Darker Space (23 page)

“Bray-dee,” Kai-Ren said. “Come.”

His touch should have terrified me. It had, in every nightmare I’d ever had. The reality was different. There was nothing in the big black, not even Kai-Ren, that could terrify me more than the thought of Lucy and Cam being lost to me forever.

“How long has it been?” I asked him. “How long was I in the pod?”

He made a clicking noise.

“Do you have minutes, or hours?” I asked him, when what I really needed to know was did
they?
Did Lucy and Cam still have time?

“They live,” Kai-Ren said.

“How far are we from the station? Are we close?”

Kai-Ren ran his gloved hand over my head. “Soon, Bray-dee.”

Maybe they measured time and distance differently than we did. Maybe they saw no need to measure it at all, or there was just no way Kai-Ren could explain it that would translate into my understanding. Words aren’t always enough. Sometimes you can share all the words in the world, but they still won’t equate to understanding.

Minutes.

Hours.

Distance.

What the hell did those things mean to the Faceless?

Rape.

What the hell did that mean?

I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, Kai-Ren still had his masked face turned toward me. I took a deep breath. “What do you call yourselves?”

The sound he made was sibilant, an exhalation as brief as a sigh. It was layered, nuanced. I don’t think I could have repeated it even if I’d tried. I wondered if I was the first human being to have ever heard it, or if Cam had asked the question before.

I thought of Chris then, and how he wanted to communicate with the Faceless. I wondered if it was possible, when we were like two tribes meeting, reduced to mimicry and mime and marking little symbols in the dirt.

Our connection hardly scratched the surface.

We were alien.

We would always be alien.

I looked around the bridge. Here I was surrounded by Faceless technology, a wet dream for someone like Chris Varro, and it was pointless. There was no frame of reference I could use to begin to describe what I was seeing to others, let alone to understand it. I suddenly knew why Cam had only smiled and shaken his head when he’d been asked about Faceless technology and weapons. I suddenly knew why he’d lied and said he’d seen nothing. Because it was easier than explaining the truth: that he saw everything, but it had no meaning. Like a monkey with a computer chip in one hand and a pebble in the other, expected to explain the difference when they were both just
things.

“Bray-dee, come.”

Kai-Ren led me over to one of the alcoves. He stood behind me. He lifted my hand and pressed it against a membrane-like surface that shone wetly between the bones of the wall.

A rush of images hit me, too hard and fast for my brain to sort them.

I saw the ship. I saw the insides of it, all the places, and the black hull that seemed to suck the light out of the field of stars behind it. I saw a thousand things that had no meaning. Kai-Ren might have been showing me all his weaknesses, his secret beating heart, but I had no way of knowing.

The images flashed past as Kai-Ren kept my hand pressed in place. He took his other hand and slid it under my shirt, splaying his fingers across my stomach. Another gesture borrowed from Cam, maybe. Mimicry. But then all communication started with mimicry, didn’t it? It started the first time a baby smiled back.

Lucy
, I thought, and Kai-Ren sent it back as an echo:
“Lu-cee.”

I needed her. Her and Cam.

I needed it to just be us again, safe and close, spinning slowly on a squealing playground merry-go-round while the stars wheeled above us.

Home.

I needed us to go home.

“Yesss,” Kai-Ren murmured in my ear, like a whisper of agreement. “
Home
.”

I shivered as he shifted his hand higher, his touch so light, so familiar, so like Cam’s. I leaned back into him.

“Bray-dee, do you see?”

The strange images on the membrane changed, twisted, spun. I fought off a wave of dizziness and found myself looking outward.

I saw Defender Three.

Saw it hanging in the black, as tiny as a spinning top, some unfathomable monument to futility. Back home, whole industries existed that shook and rattled the ground, that belched smoke into the sky and poison into the water, to build the Defenders. Men’s backs bowed and broke in the factories and the smelters of the refugee townships. They grew old before they were thirty, died before they were forty, and their hollow-bellied children watched as life wore them down to wrinkles and bones. And the Defenders they died to build were so very, very small out in the black.

I couldn’t see the damage from out here. Couldn’t see where the Hawk had ripped a hole in Defender Three’s side and torn it apart. I wondered if Cam and Lucy and the others were still sheltering inside that fractured, broken part, counting down the minutes of oxygen they had left.

I wondered if Commander Leonski had retaken the station yet, or if he and the other higher-ups were swinging from some improvised yardarm. I hoped Doc was okay. Hoped his rank hadn’t made him a target.

From out in the still waters of the big black, I couldn’t even see the scar on Defender Three. Couldn’t see the chaos under the surface, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still happening.

“Are we going back?” I asked. “Are we going to save them?”

“Yesss.” Kai-Ren pulled my hand away from the membrane at last. “We will save them. We will save them all.”

* * * *

This room was brighter than the others. Yellowish light made my skin look sickly as I peeled off my clothes. Kai-Ren took my hand and ran his thumb over the bluish veins in the underside of my wrist. Pressed my pulse to feel it push back. Hissed out a laugh when my breath caught and my skin prickled. The fine hairs on my arm stood up.

“Bray-dee.”

I closed my eyes and imagined the touch was Cam’s.

Kai-Ren made a pleased sound, and I opened my eyes.

“You no longer fear me.”

“I fear everything,” I told him, shucking off my underwear.

“Mmm.”

He led me to the edge of a room, to a tangle of sticky, pulsing things that hung like the roots of a Moreton Bay fig from the ceiling, tendrils wavering in a nonexistent breeze. I’d never seen anything like it before, while at the same time I knew exactly what it was.

I squeezed my eyes shut as Kai-Ren pushed me toward the middle of the things.

And this time I was afraid. The pulsing tendrils embraced me and coated my skin with something as thick and dark as sap. It dried as thin and smooth as latex. It dried black. When it covered my face, clinging to the shape of my cheekbones, my nose, my lips, I thought I would suffocate.

God.

I sucked a breath in without any idea of how it was even possible.

The sap seeped into my ears, and Kai-Ren made that sound that was almost a laugh when I shook my head like a wet dog.

It learned the shape of me. Spread over my naked skin like a creeping warmth.

When Kai-Ren pulled me free, the yellowish light no longer washed my vision. The mask didn’t blind me. I saw the room in sharper tones. I saw things my own eyes couldn’t. I saw the stark shadow of Kai-Ren’s face through his mask. I saw the flash of his eyes.

I raised my gloved hands and touched my own mask.

My heartbeat raced.

Guess the universe had a sense of humor after all.

I was Faceless.

Chapter Fourteen

We came out of the black like a beast from the deep, a behemoth, a nightmare.

Kai-Ren put his hand on my shoulder to steady me as we made contact with the Outer Ring of Defender Three. There was no long scrape of metal against metal. No shuddering as the docking clamps engaged. Just a jolt, the force of it barely noticeable because our ship made contact and then
yielded
and absorbed the impact. It sealed itself to the curve of the Outer Ring.

Outside, the Hawks buzzed around like insects.

“We need to get to the Core,” I said, my voice swallowed by the Faceless mask. “Cam said if the Defenders were boarded, the Hawks would blow the reactor. We need to make contact with an officer.”

With an officer, or with whoever the fuck was currently in charge of Defender Three. Someone who could stop the Hawks from blowing the station apart and killing everyone on board before we found Cam and Lucy.

Kai-Ren dug his fingers into my shoulder. “They will not.”

My stomach knotted. “Don’t…don’t just blow them out of the black.”

Kai-Ren said nothing.

I turned my head to look up at him. “Those pilots, they’re people too. They’re scared. Just don’t kill them, not unless they target the Core.” I thought about pleading, but what was the point of that with the Faceless? Despite the fact Kai-Ren’s interest had been piqued by humanity, by the mercurial forces of our love, of our hate, and the impulsive storms of our emotions, he was still a cold-blooded thing. I drew a breath. “It’s not
necessary
.”

Kai-Ren’s gaze met mine. “Perhaps.”

I walked with the Faceless.

“Cam, where are you?”

The pulsing, damp walls gave way to cold gray metal washed in red light. We stepped into the middle of a hallway in the Outer Ring. No docking hatch required. I could dimly hear the Klaxon blaring, and a recorded message, one I’d never heard before, repeating over and over in chilling monotone: “
This is not a drill. The Defender has been boarded. Report to your emergency stations. This is not a drill.
”

“Lucy?”

I wondered if Kai-Ren was using my memory as a blueprint of Defender Three, or Cam’s memory, or the memories of Chris and the other guys from intel. He strode ahead, flanked on each side by two other members of his hive. I could hear them hissing slightly through the link, tiny bursts of static.

There were five of them, and me.

Six.

There were six of us.

I was shorter than the Faceless, thinner, a stripling. But I wore their battle armor. I walked in step with them. Any human who saw me would fear me just the same.

I thought of when I was a kid, burrowing down in the dirt, too scared to look up at the black and at the same time too scared to turn my back on it. I was afraid that if I said the name of the Faceless aloud, I’d summon them like demons. I was sure, lying in my bed at night, that if I drifted off to sleep, my nightmares would hunt me down.

I never thought I’d be walking with them.

We rounded a bend and found ourselves approaching the entrance to a docking bay.
Def 3. Bay 6.

Once, when I’d been new to Defender Three, Doc had laughed at me because I got turned around. Thought I was going clockwise instead of anticlockwise, and had to double back. I’d been late to class.

“How the hell did you even make a mistake like that?”

“Fuck if I know, Doc. Every damn corridor looks the same!”

He’d laughed, then loaned me that book with the big red rock on the cover, and the story inside of the sorry bastard who had to push it up a hill every damned day. That’s when I figured out it didn’t matter if I took a wrong turn. Whatever I did, I’d always be trudging down the same old gray corridor.

And here I was again.

My nausea was a whole lot less existential this time.

A burst of gunfire caught us.

It didn’t slow us.

I saw the terrified faces of the poor guys staring us down. There were four of them. They were just kids. Fresh recruits, probably. Maybe even some from the batch who’d been on the Shitbox with me and Cam. Frontline fodder, straight from the refugee townships, wearing big boots and bad haircuts and knowing nothing for sure except that today, right now, they were going to die.

I turned my formless face toward them.

One of them raised a shaking hand and made the sign of the cross against his chest.

Their nightmares strode past them.

* * * *

I first heard his voice again when we were crossing from the Outer Ring to the Inner, along one of the arms of the station.

“Brady?”

My heart leaped.
“Cam!”

A wall of noise hit me, then—

“He’s alive?”

“Brady!”

“Garrett’s alive?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Impossible.”

“I saw— But I saw—”

“Brady! Brady! Brady!”

“I love you.”

—and Kai-Ren hissed out a breath as the shock waves buffeted him. “Quiet!” He made a sound not unlike a growl. “They make such noise, these little things.”

“Yes,” I told him.

Discordant. A cacophony. Full of sound and fury, except maybe we signified everything. Somewhere in all that noise was something that had snagged the attention of the Faceless, that had danced and skipped like a bright lure across the surface of the big black, just so. We were in their heads now. They felt us. We counted for something after all.

“Cam, have you guys got air?”

“We’re good, yeah.”

“Where are you?”

His answer didn’t come in words.

I blinked, and I
saw
them then. I saw what had happened to them. When the Hawk had punched a hole in the side of Defender Three, the elevator doors had blown. Should never have happened, but nothing’s ever as unsinkable as some asshole with a shiny smile promises it is, right? Cam and the others had gotten into the shaft and climbed two floors down. Then they’d gotten into the vents and kept crawling until they finally hit an air lock. Now they were holed up in a storeroom, trying to figure out who the fuck was in charge of Defender Three right now, and if stepping outside meant copping a bullet in the skull.

I saw Lucy’s face, pale and pinched, eyes wide as she gazed up at Cam. Her thin arms were curled around his neck, cold fingers pressed against his nape. Her heart beat fast.

“Brady’s here,” she whispered, and Cam and I both smiled at her.

“Bray-dee,” Kai-Ren said.