Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  “Where are we?” Cam asked him.

  Kai-Ren turned his face toward him. As always he spoke in a hissing burst of sounds that no human should have been able to understand. Those sounds were translated by the connection that bound our consciousness to the hive’s. “We are home.”

  Cam’s confusion was a flicker of static, and mental pictures of the things he’d seen the last time he’d been with the Faceless. The two suns. The purple sky. The towers that reached up to touch it, bulging with cupolas and buttresses like the massive nests of cathedral termites. “This isn’t the place you took me to the first time.”

  “Home,” Kai-Ren said again, his voice skipping as the connection lagged and then over-compensated. We heard the words, but an outsider who didn’t share the connection only would have heard those hissing sounds. “This is where we are from. Where we are made. Only here.”

  I blinked, and saw a flash of color in my vision, like for a moment the interstellar clouds outside the ship had somehow been projected onto the inside of my eyelids.

  “I don’t understand,” Cam said, his eyebrows drawing together, and I wondered if he’d seen the same thing. If, several decks above us in our room, through the membranous passages and conduits and walls of the ship, everyone else had too. “Kai-Ren, I don’t understand.”

  And that was the kicker, right? And it always would be. We just didn’t understand. We couldn’t force our mouths to move in the right way to even make the same sound the Faceless used to name their species. Kai-Ren had broken down the barriers between our minds and it still wasn’t enough for understanding. But we all kept trying, didn’t we? Chris, and Cam, and even me, in my own stupid way.

  I looked up at Kai-Ren’s Faceless mask now, like somehow, even after all this time, I expected to find the answers there.

  Nothing but dark space.

  A slow learner, my stepmother always used to call me. She was probably right.

  If Kai-Ren was even staring back at me, I had no way of knowing.

  Kai-Ren made a humming noise as my heart thumped under his palm, and then he lifted his hand from my chest. “Come.”

  He leaned back into the wall of the alcove, and it melted around him. For a moment the shape of him was illuminated by the pulsing orange lights, and he looked like some sort of sea creature, a jellyfish swimming in a dark ocean, and then he was gone.

  Cam took my hand, drew a breath, and we followed Kai-Ren into the walls of the ship.

  The fluid hurt my eyes—a saltwater sting—and then it was gone. Noise vanished with it, and became muted and low. My chest ached as I held my breath for longer I should have and then, my muscles tensing with the knowledge of what was coming next, I opened my mouth and the fluid flooded in.

  There was always a moment of panic when my lungs first pulled in fluid instead of air, a moment where I wanted to claw at my throat and choke. But it lasted for second at most, and then it passed, leaving nothing by a strange heaviness in my chest, the memory of an ache, and my lizard brain’s silent, primeval screech in the back of my skull that this wasn’t natural and that I was going to asphyxiate. It always took a moment to shut that asshole up. He’d been screaming that at me since I first stepped on board a shitbox and left the Earth’s atmosphere.

  A moment of disquiet always followed the panic: we were putting something alien in our bodies, and we didn’t even know what was in it. This one was easier to smother that the panic, because after everything that had gone before, what the hell did it matter?

  I exhaled and opened my eyes, my lungs spasming reflexively as they adjusted, and bubbles rose in front of my face. The liquid in the walls was warm, heavier than water. It was thick and viscous like amniotic fluid, and, from what we could tell, carried enough oxygen and nutrients to keep us alive, as well as something that accelerated our healing if we were injured or sick. We could live on it if we had to, and once our supplies ran all the way out I guessed we would.

  It was gross, but it was better than starving to death.

  This wasn’t one of the alcoves we’d been shown to feed in though. This was a wall, and Kai-Ren had already stepped through it and was waiting for us on the other side.

  We followed him through, the wall melting and reforming around us seamlessly.

  Coming out was always worse than going in. My lungs burned as I coughed and hacked the fluid up and drew a sharp, painful breath that felt like a knife in the chest. It took a moment before I could stand upright again, and before I could clear the fluid out of my eyes and take a look around.

  We were standing in a large, vaulted chamber. It was dark apart from the lights shifting in the walls, and the air was dense and moist. It was hotter in here than in the rest of the ship. There were no doors into the room, hence coming through the walls, and no windows to the outside or through to other rooms. In the middle of the floor there was what looked to be a shallow pool, with thick, membranous sides keeping the liquid contained. It was a little raised from the floor, and a strange haze hung over it like a fog. It took me a moment to realize it was steam. The strange muddy fluid in the pool was so hot it was almost at boiling point.

  Kai-Ren stood at the side of the pool, and Cam and I moved forward to join him.

  “Here is home,” Kai-Ren said, and made a protracted hissing sound that didn’t translate in our minds. A flash of something that felt like frustration buzzed between us, and then he tried again. “Here is where we begin.”

  He reached into the simmering liquid of the pool, not even flinching as his hand sank up to the wrist and he withdrew a drooping sac. He cupped it in his gloved hands and held it out to show us.

  “Here is where we make a hive.”

  A strange, tiny thing flicked and flicked and flicked beneath the opaque skin of the sac, and for a moment I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

  And then, in a sudden rush, I did.

  That flickering little movement, as rapid as the beating wings of an insect, was a pulse. A tiny muscle throbbing in a still-forming embryo.

  A heart.

  A life.

  We were in a Faceless hatchery, and Kai-Ren was showing us one of their young.

  This was where the Faceless began.

  I’d thought of them as insects, hadn’t I? Ever since the beginning, I’d thought of them as cold-blooded creatures in a hive. The only thing missing was the queen.

  I stared down at the tick-tick-ticking heartbeat of the sac held in Kai-Ren’s hands. Behind him, the walls pulsed in the same rhythm.

  And then I realized.

  Hadn’t I also thought from the beginning that the ship was a living thing? The ship wasn’t the hive. The ship was the queen, and we were all living inside her.

  Chapter Five

  The colorful clouds of the nebula washed past in our slipstream and painted my skin faintly green with the light that filtered through the window. I missed daylight. I missed the burn of sunlight on my back. I blinked my eyes a few times to try to clear my vision, but nothing happened.

  It was hot. I sweated and itched and my shirt stuck to my back. I stank, probably, but so did we all.

  I watched as Harry walked over to the wall. He lifted his hand to touch it, and his brow furrowed. He dropped his hand back to his side again, his fingers twitching.

  He didn’t want to touch the inside of the queen with his fingers, and meanwhile his bare feet were leaving damp prints on the floor. Meanwhile whatever fluids she produced were keeping him alive. Meanwhile he was living inside her like a parasite, sucking at her like a tick getting bloated with her blood.

  Harry’s fingers shook as he shoved his hand inside his pocket, and the rush of nausea I felt might have been all mine, or it might have been feedback from the connection we shared.

  A glob of something, dark and shapeless like a clot, slid through the walls.

  Harry looked away, his mouth turning down.

  I swallowed and tasted bile in the back of my throat. Nothing had changed today except
our perception but sometimes that was all it took. We were all shaken. Doc looked greener around the gills than the light necessitated and even Andre looked a little faint.

  Chris was the only adult in the room who didn’t seem to be bothered by the idea that the Faceless ship might be an insect queen. He was standing over Cam, watching intently as Cam drew a sketch of the weird pool in the hatchery in Chris’s ubiquitous notebook.

  Lucy was drawing too, sitting on the bunk beside me with her legs swinging. She was drawing rainbow clouds that looked like fairy floss. She was wearing one of the gray pinafores they’d made for her back on Defender Three. She was hunched over so that it gaped a little at the front and the braces took turns sliding off her skinny shoulders. Her shoulder blades were sharp as wings.

  They wouldn’t know us now on Defender Three. We went barefoot most days, and shirtless in the heat. Doc had even cut off a pair of pants at the knees to wear them as shorts, his hairy legs bristling out the ends. None of us would pass muster by military standards these days. Most days I wondered if we’d forgotten how to be military. Days like today I wondered if we were forgetting how to be human too.

  The Faceless had already changed us once, with the connection between us. What if it didn’t end there? We breathed the humid air inside the queen. We ingested whatever was in the fluids that flowed in her veins. What if exposure meant mutation?

  “I need a cigarette,” Doc muttered, slipping from the room.

  I followed that siren call, and rounded the corner into his makeshift medbay.

  “I don’t fucking have any,” he grumbled at me, like it was my fault. “But I’d give my left nut for one right about now.”

  “Thought I was on a promise,” I said, and sat down on one of the plastic crates he used to keep his books from getting damp.

  Doc sighed. He reached for his little wind-up clock. His surgeon’s hands shook as he turned the wheel on the back. “Well,” he said, gruff as always, “that was some unsettling shit you and Rushton shared just now.”

  I shifted my weight where I sat. Behind me, the walls of the living ship pulsed. “Right?”

  “It’s a good theory though,” he said, his bushy eyebrows tugging together. “It’s solid. Maybe the ship has to come here for the temperature to be right for the embryos to grow, or for the eggs to be fertilized, or whatever the hell is needed to kickstart them.”

  “Radiation, maybe,” I suggested.

  “Maybe,” Doc said, setting the clock aside. “There’s literally nothing off the table at this point, is there?”

  That was what made it so unsettling, I figured. There were no certainties here. No truths. There was no solid ground underneath our feet when it came to the Faceless. We were just spinning in space, untethered, like always.

  Doc tugged a pen out of his pocket and jammed it between his teeth. He chewed on it aggressively for a moment. “What’s Varro going to make of it, I wonder?”

  “Chris?” I wrinkled my nose. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s from intel, son,” Doc reminded me. “And Kai-Ren just told us where to find the ship’s hatchery. You think a man who’s spend the last three months looking for weapons isn’t going to think about that tactical advantage?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, unease biting at me all the same. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “We’ve got information,” Doc corrected me. “We just learned more about the Faceless today than we have in months. We learned where they keep their young, and we learned that this place, this cloud—whatever the fuck it is—is necessary for the breeding process. Do you remember why we don’t put women on Defenders, Brady?”

  “Yeah.” I chewed my lip for a moment. “Because women are more important than men when it comes to keeping a species alive.”

  “Don’t make that face,” Doc said with a growl. “You know how it works. It’s a numbers game, pure and simple. If you have one man and fifty women, in nine months you can have fifty babies. But if you have one woman and fifty men, in nine months you’ll only have one baby.” He shrugged. “Generally speaking.”

  “Yeah, so you don’t put your most valuable resource on the front line,” I said, and thought of Lucy, and my mother, and my ex-girlfriend Kaylee. I though of all. I thought of all the women who lived in Kopa, their faces lined by the time they were in their twenties, red dust ground into their cracked skin. Nobody was worth anything much in Kopa. Not men, not women, and not kids. All that talk about the future of humanity, about women being precious resources, but reffos weren’t a part of that equation. It was life and death for humanity, caught between the Faceless and extinction, and we still found a way to make shit like where you were from matter.

  Doc nodded, his gaze fixed on me as he chewed his pen. “So if this place, this cloud, really is the only place the Faceless can breed? Kai-Ren just brought us right to it.”

  I was slow on the uptake. “What’s that got to do with Chris?”

  “He’d be a fool,” Doc said, “not to think about some way to use that against them.”

  My stomach twisted. “Are you serious, Doc?”

  He shrugged. “Brady, I’m a doctor. My whole fucking thing is about the preservation of life, and I’m thinking it. What are the chances those boys from intel aren’t already ten steps ahead of me?”

  “He just wants to understand them, doesn’t he?” I thought back to every memory I’d shared of Chris’s. He burned to know things, to understand. He was the one who’d cooked up this crazy plan to connect with the Faceless voluntarily. But Doc was right. He’d be a fool not to consider all his options, and Chris was no fool. “I mean, he’ll be considering it, for what it’s worth, but we don’t have any weapons. We couldn’t put a dent in a Faceless ship with the tech that we have. We sure as fuck couldn’t blow up their breeding grounds. Do you know what nuclear weapons do in space?”

  “Do you?” Doc asks, the hint of a teasing smile tugging at his mouth.

  “Course I don’t.” I rolled my eyes. “But fuck all, probably. It’d be like throwing a water bomb in the fucking ocean.”

  “Exactly,” Doc said. “But we’re surrounded by Faceless tech, aren’t we?”

  “Faceless tech we can’t use.”

  “Yet,” Doc said, and spat out a tiny piece of chewed plastic. It hit the damp floor, and then sank into it and was subsumed. “We can’t use it yet.”

  Okay.

  Okay, yeah, so that was probably what Doc meant by Chris being ten steps ahead, because of course he would have considered options I didn’t even think of.

  “You think he’s planning something?” I asked, lowering my voice.

  “I dunno, son,” Doc said. There was a dark blue mark on his lip from where he’d split the pen open. “It’s big, you know? And intel doesn’t train diplomats.”

  Yeah.

  I shrugged though, because what difference did it make?

  So maybe Chris was ten steps ahead of guys like me and Doc. But what the fuck did that matter when he was still a thousand steps behind the Faceless? A thousand steps behind the Faceless, and a million miles from home.

  ****

  The canvas of Cam’s bunk creaked, and a moment later he was climbing in beside me. I blinked my eyes open to discover that the light filtering through the window was blue now. It settled on the planes of Cam’s face and made him look sick and washed-out like some consumptive patient with one foot already in the grave. I missed seeing his skin under sunlight, and kissing him when he tasted like saltwater from the wind that whipped off the ocean.

  I kissed him now, still half asleep, and shifted to make room for him. I rested one hand on his hip, my fingers brushing against the humidity-damp fabric of his underwear, and my thumb resting against his skin. He slipped a leg between mine, the rasp of our hair bringing me out in goose bumps, and then we kissed again.

  It wasn’t leading anywhere. Not in a room full of other guys, with my little sister sleeping in the bunk right above mine. Just because the
y’d been in our heads once and seen all our memories didn’t mean they got a free show now.

  “You were quiet tonight,” Cam murmured, his breath hot on my lips. “You feeling okay?”

  He knew I wasn’t, of course. I was pretty sure I’d been transmitting a discordant note of unease through our connection since I’d spoken to Doc.

  “Just a lot I’m thinking about,” I told him. “With all this new Faceless stuff.”

  “Yeah.” He bumped our noses together. “Don’t think too hard, okay?”

  I snorted and closed my eyes. “Okay.”

  Sometimes I didn’t want the universe to be any bigger than this. Just Cam and me, skin and heartbeats. Sometimes I wished that time would just stop in moments like these and we’d remain this way forever like insects caught in amber. That was the pessimist in me talking, or maybe the realist. Because if everything was in a state of decay, if the balance of the universe always tipped towards entropy, then how long could Cam and I stand against those odds? Every day we were together, weren’t we also another day closer to ruin? But wasn’t every day we were together also another day I wouldn’t give up for anything?

  That was the difference between me and Cam, I think. He took every day as a gift. I took every day as one step closer to the end. And I was trying to flip that around, trying to be more like him, but maybe I didn’t have that capacity for optimism in me. Maybe the glass was never going to be half full for someone like me.

  “You…” Cam stroked the side of my face, his touch drawing my eyes open again. “I love you.”

  Such quiet certainty in his tone.

  “I love you too,” I whispered back, and that was the core of both our very different universes at least; the truth around which everything else orbited like a boiling sun.

  Cam smiled, and pressed his mouth against mine again. The kiss was faint and fleeting and I tilted my chin up to chase down another one when the first ended. And another, open-mouthed, our tongues touching softly, the heat building slowly between us. Cam’s body shook with a silent laugh as I rocked my hips, and his hand slid down the back of my underwear.