Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  I peeled away from the others, and hurried toward the pod bay. I’d hardly taken a few steps before I realized the others were following. All except for Chris.

  “I’m going back to the bridge,” he called.

  Of course he was. Because that was Chris all over. He needed to be where the action was. He needed to know exactly what was going on with the ship and with the hybrid.

  Cam and Harry and I headed for the pod bay. My heart was in my mouth by the time I reached it because I didn’t trust the universe not to fuck me over in some way. I reached Doc’s pod first because I couldn’t bring myself to look into Lucy’s without any forewarning. I stared down at Doc as he lay suspended in milky fluid. His shirt, pulled open during Cam’s attempts at CPR, floated around him, buoyed by the unseen current that pulsed through the pod. His hairy chest and stomach appeared uninjured, but I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.

  I drew a breath, and pressed my hand to the sac of the pod. Like magic, Doc’s hand rose to meet mine. I could feel the calluses on his palm through the thin skin of the sac. A series of glowing characters appeared across his belly.

  We’d fucked this up so badly once, with Cam. We hadn’t known how to get him out of the pod and we’d made a mess of it and almost killed Cam in the process. But now I knew. I pressed my other hand to the skin of the pod, and Doc lifted his.

  The illuminated characters flickered and disappeared, and then the skin of the pod began to melt away, drawing back to the edges of the carapace. The fluid in the pod drained slowly away until Doc lay in the bottom of the pod.

  He coughed suddenly, spraying me with fluid, and his eyes opened.

  “Okay,” I said as I wiped his spit and whatever the fuck else it was off my face. “You’re okay.” I helped pull him into a sitting position so he could clear his lungs more easily. “Shit, you’re okay.”

  Doc blinked at me dozily for a moment, and then stared down at his unmarked skin. “Jesus. What the hell just happened?”

  “We’re not dead,” I said, “and the hybrid is flying the ship.”

  Doc blinked again. “Well, fuck me.”

  Which pretty much summed it up, I guess.

  ****

  We were a strangely fragile group who assembled that night for our regular scheduled debrief. Harry was quiet and jumpy, trying too hard to pretend he wasn’t freaked out by what had happened. The Stranger hadn’t raped him, but that didn’t mean the violation didn’t count. It counted, and it’d take Harry a while to come to terms with that. Andre and Doc had their own shit to deal with, after they’d both thought they were dead men. Lucy was quiet too, sticking close to me and Cam and shooting curious glances at the hybrid, like she didn’t know if he was terrifying after hearing what he’d done, or wanting to befriend him like he was a stray cat.

  “As far as I can tell, we’re going home,” Chris said.

  The hybrid mouthed the word curiously: Home.

  “We found four Faceless survivors,” Chris continued. “We’ve put them in the pods.”

  “And we’re keeping them there?” Harry asked suddenly, chewing the skin at the side of his thumbnail. “With Kai-Ren?”

  Chris nodded. “Unless we need them for something, yeah.”

  I felt a burn of satisfaction in my gut at that. Because why let Kai-Ren out now, when we could do this without him? Fuck him and fuck the Faceless. We were in charge for once, and we were done with being his puppets or his pets or whatever the fuck he thought we were. We’d saved his life and his ship. We didn’t owe him anything more than that. We didn’t owe him our worship just for being stronger than us.

  Andre shifted on his bunk, the canvas creaking under him. “And we’re not being followed?”

  “No sign of it, no,” Chris said.

  Andre nodded, but his brow was furrowed. “Because what if we just started a Faceless civil war?” he asked. “What does that mean for us?”

  Chris shrugged. “Maybe if they’re busy killing each other, they’ll keep their eyes off us for a while.”

  I studied him closely for a moment, feeling the faintest residual hint of sharp satisfaction rolling off him. And I remembered, suddenly, what Doc had said weeks ago now: “What are the chances those boys from intel aren’t already ten steps ahead of me?” Because somehow everything had come up roses for Chris, hadn’t it? And he couldn’t have planned it—nobody could have—but through the hybrid we’d gained control of a Faceless ship, we’d killed a Faceless in actual hand-to-hand combat, and blown another Faceless ship out of the sky. Chris had come looking for all the secrets of Faceless technology, and he didn’t have them yet, not exactly, but he had the key to them: the hybrid.

  And right then I didn’t give a fuck what Chris was planning, what game he was playing, or how far ahead he was thinking. The people I loved were alive and we were going home. That was all that mattered to me, and that’s all that had ever mattered. In the beginning, it had only been my dad and Lucy that I’d cared about, but that there was Doc, and then Cam, and now there were more people on that short list than someone like me deserved. But I’d take it.

  The debrief wound down a little after that. I was tired and hungry, but not hungry enough to go into an alcove. I wanted to stick close to Lucy just as much as she was sticking close to me, so I shook out my damp blanket and crawled under it. I held up the edge so Lucy got the invitation, and she squirmed in beside me. There wasn’t really enough room for Cam as well, but we made it work. I’d never sleep like this, with Lucy’s knee digging into my stomach and Cam wedged in behind me. Didn’t matter though, because this was perfect.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the others getting ready for bed: Andre and Harry talking in low voices, Doc scratchily clearing his throat, the creak of canvas, Chris saying something to the hybrid and the hybrid answering with a questioning hum.

  We were alive.

  I smiled, and warmth burst in my chest.

  We were alive and going home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day brought us close to what must have been the edge of the nebula. The clouds were wisps now, and starlight blinked behind them. I never thought I’d be looking forward to being in the black again. I stretched as I peered out the window, and then dug through my footlocker for clothes that weren’t totally gross. Everything was pretty much covered in the residual slime that covered the Faceless ship, but I wanted something that wasn’t stained with blood, either Doc and Andre’s, or the gross yellow stuff from the Stranger which was smeared like ochre across my pants.

  I wasn’t awake late, but Chris had already been up for hours—of course—and had drawn up a list of duties for every single one of us in one of his notebooks.

  “This is why you broke up with him, right?” I asked Cam as Chris outlined our new roster to us. “He’s fucking insufferable.”

  “Want me to write you up for insubordination, Crewman Garrett?” Chris asked. His brows were arched in a challenge, but there was a smile fighting to be known in the twitch of his mouth.

  “Want me to tell you to go fuck yourself?”

  “Swear jar!” Lucy said, but didn’t bother cup her hands. She knew we’d run out of shit to give her.

  Cam rolled his eyes at the pair of us.

  Despite Chris’s need to impose order on our comfortable chaos, he actually had some good ideas. We’d do rounds now, walking through every part of the Faceless ship we could and reporting any damage—or whatever we thought looked like damage—to Chris. Rounds also included checking out all the windows to make sure we weren’t being followed. I had no idea how useful our human eyesight would be out here, but it was slightly better than the Faceless taking us totally by surprise.

  Doc and I were also in charge of monitoring the pods by virtue of our medical training, even though nothing in that remotely qualified us to know if Kai-Ren and his surviving Faceless were actually doing okay in there or not. Nobody else was given any extra duties, but what was there to do e
xcept to monitor our situation and hope it didn’t suddenly go sideways? Same as fucking always.

  It was weird though. Our new routine—constantly walking the ship and reporting to Chris down on the bridge—gave us more purpose than we’d had in months. We weren’t just passengers anymore. And it kept us busy enough that our breaks felt well earned. Didn’t stop me from bitching about it though.

  “If I have to walk up this corridor one more fucking time,” I groaned, and threw myself down on the cot in Doc’s medbay.

  “There’s nothing for it, son,” Doc said mildly, looking up from whatever book he was reading. “We’ll have to mutiny.”

  “Fuck off,” I told him with a grin. “Don’t even joke about that. You know I would.”

  Doc grinned right back at me, and set his book aside so we could go and inspect the pods for the third time that day.

  That little wind-up clock was ruling our lives more than ever, but I didn’t really mind. Time might have been arbitrary out here where it got mixed up with speed and distance and turned into some mind-bending bullshit I could never understand, but each little tick of that little clock brought us closer to home.

  We weren’t the only ones inspecting the pods. Chris was leaning over one, one hand pressed to the skin of the sac to make the glowing characters light up, and holding himself twisted up like a pretzel with his notebook against his raised knee while he tried to copy the figures down. The hybrid was watching him curiously.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be driving this thing?” I asked him as Doc and I approached.

  Chris straightened up, catching his notebook before he dropped it. He tucked it into a pocket on the thigh of his pants. “She’s alive, and she knows where she’s going. Thomas doesn’t need to do anything except check in every now and then.”

  “Thomas?” I asked, and the hybrid looked over to me at the sound of his name. “You gave that to him?”

  “He wanted a name,” Chris said. “We all have names.”

  I searched through my catalogue of Chris’s memories, but I’d never heard him think of a Thomas. No family, no friend, no ex. “I thought you’d go for something more obvious like Adam. First of a new species and all that.”

  Chris shrugged. “It is kind of obvious. It means ‘twin’.”

  The jolt that went through me was a little unsettling. It was weird enough looking at the hybrid and seeing a face that was a strange amalgam of mine and a Faceless’s, and I’d been trying to think of him as an individual since he’d helped us get Harry back. The reminder that he shared half my DNA wasn’t a welcome one. But it also wasn’t his fault.

  “Thomas,” I said, and the hybrid looked at me again. “You like that name?”

  “Thomas,” he said back to me, stumbling clumsily over the word. A spoken word, not one reliant on any Faceless connection. A real word that any other human would have been able to hear.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “You can speak?”

  Thomas hissed proudly, and then blinked at Doc as Doc bustled toward him for a quick inspection of his mouth and tongue. If he’d seen how dangerous Thomas was, he might have been a little less eager to put his fingers in his mouth, but Thomas underwent his examination placidly enough.

  I crossed over to the pod, and stared down at Kai-Ren. “You want to draw the characters?” I asked Chris. “I’ll keep my hand here while you do.”

  “Thanks,” Chris said, and fished his notebook out of his pocket again.

  I pressed my hand down on the sac gently, and Kai-Ren’s gloved hand lifted to meet mine. Moments later, the inside of the pod lit up with the glowing characters it projected across his oily black battle armor. I wondered if it said anything different than it did when we were in there. That’s what Chris was wondering too, probably, and why he was here doing this. This was just the start, I was sure, of his fevered attempt to record absolutely everything he could while we were still onboard.

  I looked away from Kai-Ren, and watched Chris work instead. “You really think any of this will be useful once we get home?”

  “I don’t know.” Chris chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, and glanced over at Thomas. His expression clouded. “I have no idea what’s going to happen when we get home.”

  ****

  On the third day after the battle we left the nebula completely behind. The clouds slipped away slowly, and then we were surrounded by starlight again. The temperature inside the ship dropped enough that I dug through my footlocker for another shirt to pull on and then I sat on my cot, wishing I had a cigarette, and watched the stars slide by in our slipstream. It was the middle of the day according to Doc’s wind-up clock, and I was alone in the room. Thomas was driving this thing and Chris was probably hovering over his shoulder while he did it. Harry and Andre were doing another inventory of our remaining supplies, or lack thereof—fuck knows why—and last I’d seen Lucy was helping them out by ticking things off on a checklist of her own devising. She’d probably run the military one day with the head start she was getting now in pointless fucking bureaucracy. And Doc was sneaking a nap in the medbay.

  It was alone as things got on the ship, so when I looked over and saw Cam leaning in the doorway for a second I was torn between admiring the definition of his biceps while he stood there in a gray singlet with his arms crossed, and beckoning him closer. I went with the second option, always greedy to touch him.

  He sat down on the cot beside me.

  “Nah,” I said, and lay down. “Come here.”

  I shifted my legs apart so he could lie in the cradle of my thighs and then lifted my face for a kiss.

  “Brady,” he said, huffing out a warm breath of surprise. “It’s the middle of the day.”

  “Dark as fucking midnight outside.”

  “Smartass.” He pinched me on the hip for that. “But anyone could walk in.”

  “Probably won’t though.”

  “You can’t know that.” But he dipped his head down and kissed me again, his tongue sliding against mine briefly.

  I arched against him, making sure he could feel my hardening dick. “When was the last time we fucked in a bed?”

  “Made love,” he corrected me.

  “Whatever.” I got a hand between us, tugging the button on his pants free. “When was the last time?”

  “Defender Three.” He bucked against me as I got a hand in his pants and went straight for his dick. “Last time we were there.”

  Had we? I could remember fucking up against the bathroom mirror pretty clearly. Yeah, we’d probably done it in a bed there as well, just like we had the first time the brass had stuck us in a room together.

  “Come on,” I urged him. “I wanna do it in a bed again.”

  Cam stilled for a moment, and held my gaze like he was searching for something. “You mean you want to do it now, while Kai-Ren’s still in a pod.”

  Could never hide a fucking thing from him, the asshole. The dumb thing was I hadn’t even known that was the reason until he’d said it.

  “Yeah.” I exhaled heavily. “I want to do it without having to look over my shoulder and see him standing there.”

  Or touching.

  Which…sometimes it felt good. Strange or powerful or something in ways I didn’t want to think about too deeply. But sometimes I just wanted it to be me and Cam, and with the surviving Faceless in the pods the connection was the weakest it had been in months. Apart from Cam’s freaky prescience, of course, but I think that was all him. Or I was as easy to read as book. The sort with pictures that popped up.

  Cam leaned down and kissed me again.

  It took us a little while to find our heat again—making love was a little slower than fucking, it turned out—but it wasn’t long before we were both trying not to elbow each other in the face or kick each other in the balls as we shucked our shirts and pants off. And then we were skin on skin, soft kisses and heated breath, and our bodies moving together in ways that were both familiar and new, every time.

&n
bsp; “Want you to top,” I whispered to him. “But face to face.”

  “Yeah,” he breathed back to me. “I want that too.”

  Cam lifted off me briefly, stretching to reach the wall and coat his hand in the viscous goo that the ship produced. Which, yeah, gross, but we’d both learned pretty early on to push it to the backs of our minds. Everything here was so fucking gross really. First thing I had planned for when I got home was a shower hot enough to take off at least three layers of skin.

  I pulled my legs up and spread my knees, and Cam knelt on the cot. His dick was hard and shining with the fluid, and I wanted it in me.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Can you…”

  He took me by the hands and we sort of shifted around until he got me where he wanted me—straddling his thighs, my arms around his neck. And then he held me open as I lowered myself onto his dick. It stung at first, the angle tight and weird, but then Cam shifted and everything fell into place. We slid into a slow rhythm, gentle as the rocking of the waves, and Cam lifted his face so that we could kiss at the same time.

  “I love you,” I said, because I never got tired of saying it and hearing him say it back to me.

  “Love you,” he echoed, his fingers tightening on my hips. “I love you so much.”

  I sucked in a breath as our pace picked up, and we went from moving slowly to both pushing for the finish line. I closed my eyes and dropped my head back, chasing all the pleasure Cam could give me. I shivered when he licked a line up my exposed throat, and my balls tightened. My dick was hard and throbbing between us, and it didn’t take much at all to push me over the edge.

  It never did.

  I came, jerking and shuddering in Cam’s grasp, and pulling him over the edge with me.

  We came down by degrees, with slow kisses and whispered words, hearts beating together.

  And then, just to piss on our afterglow, Doc said from the door, “Could you at least pin up a blanket? You two aren’t the only ones who have to live here, you know? Jesus Christ!”