by Lisa Henry
The rest was anticlimactic. Doc shook Leonski’s hand, clapped him on the back like they were old friends—they were, I guess—and told everyone in the room exactly how many people he’d be willing to kill for a shower, a clean uniform, cigarettes and food. A little while after that we were in the officer’s rec lounge, clean and pink and dry, sitting around a large table and watching Thomas poking curiously at a bowl of oatmeal. Because as much as we all wanted to rip into steaks, Doc had decided that after months on a liquid diet we needed to pace ourselves. The oatmeal was good, so I didn’t even complain much, especially when I got a soda for the first time in months, and the bubbles and the sugar rush almost made me come right then and there.
“So,” Doc said, lowering his voice so that the marines by the door couldn’t hear us. “Chosen ambassador of the battle regent Kai-Ren, huh?”
“Yeah.” Chris glanced at Cam, and his mouth quirked. “Turns out there really isn’t a good way to explain the unexplainable to the military. So you fudge the translations a little.”
Fudge the translations? Kai-Ren had literally torn Thomas’s fellow hatchlings apart. Cam had fudged the translations when he’d described Kai-Ren as a battle regent. Chris had blatantly fucking lied. And fucking good on him for doing it as well. There wasn’t a lot of space to maneuver between the Faceless and the military, but Chris had found it and exploited it.
“Hey, don’t blame me,” Chris said in response to my snort. “Cam started it with all his battle regent bullshit.”
Cam raised his brows. “Pardon me for trying to save the human race.”
Chris nodded. “I get it now. I didn’t then, but I get it now.”
He glanced at Thomas, and Thomas made a humming sound as he spooned some oatmeal into his mouth.
“Good?” Chris asked, the skin around his eyes crinkling when he smiled.
“Good,” Thomas echoed around his oatmeal, his throat working furiously as he figured out how to swallow something with more substance than Faceless goo.
Lucy leaned into my side, and I put an arm around her shoulders. All of the clothes that had been made for her before we’d started our journey with the Faceless were still onboard the ship, so she was wearing a clean T-shirt as a dress, and kept hitching up the smallest pair of boxer briefs the Q-store carried. The military didn’t really cater for eight-year-old girls. Her hair hung in wet little twists down her back, darkening the gray fabric of the T-shirt. Now that her belly was full for the first time in months, she was blinking slowly and clearly fighting sleep. I knew how she felt. I wanted nothing more than to be given a decent fucking bed in the officers’ quarters—the benefits of Cam’s rank rather than mine—and to curl up under the blankets and sleep for hours with Cam on one side of me and Lucy on the other. My feet weren’t in the red dirt yet, but I could go there in my dreams.
Except we couldn’t sleep just yet.
There were still things we had to do.
We finished our food, and Doc went and enquired about quarters. He offered to stay with Thomas and Lucy in whatever accommodations could be found for them while the rest of us went and cleared out our belongings from the Faceless ship. He just didn’t want to lift those boxes of books himself, probably. But I squeezed his shoulder in thanks as I passed him.
It was weird, walking in boots again after so long. Weird wearing clothes that weren’t damp. The air on Defender Three felt too dry and too sharp, and I wasn’t the only one who cleared his scratchy throat and coughed as we made our way back to the Faceless ship with our marine escort following.
It was weird leaving the straight gray walls of the Defender, the rusted rivets and the seams of metal, and stepping into the Faceless ship again where everything was darker and damper and stranger. Where everything, however much we’d gotten used to it over the past months, suddenly felt starkly alien all over again.
I’d been right when I’d told Cam I wasn’t made for this. I dragged my fingers along a glowing wall and watched as it bowed under the slight pressure. A little more and I knew it would open up and let me slip inside like it had before. And it turned out that maybe I didn’t just need solid ground underneath my feet. Turned out I needed fucking walls to be walls as well.
The ship no longer scared me, but I didn’t belong here. None of us did.
Andre and Harry headed for our room to get a start on unloading our gear, and Chris and Cam and I made our way down the spiral toward the pod bay.
The pods gleamed, and I remembered the first time I’d seen one. Like a rhinoceros beetle laying on its back, I’d thought then, with its legs hugging the sac. The strangeness of it, and the fear, had faded while I’d been onboard, but something about my clean uniform and my dry skin and the fact that the smooth grey metal walls of Defender Three were right outside was reigniting that old fear all over again. Everything here was so alien. How had I forgotten that, even for a minute?
“You ready?” Chris asked, but he didn’t move any closer to the pods.
Cam nodded, and stepped forward.
“I’ll do it,” I said, my heart thumping. The way Cam brought himself up so quickly told me that I’d made the right choice.
I approached the first pod, and lifted myself up onto my toes to stare down past the skin of the sac and into the milky fluid. Kai-Ren floated there, the gash in his mask exposing the white skin of his skull-like face and his closed eyes.
I raised my hand and placed it on the sac. Kai-Ren’s gloved hand came up and rested on mine. The skin of the sac slid between our hands. I drew a deep breath, and put my other hand on the sac. And Kai-Ren touched it, completing the circuit, and the skin of the sac began to dissolve as the fluid inside drained away.
Kai-Ren sucked in a wet breath, and opened his yellow eyes. His gaze held mine. “Bray-dee. Little one.”
There was a strange buzzing in my ears like tinnitus. The connection was faltering, I realized. It was skipping channels like a busted old radio looking for a good signal. Kai-Ren wasn’t strong anymore. With his hive mostly destroyed and with the four other survivors still in stasis, the connection was the weakest it had ever been.
Didn’t mean he couldn’t snap our necks without breaking a sweat though.
I stepped back from the pod as he climbed out of it. I’d almost forgotten how tall he was, how terrifying. And now, with his mask hanging like torn skin from his death’s head face, he looked like the creature from every nightmare I’d ever had again.
My breath caught in my throat, and Cam put his hand on my lower back.
Kai-Ren stared narrowly between us.
“We are at Defender Three,” Chris said. “There is only you and four other survivors left from your hive. We saved your ship. We have repaid your hospitality, and you’re going to leave now, and never come back.”
I’d liked Chris’s audacity when he used it with Leonski. Here, it terrified me.
Chris lifted his chin. “You’re going to honor the treaty, and swear that the other hives will too.”
I couldn’t have been the only one wondering how much control Kai-Ren had over the other hives right now. Then again, we’d technically won the battle with the Stranger, right? Maybe that would give him time enough to build up his hive again. And maybe I didn’t give a fuck, as long as he was gone.
Kai-Ren narrowed his eyes at Chris. “You make demands of me? You are nothing.”
Chris didn’t even flinch. He might have even smiled. “If we were nothing, you would be dead.”
Kai-Ren snarled. “How are you alive?”
This time there was no mistaking Chris’s smile. “We destroyed the other Faceless ship.”
Kai-Ren hissed at that, because of course he knew how we’d done it. There was only one possibility. He curled his thin lips back, sharp teeth gleaming.
“I am keeping the hybrid,” Chris said, refusing to give an inch. “You said that I could, and I am holding you to your word. There is nothing for you here.”
What had humanity been to Kai-Ren but
a curiosity at first, and then a contagion? We’d polluted his hatchlings and caused the other Faceless to turn on him. We were as dangerous to him, in our own way, as he was to us. The question was, would he accept that or would he want revenge?
Kai-Ren would always be unknowable, even as we balanced on the knife’s edge.
Kai-Ren tilted his head and looked at Cam. “Does this one speak for you, Cam-ren, my pet?”
“Yes.” Cam lifted his chin. “We are home. It’s over.”
Kai-Ren hissed again, a displeased noise. He’d enjoyed all those little emotions that we shed like pollen when he shook us, hadn’t he? He’d liked the unpredictability of them, and the way they seesawed wildly. He’d liked the taste of them. He didn’t like when we were as cold as the Faceless. Where was the novelty in that?
Because all we’d ever been, however much we’d thought it was something deeper, was a novelty.
“Cam-Ren?” Then he turned his gaze to me. “Bray-dee?”
I took another step back.
Kai-Ren looked back at Cam, like a predator watching his favorite prey.
“What do you want me to say?” Cam asked, his forehead creasing. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Kai-Ren narrowed his eyes.
“Listen,” Cam said, and how was his voice not shaking? “Just listen, please. You hurt me. You raped me. And I know that you will never understand what that even means, but you took something from me that you had no right to take, and the fact that you can never understand that is exactly why I won’t go with you.”
Kai-Ren stared at him and said nothing.
“The treaty remains in place,” Chris said. “Goodbye, Kai-Ren.”
I backed away, tugging at Cam’s hand. Cam stood there a moment longer, looking at Kai-Ren. Looking, and waiting for something he wanted, something he needed that would never come.
Cam had been with Kai-Ren for four years before we met, and he’d survived those four years by telling himself that Kai-Ren wasn’t a nightmare, he was just different. An alien, not a monster. He’d survived by staring into Kai-Ren’s Faceless mask and believing it was more than his own reflection staring back.
If there was a moment for Kai-Ren to prove himself something more than he was, something even remotely capable of understanding, of feeling, then this was it.
The silence stretched out under his cold yellow stare.
And then Cam let me pull him away, and we left the pod bay.
An hour later the Faceless ship detached itself from Defender Three in a blast of vented oxygen, and slid slowly back into the black.
****
From our room in the officers’ quarters, I watched the guys in atmo suits crawl like slow-moving ants over the Outer Ring as they repaired the breach the Faceless ship had caused. I watched the Faceless ship too, stars blinking into existence around the vanishing dark space it made as it receded into the distance.
Lucy was crashed out in the bed, blankets pulled up to her chin and her hair spread out in tangles along the pillow. She was breathing deeply, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. Did she dream of the red dirt of the gulf like I did, or hadn’t she lived there long enough to have it sink into her bloodstream like it had into mine? Maybe her dreams weren’t those of a reffo kid. Maybe they were different than mine. Maybe instead of looking into the past, her dreams reached for the future. I hoped they did.
Cam sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, a half-drunk can of soda on the floor beside him. I crossed the floor and sat down beside him. Stole a swig of his soda and asked, “You okay?”
Cam blinked. “I don’t know. I thought…”
“You thought he’d give you something?”
Cam’s mouth twitched. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess wanting him to be more… more human was wishful thinking. Just another way to kid myself that he wasn’t entirely cold-blooded.” He knocked his shoulder against mine. “I should have listened to you from the start.”
“To be fair, that’s pretty bad advice for most things.”
He smiled faintly, and reached out and curled his fingers through mine. “I want to go home, Brady.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to sleep in our bed.” He squeezed my hand. “I want to wear something apart from a uniform the whole time. I want to eat the food from our refrigerator.”
“That’s gonna be pretty fucking revolting by now.”
That won a laugh from him. “You know what I mean.”
I leaned against him. “Yeah.”
We were silent for a long while, listening to the faint thrum of the station and the whisper of cool air through the ducts in the ceiling. I ran the fingertips of my free hand over the dry metal floor, and luxuriated for a moment in the sensation of not being damp for the first time in months.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Cam said. “Maybe I just wanted some closure.”
Kai-Ren was going to haunt him for a long time, probably. And I figured we could deal with that, as long as it meant he was really a ghost.
I lifted Cam’s hand onto my thigh, and opened it like carefully spreading the petals of a flower. The lines on his palm was as familiar to me as the lines on my own. The life line, the heart line. There were others too, probably. Not that I believed that stuff. Just goes to show that sometimes people stared up at the stars to try and predict the future, and sometimes they stared at their own hands right in front of their faces. It was all bullshit, but I guess we were a species that believed a lot of bullshit because deep down we were all scared of the things we couldn’t see coming.
I lifted Cam’s hand, my fingers closing around his wrist, and kissed his palm. His skin tasted a little like salt. It was nice. I kissed his fingertips too, one by one, and he watched me with a soft expression.
“Come on,” I said, and dropped his hand for a moment while I climbed to my feet. Then I reached down for him, and helped him up. I held his hand tightly as I drew him back over toward the window.
I stood behind him, and slipped my arms around his waist. His hands found mine. I rested my chin on his shoulder, and we both gazed out into the black. Into the field of stars that grew larger and larger as the Faceless ship receded into them.
Back when I’d been a recruit on Defender Three I’d hated to look into the stars. I’d hated the reminder of how small and vulnerable the station was, and how the only thing between me and asphyxiation was a thin metal wall. And knowing what was out there should have scared me even more. Should have reduced me to a gibbering mess on the floor. Facing my fears hadn’t destroyed them. It had brought them into sharp relief instead, and I would probably never shed them. But I’d learned that I wasn’t useless. I’d learned that I was stronger than I thought, I guess, and that even if I wasn’t a hero I was a survivor. And that was something worth knowing.
I leaned into Cam and together we stood there in silence and watched the Faceless ship vanish into nothing.
Chapter Sixteen
Five months later
I straightened my tunic for the hundredth time and stared down at my scuffed boots. Should probably have remembered to polish them, I guess. Still, too late now. I side-eyed the other seven crewman lined up outside the classroom, trying to pick which one of us was the obvious fucking washout. Me, probably. These guys were lugging textbooks and folders. I wasn’t even sure the single pen in my pocket even worked anymore. The classroom was in a demountable building at the back of the base hospital. The other guys clustered in the narrow band of shade that ran along the side of the building. Not me. I stood in the sun, soaking up the heat. Beads of sweat formed on the nape of my neck and slid down the back of my shirt. I could feel my skin starting to burn.
At five minutes to the hour the door to the classroom was opened. I was the last one to file in. I took a seat at the front, stretched out my legs, and pulled out my pen to chew on the end. I peered at the whiteboard, and at the words scrawled there in very familiar handwriting.
Paramedic Care - Trai
ning Module 1.
The grumpy bastard in charge leaned on his desk and glared at us. “My name is Major Layton,” he said. “If you’re good enough, you can call me Doc.”
I raised my hand.
Doc’s eyebrows tugged together. “You can call me Doc, Garrett.”
I grinned and lowered my hand again, and basked in the narrow glares the other students sent my way. I was gonna milk this nepotism thing as far as I could. Though it wasn’t just nepotism. I had been a good medic, and both Doc and I knew it. And for guys like me, guys without university degrees, becoming a paramedic was the first step to becoming a medical officer. It meant signing on for another five years once my first ten was up, but then I could walk out with actual qualifications. And an officer’s pension. It was the smart thing to do. And, unlike every other poor bastard in this classroom, I’d never have to serve on another Defender to do it. The military had agreed to keep me on the ground, and I had agreed not to fuck shit up and get thrown in the stockade anymore. It was a pretty sweet deal.
It helped, of course, that the Faceless Ambassador had made it clear that he wanted me nearby. The military still thought Thomas had the power to call Kai-Ren and the Faceless down to raze our remaining cities, and none of us were saying any different. Chris had burned quite a few notebooks before he’d turned the rest over to the war room. I wasn’t sure if that made the bunch of us conspirators, or collaborators, or some other big, fancy word that would one day get thrown at us in a tribunal, but fuck it, I liked it.
Doc took a look at my empty desk, narrowed his eyes at me, and then tossed a textbook in my direction. I caught it against my chest.
“Bring your own tomorrow, Garrett,” he said. “I presume you were issued with one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, Doc.”
I cracked the textbook open at the table of contents, running my fingers along the crisp edges of the pages and wondering whatever happened to General Physiology. Sometimes those months spent on the Faceless ship felt like the strangest dream, and sometimes all it took was seeing a diagram of the chambers of the heart and I was sitting on the cot in Doc’s makeshift medbay again, poring over General Physiology and bitching about having no cigarettes.
