Darker Space (24 page)

I shook my head to clear my vision. The corridor, bathed in red light, stretched out in front of me.

I hated Defender Three. I’d hated it since the moment I’d first set foot here back when I was sixteen. Being here again now, as part of the Faceless… I didn’t know. Maybe I should have felt some righteous, burning sense of victory, knowing that I was strong now, that I was the enemy of every asshole stuck in this damned tin can, and that they had every reason to fear me. In my Faceless suit, I was bulletproof. Maybe I should have felt like some sort of avenging angel, drunk on vengeance and power.

Instead, I was just terrified in a whole new way. Every step I took with the Faceless at my side was another step into the dark unknown.

“
This is not a drill. The Defender has been boarded. Report to your emergency stations. This is not a drill.
”

We met no resistance on the way to the Core.

If there was anyone in charge to organize it, I guess they’d have either pulled everyone back to defend ops and the reactor, or they were already evacuating the station. There should have been hundreds of guys in the Core, and we didn’t see any.

Not until the med bay.

Five guys on the doors. Five guys who looked at us like they were staring death in the face. Two officers and three enlisted men. The patches on their fatigues told me they weren’t even marines. They were from engineering. I felt a wave of anger rise in me. Where the fuck were the marines? They should have been here, looking out for the medical team, instead of leaving the job to this bunch of pathetic fucking spanner jockeys.

They fired at us. Their bullets bounced off our suits as uselessly as the seedpods from the flame trees the kids used to throw at one another back in Kopa.

I thought of Doc. He was the one guy I’d trusted on Defender Three. The one guy who had my back. After Wade had hurt me—

Kai-Ren turned his head sharply to look at me as the memory hit.

The way the showers emptied of other guys, like they’d picked up on some signal I hadn’t noticed, because I was too fucking new and dumb to realize what was going on.

The sharp spray of the water hitting my back.

The taste of bile burning my throat.

Wade crowding into me, bigger than me.

Blood from my cut eye swirling down the drain.

The way he laughed when I cried, because it hurt, and I was so fucking scared.

And worst, when it was done, when I’d climbed to my feet and shuffled back into my barracks room, and nobody would look me in the eye.

When Doc found out, he never said a thing about how sorry he was. He knew I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want sympathy, or understanding. I wanted to pretend it never happened. I wanted to nurture my anger in secret and hone it into something sharp, and I did. I finally got my revenge on Wade by unhooking his rig when he was at the top of the climbing wall and watching him fall thirty feet to the mats below. Doc was the guy who managed to fuck up setting his broken leg that day so he never walked without a limp, without pain, ever again.

Doc had my back, always.

We approached the doors of the med bay.

I watched the faces of the guys—bloodless, frozen in shock, or crumbling into panic as their nightmares were made solid. We were the Faceless. We were unstoppable.

I lifted my hands and showed them my palms, trying to indicate we meant no harm. My right hand jerked back slightly as a bullet hit it, and I almost laughed. Those poor assholes, throwing everything they had at us, and it was less than nothing.

Buzzing little insects.

The Faceless advanced, and we stood over them as they cowered on the floor. Their own fear kept them down there. The Faceless murmured and hissed to one another as they regarded them curiously.

I stepped inside the med bay.

Through the filter of the mask, it looked different. The shapes were sharper but still familiar to me. So was the man who stood waiting.

Doc.

He was bathed in red light. He was unarmed. He had a cigarette jammed between his lips, smoke curling off the end, like he figured he was a condemned man. He was just like I’d always known he would be: fucking fearless. Whatever the hell he thought was coming, he hadn’t run. He’d never leave his patients.

Captain Loh stood behind him, shoulders squared.

Fuck, these guys. These guys stood there, unarmed, and stared down the black just because it was the right thing to do.

I stepped forward. “Doc?”

My voice was muffled by the mask, almost entirely swallowed by it. But I made enough of a noise—the Faceless didn’t speak the same way we did,
couldn’t
—that confusion flashed across Doc’s craggy face.

I’d seen, in my dreams, in Cam’s memories, how to undo a Faceless mask. I’d seen Cam reach up behind Kai-Ren’s neck and hit some hidden clasp, but my scrabbling fingers couldn’t find it now, and Kai-Ren’s low hiss behind me told me to stop trying. I guess he didn’t want me asphyxiated twice in one day if they did blow the reactor.

“Doc, it’s me. It’s Brady,” I told him.

He couldn’t hear me, so I did the only thing I could think of doing to show him I was human, that I was
me
: I flipped him the bird.

Wished I had a camera to capture the look on his face.

“Jesus,” he said, his hairy brows drawing together sharply. His cigarette dangled for a moment off his bottom lip, then dropped onto the floor. “
Brady?
”

I gave him a thumbs-up. “Yeah, it’s me, Doc.”

“Holy
shit
,” Captain Loh said.

“Brady,” Doc said and closed the distance between us. He curled his fingers around my wrist, digging in and looking for my pulse. “Fuck me. Is that really you in there? Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Doc, listen.
Listen.
”

“
Listen
,” Kai-Ren hissed behind me.

“I can’t hear you, son,” Doc said, his voice wavering as his gaze cut sharply toward Kai-Ren. He lifted a shaking hand and placed it on my shoulder. “Can’t hear you.”

I looked around. I saw a book lying forgotten on top of the nearest cabinet. I crossed the floor and picked it up. Goddamn
Myth of Sisyphus
, with that big red rock on the curling cover.

Fuck that rock.

I was sick of pushing it up the same hill every day.

I was done with it.

I carried the book back to Doc. Pulled a pen out of his top pocket and scrawled at the bottom of a page:
Tell Leonski not to blow the Core
.

* * * *

Commander Leonski met us in the med bay. He looked a lot older than I remembered. It hadn’t even been a year since I’d seen him last, but looking at him, maybe it was just the last day or so that had made him so haggard. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his lantern jaw was covered in graying stubble. He looked like a fucking mess, but he still walked in the same way I remembered, his shoulders back and his spine ramrod straight.

If he was afraid, he didn’t show it.

His gaze found me immediately. Shortest, scrawniest Faceless in the universe.

“Crewman Garrett?” he asked.

I nodded.

“We have control of the Core,” he said, his gaze sliding from me to the others. “The marines are in the process of reclaiming the few pockets in the Outer Ring that are under control of the enlisted men.”

The enlisted men? Wasn’t any enlisted man who’d piloted that Hawk.

“This isn’t an invasion,” I told him, my voice distorted into muffled nonsense.
“Fuck. Can I take this off, please?”

Kai-Ren slid a hand across my shoulders.
“Not yet, little one. Not until you are
safe.”

He said the word like it was one he didn’t quite understand yet. Like he was mostly just testing the sound of it, to see if the meaning would follow.

“I need to be able to
talk
to him!”

Kai-Ren hissed softly.

I grabbed the book back from Doc. Scrawled
Faceless are NOT invading
and shoved it toward Leonski. Leonski looked at it, then looked at me, and then back down at the words I’d written like he’d never seen anything so astonishing in his life.

Words were a kind of magic. In Kopa, I learned lullabies in languages I didn’t understand, and imbued them with my own meaning. I listened to stories that some of the old people told. I liked the one about the rainbow serpent, and how he made the places in the world that I knew, the shapes of the landscape molded by his sinuous movements and the curves of his spine. Those words were an old kind of magic, the oldest kind. But writing was different. Writing didn’t need people, didn’t need voices to speak it or ears to hear it. Writing could travel more distances than voices or song. Where words failed, writing didn’t. Writing could exist in a vacuum. Writing could bridge space and time. Writing could survive the grave.

Leonski looked at what I’d written like he was seeing an undreamed-of miracle suddenly assemble itself in front of him.

I gestured for the book, and he handed it back.

My fingers shook around the pen.
They’re here for us, not you.

“Jesus,” Leonski murmured.

I felt a faint murmuring at the edges of my consciousness, a stirring, and then a jolt of recognition, of fucking relief, of gratitude bigger than the universe that had tried to swallow me whole. It hit me like a punch in the guts. I spun around.

A group of marines was standing at the open doors of the med bay. They parted as I watched, and I saw them.

Cam, holding Lucy’s hand.

Chris, bleeding from a cut on his temple.

Andre and Harry.

All of them alive. All of them whole, and
here.

“Brady!” Lucy screamed. She tore away from Cam and raced toward me. She didn’t even flinch as she passed through the rest of the Faceless. Just kept running for me, like I was the only thing she could see.

I dropped to my knees and closed my arms tightly around her. I wished I could feel her skin against mine. I wished I could kiss her.

“Brady!” Her small fingers pinched and prodded at my suit. “I was so scared, Brady!”

“Me too,” I said. The words were swallowed by my mask, but they echoed through our connection. They were heard there. They had form. They resonated.

Then Cam was beside me, and I was standing up, Lucy clinging to me still.

“Brady.” His eyes shone with tears as he cupped my masked face, his fingers finding the familiar shape of it, one thumb sweeping across my cheekbone. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I told him, my throat aching.

“You okay in there?”

“Yeah. Not freaking out as much as I thought I would.”

“Braver than you think.”
He smiled. The words echoed through the connection, through all of us, through the Faceless and back again.

The Faceless.

They regarded us curiously. One of them reached out and touched the blood on Chris’s temple. Chris’s heartbeat spiked at the contact, and that sent a murmur of interest through them. One of the others leaned close to Harry and inhaled deeply. Harry’s guts clenched, and his fingers jerked. Fear sparked through him, hot and fast. Andre stood still as one of the Faceless pressed a palm against his chest to feel his heart.

Lucy squirmed down out of my grasp.

She was unafraid.

More fearless than any man on the entire fucking station.

Like Alice, walking among towering black chess pieces.

She went straight for Kai-Ren. She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “Hello. I’m Lucy.”

“Lu-cee.”

It originated from Kai-Ren and went through the rest of us like a wave. Washed back and forth and very slowly dissipated. The soft memory of it lapped against our shared consciousness for a moment after it had faded.

Kai-Ren looked down at her and hummed.

Then he lowered himself to his knees.

Lucy smiled at him and reached out and put her hand on his cheek. “Hello,” she said again.

“Hello,” Kai-Ren echoed.

There was silence, as protracted and heavy as a lacuna in an orchestral piece. It was laden. It vibrated; it
waited
. Lucy stared at Kai-Ren, and he stared back at her.

I should have been terrified. I should have been screaming for her, because she was my sister, the baby I’d worn in a sling around my skinny chest, whose tiny fingers had once clenched in a fist around my thumb. She was
Lucy
, and she was so small and so fragile, and she was touching a
Faceless
. I should have been terrified, but I could feel both of them, and they were both equally entranced. Both trapped in quiet wonder. It buzzed between them, between all of us.

Lucy wasn’t only fearless; she was
safe.

It was unthinkable.

There were no words.

At least, I thought there weren’t.

Then Doc cleared his throat. “Jesus fuck,” he said.

Yeah. That kind of summed it up.

Chapter Fifteen

I didn’t breathe again until we’d passed through the gray metal walls of Defender Three and were back on the Faceless ship. Until we were safe. Until Cam was touching me again.

I closed my eyes as he slid his hand up my shoulder and behind my neck. The seal on the mask broke with a quiet snick, and Cam peeled it off my face. I drew a breath of air, and then Cam’s lips were on mine. Not a kiss, not exactly. It was touch and breath and my name, whispered like an urgent prayer:

“Brady. Brady. Jesus,
Brady
.”

I huffed out a breath against his lips. “Help me with the rest of this.”

The suit peeled away like snakeskin, leaving me pale and damp underneath. I shivered, even though the air wasn’t cold. It was as warm as always.

And what the hell did it say about me that I currently felt safer back on the Faceless ship than on Defender Three? Maybe the shift had been so gradual that I hadn’t noticed it, or maybe I’d been reborn in that Faceless pod somehow. Or maybe I’d been so scared of all the things I could lose—Cam and Lucy—that every instinct in me had turned me against Defender Three. It hadn’t been the Faceless who’d threatened the people I loved. It hadn’t been the Faceless who, knowing there was a kid on board, had blasted a hole in the side of the station.