by Lisa Henry
For forever, he meant.
He didn’t finish that sentence. Just leaned forward and kissed me. Caught our hands together tightly, and kissed me. We were covered in sweat and blood and Faceless goo, but there was nothing gross about the kiss. I loved Cam and he loved me, and here we were again, us against the universe. Us against the Faceless. And in another lifetime I might have been shitting myself right now, but I still had my anger and I had something even bigger than that: Cam’s love. If my anger was the storm tossed sea, then Cam’s love was the rudder that kept me steady even as the wild waves drove me forward. Or maybe he was the lighthouse guiding me safely home again.
I closed my eyes briefly, and allowed myself a moment to get lost in his kiss. And then I pulled away regretfully. “I love you.”
Cam rested his forehead against mine. “Love you too, Brady. Always. You’re my heartbeat, remember?”
My chest ached. “And you’re mine.”
He straightened up, and smiled at me in that way that was ours only. It laid me bare and took my breath away at the same time because there would always be a part of me that couldn’t believe I mattered to Cam. That couldn’t believe I’d ever done anything in my life to deserve someone like this. And that absolutely couldn’t fucking believe he felt the same way about me. And yet he showed me how wrong I was, every single day. And even if everything ended today, then at least I’d die knowing that out of everyone in the universe, Cameron Rushton loved me. And that was pretty fucking amazing.
A touch on my shoulder pulled my gaze away from Cam.
Chris and the hybrid loomed up behind me, features hidden in black Faceless armor that was as thin as latex but stronger than anything known to humans. It molded to their features, obscuring them entirely. I only knew it was Chris who’d tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, because where would the hybrid have learned such a human gesture?
Chris gestured to the alcove pointedly, and Cam and I stepped inside.
I closed my eyes as the fluid began to drip down my hair and face like oil, but not before I saw Cam’s grimace.
In a moment we’d be Faceless.
Chapter Thirteen
After a complicated set of gestures between Chris and Cam that was some sort of sign language for officers—or maybe they’d taught all of us at one point and I just hadn’t been paying attention—Chris took the lead. He was the one who knew his way around Kai-Ren’s ship the best. He was also the one of us most likely to have any idea of what we were going to do once we made it to the Stranger’s ship. I hoped he did anyway, because I didn’t have a clue. So Chris took the lead, and the rest of us followed.
Everything looked different through the armor. The colors were muted, but at the same time things looked sharper. I could only faintly see the others’ faces, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was actual sight or a whole new bunch of signals that my brain just chose to interpret as sight.
The Faceless armor made it impossible to communicate via speaking, so I found myself tuning in a little more to the static buzz of our connection. There were no words there—either the connection was too weak because Kai-Ren’s hive had been decimated, or the inclusion of the hybrid had scrambled the signal somehow, but there was something there. An awareness of Cam and Chris, I guess, and of their emotions.
The hybrid was different. His presence was a prickle down my spine of not right, not human, not one of us, a sensation so deeply buried in instinct that it was impossible to parse out. The same sort of feeling my ancestors must have got, hundreds of thousands of years ago on that spinning ball of dirt, when they heard the snap of a twig behind them in the trees. That sudden jolt of fear that said predator—the swooping gut, the chill, the burst of fear and the rush of epinephrine that signaled danger before their conscious minds could even put it all together.
But there was something else too; a gentle but insistent prodding at the edge of my consciousness that suggested the hybrid was trying to be known to us. He was trying to connect. Trying to be a part of this human not-hive he’d found himself in. Our minds—distinct, discordant, chaotic, and linked by circumstance rather than shared purpose or biology—must have been as alien to him as he was to us.
Could he feel what was important to us? Did the lines blur, and those things became important to him as well? Did he know we were going to get Harry back from the Stranger? Did he know why Harry mattered?
There’d been a shift in me too, somewhere in the past few months, and it didn’t just come from being forced to live in the other guys’ heads or from having shared their memories. Harry was my friend. And yeah, I was still selfish. Guys like Cam and Chris would probably walk into hell for anyone on the same side as them—for loyalty and for duty and for that other bullshit they’d learned in officer training—and maybe they’d even do it for anyone on a different side from them, because of morality, and ethics and the sanctity of life or some bullshit. I wasn’t there yet. Would never be probably, but I’d walk into hell for my friends. It wasn’t like I had enough to just start tossing them aside, right?
But I liked Harry and against all odds he liked me too. No fucking way was I going to leave him to the Stranger without a fight.
Could the hybrid feel that?
Did he know the plan was to save Harry?
Though… did we even have a plan beyond that? We had armor now, but we didn’t have weapons. Maybe I’d been putting too much faith in Chris after all, because charging onto the Stranger’s ship with no fucking clue what we were going to do after that sounded more like a Brady Garrett kind of plan. Probably something we should have discussed while we could still talk, right?
We moved down the corridor, the lights gleaming on our oil-slick black armor.
Diving in headfirst with no idea what we’d be facing? Definitely a Brady Garrett kind of plan.
Well, fuck it. Two decades of acting like a fucking idiot, but I was still here against all the odds. The universe hadn’t killed me yet. Maybe it’d hold off a little longer after all.
There was only one way to find out.
****
The Stranger’s ship clung to ours like a fat, bloated leech. In the place it connected the walls between the ships had dissolved, or retracted, or something, leaving a seamless transition between his ship and ours. I might have blundered onto the Stranger’s ship unknowingly, but Chris knew where the boundaries lay. He’d spend the last few months poking around in every corner he could, the curious—and faintly amused, I’d imagined sometimes, though it was probably bullshit—stares of the Faceless following him.
Chris’s held his hand up in warning as we crossed into the Stranger’s ship.
Nothing changed as we walked deeper into the Stranger’s ship except our fear. We stared down a spiral corridor that was a mirror image of the one from our ship as globs of glowing stuff slid through the walls behind us and faintly illuminated our path. There were no Faceless that we could see, and none that we could sense either. But then the Stranger’s Faceless operated on a different frequency than the one we could pick up. We were going in blind.
Chris and the hybrid led the way, the hybrid tilting his head sharply every so often like a cat with twitching ears. Whatever he was listening for, it was out of our range of hearing.
We met our first Faceless half a turn down the spiral. He stood there silently, featureless black mask turned toward our approach. And he then he hissed softly, the sound like a pot boiling over and the water hitting the element.
The hybrid ignored him, and kept walking.
Hope bloomed in me. We weren’t invisible, not exactly, but if we didn’t read to the Faceless as a part of Kai-Ren’s hive, as the enemy, then was it possible we were beneath his consideration? I’d seen it happen before with the Faceless. Back on Defender Three they’d ignored the terrified men shooting at them and walked straight through them. All our fear, our rage, our desperate need to live—it was nothing to the Faceless. We were nothing. The same Faceless mindset that
let them swat us like mosquitoes might actually save us here.
And then the Faceless reached out suddenly, fingers closing around Chris’s throat. He lifted him up, and Chris’s hands clamped around the Faceless’s wrist uselessly. He hung there, feet kicking, as the Faceless stared at him.
And then dropped him just as suddenly.
My heart thumped loudly as Chris scrambled to his feet, and Cam and I slipped past the Faceless.
Not quite invisible, but not enough of a threat to hold the Faceless’s attention.
I sucked in a shaking breath, too afraid to break into a run, too afraid to look back. I just kept moving, one foot in front of the other, until the curve of the corridor took us out of the Faceless’s sight.
The fuck was that?
I blasted the thought as loudly as any I ever had, but I didn’t get an answer. Our connection was too weak. I felt more alone than I had in months, more afraid. My churning guts felt like water and my heart was racing. And then Cam reached out and squeezed my hand and I remembered that he didn’t have to be in my head to read my mind.
I wondered if that Faceless, standing like a sentry close to the place where the ships were joined, was there to stop any of Kai-Ren’s Faceless from coming onto their ship, or if he was there to do a headcount of the rest of his hive as they came back aboard. Was his presence there an indication that the Stranger was preparing to disengage, or was it, like everything Faceless, just fucking random and unknowable?
I thought of Harry.
I thought of Doc and Lucy and Andre, and how we had to get back to them. How we had to get them home. Because the pods might heal them, might save them and preserve them, might even shield them from an explosion if our ship was destroyed maybe, but what good was that if we couldn’t get them home?
Failure, one of my instructors liked to yell at us when we were throwing ourselves through the obstacle course at basic training, is not an option.
Fuck that guy. What the fuck did he know about the cost of failure? What the fuck did he know about facing actual danger, and how the fuck was knowing how to climb a rope supposed to prepare me for anything like this? When we made it back to Earth I was going to look him up and visit him just to punch him in the face. And then I was going to track down every officer in the military who’d ever told me I was a useless piece of shit, and do the same to them.
And to think Doc had been worried I had no ambition.
Rationality had never been able to kill my fear but anger could, at least for a little while. It kept me on my feet now. Kept me moving forward. And that was enough.
A very human scream rang through the Stranger’s ship, and we began to run. All of us, even the hybrid. I felt a rush of something at that. It was some tangled up emotion that I didn’t have to time to unpick now, but I think in that moment a part of me decided that if Harry mattered to him too, then the hybrid was one of us.
The room we found Harry in was dark and small, and there was a strange frame protruding from the wall. Harry was hanging from it, naked, and there was a Faceless—the Stranger—standing behind him.
Fear socked me in the guts. Fear and memory, because I’d been in this exact position with Kai-Ren until Cam had stopped him. The Stranger was getting ready to envenom Harry. To force a connection so they could communicate. That’s what a rational man might call it. That’s what Cam had called it, because the Faceless didn’t understand what rape was.
Fuck the Faceless too.
Fuck them.
The Stranger hissed and started toward us.
The hybrid lunged at him, and he couldn’t be stronger than a Faceless, could he? Not with half my DNA in him.
I’d seen the Faceless fight before. They were smooth, and silent, sure of their superiority against us. And the hybrid—
My breath caught.
The hybrid fought like a scrappy fucking kid from Kopa. He didn’t have the Stranger’s claws. Didn’t have a shred of fucking form in him, but he had anger and no sense of self-preservation. His nails, not long enough to be considered claws, were still strong enough to pierce the gloves he wore, and to shred the Stranger’s mask as he tackled them both to the ground, exposing a sunken corpse-pale face. And then, like a true dirty fighter, he went straight for the Stranger’s fucking eyes.
I dived onto the Stranger’s legs, holding onto them tightly as the Stranger tried to thrash me off again. Above me, in a flurry of limbs, I heard hissing and spitting.
And then Chris and Cam were piling on as well.
I twisted my head just in time to see the Stranger’s clawed hand slashing into my field of vision, but then someone—Chris, Cam, I couldn’t tell—was gripping the Stranger tightly by the wrist and pushing his arm away.
I didn’t kid myself it had anything to do with our human strength. We were like those little birds that dive-bombed attacking hawks. No way could we take the Stranger in a fair fight. Luckily the hybrid hadn’t signed up for one of those.
The hybrid growled, digging his nails into the Stranger’s eye socket and ripping his eye free in an explosion of thick yellow blood. And then he jabbed his fingers into the empty socket, pushing, pushing, and pushing until the Stranger fell limp underneath us, his body twitching with electrical impulses that were no longer being received in his scrambled egg brain.
Holy shit.
And then Chris or Cam was moving, rising to his feet and hurrying to release Harry. Cam, I thought, it was Cam. Because he was kicking at the frame and making the restraints retract the way he’d done for me. Harry fell back and Cam caught him.
“Wh—“ Harry made the abortive sound a few times before he forced the question out. “What’s happening?” He twisted around in Cam’s hold, eyes widening as he saw the dead Stranger. “Is it—is it you guys under there? Holy fuck, please be you guys.”
Cam gave him a thumbs-up. Not the human gesture I usually went with, but it did the trick.
“We need to move,” I said, even though none of them could hear me. But evidentially we were all on the same page, because nobody wanted to hang around and see how the Stranger’s Faceless would react now he was dead. Would it take them time to regroup, for their connection to recover, or would they come swarming? Because no fucking way would we survive a swarm. Probably wouldn’t survive another single Faceless, if we were honest with ourselves.
So we moved.
****
We didn’t stop when we were back on our ship. Didn’t even slow down. Chris caught the hybrid by the hand, and ran down the spiral corridor into the core of the ship, and we followed. We headed straight for the bridge, or at least the part of the ship we thought of as a bridge, where there were more lights, more twisting conduits and, when they’d been alive, more Faceless. I’d avoided it because of that, but Chris hadn’t.
There were bodies on the floor still. I thought of the day our oxygen tanks had exploded, and the ship had sucked the debris into her walls. Was she too weak to do the same with the dead Faceless now, or was there something else that was supposed to happen to the dead? Did the Faceless have death rituals? Was there any room for that in a hive structure that had very little room for individualism?
Chris reached up behind his neck for the point that would unfasten his mask. His face was red and sweaty when he took the mask off. “Can you tell her what to do?”
The hybrid tilted his head.
I removed my own mask and stepped toward him, my fingers feeling under the back of his skull to release his mask. His face seemed less frightening now, despite what I’d just seen him do. His dark eyes were as human as mine.
“Can we disengage from the other ship?” I asked him. “And then blow those fuckers out of the black?”
The hybrid made a noise that was more like a grunt than a hiss thanks to his human larynx. And then he stepped toward one of the alcoves, his mouth pulling up at the edges in what might have been the approximation of a smile, and stepped inside.
A moment after that, the universe itself e
xploded.
****
There were no windows on what passed for the bridge. There was no way for us to know what was happening outside, but it felt as though we were a leaf caught in a maelstrom, churned on the boiling water, sucked under and dumped over and over again. I ended up on the floor, my fingers scrabbling uselessly in the slime for purchase, as the ship rolled and dived.
And then as abruptly as it began it was over, and I was wedged against Chris at the base of an alcove, staring at the dark ceiling and sucking in a series of shaky breaths that didn’t seem to fill my lungs at all. I blinked as the lights in the walls settled into their regular pulsing rhythm again instead of bouncing around like fireflies in a bottle.
“The fuck just happened?” Harry rasped from somewhere nearby.
Cam loomed over me, reaching down to help me to my feet. “Are we okay? I think we’re okay.”
Chris scrambled up. “A window. We need a window.”
The three of us followed him to the closest window.
My stomach dropped as I stared out into the nebula.
Backlit against a shining green cloud and receding rapidly into the distance as we moved, a Faceless ship burned. It could only be the Stranger’s ship. It spun slowly, bleeding gas or fluid into space. It’s exterior, usually black and formless, was illuminated by a series of explosions that shuddered through it. The explosions tore through the ship, and then along the trailing threads of gas or fluid only to be immediately quenched again by the vacuum of space.
There was a cluster of other Faceless ships dotted black against the shifting clouds of the nebula, but none appeared to be following us.
“Holy shit,” Chris said. “Did we just win?”
A startled laugh burst of out me, because how crazy was that? Okay, so we were clearly in full-on retreat mode, but we were alive and none of the other Faceless were chasing us, and that sure as shit counted as a win in my book. Well, almost.