Starlight

by Lisa Henry

  “A shrink,” I said. “I mean, they’re mostly assholes too, but maybe not all of them are. I’m tired of hating everything, Cam. I’m tired of being angry all the time.”

  My voice broke on that, and Cam set his notebook down and climbed onto my bunk with me. He propped himself up on one elbow and curled his free hand around the back of my neck.

  “Hey,” he whispered, and I blinked away my sudden stinging tears. “Nothing you do, nothing you are, can ever make me stop loving you, okay?”

  I nodded, my throat tight.

  “You were right about me,” he said. “I was so scared out here the first time, and there’s like this room in my head where I’ve locked that part of me away, and sometimes I think he’s still screaming, you know?” He swallowed, his throat bobbing. “Sometimes I think that if I open that door, I won’t be able to ever shut him up again, and that terrifies me like nothing else. You don’t…” He swallowed again. “You don’t have something like that in you. You don’t have any locked doors inside you, and that’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t make you weaker. You’re not a burden, Brady, and I’m not the only one doing the heavy lifting here, you know? We’re both fucked up.”

  “So fucked up,” I whispered back to him.

  He showed me a shaky smile “And we both help each other.”

  “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if I wasn’t helping you anymore?”

  “Yeah.” He squeezed the back of my neck. “I’d tell you. But it wouldn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

  I’d always thought of Cam as the guy who was always saving me. I’d never thought I was saving him as well, or that maybe we were so tangled up in each other that we were just drowning together and pulling each other down. Would someone else tell us, I wondered, if they saw that happening, or would be both just sink to the bottom of the black ocean, struggling the whole way?

  Cam saw my fear. He always did.

  “We’re okay, Brady,” he said. “You and me, we’re okay. We make it work. We save each other, remember? We always do.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I closed my eyes and held onto that thought, that faith that Cam had in us against the universe. “We always do.”

  ****

  I woke up with a growling stomach and padded off to the nearest alcove. Lucy might have taken to these things like a duck to water but I would never like it. The ship took care of my hunger but it didn’t take care of that voice in the back of my head that told me I hadn’t actually eaten. I was too human, and too stubborn. I needed food in my belly and sunlight on my skin. I needed my feet in the dirt, and all the wonders of the universe would never change that about me.

  I stripped my clothes off and stepped into the alcove. I squeezed my eyes shut as the alcove closed behind me, and then the walls expanded, filled somehow to compress around me. It was wet and dark, and then the alcove began to fill with fluid. It didn’t matter how many times I did this. I always felt that same shock, that same visceral moment of no, when I inhaled that first breath of liquid.

  I coughed reflexively, and the fluid flowed into my lungs.

  It was easier after that. It was like swimming at night, my head under the dark water, suspended in the blackness except with no burning pressure in my lungs telling me I had to break the surface and breathe.

  The others could stay for hours in the alcoves, nutrients feeding into them, toxins leaching out, but I’d never been great just spending time alone in my head. Cam tried to get me to meditate once. Fucking disaster that was.

  “Just breathe and center yourself, Brady.”

  “What the fuck does that even mean? This is bullshit.”

  I was not at one with the universe. Not then and sure as shit not now.

  I stayed in the alcove until my hunger pangs had vanished, and then dug my fingers into the seam in the wall to release me. I coughed again at the switch between liquid and air, and then stepped back out of the alcove. I wiped the fluid off me with my shirt, and then pulled my underwear and pants back on. I slung my shirt over my shoulder to hang it up when I got back to our room. There was no way to do laundry here. No water, and sure as hell no soap. The fluid just dried on our skin and on our clothes, and fell away in flakes.

  I thought about Doc and how he’d asked me about my ambition. I reckon my one ambition was to get back to Earth and have a decent fucking shower. Which probably wasn’t what he’d meant at all.

  The room was empty except for Andre and Lucy when I got back.

  I hung my shirt over the end of my bunk. “Where is everyone?”

  “Doc and Harry are in the medbay, I think,” Andre said. “No idea where Chris and Cam are.”

  “Chris went to an alcove,” Lucy announced, looking up from her drawing. “He was pissed off because you took the closest one.”

  I’d have a go at her about her language except she probably picked it up from me. “He should have got up earlier then.”

  Lucy grinned at me. “That’s what Cam said.”

  And then the smile faded from her face.

  I turned.

  There was a Faceless in the doorway, looking in at us. And…

  And I couldn’t feel him. There was nothing come off him at all. No emotion, no curiosity, no static buzz or back-and-forth of anything between us.

  This Faceless was a stranger.

  Andre moved to stand beside me, in front of Lucy. His shoulder knocked against mine, and that simple contact brought me out in goose bumps.

  And then another Faceless stepped into view.

  Kai-Ren.

  He made a low hissing sound that I recognized was supposed to sound soothing, and beckoned me forward.

  I froze.

  “Bray-dee.”

  Both a command and an encouragement.

  I stepped toward him, my heart pounding.

  The Faceless—the Stranger—made a questioning sound and reached out a gloved hand toward me. He slid his fingers down my torso. He prodded my stomach, seemingly fascinated by the softness of my skin and the way it bowed under the slight pressure he exerted. I stared up into his mask while his fingers slid down my abdomen, and my faint reflection stared back at me.

  What had Cam called me? A kid with eyes as big as an owl’s.

  The Stranger made a curious noise and jabbed his finger into my stomach, pushing a grunt out of me. I twisted away, one hand reaching out reflexively to put some space between us.

  He caught my wrist, and tugged me closer. Dragged my arm up so that he could see my fingers trembling right in front of his mask. My weak human hand, nothing but soft pink skin and blunt nails. The Stranger hummed and leaned in, and fear froze me.

  There was no connection between us. No confused white noise that sometimes approached almost-understanding. There was nothing.

  And then Kai-Ren made a sound, and the Stranger released my wrist.

  I took a step back from him, dizzy with adrenaline, my heart beating fast like a rabbit trembling under the scrutiny of a wild dog.

  Kai-Ren and the Stranger left.

  “Brady,” Andre rasped. “You okay?”

  I rubbed my stomach where the Stranger had jabbed it. It felt like it would bruise. I nodded, because I couldn’t bring myself to speak yet.

  “What was that?” Lucy asked. “Why couldn’t we hear him?”

  “He wasn’t one of ours,” Andre told her. “He must’ve been from one of the other ships.”

  I turned back toward them.

  “You okay?” Andre asked again. I could feel his tension, his anxiety, as clearly as I could feel my own.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just… just fucking Human Exhibit Number One in Kai-Ren’s petting zoo, I guess, right?”

  Andre’s mouth quirked into an approximation of a smile, but there was no amusement in it. Just worry. We were powerless here. We always had been, but that didn’t make the reminders any easier to bear.

  “What’s a petting zoo?” Lucy whispered.

  I dragged my trembling fingertips over her
hair. I guessed that was someplace Cam and I had never got around to taking her. “It’s a place you can go and pet all the animals. Like goats and sheep and wallabies and shit, I don’t know. When we get home, I’ll take you to one, okay?”

  “Okay.” Her voice was shaky.

  Another promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. Add it to the list.

  But empty or not, my promises made her happy. By the time Cam got back Lucy was sitting on her bunk drawing lopsided sheep and the trembling in my hands had subsided.

  ****

  Faceless diplomacy, if that’s what it was, was as incomprehensible to us as anything and everything that had come before. The Stranger was on our ship and then he was gone again, and if his presence had meant anything at all, then of course we’d be the last to know.

  “Maybe this wasn’t an official visit,” Harry suggested that night as we played poker with the damp stained cards. “Maybe they’re friends.”

  The idea of a Faceless having a friend was so crazy it made me laugh.

  Cam grinned, and dug his elbow into my ribs. “Well, maybe not a friend as we understand it.”

  “Sure,” Andre drawled. “Right now he and Kai-Ren are kicking back, having some booze, and talking about their old school days.”

  Even Doc laughed at that.

  “Maybe he’s a relative,” Harry suggested. “A brother, or an uncle, or a cousin.”

  Andre hummed. “But he’s not in this hive.”

  “Maybe the hives split,” I said. “If they get too big or something.”

  “Huh,” Doc mused. “Where do you suppose the queens come from then?”

  “Fucked if I know,” Andre said.

  Chris tossed his cards down. “All this speculation is pointless.”

  “Cap,” Harry said, his eyebrows tugging together. “Speculation is all we’ve got. At least it stops us going stir crazy.”

  Chris snorted. “I’m not so sure of that.”

  A joke? Jesus. The isolation must’ve been getting to him too.

  “Okay,” I said. “Who wants to raise the stakes here?”

  “To what?” Andre asked.

  “So back on Defender Three, we’d play for cigarettes and booze,” I said. “And when we ran out of those, we’d play for the shit we wanted when we got home. Like this one guy, Cesari, he’d always bet a whole tray of his nonna’s cannoli. Like I didn’t even know what cannoli was, but the way he talked about it, you’d pretty much bust a—” I shot a look at Lucy. “Your mouth’d water, I mean, when he talked about it.”

  “How the hell do you send a tray of cannoli to a Defender?” Andre asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “You don’t,” I said, taking the cards back and shuffling them. “None of us were ever going to taste that cannoli. That’s not the point. The point is it stopped us from bouncing off the walls.” I considered that. “Some of the time.”

  “I get it,” Harry said. “Okay, so I’m going to bet my grandmother’s scones. Jesus. You could turn up at her place any time of day, and half an hour later you’d be eating buttermilk scones straight from the oven. You’d burn your fingers pulling them open, they were so fresh, and she always had raspberry jam and clotted cream to go them with.”

  My stomach growled.

  “How is that not torture?” Doc grizzled.

  “What about you, Doc?” I asked.

  “Fine. When I was in med school, there was this Thai place down the street from where I was living,” Doc said. “Every Friday I used to go and buy ginger chili chicken with coconut rice. It’d blow your skull off it was so strong. I used to drink a whole quart of milk every time I ate it. It was a goddamn religious experience.”

  “Grandma’s scones and ginger chili chicken,” I said. “What’ve you got, Andre?”

  “Poutine,” Andre said with a grin.

  Harry made a face.

  “Nah.” Andre punched him in the shoulder. “Don’t give me that, man. Poutine is incredible. Fucking scones? Poutine is where it’s at. With so much gravy you gotta eat it with a spoon.”

  Harry made another face just like the first one. “What about you, Chris?”

  Chris exhaled heavily, and considered for a moment. “Calamari. Just salt and pepper calamari, cooked exactly right. Not stringy or rubbery. Just right.” He shot a narrow glare at me. “This is messed up, Brady. Now I just want real food for once.”

  “No, it’s good,” I said. “You just gotta get into it.”

  I glanced at Cam, and saw him smiling at me, like I was doing something right. Something more than making us all hungry, at least.

  “I like fairy bread,” Lucy contributed. “We had some at my birthday party. It was yummy.”

  Then she had to explain fairy bread to everyone except me and Cam.

  “Beach hot dogs,” Cam said when it was his turn. “There’s a food cart at the beach near our place back home, and honestly the hot dogs are pretty crap, but when you’ve been swimming for an hour, you know how starving you get? There is nothing better than a beach hot dog on a Saturday afternoon.”

  “What about you, Brady?” Andre asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’ve got your number,” I told him with a lazy grin. “You reckon some reffo from Kopa has got nothing on you lot, right? I’ll bet every single one of you has eaten in some real fancy restaurants, and paid a shitload of money for some salmon or some bullshit oily fish like that. But have you ever tried barramundi? Freshly caught, and wrapped in foil and cooked on coals from the fire. Just a little bit of bush lemon, and you’re set. And you sit around the fire, your toes in the sand, and you eat until it feels like your stomach will burst.”

  I closed my eyes and inhaled. Could almost smell the salt air. And that was the real trick of this game. Not to feel hungry, or to bitch about what we couldn’t have. It was to get past that, just for a few minutes in our shitty unchanging days, and feel closer to home. Just for a little while.

  Back on Defender Three it had let us escape the monotony, the drudgery, and the fact our days were full of intractable rules and even more intractable asshole officers. And here, on the Faceless ship, it let us forget for a moment that we were farther away from home than any humans had ever been before, and that we were entirely on our own, and that Kai-Ren and the Faceless were still—and would always be—unknowable to us.

  We had each other, at least, for whatever that was worth, and talking about food lead inevitably to talking about family, and about friends. And it didn’t matter that we’d been in each other’s heads, because a story told is never quite the same as a story remembered. There’s something in the telling of it that’s bigger than the memory even if you’ve heard it a hundred times before. It’s familiar and communal at the same time.

  And maybe these guys were officers, and maybe back on their Defenders they’d had come at sharing their stories in a more civilized way—coffee and cigars, probably—but what did it matter as long as we got there in the end?

  So we played cards and talked, and talked some more, and it almost felt like we were home.

  And I had definitely done something right, because later that night Cam dragged me outside and up into that secret place that we called ours, and got down on his knees and blew me.

  And after that he kissed me, and told me that he loved me, and the universe shrunk to just the two of us.

  Chapter Seven

  Back when I was a kid in Kopa, there was a man who lived across the road who had lines in his leathery face as deep as ravines. Those lines caught all the shadows and held them. The ones on his cheeks and neck sprouted bristles his razor couldn’t touch. He was old, with more years behind him than most people in Kopa got to see. His fingers were bent and twisted, with swollen knuckles, and his legs were as skinny as twigs. His eyes were watery slits. And every morning he’d stand outside the shack he lived in, lift his nose to the air and sniff it, and then tell us what weather was coming that day. He was never wrong. Dad said it was because he was so old he’d seen i
t all before, but I liked to imagine it was because he was magic. Whichever it was, we could have used someone like him on the Faceless ship, sniffing out the oncoming storm before it was even a shadow on the horizon.

  Our ship slid through the nebula, and other ships glided along beside her. Sometimes they were nothing but shadows in the color-burst clouds, but sometimes they were close enough to block our views of anything beyond them. And sometimes they touched, melded, and opened their walls so that the Faceless could pass through them. Times like those were accompanied by low static in our connection—the faint buzz of interference from an overlapping network that remained encrypted to us.

  The Faceless weren’t socializing, not exactly, or at least not in any way that was recognizable to us. The nearest I could figure was that they were here to pay their respects to Kai-Ren, and to be shown all the markers of his strength: his ship, his hive, his pool of developing eggs, and his humans. Kai-Ren was like a king showing off his riches to his vassals, or maybe like that one asshole at the gym who flexes his muscles whenever someone looks at him. Fuck if I knew which one it was, or if there was even a difference. It was all dick measuring, right?

  When other Faceless were aboard we stayed close to our room. Even Chris stayed away from whichever Faceless ship was connected to ours like a conjoined twin, because what if they separated again and he was on the wrong one? The thought of being alone out here, truly alone, must have been terrifying even to him.

  Still, we got used to strange Faceless being on our ship sometimes. Got used to not feeling that flicker of recognition we got from those who shared our connection. Got used to their stares following us when they saw us.

  Harry, less interested in Faceless tech than he was in the Faceless themselves, took copious amounts of notes on the way they interacted, his forehead creased as he wrote, coming up again and again against that same wall: how the fuck could we even begin to describe the Faceless when first we had to filter them through the narrow constraints of both our understanding and our language itself? It was hopeless, probably, but it didn’t stop him from trying.