by Lisa Henry
Fucking pointless.
I said as much to him one morning as we were both heading down to one of the alcoves. My belly was growling and as much as my brain told me it wasn’t real food, I needed something.
“It’s not pointless,” he said.
I’d seen his notebooks. Pages and pages covered in weird marks that were his Faceless alphabet. Every different mark corresponding to one of the hissing sounds the Faceless made. And that was just cataloguing them, not even translating them, because where the fuck would he even start on that?
“I’ve seen your chicken-scratch bullshit,” I said. “It’s pointless.”
He elbowed me. “But there’s something there, you know? There has to be. Why would a race that can communicate telepathically also have a verbal language? It has to exist to fill a role that telepathy can’t, right? So maybe if we can figure that out, we can actually learn to speak it.”
“Or maybe they’re totally alien and it’s dumb to even try.”
“Aren’t you even curious though?” he asked, and there was something in his tone of voice, echoed in our connection, that made me think he felt sorry for me. For my short-sightedness. For my lack of imagination. For whatever deficiency it was he saw in me.
“No.” My stomach ached, and it wasn’t just from hunger. “I just want to go home and pretend none of this ever happened.”
Of all of them, maybe it was Harry I should have had most in common with. He was only a couple of years older than me. We were the kids of the team, apart from Lucy, the literal kid. But there were whole universes between guys like me and guys like Harry. I’d seen his memories, and they were nothing like mine.
“Yeah?” he said, and elbowed me again. “Too bad, Brady, because when we get home, I’m gonna visit you and Lucy so often you’ll get sick of the sight of my face.”
“Too late,” I said. “I already am.”
His laughter carried us around the curve of the corridor, and right into the path of a Faceless.
A stranger.
Maybe the Stranger; the one that had touched me while Kai-Ren looked on.
He stared at us through his black mask, and made a humming sound, and a shiver ran down my spine.
It was the Stranger. The one that Kai-Ren had showed around the ship. The one he’d showed us to, like we were toys or trophies or trinkets, or some weird combination of all three, or something entirely different.
It was the not knowing—the never knowing anything—that made everything here so hard. It was like living in total darkness, blindly feeling our way with every step we took.
The Stranger stepped forward, tilting his head on an angle. Zeroed in on Harry like a dog on a scent. Made that humming sound again, and then reached out and curled his gloved fingers around Harry’s throat.
My fear spiked.
“It’s okay,” Harry said, his gaze fixed on the Stranger. “It’s okay, he’s not hurting me.”
The Stranger hummed again, a slightly higher pitch this time, almost as though he was asking a question. And maybe he was, but Harry and I were just stumbling around in the dark, weren’t we? All the fucking time.
The Stranger leaned in close to Harry and Harry’s fear spiked through him. I was standing close enough to feel the aftershocks of it in my gut.
I wondered what The Stranger was seeing. A pale-skinned human, face shaded with reddish stubble since he hadn’t shaved in a day or two. A smatter of freckles over the bridge of his nose that even months in the black couldn’t wash away, and red hair that had once been a sharp officer’s haircut but was now mostly untamed scruff. Did Harry look any different to me to the Stranger’s gaze, or did all humans look alike to them the way the Faceless did to us?
The Stranger hummed again, and loosened his grip on Harry’s throat.
“I’m okay,” Harry said again. He stared up at the Stranger and took a step back from him. He held out his palm as though that would stop him from following if he wanted. “It’s just…it’s just a form of communication we don’t understand yet, right?”
Which one of us was he trying to convince?
He glanced at me quickly. “Let’s use another alcove, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We backed up the way we’d come, leaving the Stranger staring after us and unease rising in our guts.
****
Harry had rediscovered his enthusiasm by the time we reached the alcove on the level above our room.
“Like last night,” he said, “when you got us all talking about food, you know what I was thinking?”
I shrugged.
“Food,” Harry said. “It’s such a universal thing to us, isn’t it? All societies, all cultures, we all break bread. Food and stories. That’s how we communicate. That’s how we bond. Eating and talking is both communication and communion. So I figured the Faceless would have something like that, you know? That there’d be these shared activities like that, where we could watch them in action, and figure them out.” He gestured to the alcove. “But they don’t eat together, or sleep together. They go into separate places to do those things. And even when they’re working together for a common purpose, like on this ship, they don’t connect, you know? You know the shit they put you through in the military? Strap on your pack and run up that fucking hill? You hate it, but you’re all in it together, right? You bond.”
“If you say so,” I said. “Your intake must’ve been different from mine.”
Harry snorted. “Yeah, you’re the outlier here, Brady, like always.”
But he knocked our shoulders together when he said it.
“My point is, the Faceless don’t seem to bond,” he said. “It’s like they don’t need it like we do.”
“That’s a mammalian thing, isn’t it?” I asked. “Ants don’t bond. Sharks don’t. Lizards don’t.”
“Don’t they?” Harry wrinkled his nose.
“Yeah, fuck if I know.” I nodded at the alcove. “Want to share?”
Harry laughed. “See? Even when we’re not breaking bread, we’re sharing a meal. That’s very human of you, Brady.”
“Apparently,” I said, and we stepped into the alcove together.
I closed my eyes and the wall oozed shut behind us, and fluid began to fill the alcove.
That would never not be gross.
****
“You son of a bitch,” I told Doc as I rounded the doorway to his medbay and hour or two later. “You’ve been holding out on me.”
Doc grinned and puffed on his cigarette. “Found this at the bottom of my footlocker.”
I sat down beside him on the cot, and he passed the cigarette over to me.
Breaking bread, I thought, my eyes sliding shut as I took a long drag.
Shit, that was good. The taste, the heat. It had been so long since I’d had nicotine that I got a head rush out of it and everything, and Doc laughed at me. His hands were shaking too though when he took the cigarette back.
We passed the cigarette back and forth.
“Better than sex,” I said, exhaling a stream of smoke into the humid air.
“You greedy little bastard, getting both.” Doc took the cigarette back. “Keep rubbing it in my face, and I’ll tell Rushton exactly how he compares to a cigarette.”
Food and cigarettes and sex. I thought of what Harry had said earlier, and of the gulf between humanity and the Faceless. Sex sure as hell fascinated Kai-Ren. He’d watched Cam and me before. Watched us, and touched us, and drank in the emotions we shared when we were fucking. I thought of the eggs in the hatchery. I didn’t know what they did to create those, but I couldn’t imagine it involved anything like love. When Kai-Ren had raped Cam, had it even been sex to him? Or just some way to infect Cam with whatever virus or venom or what-the-hell-ever it was that had enabled them to communicate?
Did he even know what he’d done? Not then, but now? Now he’d seen us make love, did he know? There was no way to ask him that, probably. No way to make him understand the question.
Bile rose in the back of my throat.
Doc passed the cigarette back to me. “Where did you go just then, Brady?”
I took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled the smoky word: “Nowhere.”
Doc side-eyed me.
“Just stir-crazy,” I said. “Same old, same old. Just…I want to go home, Doc, and I’m scared shitless it’ll never happen.”
“Don’t ever let that stop you fighting to make it happen.”
I held the cigarette out and he waved it away. “Maybe that’s the problem, Doc. There’s nothing to fight against here, except time, and I can’t fight your fucking clock, can I? Can’t fight the Faceless. Can’t fight the ship. The only thing I can fight here is you, or Cam, or the other guys, and I don’t want to do that. We’re in this together, right?”
“I think that’s called personal growth, Brady.”
“It sucks balls,” I said. “And not in a fun way.”
Doc huffed out a laugh, and slapped me on the back. “You got into plenty of fights on Defender Three. You weren’t in it together with those guys?”
“There were hundreds of guys on Defender Three,” I said. The cigarette tasted foul as the ember burned into the filter, and I stubbed it out on the metal edge of the cot regretfully. “There was no shortage of assholes there. I reckon I might be the only asshole onboard this ship.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Doc drawled. He scrubbed his hand over his shin, his whiskers rasping. “I’m pretty sure I can give you a run for your money, son.”
Liar.
Doc was just about the greatest man I’d ever met. I wouldn’t have survived on Defender Three without him, and he was here too, wasn’t he? He was here, and that said more than any words ever could.
“Thanks, Doc.” We sat in silence for a long while, and I rolled the cigarette butt between my thumb and forefinger, flattening it. “Can you believe that was our last one?”
Doc rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Brady. You can’t just enjoy the moment, can you? If you’ve got a bruise, you’ve just got to keep poking it, don’t you?”
“Sorry, Doc.”
“No, you aren’t, you little shit,” Doc said. He shot me a narrow glare that I didn’t believe for a second. “Someone once told you that misery loves company, and you’ve been making it your life mission ever since.”
I grinned, unexpected delight bubbling up from some place inside me. I leaned closer to Doc to knock our shoulders together, and he scruffed a hand over my hair.
Moments like this, I almost thought we’d be okay. Moments like this, I almost thought we’d make it safely home and I’d feel the sunlight on my back again. Moments like this, I almost forgot how far out in the black we really were.
And moments like this were shattered as easily as glass.
A sudden burst of fear and panic lit up our connection like a lightning storm.
“The fuck?” Doc twisted around on the cot to stare at me.
“Wasn’t me,” I said, but my heart was pounding and the sudden dump of epinephrine into my system made me want to be sick. Bile rose in the back of my throat, sour and hot, and still that note of panic was ringing in the back of my skull as loud as a klaxon. “It’s not me!”
Doc pushed himself up from the cot. “It’s Harry,” he said, striding out of the medbay. “It’s Harry!”
I hurried out after him, my panic pushing me along more than anything. Maybe I was worried for Harry, for whatever was causing him to send that blast of fear through our connection, but I was selfish too. I didn’t want to be left alone.
Doc barreled down the corridor. “Harry? Harry!”
The Faceless ship was strange and dark, illuminated by the glowing lights that bobbed along in the fluid in the walls. But they were as random as platelets in a bloodstream, sometimes floating along quickly—fireflies in our peripheral vision, there and gone again and leaving us stumbling in the dark—and sometimes stuck in bottlenecks of their own making, like a tangled string of Christmas lights that would light up a section of the ship for long minutes before they were swept away again.
Doc and I were a few turns of the spiral below the medbay when someone else came racing out of a side room: Chris.
“What’s going on?”
“No fucking idea!” Doc sucked in a wheezing breath, and we kept going.
Harry’s panic was louder now. It wasn’t just in our heads anymore. I could hear him calling out. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just making noises. They weren’t even words, really. They were short, choked off sounds of fear, of horror, of outrage and disbelief. They were a hundred different things, and none of them good.
My stomach churned.
I knew what those sounds meant. I’d made them before, back when I was a sixteen-year-old recruit on the filthy floor of a shower room on Defender Three. Made them on this exact ship too, except Cam had stopped Kai-Ren before he got as far as that asshole Wade back on Defender Three had.
Still, the memory was enough to bring me up short in the doorway of the room we found Harry in.
I froze, but Chris didn’t.
“Hey!” he bellowed. “Hey! What the fuck are you doing?”
The Faceless didn’t speak out language, but there was no hiding Chris’s anger.
The Faceless standing over Harry—the Stranger—turned to face us. Tilted his head like a curious predator watching a bunch of fat, twitching mice and wondering which one to snap up first.
Chris barged forward into the room.
Another Faceless appeared beside me. Not Kai-Ren, but his consciousness, that weird, static buzz, brushed against mine and it felt familiar. He was one of our hive then. The Faceless hissed and moved into the room.
Chris hauled Harry to his feet. His shirt was tattered and his pants were hanging around his thighs. Harry grabbed at them, missed, and stumbled as Chris tugged him toward the door.
“Okay,” Doc said, reaching out to steady him as they reached us. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Chris turned back as though he was ready to get back in there and face off with the Stranger. The Stranger and our Faceless were hissing and clicking like angry insects.
“Let’s go,” Doc growled.
“Chris!” I got on Harry’s other side to help him.
Chris cast one more look back at the Stranger and our Faceless, then joined us hauling Harry up the corridor toward the medbay. Harry was still trying to hitch his pants up.
“You got him?” Chris asked. “You got him?”
“Yes!”
Chris peeled away from us.
“Where are you going?” I yelled after him.
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
I could hear him screaming the name in his mind as he bolted back down into the dark core of the ship: Kai-Ren!
Doc and I got Harry into the medbay. Gave him the chance to get his pants back up at last, then sat him down on the cot and tugged a blanket around his shoulders.
Doc crouched down in front of him, feeling for the pulse in his wrist. “Did he hurt you, Harry?”
Harry shook his head numbly. “No.” His fingers curled around the edges of the blanket, tugging it closer in jerking increments. “He was going to, but...” He swallowed. “Just an attempt at form of communication we don’t understand yet.”
I glanced up to see Cam standing in the doorway.
“Just,” Harry said. He stalled, and started again. “It’s not—it’s not—” He shook his head. “It’s just we don’t understand.”
And then he sunk into silence, staring numbly at the lights floating in the walls.
I bet the Faceless ship, and the Faceless, has never seemed more alien to him than right now.
****
“New protocols,” Chris said quietly that night. “We try to limit our contact with the Faceless who aren’t a part of Kai-Ren’s hive. We don’t leave this room unless we have to while they’re on board. And if we do, we stay in pairs at all times. Agreed
?”
Agreed? That was a question an officer in charge of a mission wouldn’t have asked in any other place, but the rules were different here. The boundaries between us were different, and had been since the moment we’d starting living in each other’s heads.
“The other Faceless are here to…observe,” Chris said, his brows tugging together like the word didn’t quite fit but was the best one he could come up with. “Kai-Ren says they’re here to see the eggs. It’s like a show of strength, or something, to have so many. It shows that Kai-Ren is powerful, that his hive is the strongest, the foremost, or something. So the other Faceless come to look, they’re duly impressed, and then soon they’ll go away again. We just have to keep out of their way until that happens.”
Harry was curled up on his cot. He’d been quiet since his encounter with the Stranger, but we could all feel how he was struggling. And maybe nothing had happened in the end, and maybe it could have been a hell of a lot worse, but what consolation was that? Fucking none, because he’d had it shoved in his face exactly how powerless he was, how small he was, and how his agency, his wishes, his entire self, had meant nothing to the Stranger.
Cam had been there before.
So had I.
It was the sort of feeling it was impossible to ever forget.
Lucy was watching from her cot. She was quiet too. She looked younger than she had that morning. We couldn’t protect her from our fear. Couldn’t hide it from her when she could feel it too.
Andre wiped a hand over his face. “What did Kai-Ren say about Harry?”
“What does Kai-Ren ever say?” Chris asked. “He was annoyed.” His mouth twisted as though he was fighting a bitter smile. “Like a kid who finds out someone else touched his stuff.”
Yeah, that sounded about right. The gulf between us and the Faceless? Unbridgeable from both sides.
I turned my head as I saw a flash of movement in the corner of my eye: Cam was striding out of the room.
“What did I just say?” Chris asked. “Cam!”