”

  He laughed. “That’s what you get from that?”

  There was no anger in his words though. He knew I was full of bullshit. The whole fucking universe knew that.

  “Just calling it how I see it,” I said.

  He laughed again. “Sure.”

  We fell into silence for a while, but it was more comfortable than before. I watched the hybrid’s chest rising and falling in the gloom.

  “So what is it you’re looking for, Chris?” I asked him at last.

  He shrugged, and held my gaze. “I don’t know. I just hope I’ll know it when I see it, like Cam did.”

  And maybe, for the first time since I’d known him, I discovered that I didn’t hate Chris Varro even a little bit, and I hoped he’d find whatever he was looking for too.

  “Are you pissed we’re going home?”

  Chris shrugged again. “Maybe. It’s the safest thing, I know that, but we won’t get an opportunity like this one again. How can we, if just being on this ship does…that?” He gestured at the hybrid. “I wish we’d had more time here. I feel like we’ve hardly been given a glimpse of the Faceless, and now even that’s being taken away from us.”

  “How did you…how were you never scared of them?” I was half afraid to ask the question. It revealed more about me than it did about anything, but I also wanted to know.

  Chris’s mouth quirked. “I’m terrified of them, Brady.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am.” He dragged his fingers through his hair, leaving it mussed up. “You always say we’re insects to the Faceless, right? And you’re right. The thing is though, we’re insects whether we’re up here buzzing in their faces, or living in the ants’ nests we call cities back on Earth. We’re not safer when we’re at home. We just lie to ourselves and say that we are so that we can actually function enough to live our lives. The Defenders are useless. Anyone who’s ever been on one knows that. I’m as scared of the Faceless as anyone. I just figured it didn’t make a difference where I was scared of them, so I might as well be standing right in front of them.”

  “Jesus.” I snorted. “You and I have very different fear responses.”

  “Same fear though,” he offered.

  Yeah. Same fear. The difference was that Chris didn’t let his fear cripple him. And whatever he said, however much he tried to downplay that, it was a hell of a difference.

  “And what about the hybrid?” I asked.

  Chris looked over at it. “I want to take him home,” he said. “If Kai-Ren lets me. And if he survives.”

  Delivering a Faceless hybrid to the military would make up for our failures to deliver anything else useful, probably. Not that I gave a fuck if the military thought we’d failed—and Chris probably didn’t either. That’s not how he measured failure and success. But the hybrid also represented knowledge, and Chris burned for that.

  I watched as the hybrid’s pale fingers twitched against the cot. “You think Kai-Ren will let you take it?”

  “I think Kai-Ren doesn’t give a shit what happens to him,” Chris said, and shrugged. “Unless he thinks we could somehow use him against the Faceless.”

  “I don’t think he thinks we’re smart enough for that.”

  Chris shrugged. “And he’s probably right.”

  “Does it matter that it’s a—“

  A living thing? A thing that could feel pain, maybe? Possibly even a sentient thing? What would scientists do to it back on Earth? And what would it mean if we were the ones who delivered it to them?

  Chris didn’t need to hear the end of the question. “I’m not going to let anyone cut him up or anything, Brady.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” I said. “You wouldn’t. But remember the time the military put me and Cam in a glass cage underground? Because I do, and that sure as fuck wasn’t fun.”

  Chris pressed his mouth into a thin line and then exhaled and dragged his fingers through his hair. “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know if that was an acknowledgement or an apology. Neither did he probably.

  He reached down for the tin cups beside the hybrid’s cot. “Come on, you can help me with this.”

  ****

  The nearest alcove was back past our room. I looked in while we passed and everyone was sleeping. Not that I needed to look to know with the connection we shared, but human habits were hard to break. I followed Chris through the curving passageway to the alcove. He stopped when he reached it and stared at the wall for a while.

  “It’s creepy now, right?” I asked. “Like creepier than before. And it was creepy as fuck before, but now it’s like every eyelash, every flake of skin you leave in there, the ship could use that to make a living, breathing thing.”

  “Nature isn’t creepy,” Chris said. “And this is just nature.”

  But he still hesitated.

  “What nature have you been watching?” I asked him. “Back home, in Kopa, I once watched a gecko cannibalize another gecko right on my bedroom ceiling. Nature is fucked up. They get you in with those pictures of sunsets and golden leaves and shit, but it’s all a lie. Nature is brutal and ugly and gross.”

  Chris’s mouth twitched in the gloom. “Aren’t you going to be a paramedic?”

  That threw me. Because he wasn’t mocking me for it. He wasn’t saying I couldn’t do it, that I was too dumb, or too old to start, or too poor. There was a joke in his words, but it wasn’t on me.

  “Maybe,” I said. “In which case it’s my professional opinion that nature is disgusting, and the human body is pretty fucking disgusting too.”

  “Well, I won’t disagree with you there.” Chris pressed his hand against the alcove, and the wall closed around him.

  I waited, and wondered how long this would take. Would he wait for the entire alcove to fill up, or would he—

  The walls opened again. Chris was crouching on the floor, his bare feet shining with goo, and the bottom of his trousers stuck to his calves like he’d been paddling through sludge. That answered that, I guessed.

  He passed the two tin cups up to me, and rose to his feet.

  We walked back toward the medbay.

  “You really think this is what it needs?” I asked, eyeing the goo in the cups.

  “I have no clue.” Chris pulled up short suddenly, his expression tightening.

  There was a Faceless standing in the door of the medbay. It turned its head when it saw us, and I felt a frisson of unease along the connection. It wasn’t Kai-Ren—it wasn’t immediate enough to be him, somehow; it didn’t feel right—but it was one of the hive.

  Chris moved forward. “What do you want?” he asked the Faceless.

  The Faceless didn’t move.

  As chatty as fucking ever.

  Chris squared his shoulders. “What are you doing here? Did you touch it? Kai-Ren said I could have it. He gave me his word.”

  I could see Chris’s face reflected ghostly-pale in the mask of the Faceless.

  “Did you touch it?” Chris asked again, lifting his chin like he was really going to fucking square up to a Faceless if he got an answer he didn’t like. His anger thrummed through him, through all of us, and the Faceless tilted its head as it regarded him.

  And then it moved out of the doorway.

  Chris hurried inside.

  I followed him, more slowly, and watched as the Faceless turned and walked away. A moment before it was swallowed by the gloom, I thought I s
aw another one standing there.

  Saw it, but I couldn’t feel it.

  The Stranger?

  The last time I’d seen him, he’d been standing over Harry, ready to hurt him. But now, when I blinked into the darkness that was barely softened by the weird gelatinous lights that bobbed in the walls, the Stranger was swallowed up by the black and I wasn’t sure if he’d been there at all, or if he was just the manifestation of my fears.

  I stepped inside the medbay and passed Chris the tin cups. “There was another one out there, I think. I saw it, but I couldn’t feel it.”

  Chris’s focus was on the hybrid. “I don’t think they touched him.”

  The hybrid’s chest was still rising and falling shallowly. Its eyes were still dark slits. It was still creepy as fuck, so situation normal there, right? I grabbed Doc’s stethoscope so I could do the obs while Chris rubbed the fluid into its skin and dribbled some down its throat.

  Its obs were unchanged from the last hour.

  “You really think they were going to hurt it?” I ventured at last.

  “That Faceless didn’t exactly read warm and fuzzy to me,” Chris muttered, massaging fluid into the webbing between the hybrid’s fingers. The skin looked dry and cracked there. Maybe the fluid would help. “You?”

  “They’re Faceless,” I said. “I never get anything off them except the urge to run and scream.”

  Chris snorted, but it sounded a bit like agreement.

  I drew a deep breath and tried to force myself to relax a little. It hadn’t worked for the past three months, and it wasn’t likely to start working now, but when had I ever learned a lesson quickly?

  “Do you really think that one day you’ll be able to talk—”

  Except I never got the question out, because at that moment the Faceless ship made an echoing sound like the song of a distressed whale, and then a sudden shudder ran through her, and through me, and through all of us. And the hybrid, who hadn’t moved since Kai-Ren had torn it from its sac, sat bolt upright on the cot, it’s dark eyes shining in the gloom, and then opened its mouth to suck in a wet, rasping breath that felt as loud as a scream.

  Chapter Ten

  “Brady, go!” Chris told me.

  The corridor between the medbay and our room had never felt as long before. It was dark, still dark, but the weird low lights floating between the walls were purple and red, in tones I’d never seen before, and the ship shuddered around me. She was hurt. I knew it without seeing it, because I could feel it. She was hurt.

  She made that sound again—whale song—and it reverberated through her, through me. I felt it bone deep.

  The reappearance of the Stranger? The other ship that had drawn up alongside ours? An attack. Somewhere, our ship had been breached, and she was bleeding into the black. She had been breached and boarded.

  I felt them, or rather I felt our Faceless pushing back against them. Our human brains weren’t built for this. We were so incompatible and so out of sync with the Faceless. We couldn’t process the signals we received—we could barely even describe them—but we could feel the echoes of them. We were the insects who skated in the water tension on the surface of the pond. We didn’t know what was happening above us or below. We existed in a narrow place. We never saw the rock get thrown, who threw it or where it landed, but we felt the ripples in the surface of the pond.

  We could feel them now.

  Other consciousnesses, other entities, prickled at the edges of my awareness like static. They weren’t part of our network, our connection, but the Faceless that now moved onto our ship used the same method to communicate as Kai-Ren and his hive did, but on a slightly different frequency. They were interference, or feedback, or a radio squelch, or something. They were there, and I could feel them.

  My consciousness washed up against the wall of their cold hostility even as I struggled to breathe. I could feel my fear, and Chris’s, and Cam’s and Lucy’s and everyone’s, and behind all of that I could also feel something new: Kai-Ren’s uncertainty. It wasn’t sharp enough to call it fear, or maybe he wasn’t smart enough to process it that way. Whatever this was, it was unprecedented.

  Cam had called him the Faceless battle regent once because he was their leader, not just of his own hive, but because he directed other hives as well, or held some authority over them that he’d won in previous battles with whatever the hell else lived out here in the black. And now, for the first time, another hive—the Stranger’s—had pushed back. Had refused to accept his authority. Had attacked him. It had seen the hybrid—that sign of Kai-Ren’s weakness—and attacked.

  And Kai-Ren hadn’t been expecting that.

  Kai-Ren had promised to take us home, but how much was his word worth in the face of a mutiny?

  I turned into our room. Lucy tore herself from Cam’s grasp and flung herself toward me. I caught her and held her tight. Her fear thrummed like a high musical note played on frayed strings. It reverberated, and wavered, and hung in the air between us. So did mine, probably.

  “What’s going on out there?” Andre asked.

  I shook my head. “I know as much as you do. I haven’t seen anything. But I think we’re under attack.”

  Our ship was hurting, and there were Faceless here who weren’t a part of this hive. What else was there to understand?

  “Okay,” Cam said. “We need to get to one of the alcoves. We need armor, in case of actual fighting, or decompression.”

  “And then what?” Harry asked.

  “Then we hole up somewhere,” Cam said, “and stay the hell out of the way.” He looked at me. “Where’s Chris?”

  “With the hybrid.”

  Cam nodded. “Okay. Let’s go. Andre, you and me will take point. Brady and Doc, stick with Lucy. Harry, you’re watching our backs.”

  Watching for what, though? If the Faceless found us and wanted us dead, then we were dead. But I kept my mouth shut, because Cam knew this stuff better than me. The military taught their officers how to lead, how to take the initiative. They never taught that shit to the rest of us. They only taught their enlisted men how to die. We picked up the cynicism for free along the way. And some of us had a head start in that way before we were even conscripted. Some of us were born fucking cynical.

  The nearest alcove from our room was the one Chris and I had visited earlier with our tin cups. We started toward it, moving slowly and quietly in the darkness.

  The Faceless ship had been built—or born, or hatched, or whatever—on a spiral. The curve of the corridors meant that it wasn’t just the darkness that obscured our vision. It also meant there were no cross-passages to use as cover if we needed it. We were exposed.

  My fear sharpened as we followed the corridor up. I heard a sudden screech of something in my head, a soundless scream as though the creature who had been making it had been pulled underwater in front of me and my mind had filled in the sound from just the shape of its mouth, in the absence of any actual sound. Then a rush of dizziness washed over me, there and gone in the blink of an eye, and everything felt off kilter somehow when it was done.

  There was…

  There was an empty space somewhere.

  Somehow.

  And then it wasn’t empty anymore.

  I didn’t understand what it was I was feeling.

  “Did…” Harry whispered from behind us. “Did anyone else feel that?”

  “Someone’s missing,” Lucy whispered back. “One of the Faceless is gone.”

  God. That was it. One of the Faceless from our hive had been killed. Snuffed out and gone, and our connection had readjusted.

  When I was a kid, my dad used to take me hunting for eels in the mangroves. Dad knew the trick of how to spot them from the tiny bubbles that appeared in the brackish water, and then suddenly he’d thrust his gnarled hands down into that stinking, sticky mud and pull a wriggling eel free, and I’d watch as the water rushed back in to fill the hole he’d made. It only took a minute or two before the bubbles died
away and the sediment settled again and it was as though nothing had ever happened.

  “Keep moving,” Cam said, his voice low. “Come on.”

  I held Lucy’s hand tightly in mine as we continued up the sloping corridor.

  The alcove was maybe fifteen or twenty meters away from us when we felt it: from somewhere in the heart of the ship, fighting. Everything we knew was because we felt it. There wasn’t any sound.

  Back on Defender Three, when they’d made us watch the footage of Cam getting taken by Kai-Ren, there hadn’t been any sound then either. They’d cut the audio so we couldn’t hear Cam screaming. But the Faceless, when they fought, were silent. And we knew why now. What use was sound when they could communicate via their connection?

  But if there was no sound, there was still a cacophony of fear, of surprise, of the rush of adrenaline, of sudden sharp pain, of rage. And the connection spiked higher and higher with every emotion the Faceless experienced as they fought the intruders. Through it all, Kai-Ren’s mind was a solid presence. In that twisting chaotic tangle of threads, he was the anchor line.

  I couldn’t tell which hive was winning.

  “Okay,” Cam said as we reached the alcove. “Let’s go. Lucy, Brady.”

  I took a breath and stepped into the alcove with Lucy, and the opening oozed shut behind us.

  It had been a long time since I’d used one of these for anything but food and sleep. I looked up, waiting for the weird slimy tubes to drop down and cover us in fluid that would harden into Faceless armor, but nothing happened.

  “Come on,” I told the ship. “Come on.”

  And still nothing happened.

  Jesus fuck.

  The sudden realization was as cold as ice.

  In all our time here, we’d had no control over the alcoves at all, had we? It had been Kai-Ren and the other Faceless who’d somehow got the alcoves to do what we needed, through whatever interface they used. The ship wasn’t connected to us in the same way it was connected to them. We needed an intermediary, and all our intermediaries were currently fighting for control of the ship.