Darker Space (8 page)

We fell into a rhythm, each of us urging the other one higher. Heat coiled in me, tighter and tighter as we fucked. So close. I was so close. Then Cam reached down between us and closed his hand around my wet cock. I came, squeezing his dick tight inside me, and shuddering and jerking underneath him.

“Brady,” he moaned, muscles seizing before he tumbled right after me over the edge.

We lay tangled together, wrung out, hot breath and sweat mingling. My cum sliding between us, and his leaking out of my ass.

Even when everything else was fucked up or felt like it was falling apart, we always got this right. With everything else stripped away, we were good. When he was the center of my universe, and I was the center of his, it was perfect. We were perfect.

So why, when it was perfect, was I always so fucking sure it was already slipping away?

Cam kissed me and rolled off me.

He fell asleep first.

* * * *

It was dark.

The floor underneath me was as smooth and oily black as the shell of a beetle. It wasn’t like any metal I knew. It was warm, like flesh. It yielded under my weight. It thrummed. Above me, in weird misshapen alcoves, lights glowed and faded, illuminating the ceiling and the walls, and the strange veins and arteries that pulsed close to their surface. If there was some sequence to the lights, I couldn’t pick it.

I knew this dream.

My subconscious always brought me back here, to Kai-Ren’s living ship.

I rose onto my knees, sucking in a deep breath. The air tasted different here. Not stale and cold like on a Defender, but warm and a little humid. I braced my hands against the damp, thrumming floor and climbed to my feet.

I was naked. Trembling, despite the humidity.

The knowledge that this was a dream was no comfort at all.

“Brady?”

“Cam?” I croaked.

“Stay there, Brady.”

I stumbled from the room into the twisting passageway. The walls bowed outward and bulged in places. They were damp, sticky with some fluid they secreted. Lights glowed and dimmed from within the walls, from within whatever system of veins and arteries ran through this ship. Strange, shapeless things swam in the walls like bluebottles, or were propelled through them like platelets in a milky bloodstream.

“Cam?” I called again, spinning around as a shadow shifted somewhere behind me. Whatever it was had already gone. I hugged my arms to my chest and continued on.

“Stay there, Brady.”

I never did.

“Don’t come in here.”

But I did. Every time. And even knowing this was a dream, and even knowing what I’d see when I rounded the corner, it was like a punch to the gut every time.

That thing was on Cam.

That Faceless thing.

Skin white and hard as porcelain, stretched tight over its face. Its clawlike fingers holding him by the throat. Its body bent over his as he knelt on hands and knees on the floor. The grimace on its face—that was maybe a smile—when it looked up and saw me watching.

“Bray-dee.”

Kai-Ren, the Faceless battle regent.

Cam lifted his tear-streaked face. “Don’t watch, Brady. Don’t watch.”

But it was the echo of his voice in my mind that drove me away. That voice that said more than he’d ever wanted me to hear:
“Master, master, oh, master.”

I reeled back into the passageway.

Just a dream.

This was just a dream.

I leaned against the pulsating wall and sank down to the floor. Wrapped my arms around my knees and curled up tight.

“Brady?”

I opened my eyes to find my sister was sitting beside me in that place, in her butterfly pajamas. She held my bead bracelet out for me, and I put it on.

“Why are you crying?” she asked me. “Are you lost?”

“No. It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m gonna wake up soon, you know.”

“Okay,” Lucy said and pecked me on the cheek.

The universe collapsed around me.

* * * *

Awake.

Thank fuck.

I blinked up at the ceiling.

Cam shifted and stretched beside me. “Shit,” he muttered into the pillow.

“Yeah.”

He rolled over and flung an arm across my chest. “I had a weird dream.”

“Me too,” I told him.

“I was back with Kai-Ren,” he said. He sighed, and his breath caressed my cheek. “You were there.”

My blood ran cold. “You told me not to come in.”

Cam pulled away from me, twisting around to hit the switch on the bedside lamp. “Shit.”

The universe sucked all the breath out of me. Left me hollow, close to collapse. My lungs hurt. My eyes stung.

No no no no no.

Not again.

Not this.

“Fuck.” Cam raked his fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Okay. Okay, let’s not freak out. Maybe it’s nothing.”

We were sharing dreams again, and it was nothing? He didn’t believe that, not for a second. If we were in each other’s dreams again, how long until we were in each other’s heads all the time? And how fucking long until Kai-Ren was there with us?

“Cam,” I whispered, afraid that any second now, the panic squeezing at my chest would crush me. I pushed myself up so that I was sitting too. “What do we do?”

“It’s okay.” Cam put his arms around me. I could feel his heart beating. “We’ll figure this out. It’ll be okay.”

Our bedroom door squeaked open, and we pulled apart.

Lucy peered around the door.

“What’s up, Luce?” Cam asked her, his cheerful tone sounding forced.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure that Brady was here.”

Cam smiled. “He won’t be going back to the stockade for a while, will you, Brady?”

I stared at Lucy, suddenly sick to my stomach.

She wasn’t talking about the stockade.

“No,” she told Cam. “I thought he was lost. In that place where the walls are sticky. You know, the place where the Faceless are.”

Chapter Five

Everything had changed, but nothing had.

The next morning I had orders to report to Chris Varro at intel, and all I could think was the Faceless were somehow fucking with my head again, and he’d take one look at me and
know
. And then what?

Cam had wanted to talk about this, but what good would talking do? Our link was back. We didn’t need to talk, and we sure as hell couldn’t ask anyone else for help. We needed to run, because if Lucy was a part of this now, a part of our fucked-up Faceless head space, there was no way in hell I was letting the military get their hands on her.

These assholes had been sticking electrodes on me, making me run for hours on the treadmill, and jabbing me with needles for the past ten months. I’d given more blood for the fucking war effort than most of the guys who’d gotten medals. Turns out it just wasn’t considered heroic to give it in vials.

“No,”
Cam had said that morning.
“No, we don’t run. Running is the worst thing we can do. We can hide this, okay? We can hide it from them until we figure something out.”

Could we really, though?

Jesus.

Why this again? Why the hell now? And where do you run when it’s coming from space?

You can’t hide from it when it’s all around you.

You’re on a spinning ball of dirt, hurtling through the black.

There’s nowhere to go.

I sat outside Chris’s office and rubbed my eyes and tried to think everything through, but a few years of basic medic training didn’t exactly make me an expert in epidemiology. Hell, was it even like a virus anyway? If it was… Fuck, if it was, then all I could think of was how Cam and I had gone about the process of building our life together in the same blissful fucking ignorance as Typhoid Mary.

Maybe there had been no symptoms until now because Kai-Ren had guessed the military would quarantine us at first, like they had. And they’d demand regular tests, like they had. First every few days, then every few weeks, and now every month. Maybe whatever the hell it was would only activate once everyone was nice and complacent.

What if Kai-Ren had just pretended to let us go, when actually he was using us as carriers to infect the rest of humanity? What if we all ended up hooked into the same hive mind the Faceless had?

“Ah,” said a voice, and I looked up to see Major Hanron walking toward me. “Garrett. We don’t have an appointment today, do we?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m here to see Captain Varro.”

“Ah,” Hanron said again. He smiled that faint, smug smile of his. “I’ve been going over last month’s brain scans. Interesting stuff.”

I kept my mouth shut, for once in my life.

“Interesting,” Hanron said again, his smile vanishing and his expression hardening, and then walked away.

The voice in my head said
run run run.

I wanted to go and get Lucy. Take her out of school and run. Go north, maybe, back up to the gulf. Because maybe we couldn’t run from the Faceless, but we could run from the military.

“Brady, no.”

I groaned.

“Stay out of my fucking head, Cam!”

Last night we’d shared a dream, and now I could hear him in my waking mind again. Jesus, if this was a contagion, we’d already infected half the city. I thought of Stockade Sam and Marcello. Thought of the woman I’d brushed past in the hallway of our building yesterday. The kid behind the counter at the shop where I got my cigarettes. Thought of the guys I’d stood on the parade ground with, sweltering in the sun. Thought of crowds I’d pushed through: bodies pressed against mine on the train, at a football game, at a bar.

I clenched my hands into fists and jammed them into my pockets. My heart was racing. I was flooded with adrenaline, and I just wanted to
run.

“Settle down, Brady.”

“Settle down,” I muttered. “Fuck you, LT. That fucking thing’s in our heads again, and you’re telling me to settle down?”

Fuck him.

A part of me wanted to storm across the base, right into his comfortable air-conditioned office, and punch him in the head. The smart part of me—which didn’t often get a say—knew that drawing attention to us right now was just about the worst thing we could do.

“Garrett.” I looked up to find Chris’s door open and the man himself standing there. “Come in.”

I stood up, pulled my hands out of my pockets, and wiped my palms on my fatigues. I stepped past Chris into his office, and he closed the door behind us.

“Take a seat.”

I sat.

It was a small office. Nothing special. Just the same gunmetal-gray walls of every other office on the base, and of every Defender hanging in the black. Just the sort of room a guy could sit in, day after day, year after year, and feel the color leaching out of his skin.

Chris sat down on the other side of his desk. “You look like shit.”

“The stockade’ll do that to you.”

“You been sleeping okay?”

“What do you care?” It came out sounding more belligerent that I’d intended, just like everything. Chris met my gaze steadily, a challenge there, and I figured I really didn’t need to go back to the stockade anytime soon. “I mean, I don’t understand why you’re asking. Sir.”

His mouth turned up in the smile I remembered from Cam’s dreams. “You’re a terrible soldier, Garrett.” For some reason it didn’t sound like an insult. “An officer asks you a question, and you answer it. He gives you an order, you obey it. It’s not hard.”

“Guess they didn’t beat it into me enough in basic.”

His smile grew. “I guess they didn’t.”

He didn’t say anything else, so I looked at my boots, then his bookshelf, then the discolored patch of water damage in the ceiling panel in the back corner of the office. I didn’t say anything either. Maybe I was learning after all. Or maybe I was distracted by the silence, listening for Cam’s voice in my head again and wondering if he was listening for mine.

I’d hated the black. I’d been terrified most of the time there, except then Cam’s voice had been in my head, and we’d shared a heartbeat. He was like a light, burning just bright enough to keep the darkness at bay. He once said I was his heartbeat, but he was mine as well.

“I want you to listen to something,” Chris said. He took a tablet from his desk and opened a file.

A sudden hiss, like steam escaping.

My heartbeat spiked; the rest of me froze. I felt Kai-Ren’s claw slide down my naked spine, dragging a shiver in its wake.

“Turn it off!”

Chris tapped the screen, ending the recording. “You recognize it, then.”

“Faceless,” I told him, the word catching in my throat. My mouth was dry. “Faceless talking.”

“Do you understand it?”

“No.”

“You did, once.”

“That was before.” Before our connection was broken. Jesus. What if it wasn’t just the connection with Cam that was back? What if Chris had let the audio file play, and somehow those awful sounds had started to coalesce into words?

“Bray-dee.”

Nausea curled in my guts and pushed up toward my throat. I fought it back down, raising a shaking hand to my mouth just in case I couldn’t. Just in case I was about to vomit all over Chris’s desk.

“So you don’t hear any words at all?” He frowned.

“No, sir.” I swallowed. “What…what’s this about?”

Chris set the tablet down. “Garrett.
Brady.
The next time the Faceless come, I want us to be able to talk to them.”

“What makes you think they’re coming? They signed a treaty.”

And the connection between Cam and me was alive again. I didn’t want to believe it meant anything, but of course it did.

“Because of these.” He opened his drawer and pulled out a folder. He opened it and pushed some documents toward me. Printouts. A dark background and a field of fuzzy stars. “Readings from Eleven and Six and Two. Three months ago, one month ago.” He tapped the last one. “And last week. What do you see there, Garrett?”

The black. Emptiness. Suffocation.

“Nothing, sir.”

Chris jabbed the final printout. “Here. What do you see
here
?”

“Nothing!” A black smudge no larger than a thumbprint.