Darker Space (16 page)

“Or sooner.”

“Probably.” I put a cigarette between my lips, and Cam reached over and plucked it out. “Hey, asshole!”

“I can’t kiss you if you’re smoking.”

“You wanna kiss me?”

He propped himself up on one elbow, then leaned down and pressed his mouth to mine. Just a small, chaste touch at first, and then his tongue slid against the seam of my lips, opening them.

I moaned.

He pulled back. “You taste like cigarettes and whiskey.”

“Yeah.” I grinned up at him. “What’re you gonna do about it, LT?”

He rubbed his thumb along my jaw. “I’m going to wait until you brush your teeth.”

Fucking killjoy, since I was pretty sure I couldn’t move for a while yet.

Cam padded to the bathroom and came back with a mug of water. Then he made me sit up and drink the whole thing.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you drunk before,” he said.

“Yeah.” I finally lit the cigarette, then gestured at the room. A tiny furl of smoke followed the pattern my hand made. “It’s a real party, right?”

He smiled.

I flicked ash into the cup. It was hot enough to hiss as it hit the dregs of the water. “I guess the last time I got drunk was here in this fucking tin can as well. Nothing else to do, you know? I bet the guys are still hiding out in that same old store off engineering, making their own booze.”

“Your friends?”

“I never had friends, LT.” I wasn’t looking for pity, just stating a fact. I’d had guys I got along with okay, and assholes who’d wanted to punch my head in. There hadn’t been anyone I would have called a friend. Cesari, maybe. That mad dickhead Hooper. And Branski, I’d thought, until he’d teamed up with Wade and those other assholes and tried to kill me. Which would have been a total success except for Cam and Kai-Ren. Sometimes it was like I was still lying broken on the floor of that UV chamber, and I could smell my own flesh starting to burn away. I’d been beyond feeling pretty much anything at that point—thank fuck for blood loss and the ensuing shock—but I’d smelled it. “Guys like me don’t make friends.”

Cam looked at me steadily but didn’t contradict me.

“I mostly only had enemies,” I said. I wrinkled my nose. “Speaking of, Wade’s dead.”

“Wade.” He frowned. “The guy who…”

He didn’t finish that thought.

“Yeah,” I said. “He hanged himself. That fucking asshole. Not for hanging himself. That was the best decision he ever made. Would have saved me a lot of fucking grief if he’d done it a few years earlier.” I tried to imagine him hanging, tried to feel fucking happy about it, but I could only picture Mike Marcello instead, his bare feet dragging on the shower floor. “So yeah, that’s the sort of guy I met when I was here the first time, Cam. Not
friends
.”

He sighed.

“I don’t
mind
,” I told him. “I’ve got you and I’ve got Lucy. And this time I’m not gonna give up, not on either of you. This time I’m gonna believe we’re gonna make it home.”

“We are,” Cam said, as though there was no room for even a sliver of doubt in his universe.

Cam’s universe.

Cam’s universe was full of starlight, full of wonder. Cam looked at the black and wasn’t afraid. Whatever was coming, Cam would face it with courage and with dignity, two virtues I sure as shit didn’t have much experience with, but he could teach me. This time, I’d listen. This time I’d believe him.

That was faith, I think.

There was no government school in Kopa. When I was a kid, I went to a church school. They taught us how to press our dirty palms together and close our eyes and say secret words that would make God listen. It was bullshit, then and now, because then it didn’t matter how much I’d believed. And I had. I’d
tried
. I’d felt every muscle in my body tighten as I’d bent over the ache in my hollow belly, my hands clasped tight, sending all my thoughts up to the heaven they promised was listening. Prayer got me nothing then. Not a full belly, not money in my hand, and not a day when my stepmother, Linda, didn’t flog me for some reason or another. One time, I asked the teacher why my prayers weren’t answered, and he’d said it was because I didn’t have faith.

My school had been a tin shed in a red-dirt paddock with a single coolabah tree for shade. We all sat under that tree at lunchtime, bare feet paddling the dust, bellies growling as we looked wide-eyed at the kids who actually had something to eat, waiting for the teacher to call us back inside. I asked the teacher how I could get faith, but he hadn’t been able to tell me. Just said something about accepting Jesus into my heart. Wasn’t my heart I’d been thinking with, though, just my belly. Pretty soon I’d figured out the truth: prayer got me nothing because there wasn’t some loving God out there listening in the black.

The only thing out there was the Faceless.

I raised my blurry gaze to the window and stared outside. All my deepest fears came from there. Every single nightmare I’d ever had.

Cam leaned into me, our shoulders knocking together.

“I don’t understand what Kai-Ren wants,” I said, trying to keep my heart from racing. “I just want to understand.”

“Sometimes we don’t get to understand,” Cam said.

I remembered what Chris Varro had said to me that day in his office:
“An officer asks you a question, and you answer it. He gives you an order, you obey it. It’s not hard.”

“I’m a terrible soldier.” I snorted.

“You really are,” Cam said and put an arm around me. “Lucky nobody who matters gives a damn.”

* * * *

That night I dreamed of Kai-Ren again. I opened my eyes to find myself on his ship, and the familiar spike of panic lanced my guts. I hauled myself to my feet, wiping my slimy hands on my pants. This time, instead of blindly racing toward Cam, I tried to see if I could actually make any sense of my surroundings. The corridor I was in, glowing and pulsing with weird energy, curved sharply enough that I couldn’t see far in either direction. I wondered if this was even a true representation of the ship, or if it was some kind of dream shorthand. Would the corridor lead anywhere, or would it just turn into a futile circle?

Did I have any power in this place?

Once, Kai-Ren had given me Kopa.

I thought of it now, as hard as I could.

“No,” I said aloud, squeezing my eyes shut. “No. I don’t want to be
here
.”

I reached my shaking hand out to touch the wall, and instead my fingers brushed a curtain of dry leaves. I crushed one, and the sweet, unmistakable scent of eucalyptus filled the air.

I opened my eyes.

Kopa.

I was sitting on the bank of the riverbed, where the old rusted triangle hung out over the dry red dirt. In summer, in the wet season, all the kids would come here and swing out into the muddy water. In the dry season there was nothing in the riverbed except snakes and lizards, rustling in the dead leaves.

It was hot. A bead of sweat slid down my spine inside my shirt.

“Hey.”

I looked up as Cam sat down beside me. In the sunlight I could see the faint freckles across his nose. His green eyes were brilliant. I could see entire universes in them.

“Hey,” I said and flicked a green ant off the back of my hand before it stung me.

“Did you do this?” he asked.

“I think so. I don’t really know.” I looked down at my boots and began to unlace them. I wanted to feel the dirt under my feet again. I thought of Marcello as my fingers tugged the laces undone. “We had this before, in the pod, so I thought maybe he’d let us have it again.”

“I like it.”

“Pretty sure it’s clouded by nostalgia, LT,” I said, bumping his shoulder. “You’ve seen the real thing.”

A flash of movement through the trees on the other side of the riverbank, and everything else stilled. Even the shrieking cockatoos fell silent. My heart skipped a beat.

“Lucy? Lucy!”

If she’d been with us on the Faceless ship, then why not here? This was just a construct too.

A tall figure clothed entirely in black stepped through the trees.

Shit shit shit.

Kai-Ren.

Cam put a steadying hand on my forearm. “Just a dream,” he murmured.

A nightmare.

I drew in a deep breath and held it for as long as I could. I tried to remember how I wasn’t going to be scared, how I’d sat in our room on Defender Three just hours ago, before sleep, and stared into the black.

Kai-Ren moved toward us. Red dust rose in puffs under his shiny black boots as he strode across the riverbed. The dust didn’t settle on him, didn’t leave a trace on him, and that, more than anything, told me this wasn’t real.

Cam stood to meet him. “Kai-Ren.”

He didn’t even flinch as a narrow, gloved hand reached out for him, and Kai-Ren’s fingers traced his face. He only gazed into Kai-Ren’s masked features, a strange sort of half smile on his lips.

“Cam-ren.” The mask turned to me. “Bray-dee.”

It should have chilled me to hear my name coming from him, but I was just numb. Maybe that was all bravery was: numbness. Or maybe it was something else entirely.

My breath caught as Cam reached up, slipping his fingers around the back of Kai-Ren’s neck. I heard the faint click of a clasp being unfastened, or a button being pressed, or something, and then Cam was taking off his mask.

Kai-Ren’s face was a nightmare, a death’s head.

He had flesh as white and cold as porcelain that was pulled tightly across a sharp, angular skull with prominent cheekbones and brow. His eyes were lashless, the irises yellow, his nose narrower than a human’s. His lips were thin and bloodless. In the sunlight I could see yellowish veins underneath the pallid skin at his temples.

“Why is the connection back?” Cam asked him. “Why are you back?”

“It called me.” Kai-Ren’s gaze flicked between us, lizard-like. “
You
called me, Cam-Ren.”

Cam’s heartbeat stuttered. “N-no.”

Cam’s denial was hollow. It didn’t matter if it was true, because hadn’t he dreamed of starlight? Hadn’t he felt the pull of it since when he was a kid, watching those model Hawks swinging on fishing line from his bedroom ceiling? And despite everything that had happened to him, didn’t he still ache to go back into the black?

I looked down and blinked my stinging eyes. I stared at the ground. My heart was there, in the warm red dirt I could curl my toes in.

Cam’s never had been.

“Your minds, like static, are heard again.” Kai-Ren hissed gently.

“But why is it back?” Cam frowned. “You said it was broken for good.”

“Your bodies, your chemistry, they are
different
.”

Cam closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his face was set. “They’re scared you’re going to break the treaty, that you’re going to destroy us.”

Kai-Ren hissed. Maybe it was supposed to be a laugh. “If we wanted you destroyed, you would already be dust.”

“I know that,” Cam said. “But they’re afraid.”

Kai-Ren’s flat nostrils twitched. Disgust?

Cam took his hand and held it up, gloved palm facing the sky. “You hold our lives here.” He pressed his thumb into Kai-Ren’s palm and then curled those gloved fingers closed. “You can crush us so very easily. That is why they are afraid.”

“You are afraid too.”

Cam met my eyes for a moment. “I’m afraid of what they will do to us. To me and Brady, and to Lucy.”

“Lu-cee,” Kai-Ren whispered.

He turned his head, the sun glinting in his yellow eyes.

On the other side of the riverbed, on the crest of the hill, I saw her. Her hair was flyaway on the wind, her blue-checked school uniform dress flapping around her skinny knees. She was there but not there, here but not here, obscured somehow by a distance measured in thousands of miles. She was here, but she was also on Earth. So far away.

As I watched, men appeared as though stepping out of a haze to join her. Five men, all dressed in gray fatigues. They were too faint, too ghostly, for me to make out their features. I knew one of them, though. I knew his height, his stance, the width of his shoulders, and the set of his jaw. I’d known them in my dreams before I’d even met him: Chris Varro.

Holy fuck.

It had worked.

Chris Varro was connected too.

* * * *

I came up from sleep gasping. Beside me, Cam did the same.

“Fuck me,” I muttered. “That happened, right?”

“That happened.” Cam’s heart was racing; I felt it in my own heartbeat. We were synchronous again, our hearts no longer beating in counterpoint. It wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. How long until Lucy’s heartbeat joined ours? How long until Chris’s did, and the others? How long until there was no fucking room in my head at all because it would be full of other people’s memories, voices, fears, dreams, and nightmares?

This wasn’t how people were supposed to be. This wasn’t what we’d evolved to handle.

How long until it drove us fucking insane?

Chapter Ten

Sudden, total silence.

It took me a moment to realize what that meant. On a Defender, even in the middle of the night there was always noise of some sort: the low background hum of the air filtering through the vents from the scrubbers.

“Cam!”

Cam looked up from where he was sitting at the table, picking through his rations and reading his tablet. His gaze went straight to the vent in the ceiling.

“They’ve turned our air off!”

“Don’t panic. It’s probably routine maintenance or something.”

“Cam,” I said in a low voice.

He knew how I felt about asphyxiation. I mean, hell, I guess nobody is a fan of it, but not everyone seemed to be as acutely fucking aware as I was that out in the black your very ability to breathe was dependent on some machine not breaking down.

“Brady.” He set the tablet down. “We’ve got air. We’re okay. It’ll take a long time to run out.”

I got up from the bed and paced for a few moments, then worried about how much oxygen that used. I remembered in excruciating detail the testimonials of pilots I’d read: how they could feel the moisture on their tongues
boiling
in the vacuum of space. But this was no catastrophic breach. Defender Three wasn’t venting oxygen into the black, hemorrhaging it out like blood. I tried to remember if we’d passed a fire store on the way here. This was the officers’ quarters. There was bound to be one close by—a locker in the bulkhead that had breathing apparatuses in case of fire or other emergencies. Surely Cam and I would be able to break the door down and get to it, if we really had to.