Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  “So what’s the plan?” Cam asked, his gaze steady.

  Chris exhaled slowly. “We split up. Andre and Harry, you guys stay here in the bay with Doc and Lucy and the hybrid. Keep the doors shut, if you can.”

  “And if we can’t?” Harry asked.

  Chris just shook his head slightly and didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to. He looked over to Cam and me. “Cam and Brady, we’ll go and find Kai-Ren. Your connection with him is stronger than mine. And he listens to both of you. We might need that.”

  “You think?” I asked. “Middle of his ship exploding and we’re going to ask him to worry about his fucking house pets? Yeah, that’ll go down well.”

  “With that attitude, sure,” Chris said. He’d learned Cam’s trick of not rising to my bait. “We need to find Kai-Ren and help him win this.”

  “We?” Cam asked. There was a tone in the word that was almost a laugh, that’s how ludicrous this all was. “Chris, there’s no ‘we’ in this fight. It’s Faceless against Faceless. We can’t be in it. We literally have no way of engaging. We have no armor and no weapons. We can’t operate their technology. What are we going to do? Slap them around a bit?”

  Except can’t wasn’t a word that Chris Varro had ever listened to in his life. He wouldn’t have been here otherwise.

  “Listen, Cam,” Chris said.

  Cam’s brows tugged together. “What?”

  “No, listen,” Chris said. “Listen to the bond. It’s… the network is getting smaller. Kai-Ren’s Faceless are losing.”

  Fear settled deep in my gut, and a shiver ran through me. Chris was right. I knew it instinctively. I felt it. There were fewer Faceless in our connection than before. The gaps had been filled in, but it was like painting over the cracks in a wall. The paint was too thin, and behind it the wall was starting to crumble. Soon the whole thing would collapse.

  “And if Kai-Ren loses,” Chris said, “then we’re all dead as well. So we either wait for that happen, or we help him. We need weapons and armor, and if those won’t save us we need the pods. Otherwise we’re sitting ducks. But if he gives us access to their tech—all their tech—then we’re reinforcements.”

  So he had a point. Whole fucking universe was on fire outside. Maybe Kai-Ren would actually appreciate the backup.

  Chris took our collective stunned silence as agreement. Or maybe he didn’t, but he pressed on anyway because he knew it was the best he was going to get.

  “We’ve got incoming still,” he said. “And we’ve got at least one other Faceless ship docked with us. Until that ship undocks, then I’d guess we’re safe from being targeted by missiles, or whatever the fuck it was our ship used to take that other one out.”

  “You’d guess?” Harry asked, arching his brows. My attitude was catching.

  “This whole fucking thing is nothing but guesswork, Harry,” Chris said. “It has been since Earth.”

  Guesswork, dumb luck and recklessness. Jesus. We were humanity’s finest, weren’t we? I probably could have laughed at that if we weren’t so close to getting killed. Chris would probably laugh at it anyway, because what else was there to do?

  You pushed that same rock up that same hill every fucking day, and one day it was bound to roll back and crush you. And at least your painful death would be a break in your usual routine, right? That thought was more bluster and bullshit than actual bravery, but it was enough. Bluster and bullshit had always carried me through before.

  Cam looked to me.

  I looked to Lucy, a thousand different thoughts swirling through my head and none of them good. But Chris was right. He was right.

  “I’ll be back soon, Lucy,” I told her.

  She nodded, her eyes wide, and I didn’t need the Faceless connection between us to know that she didn’t really believe me. Lucy was Kopa born and bred. She knew bullshit when she heard it. She also knew when the odds were stacked against us.

  I looked to Cam and Chris. They were expecting me to be the one to dissent, the one to refuse, the one to break. Fuck that though. If I was going to die, then I’d die fighting. I’d die angry, same way as I’d been born. I squared my shoulders. “Let’s go find Kai-Ren.”

  ****

  Kai-Ren was our savior-god and he was our destroyer-god. He could shield us or he could smite us, and there was no in-between. And the trick was, the trick had always been that we would never be able to tell the difference.

  And maybe neither could he.

  We’d come out here into the black to learn about the Faceless, to learn about the universe and our place in it. Shit, there was probably a part of Chris Varro who saw this whole thing as an exercise in philosophy as much as anything else—“But what does it mean to be human?”—except all we’d ever see, all we’d ever be, would be the shadows on the walls of the cave.

  And now the shadows on the walls had become shapes inside them, moving, twisting, shifting in the walls like little bits of seaweed caught in the back-and-forth churn of the tide, and as I followed Cam and Chris down into the heart of the Faceless ship, I wondered what would happen if I broke my chains and turned around.

  I wondered what I’d see.

  And I wondered, with a sick, dizzy feeling, if I’d ever really left the pod that Kai-Ren had put me into that time when my body was broken. If maybe I was still there now, still drowning slowly, and everything that had happened since was nothing more than a simulation.

  How was I supposed to know?

  How was anyone?

  “Brady,” Cam said softly, holding his hand back for me.

  I took it and squeezed it, and we continued down the corridor with the shifting shapes in the walls, glowing and pulsing, lighting our path.

  I’d follow Cam into hell, probably.

  And Cam, it turned out, would follow Chris.

  There was no room here now for my petty jealousy. Maybe one day, if we survived this, I’d let it flare. Coax the embers of it into a flame. Wouldn’t that be just like me? Cam and me and Lucy, safe back on Earth in our sunlit apartment, and I’d sabotage it all by accusing Cam of wanting to fuck Chris. And I knew he didn’t. I’d been in his head. I knew it, but when the hell had I ever let the truth get in the way of my smart mouth? If Cam was following Chris into hell now, it was because it was our only option. It was because Chris was the officer in charge of this goatfuck of a mission. It was because Cam trusted him. It had nothing to do with their past.

  We followed the twisting thread of the corridor deeper into the heart of the Faceless ship.

  The connection in my head buzzed with static, with sharp bursts of white noise, with things I couldn’t untangle, but none of them were good. The connection hummed like a swarm of angry wasps in my skull, scrambling to defend their nest.

  And then we saw it: the tall black figure of a Faceless at the curve of the corridor. The glowing lights in the walls made shifting patterns across his inky, featureless mask, like sunlight on water.

  “Is he one of ours?” Chris asked in an undertone.

  He couldn’t tell. Neither could I. If the connection was like a radio signal, then there was too much interference right now.

  Chris moved forward.

  The Faceless turned its mask toward us.

  “Where is Kai-Ren?” Chris asked it.

  The Faceless tilted its head, like a dog asking a question.

  “Not one of ours,” Chris said, a thrill of fear running through him and washing back between Cam and me.

  The Faceless stared at him.

  Insects, I remembered. We were insects, or house pets. We were nothing to the Faceless. This Faceless wasn’t hunting us. We were beneath its consideration while Kai-Ren’s Faceless were still alive.

  In theory.

  Chris had obviously reached the same conclusion.

  “Keep moving,” he said. I felt his fear, felt him steel himself against it, and watched as he stepped past the Faceless.

  The Faceless turned its head to watch him go.

&nb
sp; In theory we were beneath the consideration of the Faceless. In practice I wanted to piss myself.

  Cam held my hand tightly, keeping himself between me and the Faceless. He tugged us forward. I clamped my jaw to stop it from trembling as we moved past the silent Faceless. I glanced at its mask, at the reflected colors that swirled there like an oil slick, and sensed nothing behind it but a void.

  It hissed lowly, but made no move toward us.

  We rounded the curve, the corridor opening up ahead of us, and saw two more of them.

  Two more of the Stranger’s Faceless.

  Chris moved toward them, intending to pass them like we had the other one. One of them shot a hand out, and made a curious sound, and Chris pulled up short.

  No.

  No, we were on their radar now. Not a threat, but no longer nothing either. We weren’t invisible anymore, and we could taste the menace in the humid air.

  “Okay,” Chris said softly. “Let’s back it up before they get angry.”

  Cam and I turned back and moved up the corridor. The first Faceless came into view again. His mask was still turned toward us, and as we reappeared in his field of vision he splayed his fingers. And maybe it was a meaningless gesture, but all I could do was think of claws.

  Cam and I retreated again, bumping back into Chris.

  We were caught between the Faceless now, in the narrowest of spaces where we were still out of sight. A step or two in either direction would take us back into their field of vision.

  I looked hopelessly for a door.

  “This is bullshit,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “There’s got to be a better way to—“

  Fuck, we were dumb shits.

  What had I been thinking since the moment we came aboard? How paltry words like doors and windows and walls were for what we’d encountered here on the Faceless ship. The usual definitions didn’t apply.

  The walls.

  Did the walls count as tech? Had we been locked out of those?

  I pulled my hand free from Cam’s, and pressed it against the wall. It bowed, just like the one around the hatchery had, and then it gave, and my hand was inside it.

  “I think I found a shortcut,” I said, my heart thumping.

  I leaned slowly into the wall, and it opened up to accept me. A warm, sticky sensation crept over my skin as the wall oozed closed around me.

  If the wall around the hatchery was a thin membrane between chambers, then this wall was an artery. I kept my eyes shut, and fought against the panic of my near-drowning while the fluid burned my lungs. And then I was breathing again, for certain values of breathing at least, and I opened my eyes again. The fluid stung for a moment and then I could see again.

  Everything was weird and murky, like a sand-churned ocean.

  A glowing orange something bobbed in front of my blurry vision for a moment before it was carried away on the tide that tugged me forward too. I was strong enough to prevent getting swept away, but I was glad that the current—the bloodstream?—was heading in the direction we needed. It’d be hard work to fight against it.

  Coming back again was a problem for future Brady, right? If that guy was still alive in an hour or so.

  I turned my head and saw Cam and Chris were already inside with me. As I watched, Cam raised his hand slowly and something shaped like a stringy jellyfish, or a clump of seaweed—or maybe some kind of filamentous bacteria magnified by about a million degrees—brushed against his fingers before bumping into me and then flowing past me.

  I turned my head to look back out into the corridor. I watched the two Faceless round the corner through the opaque lens of the wall. What was that saying? Through a glass darkly. That was from the Bible, I think, and I guessed it meant the same as watching the shadows on a cave wall.

  Except we were those shadows now, weren’t we? Me and Cam and Chris, and the Faceless didn’t even glance at us as we slipped past them, letting the tide pull us deeper and deeper into the heart of the ship.

  ****

  We found Kai-Ren in the center of the ship, in the core, or the heart, or whatever that strange place was where the lights gathered in the walls like Christmas, like fireflies, and the twisting banyan roots of the ship’s veins and arteries were twined as close together as brambles. Kai-Ren lay where he had fallen, sprawled backwards across the corpse of another Faceless. His mask was split, and his death-white face stared up at us. There was a cut on his face, bisecting his hollow cheek. It was leaking pale fluid, as thick as pus.

  I thought he was dead, and in that moment my heart stopped, and I hated him. I hated him for bringing us out here, further into the black than we ever should have gone, and I hated him for promising to take us home again. And I hated him most of all for all the times I’d thought he was a god, or at least some invincible nightmare, when he was as fucking mortal as any other weak creature who ever crawled in the dirt.

  I hated him for failing us.

  And slowly, Kai-Ren’s yellow eyes blinked.

  “Kai-Ren?” Cam asked, dropping to his knees beside him. He reached out and put a hand on his chest.

  Kai-Ren’s response whispered down our connection, faint and broken: “Cam-Ren.”

  My stomach twisted, and a fear deeper than any I’d ever known caught me. Was he dying? I was no Zarathustra and this was not a Nietzschean moment. If God was dead I only cared because it meant that I was dead too, and so was Lucy and Cam and every other human being on this ship.

  Kai-Ren’s chest rose as he sucked in a wet-sounding breath, and it sounded laborious. It sounded almost final.

  No.

  Every cell in my body screamed the word even while I was frozen in shock.

  No, Kai-Ren wasn’t allowed to die, because he’d promised us he’d take us home. He owed us that.

  “We need to get him to the pod bay,” I said, my voice rasping. “We need to get him healed.”

  Cam and Chris exchanged a look. It was a look that said they’d made the same calculations I had and they didn’t like the result. But what choice did we have? Backs against the wall, what choice did we have?

  This was a battle we were too small to fight, and it was a battle that the Stranger was winning. We needed to retreat. We needed to run, but we could only do that with Kai-Ren alive.

  “Fuck this,” I said. “I’m not dying in the black.”

  I crouched down on Kai-Ren’s other side, and gripped his arm.

  Between the three of us we hauled him more or less upright. His suit was slimy with goo, but whether that was because he’d been lying on the floor or whether it was because he it was coming from some wound, I had no idea. It was way too fucking gloomy inside the heart of the ship to see anything against the inky black of Kai-Ren’s battle armor.

  We half-carried, half-dragged Kai-Ren toward the nearest porous wall.

  “Do we even know where this will take us though?” Chris asked, his brow furrowed.

  “It’s a circulatory system,” I said. “It brought us down here, it’ll take us up again.”

  Unless there were valves and chambers we couldn’t get through, but we’d cross that bridge, or not, when we came to it.

  “Besides, he’s dying,” I said. “And maybe the stuff in the walls might not even be the same as the stuff that fills the alcoves or the pods, but maybe it is, and maybe it will help!”

  And maybe it would kill him quicker too, but at this point we didn’t have much to lose. We were dead if we did nothing. Hell, we were probably dead anyway, but that didn’t mean we could stop fighting. I wasn’t sure Cam and Chris knew how, not while we still had room to move, and I sure as shit didn’t. Not that I was smart about it like they were. I was just a stubborn little prick. Ask anyone. The universe could lock me in a concrete box and I’d still be kicking the walls until I died. And maybe that was what I brought to the team—since it sure as hell wasn’t knowledge, or experience, or even optimism. Maybe all I brought was all I’d been born with: the mongrel in me. And Cam brought the pra
gmatism, apparently.

  “We’re out of options here, Chris,” he said.

  Chris nodded, a short sharp jerk of his chin, of his tightly clenched jaw, and we dragged Kai-Ren into the wall.

  We leaned into it, a knot of interlacing limbs, and the wall swallowed us whole. And then the current caught us and carried us, lungs burning as we breathed the fluid in, deeper into the heart of the Faceless ship.

  And, if we were lucky, maybe it would take us back up towards the pod bay, to Lucy and Doc and the others, to where we needed to be.

  Chapter Twelve

  We pushed our way out of the walls somewhere in the Faceless ship. The current had pulled us deeper into the ship for a while, buffeting us together while we all clung to Kai-Ren like a life raft and globs of shining bits of stuff swirled past us. And then, as suddenly as getting dumped by a wave, we’d been dragged upward again. We’d ridden the current until we’d felt it begin to turn again, and pushed our way out of the walls into an interconnected honeycomb of rooms that served no purpose that was immediately apparent. Story of our fucking lives. The artery we’d been traveling through cut through the honeycombed rooms, but the rooms themselves were divided by walls that didn’t appear to be porous. They shifted and stretched like ligaments. Maybe they were.

  I knelt with Kai-Ren on the floor while Cam and Chris went in different directions to find a way out of our unexpected labyrinth. Kai-Ren’s eyes were closed now. I kept a hand on his chest, just to feel the shaky rise and fall of his breathing and wondering, if it stopped, if there was anything I could do. Was my medic-level training worth shit with the Faceless? I didn’t even know if he had a heart, let alone if CPR would do a fucking thing.

  I closed my eyes briefly, and thought of the last guy I’d performed CPR on. Mike Marcello. Hadn’t done him any fucking good, had it?

  “This way!” Chris yelled moments later.

  Cam backtracked to find me, and we dragged Kai-Ren toward the sound of Chris’s voice. Soon enough we found ourselves in what might have been the main spiral of the corridor. The ship was a fucking maze, but of course Chris knew his way. He’d been poking around in corners since the day we came aboard.