by Lisa Henry
I rubbed a thumb over my leg, remembering the way I’d cut my thigh when we’d been trying to get Cam out of the pod. I’d ended up with slimy goo from the pod all over me, and in the cut. “I cut my thigh, though, remember?”
“The fluid from the pod was sterile,” Doc said, then shrugged. His hazmat suit rustled. “So far as we could tell.”
“It doesn’t follow the rules a disease does,” Cam said. “It’s more complicated than that. It targets certain people, like Brady, or Lucy, and makes the connection itself. It’s not random, like a disease or a virus. I think it brought Lucy in because she was a part of our family group. I don’t even think anyone else was at risk until Chris and the others injected themselves. They’re the ones risking it spreading now, through their own families. Not us.”
There was Cam’s faith again. Trusting the Faceless. Trusting the link, and the way it was transmitted, to have a purpose, even though it was one he couldn’t understand. Mysterious ways and all that.
“You can’t know that, surely,” Doc said.
No, but he believed it.
“The way the Faceless communicate…” Cam made a face. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly. Their family groups are structured almost like hives, and they communicate within that group only. To talk to another hive, someone has to get linked. But it doesn’t automatically get passed to every other member of the hive. Kai-Ren was the only one I could talk to. I think it’s something very specific to their biology, but it doesn’t work exactly the way it should with ours.”
I thought of Kai-Ren’s face, sickly white in the sunlight. “Your bodies, your chemistry, they are different.”
I curled my fingers through Cam’s.
“I’ve told a hundred different officers this a hundred different times,” Cam said. He sighed, and the weariness of the past year rolled over him. “It’s in all the reports. But I can’t explain it any better than that, because I can barely understand any of it myself. I’m not hiding anything, sir.”
Doc was silent for a long while before he finally spoke again. “You’re asking us to take a lot on trust, Rushton.”
He always was, ever since he came back from the Faceless.
“I know that, sir.” Cam shrugged helplessly.
Doc sighed. “I’ll tell the commander that I believe you’ve acted in good faith, but I doubt it’ll be much consolation to him. The whole goddamn Defender is already in an uproar because of this shit. And the quarantine will stay in place.”
Cam nodded.
“Doc,” I said, my guts clenching a little. “Why are we in quarantine here, and not in the med bay? Not that I’m complaining, but last time they didn’t give us so much room.”
Doc’s suit crinkled as he turned his head to look at me. “Because, Brady, the others haven’t arrived yet.”
* * * *
It took three days. Three days of me alternately climbing the fucking walls or sitting and staring out into the black. Nobody came to see us: not Commander Leonski, and not anybody from intel. A bunch of ration packs appeared in front of the elevators in the middle of the night. We hadn’t just been quarantined—we’d been ignored.
On the third day, the lights dimmed. When they came back on, they were red. There was no accompanying Klaxon or recorded announcement, but the station was on high alert.
I crossed the hallway and went into Captain Hayashi’s room. His window overlooked the Outer Ring. I couldn’t see anything, though, except starlight. I was frustrated. I wanted to stomp on his circuit board just to be an asshole, but then I figured I’d already stolen his chocolates and caused him, and every other officer in this section of the quarters, to be banished from their own rooms. There was something eerie about that. Drawers left ajar, books left open, a wallet on the bed. It was like standing on the deck of the Mary Celeste or something and wondering where the fuck everyone had gone.
I flicked though a magazine of Hayashi’s—couldn’t read the Japanese, though—and then went back to our room.
Cam was on edge too.
We were both listening for it, so when the elevator doors rolled open at the end of the corridor, we both hurried down to see.
Four guys in uniform, packs slung over their shoulders, lugging two footlockers between them. They eyed us curiously. They all wore orange armbands, same as us, but the patches on their uniforms told us they were from intel. I checked their rank insignia too: a lieutenant, a second lieutenant, and two officer cadets. Of course they all outranked me by miles. Hell, I don’t know why I’d even bothered to look. Everyone always outranked me by miles.
The elevator doors shut.
“Lieutenant Rushton,” one of the guys said and held out his hand.
Cam shook it.
Shit.
A sudden swirl of emotions, too thick and fast to untangle and make sense of, crashed over Cam and caught me too. This guy here, sandy-haired and gap-toothed as a kid. Some woman, laughing, who smelled like perfume. An older man, mouth downturned in a thin sneer: “You’ll never make it through officer training.” A song playing in a club—strobe lights and this guy’s gaze fixed on some girl whose tits were trying to pop out of her dress. A teacher banging a ruler on a desk: “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” An overcast day. A funeral? The sound of a kid screaming. A champagne cork popping. Sweeping up sweet-smelling wood shavings off a garage floor.
A hundred different moments, connected in some way that only he knew, that had led him here, to the black, to us.
Cam reeled back.
“Shit,” the guy said, looking just as shell-shocked. “Sorry, sir. Shit.”
“It’s not your fault,” Cam said warily.
“It kind of is,” I pointed out. “These assholes did this on purpose, LT.”
“These assholes outrank you, Brady.”
We both watched the guys carefully, but there was no indication they’d heard. We were safe enough, for now, but how long until that last wall crumbled and every single one of them was in my head? In our heads?
They didn’t say anything else or make any more overtures. I didn’t care. I’d know soon enough, wouldn’t I? Whether I wanted to or not. I glared at them as they lugged their gear down the corridor, their boots squeaking on the metal floor.
“Fifth on the left is ours,” I yelled after them. “Stay the hell out!”
“Brady,” Cam said in a warning tone.
The elevator doors rolled open again.
Chris Varro stood there. He wasn’t alone.
He was holding Lucy’s hand.
Lucy.
I froze. For a moment I couldn’t even move enough to suck breath into my lungs. Then Lucy was barreling into me, and instinct took over. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She squealed with delight.
I stared at Chris Varro over her shoulder, the sudden joy at having her in my arms colliding with the rush of hot anger that she was here, both of them crashing together in a million jagged fragments that I couldn’t begin to sort through. My body responded before my brain knew how: hot tears slid down my face before I’d even known I wanted to cry.
You asshole. You fucking asshole.
Lucy was chattering in my ear, but I didn’t hear her, not really. All I could hear was the pounding of blood in my skull, as loud as the roar of the ocean, as loud as a barrage.
“Okay,” Cam said at last, a hand on my back. “Okay, we’re going to our room.”
“Cam,” Chris said. “Let me—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Chris!” Cam led me down the corridor to our room.
Slowly, the numbness receded enough so that I could feel my hands shaking. Slowly, very slowly, I tuned myself in to what Lucy was saying.
“…seen so many stars! I drew a picture, look!” She squirmed out of my grip and shrugged her backpack off her shoulders. It was the same backpack we’d gotten her for school. Purple, with daisies on it. She dumped it on the floor and unzipped it.
I sank down onto the edge of the
bed, Cam beside me.
“Cam?”
“Jesus, Brady. I didn’t think they’d do this.”
Lucy pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her backpack and clambered up onto the bed, wedging herself between us. She smoothed the paper out over her knees. “Look. This is me on the Sh—the shuttle.”
Great. So someone had also told her it was called a Shitbox.
“I’ll bet that was a pretty boring ride, though,” Cam said, his voice tempered with a smile. I was glad he could talk, because I wasn’t sure I could. “It takes a long time.”
“Chris and Harry taught me how to play Go Fish. Have you got any cards, Brady? I can teach you too.” She frowned at me for a moment when I didn’t answer, and turned to Cam. “Cam, do you?”
“We’ll make sure we find some.”
Lucy looked at me, then started digging around in her backpack again. She pulled something out. It took me a second to realize what it was. “Chris gave me your bracelet back. Brady!”
She slipped it over my shaking hand and onto my wrist.
Fucking Chris fucking Varro.
“Thanks,” I managed at last. I swallowed and stood. “I’ll go get some cards.”
* * * *
Chris Varro had ended up claiming Captain Hayashi’s room. And our connection obviously wasn’t strong yet, given he had no fucking idea what was going on when, fully clothed, I stepped into the shower behind him, wrapped an arm around his throat, and pressed the point of Hayashi’s screwdriver against his jugular.
“Jesus fucking Christ! Garrett?”
I dragged him out from under the spray, my boots squeaking on the shower floor. He was slippery as an eel, but he also had suds streaming down his face from his hair, so the advantage was still mine.
“Garrett! What the fuck!”
I moved my mouth so close to his ear that it felt almost the same as some of those times in Cam’s dreams, except this time it was a promise of violence that quickened his heartbeat and made his jugular jump. I kept my voice low. “You brought my sister to the Faceless, you piece of shit.”
“That wasn’t my decision!” He wrapped his fingers around my arm but couldn’t dislodge it.
“Don’t fucking lie to me!”
“I’m not!” His wet feet slid on the floor as I hauled him out of the shower and spun him around. “I wouldn’t have brought a kid into this! I wouldn’t!”
“But you did,” I growled, jabbing the point of the screwdriver in deeper, expecting to feel it pierce his skin at any moment. “You brought her into this the second you decided it was a smart idea to inject yourself with our blood!”
“Garrett,” he said. “Brady!”
We both staggered a little as the images hit.
Chris was eleven. His parents were making him lean down and press a kiss to the forehead of an old woman lying dead in a bed. Her skin was thin and wrinkled and dry like paper. Her cold, gnarled fingers were wrapped around a large wooden cross. He’d never seen a dead person before. It scared him so much it would take years before he could think of his Nona without thinking of this.
He was smart. He’d always been smart. The smartest kid in the class. When he was six, a girl beat him in a spelling test, and Chris burned with jealousy for days.
When the bone snapped in his left arm, he heard it before he felt it. He and the other kids weren’t supposed to be exploring the construction site, so the rest of them scattered like rats. Chris walked home alone, cradling his arm to his chest, face set, jaw jutting out. He was thirteen, and he thought of all the heroes from the stories he’d read and knew he could be as brave as them. He didn’t cry.
He was seventeen when he slept with a girl for the first time. Seventeen and a half when he slept with a guy and everything fell into place for him.
And then there was Cam.
Then there was Cam.
There was Cam.
Those green eyes, that brilliant smile, that easy grace. They were perfect together. Both smart, both ambitious, both good-looking. Both officers. They were perfect together in other ways as well, the ways their bodies moved together. Mouths slotted against each other, sweat-slicked skin sliding, breath hot. Minutes that stretched into hours, learning each other. Mapping Cam’s skin with his mouth, his fingers. They were perfect together, except when they weren’t.
It ended with a faint taste of regret and the memory of his name on Cam’s lips.
It ended years after, with the point of a screwdriver jabbing into his throat and Brady Garrett growling in his ear, “Fuck you.”
I blinked and froze.
For a second it was like two pictures superimposed and not quite meeting how they should. Then they shifted, coalesced, and I was in my head again, not his, and not that strange shared place between us.
“Brady.”
I turned my head to see Cam standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Two of Chris’s guys were behind him. I wondered if it had been noise that had brought them here, or the connection.
I released Chris, holding my hands up for a second before slipping the screwdriver back in my pocket.
Chris reeled away, gasping for breath, wiping his wet throat furiously with his hand and then checking his palm for blood. “Jesus Christ! You fucking psycho!”
I jabbed a finger against my temple. “Welcome to my head, asshole.”
I didn’t need to read his mind to feel the fear and anger rolling off him in waves. Didn’t need a Faceless virus swimming in my blood, or a mutation tweaking out the threads of my DNA and twisting them into something new, to know that Chris Varro hated me as much as he was scared of me.
Chris’s guys stepped back as I moved toward them. A path opened up for me.
“Any of you fuckers come near me, and I’ll stab you in the fucking eyes,” I told them.
I headed back down the hallway, boots squelching, my uniform dripping the entire way.
* * * *
“So remember that thing where you were going to work on your anger management?” Cam asked me, rubbing his knuckles gently over my buzz cut.
“That was before they brought my sister into this,” I told him.
Lucy was sleeping beside us, her mouth open, snoring a bit.
“Fighting them is not going to help you,” Cam said.
Always the voice of fucking reason.
“I know that. But fuck him, he deserves to be scared.”
Cam sighed. “As scared as you?”
“Shut the fuck up, LT.”
He kissed me softly. “Chris is not the enemy, Brady.”
“Who is, then? The Faceless? The military?”
Cam sighed. “Maybe sometimes there is no enemy.”
“If you think that, you’re just not looking hard enough.” I propped myself up on my elbow. “There is always someone who wants to fuck you over, Cam, always. You’re just too nice to see it.”
“You mean I’m too naive.”
“That’s not what I said.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t need to say it, Brady. I’m in your head.”
I huffed out a breath. “Okay, so maybe I do think you’re naive. You always think the best of people, but guess what? Most people are assholes. Most people would fuck you over in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. You’re like that guy who said that people are born basically good. That’s bullshit. People aren’t good. People are assholes, Cam. Just fucking assholes.”
“You’re not an asshole,” he told me quietly.
“Pretty sure every person in the world would disagree with that,” I muttered.
“What would they know?” Cam asked with a slight smile. “Anyway, why should I believe them? They’re all assholes, aren’t they?”
“Don’t,” I said, sitting up.
“Don’t what?”
“I’m not a kid, LT. Don’t do that thing where you think you can make me laugh and I’ll forget how angry I am. I’m not a dumb kid. Don’t patronize me.”
; “Brady, I—”
“Don’t. And don’t you dare tell me you never wanted any of this. I fucking know you. I know how much you missed the black. I know Lucy and me were just your consolation prize!”
“My fucking what?”
“If you’d had the choice between us and the black, you wouldn’t have even had to think about it!”
“Brady!” His face was twisted. “But they didn’t give me the choice and—”
“I know! That’s my fucking point!” I climbed off the bed and reached for my pack of cigarettes. I paused with my hand on them, waiting for him to remind me I was supposed to be quitting. He didn’t, and the fucked-up little part of me that always had to ruin everything told me that was just fucking typical. He didn’t even care if I gave myself lung cancer.
And Jesus, how fucking immature was that? I’d given him enough shit that I knew the only reason he wasn’t saying anything was because he didn’t want to add fuel to this fire I was busy stoking. But there I was, the emotional maturity of a fucking child, finding blame with Cam when there was none to find, because as long as I could spit and snarl at him, I didn’t have to look at my own shitty behavior. As long as everything could be his fault, I was the victim. And I was a born fucking victim, wasn’t I?
“You ever get sick of defending me, LT?” I asked, my voice rasping.
“Brady, come on.”
I snorted, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t wanted him to give me a straight answer. I shoved the cigarettes in my pocket. “Don’t follow me.”
Cam didn’t, but I could feel his regret curling after me like tendrils of smoke as I walked out.
Chapter Eleven
I sat in the corridor and smoked for hours, until my throat hurt and I was wheezing a bit. The pile of cigarette butts beside me grew higher and higher while I tried to remember how on the Shitbox I’d decided to man up and face whatever the universe threw at me.
I hated myself right then, which was no big surprise. Hate and anger had always come too quickly to me. Except, as they both slowly drained away and weariness settled in my bones, I realized something else too: I really didn’t like myself at all. It wasn’t as strong as hate, not so easily fired up and not so easily shed either. It wasn’t a sharp, hot reaction to something stupid I’d done. It was more pervasive than that, persistent. It was…it was my baseline. I’d spent so long cultivating all my jagged edges in defense that maybe I’d never bothered to worry that there was nothing much in me worth defending.