Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  “This way,” he said. He and Cam each took an arm of Kai-Ren’s, leaving his feet for me. It was like dragging a corpse.

  If he died, would we feel it?

  We slowly descended down the spiral, and I was gratified when we passed the place that Cam and I sometimes snuck away to, and where we’d all hidden earlier before making our way to the pod bay. I knew where we were at last, though it seemed like a hundred years ago that we’d hidden there. Seemed like even longer since Cam and I had been there on our own, chasing our pleasure in private away from the curious appraisal of Kai-Ren and the Faceless.

  Our journey to the pod bay felt laborious. It was terrifying too. I was afraid that every step that revealed another curve of the corridor would also reveal a Faceless. I tried to clear my mind and discover if any of Kai-Ren’s Faceless were even still alive, but either my fear was broadcasting a blast of fear that drowned out the Faceless, or they were all dead. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear them because it was Kai-Ren who’d held the connection together this entire time, and now he was dying it was broken.

  There was too much we didn’t understand about how any of this worked. I’d always known we were totally out of our depth, but now I looked at Chris’s drawn face and thought that he was truly feeling it for the first time.

  We were on our own.

  And then we reached the pod bay, and rounded the entrance, and my world shattered.

  I saw Andre first. The bulky shape of him, on his knees, his entire body shifting each time he performed chest compressions on the man lying on the floor.

  Doc.

  I froze again, Kai-Ren’s boots slipping from my grasp and hitting the floor.

  “Doc!” The name rasped out of me, but I still couldn’t move, because this was a nightmare. This was a nightmare, and Andre and Doc were the only ones I could see in the bay, and what I was seeing was bad, so bad, but it didn’t even matter because where was Lucy?

  The universe was unraveling so quickly that it made me dizzy.

  “Shit!” Cam was the first one to reach Andre and Doc. He dropped to his knees, taking over from Andre, and Andre sagged back, his bloody hands going to his stomach and pressing it tightly. He was hurt too, his shirt soaked in blood.

  Moving forward was like walking underwater. Like trying to push against the currents inside the walls of the ship. I was slow and dumb and the only thing I could hear was the roar of blood in my skull.

  My medic’s training took over while the rest of me couldn’t, except every part of my medic’s training came down to one thing: do what you can until there’s a doctor on scene. But what about when the doctor was the one lying on the ground not breathing?

  “Keep going,” I told Cam, and forced myself to look at Andre instead. “Show me.”

  Andre winced, and peeled his shirt up. The laceration went right across his abdomen, and it was deep. Doing the chest compressions on Doc had pushed his guts out the wound.

  “Keep pressure on it,” I told him. I needed to get to the medbay, except…

  Except it wouldn’t make a fucking difference. I could stitch him up, but this was the sort of injury that needed internal surgery, not just patching up. This was the sort of injury that might take hours or days to kill him, but it would happen. Morphine though. Doc had morphine in his supplies, so at least it wouldn’t have to hurt.

  “Just keep pressure on it.” My eyes strung, and I held my hands over his. His were trembling. “Where’s Lucy?”

  “She’s okay,” Andre said softly, and how was it that he was the one comforting me? How was it that he cared for Lucy more than himself? It couldn’t have just been because we’d shared memories. Because he’d once known what it felt like to wear a baby in a sling across his skinny chest and feel her heartbeat. It was that, but it was also more than that. Andre was a decent guy. He wasn’t selfish. He was better than me. “The Faceless came. Not ours. They took Harry. We tried—we tried to stop them. Lucy hid.”

  “Lucy?” I called. “Lucy!”

  Beside me, Cam was still doing chest compressions on Doc, and I still couldn’t look at the face of the man who’d been the closest thing to a father to me since I’d been conscripted.

  I saw a flash of movement over Andre’s shoulder, and a small pale face appeared from underneath one of the pods. Lucy. She crawled out and behind her, like a naked, spindly spider, came the hybrid.

  I fixed my gaze on that face that was a grotesque parody of mine.

  Nothing to lose, I’d thought back when we’d found Kai-Ren.

  That was still true, wasn’t it?

  I twisted around to look at Chris. He was crouching down over Kai-Ren. Kai-Ren’s eyes were still closed. He was useless to us. I looked at Cam, his brow furrowed in concentration as he worked on Doc. And I looked at Andre, at his ashen face, and then down at where my bloody hands covered his.

  Nothing to lose.

  “Keep the pressure on it,” I told Andre, and peeled my hands away from his. I rose to my feet, the muscles in my thighs aching from being crouched so awkwardly. “We’re losing this fight. We need to win it.”

  We’re losing them.

  “How?” Cam asked, voice strained as he worked. “We can’t use their tech, and we don’t have any weapons of our own. Even if we did, there’s nothing we have that could make a dent in Faceless armor.”

  The ship shook and shuddered as though she heard us, and rolled slowly like whale diving in the deep. The clouds of the nebula swirled in dizzying colors outside the window.

  “The bond is like a virus, right?” I asked. “That’s how we became a part of this. Kai-Ren infected you, you infected me, we passed it on to Lucy just be being close to her, and the others injected themselves with our blood to link themselves to the network. But we’re not Faceless. This whole time we’ve been using the alcoves we thought we were controlling them, but we weren’t, were we? We’re locked out by default, but every time we’ve needed something, one of the Faceless has authorized it without us realizing it. How’s that for a working theory?”

  “Yeah,” Chris said grimly. “That fits.”

  “So what’s the lockout override? What if it’s DNA? What if in order to work the tech, you need to be part of the hive bond and be Faceless?” I nodded at the hybrid. “He doesn’t have the bond, but he has Faceless DNA. What if he was in our network? What if we could get him to operate this stuff for us?”

  “Kai-Ren doesn’t want him to be part of the hive,” Cam reminded us.

  Chris raised his eyebrows. “Kai-Ren’s about to be dead.”

  Which was fair.

  “So what if we tried that?” I asked. “Our bond plus his DNA? What have we got to lose at this point?”

  And none of us had an answer for that.

  I looked over at the hybrid who wore a twisted approximation of my face, and found him starting back at me with dark unblinking eyes. He hunkered down, sitting with his arms crossed over his chest and his twitching fingers splayed over his shoulders. There was a flutter in a muscle in his cheek that pulsed as fast as a frantic heartbeat.

  I wondered if that meant he was scared too.

  “Chris,” I said. “Give me your knife.”

  The hybrid’s skin wasn’t as unyielding as the skin of a Faceless. It bowed under the pressure of the blade of Chris’s pocketknife, and then split, and the hybrid let out a high-pitched keening sound and thrashed and thrashed and thrashed as Chris and I held him still. His blood wasn’t yellow, but it wasn’t quite red either. It was thicker than mine, and it was brown like sludge.

  I thought of the dog I saw one time when I was a kid. How it got caught in barbed wire and made a sound just like that. It dug into my skull then, and it dug into it now. I fought the urge to cover my ears.

  I was hurting him. The least I could do was be a witness to that and not turn away like a coward.

  I glanced at Lucy, and her face was pale and tears slide down her cheeks.

  I flipped the knife around in my grasp, a
nd sliced my arm. It was a short, sharp sting that I hardly felt. Then I pressed the bloody wound against the matching one in the hybrid’s arm while the hybrid thrashed again and tried to squirm away.

  “Brady!” Lucy whispered loudly, her voice raw. “He’s just a baby!”

  Not a Faceless. Not a human. A baby. Is that how she saw him? Is that what he was?

  I shot a look at Chris, and he pressed his mouth into a tight line.

  And then it hit.

  “Oh…” I was still pressing my bleeding wound against the hybrid’s. “Shit. Do you feel that?”

  When I was a kid, there was another kid who was my friend for a while. Morgan. He was just another snot-nosed dusty-footed Kopa kid, but we were best friends for a while. We were brothers. And Morgan took his dad’s old fishing knife and one day we sat out by the side of the road that ran past his place, bare feet paddling in the red dirt, and we decided to become blood brothers. Morgan cut the pad of the thumb with the knife, and I remember how red his blood seemed against his dark skin—I’d never seen blood so red—and then I cut mine, and then we pressed our thumbs together and swore we were blood brothers.

  When I was eight, I thought it would be magical, but all I got out of it was an infected thumb from that dirty fishing knife and a flogging from my step-mother because she was pissed that dad had to spend his pay on a tetanus shot for me instead of booze for her. But I’d thought, when Morgan’s blood mixed with mine, that I’d feel something.

  I felt something now.

  The hybrid keened and thrashed, and he was scared, and so… so alone. His consciousness wasn’t like the Faceless’s. It wasn’t so removed, so alien. The hybrid was an individual, and his mind crashed up against ours, new and discordant and chaotic and afraid.

  Alone.

  He’d woken up alone with Kai-Ren’s fingers around his throat, while on the floor of the hatchery his clutch-mates lay in twisted, broken ways.

  Alone.

  Hands were on him, touching him, strange creatures who peered down at him as he lay on his cot. Their voices like dull murmurs. He was a thing in a box, an animal in a cage, a specimen behind thick glass. He didn’t know what we were, and he didn’t know what he was. The only thing he knew was fear.

  Alone, except now we were flooding his mind with images of strange places, of people, of thoughts and memories and emotions, pouring them into him until he was sinking under the weight of them, and he didn’t understand us, and he didn’t know what any of these things meant, and he was drowning, panicked and afraid.

  “Do you feel that?” I asked again, and, overwhelmed by the his fear, by his loneliness, I then forward and placed my hands on either side of the hybrid’s face. Blood slid down my forearm. I left a smeared thumbprint of it on the hybrid’s cheek. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  The same soothing nonsensical tone I’d once used to calm Lucy when she was small and afraid and crying.

  “It’s okay,” I told the hybrid, holding his dark gaze. “You’re okay. Do you understand me? You’re okay.”

  Middle of a fucking Faceless space battle we were currently losing, but sure, he was okay.

  Chris threw me a wry look as that thought passed through my mind.

  “We’re all fucked if this doesn’t work,” I said, sharp-toothed fear gnawing at my guts. “We’re all totally fucked.”

  “Situation normal then,” Chris said, raising his eyebrows like he was daring me to have a breakdown right here and now. Daring me to falter when I could chose to move forward instead. Daring me to forget I was a stubborn little asshole who never went down without a fight. I could feel his grudging respect, warm as an embrace, when I lifted my chin and glared back at him.

  He flashed me a smile. “Come on, let’s see if this will actually work.”

  We hauled the hybrid to his feet, and pulled him over to the nearest pod.

  “Please,” I said, not even knowing how much he understood. “Please make it work. Please.”

  For Doc, and for Andre, and even for Kai-Ren who might still be our only way home.

  The hybrid stared blankly at the pod.

  I lifted my bloody hands and ran them over the pod’s strange carapace. “Make it work, please.”

  The hybrid stared, and then raised his hands and slid them over the path mine had followed. My breath caught, and then—

  A small row of lights at the side of the pod blinked on, and the pod thrummed as power ran through it.

  Relief almost overwhelmed me, but we weren’t in the clear yet. “Cam!” I yelled. “Cam, get him over here!”

  Chris ran back to help, and between the two of them they lifted Doc and carried him to the pod. It took the three of us to lift him high enough to topple him in, and I grimaced at the indignity of it. But also, fuck indignity. This could save him.

  The muggy air over the pod seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then the skin began to grow outward from the upper edges of the gleaming carapace, forming the sac. I stood on my toes and watched as fluid began to fill the pod.

  I was either watching Doc drown, or I was watching him heal.

  I turned away, grabbing the hybrid by the hand and drawing him along to the next pod. We wrestled Kai-Ren into that one.

  Then the third.

  “This gonna work?” Andre asked, wincing as we helped him climb in.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I clenched his hand tightly as he lay down. He spasmed in pain. “Hope so.”

  “Yeah,” Andre said faintly. “Me too.”

  “Good luck,” Cam said, squeezing his shoulder.

  “You too,” Andre said.

  “No!” Lucy exclaimed as I picked her up. “No, Brady! I want to stay with you!”

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said.

  She clung to me like a monkey. “You always say that!”

  “Have I lied yet?” I hugged her back. “You stay here with Andre. The pod’s no different than the alcoves. It’s just like being asleep. You’ll be safe here, and me and Cam and Chris will be back soon.”

  “Are you bringing Harry back?”

  “I hope so,” I told her. “That’s the plan.”

  She loosened her grip at that, and slid into the pod with Andre. She wiped her tears as she lay down beside him. They were holding hands as the skin of the sac grew over the pod.

  She’d be safe.

  I had to believe that, or I never would have found the strength to step away from the pod again.

  Lucy would be safe, and Doc and Andre would heal, and we were going to save Harry, and Kai-Ren would take us home again. And I decided in that moment with a kind of fierce, burning zealousness that I was going to believe those things as long as I could, until they either came true or I didn’t have the anger to fight anymore.

  And one thing everyone knew about me—the only thing probably—was that I was never smart enough to stop fighting.

  ****

  “Okay,” Chris said once the pods were all sealed. “If the other Faceless have Harry, then we need to get him back before their ship disconnects from ours.”

  “And also sucks all of us into the vacuum of space,” I said.

  “Optimistic as always,” Cam said wryly, wiping his hands on his pants. We were all covered in blood at this point. Doc’s, Andre’s, mine and the hybrid’s. Cam’s hands left dark streaks down the sides of his pants.

  “The ship’s injured,” I said. “And there’s nobody in control of her. She might not be able to seal the breach.”

  Chris’s gaze flicked to the hybrid for a moment, and he was probably wondering the exact same thing as me. Could the hybrid control the ship? He’d got the pods activated, but could he do everything else as well? Was all Faceless technology unlocked to him? Between his Faceless DNA and our shared connection, did he hold the key to all of their tech now?

  “Well, let’s see what we’ve got then, huh?” Chris asked.

  The hybrid watched Chris warily as held out a hand toward him. Then he inch
ed forward slightly, and laid his pale hand against Chris’s. Chris nodded at him, and smiled, and curled their fingers together. “You understand us, right? Not words, maybe, but us. You understand that we’re your hive.”

  The hybrid has been so lonely and afraid, but there were new spikes of emotion in him now. He was cautious, but he was also curious. Maybe he didn’t belong with us in the same way a newly hatched Faceless would slot right into a hive, but that was humans all over. All sharp edges and ragged feelings rubbing up against one another hard enough to cause sparks, but we made it work most of the time.

  I drew a deep breath as we walked toward the exit of the pod bay, and turned around to look at the pods. Told myself again that we’d be back.

  Cam stuck close as we headed up the spiraling corridor again. The ship listed heavily a few times, sending us off balance, but she was hanging in there. How much longer did we have though, before the other ship disengaged and we were blown out of the black? At the moment the other ship was both an attacker and a protector.

  We hurried to the closest alcove.

  “We need armor,” Chris told the hybrid. “Battle armor. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  The hybrid looked at us all in turn, and I felt a strange buzzing in my skull. It was pitched high, like a question, and maybe it was the hybrid trying to speak to us in turn.

  “Armor,” Chris repeated, and drew the hybrid into the alcove with him. “Here goes nothing, right?”

  Cam and I watched as the cluster of things dropped from the ceiling of the alcove. They were like wet tendrils of seaweed, and they coated Chris and the hybrid in fluid as black as ink, that I knew from experience would harden into Faceless armor.

  Cam put a hand on my shoulder, pulling my attention back to him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, though that was probably a lie. “We’ve got this, right?”

  “I hope so,” Cam said, the corner of his mouth quirking up ruefully. “But just in case we don’t get another chance to talk for a while…”