Darker Space (11 page)

“Fuck you,” I muttered into my kneecaps.

Chris turned his gaze on me. “And given that I’m just about the only person you’ve got on the outside who gives half a fuck about you, Garrett, you might want to keep a lid on the attitude.”

“I’m surprised I rate that highly,” I said.

Chris raised his eyebrows. “Me too.”

“I don’t need your—”

Chris cut me off. “I called Cam’s parents. Told them to collect your sister from school.”

That knocked the remaining fight right out of me. Okay, so Chris might have been an asshole of the highest order, but right now he was my fucking hero, okay? I lifted my chin off my knees. “Thank you.”

He looked a little wary, like he was searching for the sarcasm. “I couldn’t tell them much, just that you’re both being held here for a while.”

“How long is a while?” Cam asked, voice quiet.

“I don’t know. It’s not my decision.”

“Are they going to tell us anything?”

Chris dragged a hand through his dark hair. “I don’t know. Hell, Cam, they’re not telling
me
anything.”

Cam nodded slowly, his jaw tightening. “Okay. So maybe in the meantime you can get us some blankets or something. It’s cold down here.”

“Yeah.” Chris looked almost regretful, and I wondered if he knew more than he was saying.

“Bet you wish you could read his mind, huh, Cam?”

Cam’s mouth quirked in an unwilling smile.
“Yeah, that’d be handy right about now.”

“And some food and water?” Cam asked.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Ask him for my cigarettes.”

“I’m not asking him for your cigarettes, Brady.”

“Asshole.”

Cam’s mouth quirked again.

Some strange part of me had missed this. Our connection. Not the way we had no secrets from each other—that part
hurt
—but the way we had secrets from the rest of the universe. All those jokes and smart-ass one-liners even I wasn’t dumb enough to say aloud. Those became ours.

I’d missed his voice in my head. His thoughts and memories twisting in with mine until I couldn’t pick the threads apart, and it didn’t matter. Until the barriers separating us broke down like enzymes eating through cell walls, and those places at the edges of our consciousness flowed together. I lost a little of myself and that was frightening—terrifying, trying to hold myself together when the walls weren’t there anymore—but look at what I got in return.

I got Cameron Rushton.

My heartbeat.

I watched as Chris left.

The day dragged some more. An MP delivered two blankets and two ration packs. Cam immediately went all officer on my enlisted ass and made sure I didn’t eat everything at once. I measured out the dimensions of our cell in foot lengths and smacked my hands against the glass like I was playing the drums, just for something to do. I quit when my palms started stinging.

“It’s not glass,” Cam murmured, and I remembered he’d told me the same thing once on Defender Three.

I sat down beside him and shivered. Cam slung my blanket around my shoulders.

“I spy,” I said, “with my little eye, something beginning with T.”

Cam’s gaze followed mine to the toilet. “Idiot.”

“Stockade expert, remember?”

He smiled a little at that.

I shifted, tugging my blanket more tightly around my shoulders.

“Cold?”

“A bit.”

Cam opened up the crackers on his ration pack and curled his lip. The crackers were soft and stale. I’m pretty sure the ration packs had been thrown together about the same time as my grandfather was born, but food was food, right?

I helped him out by eating half of his crackers. My belly was full enough that it was making me tired. I was still worried about Lucy, still seeing Marcello lying on the floor of the bathroom, and still angry about this whole fucking bullshit situation, but I’d spent enough time in the stockade to know that anger only ended up with busted knuckles. And I had Cam this time.

“Do you think it’s dark outside yet?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” He stuck a finger in his mouth, wet it, and used it to reach the crumbs in the bottom of his cracker packet.

Watching him suck his finger, suddenly I wasn’t so tired.

“What?” he asked. “Brady?”

I straddled him, tugging his blanket open.

“Um.” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Cameras, remember?”

“Fuck the cameras, LT.”

“You can’t be serious,” he whispered.

I wedged a hand between us, shoving it down to find his cock. “It’s either this or I Spy.”

Cam grabbed my wrist and pulled it back. “Pretty sure those are
not
our only options.”

I sighed and shifted back off him.
“Come on, LT. Some little fucker in intel, and we could have given him a show.”

Cam closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back against the wall. Then he shook his head and smiled.
“Your brain does not work the same as other people’s. You know you’re crazy, right?”

“Stir-crazy.”

Cam opened his eyes.
“Regular crazy.”

It had taken a long time back on Defender Three, when Cam had first been in my head, to get used to him. To realize that I didn’t have to be afraid of having him there. To realize that I didn’t have to be
ashamed
of all the stupid shit I thought. And said. And did.

Whatever.

It was nice to have someone see past all that, I mean. When it stopped being terrifying, anyhow. No walls between us. No spaces. Because sometimes I got so angry that I fooled myself there was nothing in me apart from rage, but Cam knew there was. He’d been able to see it even when I hadn’t. And he’d never laughed at me for being scared.

I reached out and laid my cold palm against his cheek. “I was horrible to you.”

“When were you horrible?”

“How about every time I called you a faggot in my head?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”

“I’m sorry.” My throat ached, and my eyes stung with sudden tears. “I’m really sorry, Cam. And I’m not saying it just because now—
Fuck
.”

“Because now you’re on my side of the insult?” In the gloom his face was serious, but his voice was quiet. Gentle.

“Always was, I guess. Just too fucking stupid to know it.” I leaned toward him and pressed my lips against his. Inhaled his scent and wondered what sort of idiot I’d ever been that I’d tried to deny myself this. Cam was everything I’d ever needed. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” The words slid out of him as softly as a sigh.
“So much, Brady. So much.”

Warmth rushed through me, a tidal surge.

“Yours was the first face I saw, remember?”

How could I forget? The med bay of Defender Three. Cameron Rushton in that Faceless pod, and a bunch of doctors—and me—in orange hazmat suits, ready to cut him out. It hadn’t gone to plan. Well, unless the plan had been to almost kill him. His heart had stopped. And me, sitting on the floor in a puddle of slimy fluid from the pod, my thigh bleeding and nightmares of infection running through my skull, suddenly seized by the batshit-crazy idea that I was his battery.

I’d put my hand on his chest.

His heart had begun to beat again.

“I remember.”

“Your face.”
Cam’s breath was warm against my lips as he kissed me gently again.
“The pale, wide-eyed face of this terrified human kid.”

I closed my eyes.

“I hadn’t seen another human face in four years. It felt like longer. It felt like everything that had come before the Faceless was unreality. Everything until you. I didn’t know how homesick I was until I saw your face.”

I smiled and broke our kiss.

“What?” he murmured.

“You and me, LT,” I whispered back. “We only get shit right when it’s us against the universe.”

Cam leaned back, frowning slightly. “Is that really what you think?”

Wasn’t it the truth? My stomach clenched, and I tried to make a joke of it. “Sure. You turn into a romantic, and I turn into less of a dick.”

He didn’t smile. “I think…I think we get it right most of the time, Brady.”

Except even now he was thinking of the black, of how free and alive he’d felt when he’d been floating in it, and of the ache its absence left inside him.

“We did.” The words sounded hollow. “We do.”

Cam pressed his forehead to mine. “I hope we do.”

I closed my eyes. “Because I don’t know how to do the other stuff.”

He put a hand on the side of my head and stroked my cheek with his thumb. “What other stuff?”

“The stuff that doesn’t matter when we’re in a cage. Like the times we meet up with your old friends and they talk about stuff I don’t understand.” I frowned, trying to make sense of something I’d never even articulated to myself. “Like university and taxes and politics, and shit I don’t know anything about. And they’re nice guys, and I know that, but sometimes I think there’s a bigger gulf between here and Kopa than between here and anything that happened out in the black.”

His breath hitched.

“And I tried real hard to fit, but you and me, we only work when we don’t have all that other shit between us.”

“Bullshit,” he said roughly, the word rumbling in his chest. He pushed my head back to make sure I was looking him in the eye. “That’s total bullshit. You think you’re not good enough for me?”

“Whole fucking world thinks it, Cam.”
My eyes stung.

“I don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks.” He shook his head. “How many times, Brady? How many times have I told you that, and you still don’t believe it?”

“I try to.” My voice rasped. “When you say it, I do, and then…then shit gets in the way again.”

“Because you let it.”

“Yeah.” I hated myself for admitting it. “I guess.”

“I love you,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be us against the universe to make it work, okay? Or us in a cage. It can just be
us
.”

He made it sound so simple, but how could I compete with starlight?

“It can be,” he whispered. “It can be as simple as we want.”

“Me and you in a cage.”

I think my past had ruined me for simple.

I leaned my head on his chest. His arms came around me. I closed my eyes and listened to his heartbeat. For a moment it beat in counterpoint to my own, and then we slipped into sync.

“Am I your heartbeat again?”

“You always have been.”

“I meant literally.”

His fingers counted the knots in my spine. Unease spread through him, and then through me. As gentle but relentless as the tide.
“I don’t know.”

I slid my hand under his shirt.

The muscles in his abdomen tightened. “Cold!”

“Sorry.” I wasn’t. We both knew it.

He relaxed as I shifted my hand higher and held it over his heart. “How does it feel? In your medical opinion.”

“Not a trainee medic anymore, LT.”

“Their loss.”

I snorted out a laugh. “Not really.”

Doc had always said I had a good bedside manner. Maybe I did. Doc had even had this crazy idea that he could make an officer out of me. But pushing a mop around a floor was more in line with my skill set. I dropped out of school when I was twelve. I had no fucking business pretending to be better than I was.

I pushed those thoughts away. I didn’t like how there was something sour in them that felt a little like regret. I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself because the military dropped me from trainee medic to orderly. You start thinking you deserve something, that’s when it gets all fucked up. You expect nothing, and they can’t disappoint you.

And fuck them. Fuck everybody. I had more than I could ever have hoped for. I had Cam, and Lucy was safe. Alive and safe. What the hell was the point in wallowing in self-indulgent misery when Lucy was alive and safe? Who the fuck did I think I was?

“Lucy will be okay with your parents.”

Cam traced a pattern on my back with his fingers. “Yeah.”

I exhaled. “Okay.”

His fingers stilled. “Really okay?”

I had to think about that for a while.

“On balance?”

He rubbed my back. “Sure.”

“I’ve had better days,” I murmured. “I’ve had worse too.”

I wanted to be enough for Lucy, but I wasn’t. It hurt, but what did pride matter, or ego, or any of it, so long as she was somewhere safe? Back on Defender Three when I was certain she’d die before I could get back to her, I would have sold my soul for people like the Rushtons to take her. So why fucking whine about it now?

I’d found Marcello dead. He’d made his choice. And maybe it was even a rational choice. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t just figure things would never get better; maybe he
knew
, and maybe I had no right to think any different or to judge him for it.

I wasn’t cold, and I wasn’t hungry, and Cam’s arms were around me.

I’d had plenty of worse days.

“I’m okay. On balance.”

I closed my eyes.

Opened them again to find myself on the humming Faceless ship.

* * * *

This fucking dream again.

“Brady. Don’t come in here!”

Too late.

I stumbled through the doorway, eyes rolling in my skull, fear squeezing my chest tight.

“Is she here? Is Lucy here?”

Cam turned his face to mine. He was crying. Above him Kai-Ren looked like some shadow from a nightmare. Tall, his suit oily black, his ungloved hand as white and bloodless as a corpse’s as it lay on Cam’s spine.

“Is Lucy here?” I twisted around as I sensed movement behind me and saw a flash of color that didn’t belong in this place: light blue. It was already gone before I realized what it was. Lucy’s checkered school uniform. “No! You need to make this stop! She can’t be here!”

Kai-Ren drew himself up to his full height. He hissed. The noises weren’t words, but my brain translated them.

“Bray-dee.”

“Tell him she can’t be here, Cam!”

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

“Cam!”

“I’m sorry. Brady. I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”