Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  Harry winced. “Good point.”

  It was the only fucking point, actually. Every decision we’d made since coming aboard the ship had been about choosing what might harm us later instead of what might harm us now. Guys like Harry didn’t like choices like that. Guys like Harry hadn’t grown up in Kopa.

  Maybe I brought something to the team after all: years of finely tuned fatalism.

  “I’ll catch you guys later,” Harry said.

  “Yeah. Try not to explode.”

  “That’s the plan,” Harry told me with a grin, and headed off.

  Lucy and I sat on my bunk and played Go Fish.

  Scared and bored. Bored and scared. Sometimes it felt like the military had stripped me of the ability to feel any other emotion when they’d shoved me in an itchy uniform and bad-fitting boots the day I’d turned sixteen, and blasted me into the black.

  Then Lucy laughed when she won, and then I felt Cam’s presence at the edge of my consciousness, safe and solid, and I knew that was nothing but bullshit.

  ****

  It took the guys a while to get rid of the tanks. Lucy was sick of playing Go Fish long before that. I went with her to grab her pens from where she’d left them in Doc’s makeshift medbay. I pressed my hand against the wall where the metal from the exploding tank had been sucked in. It gave a little against the pressure of my touch, and my fingers dipped inside, piercing the viscous outer layer. Inside was warm. Wet and spongy. My fingertips tingled as tiny sparks zipped around them. I withdrew my hand again. I wondered if the metal had dissolved, or if it had been carried away like a jagged acanthocyte in a bloodstream.

  There was nothing here I understood.

  I pushed it away whenever I could. Forced myself not to look it in the eye.

  Sometimes I could almost forget where I was. Sometimes, when I was sharing a cigarette with Doc or messing around with Cam or trading insults with Chris, sometimes I almost forgot. But then I’d feel one of them at the edges of my consciousness, cold and curious. The Faceless.

  Faceless, and nameless too, except for Kai-Ren.

  I was heading back to our quarters when I sensed him. I turned, and saw him standing there with two others.

  I knew instinctively which one he was, even though it should have been impossible. Three identical Faceless in their black, gleaming body armor, tall and silent and terrifying.

  There would always be a part of me that knew them from my nightmares. That only saw the cold-blooded killing machines that had burned most our cities off the face of the planet without a twinge of anything even resembling conscience. They would always be alien, and there was nothing in the universe that could ever bridge that completely. Just because we could communicate now, just because Kai-Ren was curious enough to listen to the buzzing of the little insects called humanity didn’t mean that he would ever truly understand us, or that we would ever truly understand him.

  But he was my savior too.

  I moved toward the Faceless, 12toward Kai-Ren, and exhaled slowly when he reached out and rubbed his gloved hand over my hair. My hair had grown out in the months I’d been here. It no longer crinkled and prickled under his touch. It was longer now, sticking up at weird angles. It gave Cam something to twist his fingers in when I blew him. We both liked that.

  “Bray-dee.” Kai-Ren said my name with a hum of pleasure.

  I stepped into his space, and slid my hand down his chest.

  It had felt wrong at first, doing this. Touching and being touched. It had felt like a betrayal of the same touches I shared with Cam, but it wasn’t.

  Not…not when he didn’t understand us. He liked us. He liked our warmth, our sudden bursts of irrational emotion, our strangeness. We caught his attention. We pleased him, like shiny baubles pleased some ancient king. Sometimes it felt as though we were always teetering on the brink of greater understanding, of actual meaningful communication—Cam certainly believed Kai-Ren saw us as more than interesting little diversions—but I thought that maybe we were just too different. Just because Kai-Ren liked to get caught in the echo chamber of our emotions, of our love, our fear, our hope, didn’t mean he understood them.

  Where Cam saw tentative connections between us, twisting and shining like fishing line in the water, I only ever saw dark, empty space.

  Kai-Ren hissed under his breath, and the other two Faceless melted away.

  “Bray-dee. Little one.” He plucked at my T-shirt with his gloved fingers, pulling it free from the waistband of my pants. Even with the glove, his touch was cool. The ship was humid, but the Faceless were cold-blooded. Kai-Ren moved his hand along my abdomen and my muscles jumped under his touch. His other hand gripped my jaw lightly, and he turned my face from side to side as though he was searching it for something.

  He saved me, once.

  Twice.

  He saved me.

  He saved all of us.

  Humanity still lived and breathed and crawled around on the spinning ball of dirt we called Earth because of Kai-Ren. It’s not so difficult to worship the unknowable power that holds your life in its hands. It’s human nature. A thousand religions were built on it. Merciful gods are only a new creation. Scratch the surface and underneath they’re all fed on blood and fear.

  I tried not to flinch as Kai-Ren slid his fingers past my waistband.

  He hissed again, and released me.

  “Kai-Ren!” Lucy rounded the bend of the corridor, clutching her pens.

  “Lu-cee.”

  Lucy grinned, and slid her hand into his. “I drew you a picture! Do you want to see it?”

  A braver man, or maybe a smarter one, would have seen this moment for what it was. Seen him for what he was. A predator. A nightmare. Should have seen the death’s head under that black mask, should have seen that he was a cold-blooded thing.

  But I wasn’t, and I didn’t, and all because of the pleased hum he made when Lucy curled her fingers through his.

  I let my chattering little sister draw Kai-Ren away from me.

  Just stared and let it happen, and reminded myself again that he had saved us all. The nightmare, the savior; they were the same thing, and I still hadn’t reconciled that. Still hadn’t found a way to stop my heart from trying to beat out of my chest when he was close. I probably never would.

  Kai-Ren had never hurt her. I knew he wouldn’t.

  I knew that, or told myself I did.

  But knowing was never enough to kill the fear at the heart of me. Fear was just another thing the universe let build up, let feed on itself until it was big enough to shatter me over and over again, and then send the fragments spinning into the black.

  Fear was one of the few things I understood.

  Without it, I would be adrift.

  Chapter Two

  On the Faceless ship we debriefed every night. Doc had insisted on that from the first day, just like he’d insisted we keep to a regular schedule like the one the military had drilled into us for years. Doc had brought a clock with him from Defender Three. It was an old wind-up clock with hands instead of a digital display. Our lives were ruled by that little clock. Time was arbitrary, out here more than anywhere, but Doc made sure we had day and night, every hour counted and accounted for.

  At first the Faceless thought it was strange, the way we’d stay in our room and sleep from ten until six. And it had felt strange too. There was no dimming of the lights at night on the Faceless ship like there had been on the station, and no turning them on again in the morning. But Doc’s insistence of sticking to a routine had stopped us from going crazy in those first few weeks probably.

  Bringing a clock that didn’t need batteries had been smart. It only took about a week for all the tablets to run down. We’d started with twelve solar powered chargers but were running through them at a rate of knots. Sometimes there wasn’t enough light outside the ship for them to get any juice and at least one of them had been completely ruined when we skirted too close to something that looked a lot like an electri
cal storm, but probably wasn’t. What the fuck did I know about what was out here?

  We debriefed in our room. Even Lucy joined us, lying on the top bunk above mine and drawing pictures while we went over everything we’d done that day.

  “Well, we’ve lost our oxygen tanks,” Doc growled, puffing on a cigarette. He was sitting on his trunk, knees apart, big hands dangling into the space between them. He had the hands of a rugby player, not a surgeon, but I’d seen him with those hands shoved up the wrists in the guts of some guy and I knew they were deceptive. “I checked the seals on the atmo suits as well, and they’ve all corroded. They’re useless.”

  He dragged the toe of his boot across the damp, spongy floor.

  The first week or so we were onboard we’d tried to keep our stuff dry and clean, but the air itself was damp and humid so it was impossible. The Faceless ship had been hard on our gear. We were mostly using notebooks instead of datapads, and not just because we were fast running out of ways to charge the datapads.

  “Can we fix the seals?” Chris Varro asked.

  “No idea,” Doc said, puffing out a mouthful of smoke. “It’s possible we can use some of the Faceless goo in a pinch, but I wouldn’t want to gamble my life on it. Or anyone’s.”

  Chris nodded, his brow furrowed, pacing back and forth in front of the strange filmy window. Stars slid slowly past behind him and I tore my gaze away.

  “Fried another solar charger today,” Andre said from his bunk.

  Chris stopped pacing. “Another one?”

  Andre nodded. “We’re down to six now.”

  “Shit,” Chris said.

  “Swear jar!” Lucy announced from the bunk above mine, her skinny legs and bare feet swinging in my field of vision.

  The humidity on the Faceless ship was probably going to wreck our canvas bunks too—even on those rare days it was inexplicably cold everything was still so fucking wet—but Lucy was light enough that she wouldn’t hurt too much if she crashed on top of me one night. Chris was probably the one who had most to worry about on that account: Andre was built like a tank.

  Harry, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, laughed when Chris hunted through his pockets for something to appease Lucy with. He came up with a sachet of sugar he must have saved from a ration pack, and tossed it up towards Lucy.

  I didn’t like Chris much, and I hadn’t since the day I’d met him on Defender Three after I’d shared all Cam’s memories of fucking and being fucked by the guy. Of loving him. I’d felt for him the things Cam had felt when they’d been together, and the asshole had looked right through me.

  It hadn’t been his fault, but it had stung.

  There was also the time that his buddies in intel had beaten the crap out of me, and the time they’d put Cam and me in a cell underground. Neither of those things had been Chris’s ideas, but he hadn’t exactly objected too hard either. Chris had come through for me since, but we were never going to be friends. Chris was better looking than me, and smarter than me, and he’d had Cam first.

  Cam, sitting beside me on my bunk, caught my eye like he’d sensed my mood souring. Maybe he had. Maybe everyone had. Maybe my jealousy washed through the whole ship like the last dregs of moonshine you swirled in the bottom of the bottle while you braced yourself to swallow it down, and then it burned the whole way.

  “Yeah.” Andre shrugged his massive shoulders. “We need to figure out some way to charge our equipment using the ship’s power. But everything here is...”

  I glanced at the wall as a cluster of bioluminescent platelets burbled through it. Power thrummed all around us, but how the fuck were we supposed to plug anything in?

  “It’s a moot point anyway,” Cam said, “since everything corrodes so rapidly. The datapads won’t last much longer than the chargers.”

  “Okay.” Chris nodded, worry tugging the edges of his mouth down. He dipped his head, and it threw the dark shadows under his eyes into stark relief. For a moment his face looked like a skull, the eye sockets empty. A death’s head, or maybe a Faceless. And then he looked up again, and the illusion vanished and he just looked tired.

  Despite Doc’s insistence on maintaining a routine, Chris didn’t sleep much. It was like he was working on a deadline only he could feel. Like he couldn’t get more than a few hours sleep at a time before he was driven from his bunk with the urge to work. I didn’t even know what the hell he did every day, except he knew the Faceless ship better than the rest of us. He was always checking something new out and coming back to the room with pages and pages of notes.

  “So we just make the move completely to paper and pencils,” Chris said. “And hope we don’t run out.”

  “We still don’t know anything about how Faceless tech works,” Harry said. “If we could find a way to make it compatible with ours, we could use it, and then transfer all the data back whenever we get back to a Defender.”

  “Faceless tech is synapses and blood and brain chemistry,” Doc said. “We’re already using Faceless tech—it’s how we can talk to them. They plugged us in to it via an infection. Well…” He snorted. “Well, Rushton was plugged in by the Faceless. The rest of us did it to ourselves. Still, it’s biological, not mechanical. It’s technology, but I don’t think it’s the sort we can upload files on, anymore than we can upload them to another person’s brain.”

  Just another word we had to rewrite the definition for when it came to the Faceless then. Just another concept we barely had the language to explain.

  “That’s not exactly true though,” Chris said. He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to release the tension he was holding in them. “There’s this thing near the base of the helix that spins like a turbine. That has to be manufactured. I can’t believe biology can be that precise.”

  Doc huffed, and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “They’re aliens, Varro. Whole fucking universe right outside that window, and you think biology’s bound by what you know about from Earth? Those rules don’t apply out here in the black. And for all we know somewhere out there is a species that shits perfect equilateral triangles!”

  “Swear jar!” Lucy exclaimed, and Doc grumbled as he went through his pockets.

  Doc had a point though.

  This wasn’t a scientific mission, and we sure as shit weren’t scientists. Chris and Andre and Harry were from intel, but there were no codes to crack here, no information to sift through looking for patterns. The Faceless were too different than us. Our frames of reference were useless here, as useless as our datapads and oxygen tanks and atmo suits.

  And if the guys from intel were useless, the rest of us were even worse. Cam and Doc and Lucy and me were just the extras. At least Doc could contribute on the research side of things, and Cam was smart enough to keep up with the others, but Lucy and I weren’t exactly pulling our weight. If we ever made it back to Earth, nobody would be publishing any research papers by Brady or Lucy Garrett. We were just a pair of reffos along for the ride.

  We drew pictures and we told stories about what we remembered from Kopa and our dad, and every day I saw the echo of him in Lucy’s smile and heard him in her laugh.

  Sometimes I wondered what my dad would say if he could see us now. His kids, drifting in the stars. I liked to think he would have smiled at that, and said something about how he always knew we were made for more than Kopa. That was probably just a fantasy though. How could he even have imagined something like that? My dad’s world had been a small one, a narrow one. Men like him didn’t get to dream.

  I figured that maybe me and Lucy could do the dreaming for him.

  I didn’t know.

  We were both alive, and that was miraculous.

  We were also on a Faceless ship, and most days I couldn’t tell the difference between the miracle and the nightmare.

  Just fucking semantics maybe, but it prickled at my consciousness all the time, like some sort of scab I couldn’t leave alone. How could I come to terms with something I couldn’t ev
en define? How could I process a thing I couldn’t even fucking articulate?

  It left me with nothing but nausea. It was the sort of nausea that had more to do with Doc’s philosophy books than his medical ones, I think. I probably shouldn’t have read them at all, but what else was there to do?

  The hours and days all bled together on the Faceless ship just like they had on Defender Three, really. Mostly I did what I’d done there. I kept my head down and tried to avoid work. Back on Defender Three I’d been counting down the days until the military let me go home again. It didn’t work like that here. How could it? Time wasn’t just arbitrary out here—it was meaningless.

  I didn’t have the same anger in me here though; the same low flare that burned in my gut and itched at the base of my skull, day in and day out, until I was wired enough to lash out and get in a fight just to break the fucking tension. Here, Lucy was with me. I was looking after her, just like our dad had wanted. I had Cam as well, and he was more than I’d ever dared to hope for.

  Cam saw better things in me than I ever saw in myself.

  He caught me looking at him, and leaned in closer. He reached around behind me and hooked a finger through the belt loop of my pants, like he just wanted to keep me close and remind me that I was his. I liked it.

  “The Faceless have weapons that blasted our cities off the face of the planet,” Chris said, unwilling to let shit go, just like always. He got an idea fixed in his head and he went with it. And he might not have been a scientist, but he had that same need to assign everything a classification. To create order out of chaos by putting labels on things. “You really think that’s biological tech?”

  Doc stubbed his cigarette out on the top of the footlocker. “Why the hell not? You ever heard of a bombardier beetle? Irreducible complexity is a fallacy. If evolution can give us a beetle that shoots boiling acid out of its ass, why not some sort of weapon that could destroy a city? We’ve been on this ship for months now, and I’ve yet to see anything that looks like it came from a factory or a store. They Faceless aren’t monkeys with tools like us, Varro. They’re insects in a hive.”