Darker Space (25 page)

I sighed and closed my eyes as Cam folded his arms around me. I leaned my forehead on his shoulder and thought of sunlight and red dirt and the taste of salt and dust on my lips.

“I have small dreams, Cam,” I whispered. “Small dreams, small drawn. Not a universe like you. I never chased starlight.”

His fingers rediscovered the knots in my spine. “I know.”

“I’m still afraid of the dark.”

“Yeah.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and searched the connection for Lucy. I found her with Harry. Found him as well. Lucy was sitting on the floor next to him as he went through one of the ration packs Commander Leonski had given us. He passed her a little packet of crackers. The foil crinkled as she took it with a smile and tore it open. She crunched on a cracker and then returned to her drawing. Doc had given her a notebook and a bunch of pens.

She was drawing Kai-Ren. A tall black figure with an incongruous curving smile drawn on his Faceless mask. Was that really what she saw when she looked at him? Harry wondered it too.

Cam pressed his mouth against my neck, pulling me back to us.

We weren’t alone in this room.

“Cam-Ren. Bray-dee.”

I shivered when Kai-Ren touched me, when he dragged the point of a claw down my naked spine.

“Kai-Ren,” Cam said.

“You called me master once, Cam-Ren.”

Cam nodded. “Once. Not now.”

“Mmm.”

Silence settled. The air shifted around us. The last of my fear bled away.

Cam lifted my hand and kissed my palm. His breath was hot and warm against my damp skin. Kai-Ren hissed and brushed his fingers over my scalp, his glove rasping against my hair.

“Don’t want Lucy to see,” I whispered.

“Shhh, little one. She will not see.”

“Promise,” I said. I twisted my hand in Cam’s shirt, but the words were for Kai-Ren. “Promise me.”

I tried to listen for her, tried to see her. Couldn’t. There was nothing but the low buzz of static when I tried to get a fix on her. I could still get a vague sense of her—quiet, calm, safe—but she was hidden from my thoughts, and from my sight.

“She will not see.”

I slipped my hands under Cam’s shirt and slid them up the planes of his chest. The shirt rode up with them, the fabric bunching. I leaned down and pressed my mouth against his chest, in the dip of his sternum. I could feel his heart beating against my lips. I could feel it beating inside me too. Electricity sparked between us, and it felt good. It felt like home. The connection, as strong as it ever was, and us, and that small, secret place we shared while the maelstrom of the universe swirled around us.

“Cam,” I whispered.

He lifted his arms and let me tug his shirt over his head.

We kissed.

Kai-Ren’s fingers closed around the back of my neck, his thumb pressing into my pulse point. I could feel him doing the same to Cam. I was unafraid. I didn’t know why. A part of me—that part that had been raised with nothing but fear and anger and no hope for anything different—thought I should have been. The same part of me felt the pressure on my neck and remembered when I was seven or eight, watching our neighbor snap the neck of a twitching, squeaking kitten so small it never even got to open its eyes before it died. I kept my eyes closed too.

I didn’t understand this. I didn’t understand why I was doing this, or what Kai-Ren wanted out of this, but I was safe. I knew I was safe. There were no restraints here, no venom that would make my limbs sluggish and my mind hazy. Kai-Ren wasn’t going to hurt me.

Funny.

I’d never been able to scratch up the tiniest shred of faith when those teachers at my school had shown me how to press my hands together and bow my lice-infested head for a god who lived in heaven and had created me in his own image, but here I was finding some in the black. My god wasn’t the one my teachers wanted me to find, but he was just as fucking unknowable.

He’d listened to my prayers.

He’d delivered me.

He’d resurrected me.

Plenty of people had worshipped less.

Cam broke our kiss. “You okay with this?”

“I don’t even know what the fuck this is,” I told him.

Kai-Ren made a hissing sound that prickled my skin, and a sudden rush of need hit me like a wave. He wanted to know. To feel. To taste the strangeness of our alien emotions. To connect. To understand. We were like nothing he’d ever known, because Cam, Cam had adapted when he’d been with the Faceless. He’d locked his emotions down. He’d found a way to overcome his fear.

Not me.

Never me.

I was different.

Kai-Ren hadn’t known we could be different. Cam might have been the perfect emissary for humanity, but I
was
humanity. I was the wretched bits, the reckless bits, and all the bits with jagged edges that didn’t fit. I was rough and unfinished, cracked and broken, all made up of splintered pieces and sharp corners, but it was those ragged parts of me that had snagged Kai-Ren’s attention.

Cam’s eyes widened as Kai-Ren’s strangely warm curiosity washed over us, through us, trickling into all our hidden parts and bringing us out in chills.

“This whole time you thought it was me,” he whispered. “You thought it was me that saved us. But it was you, Brady. It was always you. When are you gonna believe it?”

A laugh burst out of me, loud and ugly.

“Kiss me,” I said, tugging at the button on his fly. “Fuck me.
Love
me. Want us to feel everything.”

Kai-Ren made a pleased sound and stepped away from us.

I was reckless now, lit up from inside by some crazy burst of elation that burned as bright as a supernova, consuming whole solar systems. I wrenched Cam’s pants down and laughed again as they caught on his boots.

We went down onto the damp, spongy floor, fingers and bootlaces tangling. Then Cam’s boots were off, his pants and underwear following, and I was on my back and he was crawling up my body. I bracketed him with my thighs, one hand curled around the back of his neck. We exchanged rough kisses broken by smiles and bumping teeth, and accompanied by staccato bursts of our gasping breath.

“Come on,” I urged. “Fuck me, LT.”

He closed his hand around my cock, and I jackknifed underneath him.

Kai-Ren hissed in surprise at the sensation.

“Come on,” I said again, hooking my legs around his ass. “I want your dick in me.”

Cam leaned up, frowning slightly, breathless. “We don’t have anything.”

I looked up at him, then dragged my fingers across the floor. They came back glistening wet with whatever the fuck it was the Faceless ship leached from every surface.

Cam raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”

“I’ve been in a Faceless pod, and in Faceless battle armor,” I told him. “Whatever the fuck this shit is, I don’t think shoving it up my ass is going to make a difference.”

Cam huffed out a laugh, watching as I moved my slick fingers to my ass. “Fuck.”

I held his gaze as I slid a finger inside me. “You like watching?” I cut my gaze to Kai-Ren, then back to Cam. “Better fuck me soon, because I’m not gonna last.”

Cam dragged his hand along the floor—yeah, I wasn’t going to think about whatever the hell that stuff was—and lubed himself up. He sucked in a quick breath as he rubbed his thumb over his slit, then leaned over me again. One of his fingers joined mine in my hole, and it was good, and weird, and I could feel myself, and I could feel him feeling me.

I could feel Kai-Ren’s sharp gaze too, and see the tableau of exposed flesh and naked limbs we made for him. I could see the way my back arched off the floor as Cam pressed the head of his cock inside me, the way we both froze for a second at the ache, the pressure, the stretch and the burn that all of us could feel. I hooked my legs around Cam and urged him closer.

“Fuck, yes,” I said as he slid home.

There was no trace of laughter on Cam’s face anymore, no smile, but an entire universe unfolded in his eyes as we began to rock together slowly.

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you,” I whispered back.

We were a fucking feedback loop, an echo chamber that only knew one word, recurring endlessly:
love love love.

The universe couldn’t scare me now. The dark couldn’t. Not when all I could feel was love, in every gentle thrust and surge, in every touch and kiss. Not when all that existed was us, and this moment.

The stars wheeled around us.

It was beautiful.

Looking into space is the same thing as looking back in time. The lights of millions of stars that burned out millennia ago still shine in the black. Time and space meet in a place where they get all mixed up together and lose all meaning, but the dead stars still shine. Whole galaxies in their endless death throes light a path across the black. Nothing lasts forever, or everything does.

We’re the flotsam and the jetsam of the universe. We’re caught in its eddies, and in the pull of its tide. We sink, or we float. We’re carried by starlight.

Some of us chase it.

Cam and I moved together. I closed my eyes and saw pinpricks of starlight. Opened them again and saw the man I loved.

Love love love
, the universe echoed, louder and louder, higher and higher, until the wave crested, broke, and smashed me into a million glittering pieces.

I cried out when I came, and Cam held me close and kissed the tears from my cheeks.

* * * *

It was late when we crossed back over into the gray corridors of Defender Three. The emergency lights had been turned off. The world wasn’t washed in red anymore.

The officers’ mess was mostly empty. I sat down with my tray and picked through my food. The food was so much better here than in the enlisted men’s mess. Chicken Kiev. With vegetables on the side that weren’t just a pureed glob. I mean, seriously? Pretty sure we hadn’t been the only reason for the mutiny. We’d just been the tipping point, probably.

Didn’t mean I forgave those assholes even if, a couple of years ago, I would have been on their side. Devon and Kyle were dead. Lucy had almost died.

I dug into my chicken.

Lucy was eating ice cream. These fuckers even had ice cream.

Harry and Andre sat across from us. They were eating slowly, not like Lucy and me. You’re born somewhere like Kopa, you don’t stand much on manners when someone shoves food in front of you. You hunch over it like a growling dog and shovel it down as fast as you can, just in case someone tries to take it away.

“What food do the Faceless eat?” Lucy asked me.

I shrugged. I’d never spent long enough with them to eat. “Dunno.”

“I hope they have ice cream.”

I looked sideways at her. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Luce.”

“But it’s not forever, right?”
she asked in my head.

“No, it’s not forever.” I dragged a green bean through my garlic butter. “But we don’t know exactly how long it will be.”

The Faceless didn’t have the same frame of reference we did for the passage of time. And depending on how fast we traveled, it wouldn’t matter anyway. We might be away for a few weeks, only to come back and find years had passed here. That was the kind of shit I couldn’t wrap my head around. Mostly I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Cam and Chris and Harry and Andre still wanted to go. I wasn’t leaving anyone behind, not really.

I thought of Catherine and David and wondered if we’d see them again.

“Anyway,” I said, “we’re not going anywhere unless Kai-Ren can fix the link.”

“Why?” Lucy asked.

I looked over at Harry and Andre. Andre grinned and waggled his eyebrows, and I showed him my middle finger. “Asshole.”

“Are you talking about s-e-x?” Lucy asked.

Harry snickered.

“Jesus,” I said. “We can all spell, Lucy.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, I know what you and Cam do, so it doesn’t even matter.”

“Firstly, what do you mean, you know what Cam and I do?” I set my fork down. “No, don’t tell me, actually. I don’t want to know. And secondly, it
does
matter, okay?”

She was a kid. Knowing what we did in some abstract childish way was one thing, but no way in everlasting fuck did I need to screw her up by letting her
feel
what we did. No way.

“Pretty sure you’ve already screwed
me
up,”
Harry said, but there was no rancor in his tone. Just amusement.

“Suck it up,” I said. “
Sir
.”

“That’s what he said.”

I threw a piece of carrot at him. He caught it and ate it with a grin.

It was weird.

We were friends now, I guess.

That was going to take some getting used to.

“Brady?”
Cam’s voice.

I looked around for him, but he wasn’t in the mess. Last I’d heard, he and Chris were talking to Commander Leonski.

Commander Leonski did not like what we were doing. It was evident every time he spoke, and in his clenched jaw whenever he wasn’t speaking. Unlike the enlisted men, though, he knew how to follow orders, and the approval for this had come from way above him. Back on Earth, our names were probably spoken in hushed tones by politicians I’d only ever seen spruiking their bullshit on television. If we came back, we’d be heroes. If we didn’t, nobody would ever know.

We were five guys who could be easily written off.

Five guys, and one eight-year-old kid.

Nobody had ever tried diplomacy with the Faceless before, not like this. Nobody had any idea if it could work, but we were a species with no other option. It wasn’t like we could defend ourselves from attack if the Faceless decided to break the treaty.

Fucking Chris Varro and his fucking love of thinking outside the box.

“Where are you?”
I asked Cam.

“Med bay. Meet me here?”

I shoveled down the rest of my lunch and shoved my tray away. “I gotta go meet Cam.”

“We heard,” Andre said.

I glanced at Lucy.

“We won’t let her out of our sight,” Harry said.

I didn’t need the connection to check he meant it. He’d been in my head. He’d felt her heart beating against his as well when she’d been a baby. He’d felt that same fierce protective instinct rise in him when he was just a scrawny, dirty kid. It might not have been his to begin with, but it was in the heart of him now, and as real as any other emotion he’d ever felt.