Darker Space (22 page)

“I’m dead,” I said.

“Bray-dee.”

A shudder ran through me. “I’m not dead. I’m in a Faceless pod.”

“Bray-dee.”

I sat up and unlaced my boots. Pulled them off. Balled my socks up and threw them away. Tugged my shirt off. Then I hugged my knees and let the sun burn my back.

Starlight, Cam tried to tell me once. Sunlight was just starlight. But the sun was the only star that could warm me. It was the only starlight I’d ever chased.

I dragged my fingers through the red dirt and caught a handful of it. I held my palm up and tilted it to let most of the dirt trickle away. Traces of it pooled like blood in the lines of my palm.

Not dead.

But a part of me wondered what the difference was.

* * * *

When Kai-Ren touched the pod, the skin bowed in, and the pressure of the fluid inside increased. I opened my eyes. The fluid didn’t sting. I knew it was him, even though he was wearing the thin black mask that covered his cadaverous face. I knew his face. His porcelain-white skin stretched tight over angular bones. Hollow cheeks. Yellow eyes. A narrow bridge of a nose, slits for nostrils. A face like a death’s head from some ancient illuminated picture where the creatures from hell danced out of the pit. As primal as a nightmare.

I lifted my hand and pressed it against his. The skin of the pod slid between our palms, as slick as mucus, and then it began to dissolve.

I stared up at him as the fluid surrounding me drained away. I coughed once when the air hit my face, spitting out gobs of the milky fluid, and then my lungs burned as I sucked in a lungful of oxygen. Only the first few breaths hurt.

“Bray-dee.” Kai-Ren ran his gloved hand down my slick chest. He splayed his fingers over my heart. “Mmm.”

I felt the slow burn of pleasure thrum through him as my heartbeat thumped against his palm. It sounded as hollow as a drum.

I lifted a shaking hand to wipe the fluid out of my eyes.

Kai-Ren slid his hand up to my throat and closed his fingers around it gently. My carotid artery hammered against his hand. I blinked and saw myself through his eyes. Naked skin gleaming with fluid, dark eyes wide. A pounding heartbeat. Hot blood pulsing under prickling skin. Waves of confused emotion crashing inside that fragile human skull and spreading out through twitching limbs. A million different synapses firing and misfiring. Nerves sparking. So warm and so alive.

So
alien.

A twisting mouth. A rasping voice. Stuttering words laced with fear.

“Are th-they alive?” I asked him.

He tilted his head. “Listen, Bray-dee.”

“Listen.”

“I don’t hear them.”

Kai-Ren made a hissing sound. “You must listen.”

I heard Lucy’s laugh. Heard the clatter of her shoes on the floor of our apartment. Heard the huff of Cam’s breath against my ear as I tugged him into an embrace at night. Heard them arguing about how many pieces of carrot Lucy had to eat before she could have her dessert.

“These are just memories,” I said. “I need to know if they’re alive.”

That same hissing sound. Rebuke, maybe. “They live.”

“Are they safe?”

There was no answer, only a lessening of the pressure on the throat.

“Am I safe?”

Kai-Ren stepped back.

He was my nightmare. I should have been crippled by fear. I had been, last time. I’d collapsed like all my bones were suddenly liquid. I’d sobbed and screamed, curled in on myself like a wounded animal.

Helpless. Hopeless.

Still those things, maybe, maybe always, but this time Cam couldn’t protect me. Couldn’t stand between me and Kai-Ren. This time I had to stand on my own.

I reached up and gripped the edges of the pod. Pulled myself upright. I shivered, even though it wasn’t cold. The Faceless ship was humid, almost dank. I remembered walls that were damp, like living tissue. I remembered floors that would give underfoot, yielding like flesh.

I climbed out of the pod.

The fluid from the pod was already drying on me like a second skin. It flaked away like scales when I moved. I remembered the burst of blood from the jagged tear on my arm and ran my fingers over the skin. There was no wound, not even a scar.

I turned my head and looked at Kai-Ren. The tall black shape of him. Formless. Faceless. I wondered, for the first time, what they called themselves.

He’d saved my life.

If I was an insect to him, and I knew I was, then I was the insect he’d seen drowning. The insect he’d spread his hand under, lifted out of the black water, and set down in the sunlight. The insect he’d watched curiously while it trembled and buzzed awake.

“Bray-dee.”

My heart beat faster as I walked toward him. As I stood before him. As I lifted my hand to touch his Faceless mask.

I’d seen Cam do this a hundred times in dreams. I’d been Cam those hundred times. The feel of his mask, as smooth as latex, as damp as a membrane, was familiar to me.

I touched him.

The dark-eyed alien touched him.

A thrum of electricity ran through us both as the connection sparked and then settled. I could hear the other Faceless then, the ones on this ship, Kai-Ren’s hive. I could hear the hissing sounds they made when they spoke, coalescing slowly into words that I could almost understand. My link was weaker than Cam’s; he’d been the connection that completed our circuit. The link grew weaker as it branched out. Chris and Lucy were farther away from the center. The other Faceless were.

“I want Cam and Lucy,” I told him.

“Lu-cee,” he hissed.

My memories crashed over both of us.

A baby worn in a sling across a boy’s skinny chest, her heart beating against his. A little girl with a grubby face and flyaway hair.

“Tell me a story, Brady.”

“Sing me a song. Brady.”

“Sasi sasi, Brady.”

“Carry me, Brady.”

“Higher!”

My memories, my heartbreak had caught him once. The universe had shrunk under the force of it. He’d sent me back the first time because something about that little girl, about the fierce love I had for her, the shadow of it resonating in the link between us, had caught him.

The Faceless didn’t feel those things like we did, but the echo of it had snared his attention.

The faintest echo, and it had burst like a supernova in his universe.

Kai-Ren had sent me home because he’d caught a glimpse of that light, and it had burned so brightly. It had torn a hole in his armor that no bullet or blade ever could.

Those memories caught him again.

We shared that.

I shifted my trembling hand from his face to his shoulder. This tall, nightmarish thing.

“Bray-dee,” he said.

I closed my eyes as he lifted his hand and ran it over my buzz cut. The gesture was so familiar it could have been Cam touching me. It was, in a way. Kai-Ren had learned it from him, from me, from all the memories that swirled around us like detritus caught in the ebb and flow of a tidal pool.

He touched me.

Slid a thumb along my bottom lip, testing the drag.

Curled his hand around my wrist and pressed the tendons there like they were the frets of a guitar.

Ran his fingers across my abdomen and watched the muscles underneath jerking as I shivered.

Scraped a claw down my spine, just like in all my nightmares. Claws sliding down his spine—
Cam’s
spine. Pulling uselessly at the restraints. My shoulders hurting. Pain flaring down my spine. My bare feet scrabbling on the floor but failing to find purchase. I couldn’t get away. There was nothing to do but take it.

I forced my eyes open.

“No,” I told him, my heart racing. “Not that. I will listen. I am listening.”

“Bray-dee.” The amusement radiated off him.

“No,” I repeated. “Not that.”

He’d hurt Cam. He’d raped him. Just another thing that fell outside the scope of Kai-Ren’s comprehension, as strange and alien and as inconsequential to him as any other human concern had been. And Cam knew it. Cam had forgiven it, because Kai-Ren didn’t
know
, and because it had facilitated the bond between them. Cam had taken that pain, that violation, and sacrificed it for the bigger picture, for understanding. But Cam wasn’t me and I wasn’t Cam. That was something I could never do.

“We already have a link,” I told him. “Not as strong, but I am
listening
. You don’t have to hurt me.”

“Mmm.” Kai-Ren took my hand and pressed it to his chest.

I splayed my fingers. If he had a heart beating somewhere inside his chest, I couldn’t feel it. Maybe the suit stopped me from feeling it. Maybe he had three hearts like a cephalopod, in different places around his body. Maybe he didn’t have one at all, like an earthworm.

Cam had touched him like this.

Cam had touched him without the suit. He’d run his hands over that cold skin, as white and unyielding as porcelain. Afraid, at first, and then curious, and then something else altogether. He’d touched to discover, to explore, and to have Kai-Ren touch him in return.

Cam had been with the Faceless for four years.

He’d done what he’d needed to survive. He’d called Kai-Ren his master and played the pet because it pleased him. Because it had pleased them both, in the end. Cam looked into the black and had been unafraid. He’d seen how small he was, how insignificant, and it hadn’t destroyed him. It had freed him. Cam had never thought the universe was unjust. The universe simply
was
. In the face of the storm, Cam had bent and not broken.

I wasn’t like him. I’d always found some new way to break, while I howled at the unfairness of it all. Like it mattered. Like my anger could make a difference. Like it could even be heard in the center of the storm.

I closed my eyes briefly and tried to shed my fear, my anger. I tried to pretend for a moment that my fear and anger weren’t bone deep. I tried to let them flake off my skin like the flecks of dried fluid from the pod.

“Always fought,” I whispered. “Always kept kicking even when I was down.”

“Bray-dee.” Kai-Ren put his hand over my small-drawn heart.

“Please,” I said, my shaking fingers beating an unheard tattoo against his chest. “Please, I want Cam and Lucy. They’re why I fight. Please.”

Kai-Ren released the word like a low hiss of steam. “Yessss.”

* * * *

I followed Kai-Ren though the corridors of the Faceless ship. It was warm and dark. The walls were opaque and mottled. I could see light behind them, and pulsating fluid. I thought of firing synapses, of bioelectrical activity, and blood and lymph. Arteries and veins and capillaries. I thought of being in the belly of the beast.

My clothes and boots lay in a pile close to what was maybe an air lock. A section of the throbbing wall was pinched as tightly as a pursed mouth.

The last time I’d been on this ship, I’d woken up naked and stayed that way. Now Kai-Ren gestured to my clothes.

My T-shirt was stained with blood. Mine, probably, but mostly Devon’s, I guessed.

“Did you feel it when he died?”

Kai-Ren turned his face toward me. “Silence. I felt silence.”

I thought of a redheaded girl and kisses that tasted of coffee. I thought of a million dreams and hopes, all snuffed out in an instant. The sudden silence gaped like a hollow wound. It hurt. We’d hardly spent any time together, but it had also been a lifetime. It had only taken the echo of all his memories, just the breath of them—and the space they’d carved out inside me ached with emptiness like a cavity in a tooth.

I pulled the shirt on. The blood had dried in hard little patches on the fabric. Tiny flakes of the fluid from the pod fell away from me like dandruff as my shirt pulled over my skin.

I tugged my underwear on, and then my pants. There was a tear in the right leg from the knee down. The fabric flapped around my calf. I jammed the ends into my sock and then pulled my boots on. I laced them tightly.

I thought of Mike Marcello.

His toes dragging back and forth against the tiles as he swung.

Kai-Ren made a curious noise as the memory settled over both of us.

“He was scared,” I said. “He had no hope.”

Lucy had always been my hope and, at my most hopeless, my obligation. If it hadn’t been for her, for my dad, I would have opened my wrists after Wade jumped me. Maybe I would have. I don’t know. I only know I used to look at the guys who did it with something like envy.

“Fuck it,”
Doc had said once, dripping with sweat. Ripping his gloves off and flicking them to the floor, where they landed with a wet splat. “Fuck
it!”

The kid was dead. Doc always took shit like that personally. Got angry about it, called it a waste. Cracked open a bottle of something once the body was tagged and bagged.

“Jesus, Brady. He had his whole life in front of him!”

“Yeah,”
I said, but I figured that maybe the guy who did it just knew exactly what sort of life it was he had coming.

And now? Now I had no fucking idea what was coming, but it didn’t matter. As long as Lucy and Cam were still out there, I could face it.

I could face all my nightmares.

I might not do it like a hero, but I’d do it all the same.

* * * *

I followed Kai-Ren.

All around me the ship pulsed. I stumbled against a wall, and my hand came back damp and warm. Strange lights appeared and vanished in the membranes of the wall. The air grew warmer and more humid in places. At other times, small gusts of cooler air chilled my sweaty skin.

Sometimes the walls parted with a sticky sound and closed again behind us. Doors that healed like knitting flesh when we stepped through them.

And then we were on the bridge, or whatever passed as one on a Faceless ship. There were no panels or screens. There were only alcoves, filled with glowing lights. And for the first time, I saw other Faceless.

They turned toward me. I heard a symphony of those hissing sounds like steam that made up their language. I couldn’t understand their words. My brain snagged on them, caught just on the wrong side of understanding. Not like they were speaking an alien language, but like I was a step out of sync. Like a radio channel full of static. I understood the pattern of speech, could almost hear it,
almost
; I couldn’t tune it in properly.