by Lisa Henry
The strange blue light washed over the walls, over our skin, and for once I tried just to look at the color of it, and not think of radiation and mutation and cancerous cells dividing endlessly inside us. But it was impossible to think we’d come back from out here unscathed, wasn’t it? Impossible to think that there wouldn’t be an ugly price to pay.
Blue light caught on Cam’s lips as they quirked. “Didn’t I say not to think too hard?”
“Yeah.” I released a long breath. “I’m trying.”
“I know.” His hand settled on the base of my spine.
I closed my eyes again, and pretended that we were all that existed in the universe.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured. “I’ve got you, Brady.”
He held me as I drifted off into sleep.
****
I dreamed of home that night. I dreamed of red dirt underneath my bare feet and sunlight burning my shoulders. I dreamed of the taste of salt on my cracked lips, and the heavy smell of mudflats and mangroves on every hot breath of wind. I dreamed of my dad’s voice, and of his hands. His fingers, long and dexterous, as he stirred sugar into a cup of tea. I dreamed of his careworn face with lines on it that belonged on a much older man. I dreamed of the calluses on his palms, the gray in his hair, and the shadows, dark as bruises, under his eyes. I dreamed of his smile.
I dreamed I walked through our house—it had more rooms in the dream that it did in reality; a never-ending maze of them, a twisting labyrinth—and I could hear Dad’s voice but I couldn’t find him. He was always just a room away. I caught glimpses of his shadow, but I couldn’t catch him. In my dream I panicked and got scared. I started to run, but he was always out of reach. Just a room away, but it might have been an entire universe.
“Brady?” A warm touch on my face brought me around. Cam’s thumb sliding across my tear-damp cheek. His fingers cupping the hinge of my jaw. “You were having a bad dream.”
I lay still for a moment, letting my eyes slide shut again so that I didn’t have to see if anyone else was awake and watching. “Yeah.”
Cam slid his hand to my chest, and my heartbeat thumped against his palm. Echoed in my mind a little, in the connection between us, and I thought of the Faceless hatchery, of all the fluid-filled sacs, of all those tiny hearts pumping as fast as the beat of an insect’s wings. Maybe someone else would have looked at those things in the hatchery and seen a miracle. Maybe Cam did, but not me. It make my skin crawl.
“I’m not made for this,” I whispered into the darkness. “Not made for expanding horizons.”
He rubbed his palm in a circle over my chest. “Maybe nobody is.”
It was a lie, but a nice one.
“I need a cigarette,” I said at last, and pushed Cam away. I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the cot. The soles of my feet met the warm, damp floor. The flesh of the living creature we infested like parasites. Could it feel us, burrowing in like hookworms?
Bile rose in my throat.
I didn’t have any cigarettes but that didn’t stop me from going through my footlocker, twice, hoping that maybe I’d missed one the last time I’d searched it.
The light outside was reddish now, like the faint glow from a dying campfire, and I thought of embers that floated up into a starlit night. I missed the feeling of dirt under my feet. Missed the smell of the air from home. Such small things, really, but without them I was unanchored and adrift in a churning black sea that I didn’t understand.
I was out here now, facing my fears, and maybe finding myself a little braver than I’d ever imagined, but I was still homesick. That wouldn’t ever go away, probably. I’d only ever had small-drawn dreams, but it turns out they were harder to reach than the stars. And that was okay, maybe. That was just life, maybe. Because if I was finding myself braver than I’d ever thought, then I’d also gone much farther than anyone would ever have imagined someone like me would. And maybe that even counted for something in the end.
I sat back on my heels and looked over the room. Cam was watching me—I sensed it more than saw it in the weird, dim light—and one or two more consciousness prickled against mine like faint static. Andre and Chris. They were awake too.
I climbed to my feet and left the room.
It was darker in the corridor, and quiet. I closed my eyes for a moment and waited to feel the Faceless in my mind. Waited for my synapses to map them. There was one close by, feeding in the walls. The rest were closer to the core of the ship. Kai-Ren was down there too—magnetic north on the compass he planted in my brain.
I wondered what Chris and the others had thought this would be. Translation and negotiation, maybe. Cultures clashing before discovering shared ground. We had a term for that on Earth, didn’t we? Common humanity. It was meant to encompass everyone, but the limitations of it were right there in the words. The Faceless were too alien. Cam had tried to be an emissary once, a bridge between us and the Faceless. He’d tried to translate them into ways that we would understand, and into ways that meant he didn’t have to look what Kai-Ren did to him in the face—but the Faceless weren’t like us. Not in any ways that mattered. Not in any ways that could be bridged. If Cam hadn’t managed it, then how could anyone?
Kai-Ren had saved me, had saved all of us, but not because he understood us. Not because he thought we were worth anything. He’d saved us because our pain, our rage, our sorrow, our love—a maelstrom of muddied emotions screaming out into the black—had caught his attention like a glittering lure on a wire and he’d snapped it up like a fish.
I moved down the corridor, following a glowing glob of something that floated inside the walls.
Cam called me a pessimist, and maybe I was, but also maybe the reason I couldn’t just bow and scrape to the almighty Faceless gods who held my life in their hands was that I was also a stubborn little asshole and always had been. Cam had put aside his pride and his ego for Kai-Ren because he was smarter than me, and because he was always thinking ahead to tomorrow. Not me though. Never me.
I drew a breath and remembered my stepmother Linda, and how she’d flogged the shit out of me for stealing from her and for talking back. Didn’t stop me though, did it? Because all I had in me was that anger, burning like a flame. I refused to bend. I always broke instead.
I followed the curving corridor a short way down and turned into Doc’s makeshift medbay.
Back on Defender Three on nights when my anger and fear wouldn’t let me sleep, I’d head out of my barracks room and find some card game going on somewhere. Get drunk, maybe win some money, but probably lose some. If that didn’t work I’d find someone else who was also itching for trouble, and rile him up until we fought. I’d been rattling the bars of my cage since the day I was born, probably, and I’d tried so hard to let go of my anger, of my pride, I’d tried so hard to not be that guy, but he kept coming back like a bad rash, didn’t he?
I took one of Doc’s books from the locker on the floor, and sat near a window to read it.
Doc had been trying to knock me into shape since the day he met me. He still was, so at least I wasn’t the only one of us banging my head against that metaphorical wall over and over again. We all had windmills to tilt at, I guess, because we were all fucking crazy.
Maybe that’s why the Faceless would never really understand us. They were a hive mind, or a machine where each component worked together to complete a task. We were a pack of feral dogs, growling and snapping at each other’s tails.
I read a few pages of the book, and then looked up to see Cam leaning in the doorway.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked me softly.
“You’re in my head,” I said. “What’s the fucking point?”
He didn’t answer that, because, yeah, what was the fucking point?
I sighed and put the book away. “You remember on Defender Three when I looked after you?”
His mouth curled into a faint smile. “Yeah.”
“I liked that,” I said. “I like
d when I felt important. When I felt like you needed me.”
“I do need you, Brady,” he said softly. “I always need you.”
I knew that. I felt that. Cam’s love was like a gold thread twisted through the connections that bound me to Lucy, to Doc, to Chris and Harry and Andre, to the Faceless. I could always feel it there, a guide rope through a dark room, or the chain of an anchor laying on the sea floor.
“I’m not useful here,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m not, Cam.”
He closed the distance between us. “You are to me. I couldn’t do this without you, Brady. I couldn’t do any of this. I was lost out there, and I opened my eyes, and I saw you. You saved me. You brought me back.”
I looked away, my chest aching.
Cam took me by the hand and drew me over to the narrow cot that Doc kept in here. He lay down, pulling me with him.
“Doc will get pissed if we fuck on his cot.”
Cam snorted. “We’re not going to fuck on his cot, Brady. Jesus.”
“You fucking tease then.”
“Shut up.” Cam’s smile was beautiful, and faded as slowly as a sunset. He shifted on the cot so that he was lying on his back and I was tucked up against his side. “You remember that first day on Defender Three? In the shower?”
“Mmm.”
“You looked after me,” Cam said. “I didn’t know you. I was in shock, I think. I was so cold, and everything was loud, and I didn’t know where I was, but you were there. This cute kid with eyes as big as an owl’s, and you cleaned me up, and you talked to me. Do you remember what you told me?”
I shook my head. Bullshit, probably. It’s what I usually talked, but Doc had always said I had a decent bedside manner.
“You told me your name,” Cam said. “You told me where I was. And you told me all about the shitty ration packs and the asshole officers, and how some prick called Hooper owed you cigarettes from a card game.”
“Still does, the fucker,” I murmured.
“And I was home, Brady,” Cam said, stroking my hair. “I was with humans again, and this kid was talking to me like I belonged there. And I knew I wasn’t in the pod anymore. I knew I couldn’t be, because how would my brain ever cobble together someone like you?”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” Cam said with a soft smile. He rubbed his thumb over the nape of my neck, the gentle contact making my skin prickle. “We help each other, Brady. We always have. You just don’t see it because for some crazy reason you think I’ve actually got my shit together.”
“So you’re really a fuck up like me?” My eyes stung a little.
“Totally,” Cam said, his smile growing.
“Liar,” I whispered to him.
We lay quietly for a while. I closed my eyes, feeling like maybe sleep was in reach at last.
Cam shifted underneath me. “What’s that?”
I opened my eyes to a kaleidoscope of shifting colored lights on the wall. And in the centre of them, a dark shadow that was growing larger.
We climbed off the cot and crossed to the window.
There, against the background of the green and red and blue clouds of the nebula, was dark space.
It was a Faceless ship, black and vast, and it was swallowing the light as it moved towards us.
Chapter Six
By the next morning there were more of the Faceless ships in view, sometimes moving up close beside us, and sometimes falling back into our slipstream. Sometimes they vanished from view altogether, but they always reappeared again through the billowing colors of the nebula like fish chasing a lure through cloudy water.
“It’s an armada,” Chris said as he stared out the window in our room. “I can see at least four.”
“Don’t call it that,” Cam said from where he was sitting on his footlocker with an open notebook on his knee and a pencil in his hand. He was sketching, I think. “Armada means a military fleet, and that’s not what this is.”
Chris turned back long enough to shoot him an amused look. “It’s a bunch of ships, isn’t it?”
“It’s not an armada,” Cam repeated.
“You’re being pedantic,” Chris said, like it was somehow his place to call Cam on it even if it had been true. I think that lit the spark of anger in me more than anything else.
“Fuck you,” I said from my bunk. “Cam’s right and you know it.”
“Okay,” Andre said. “Lucy, want to come visit Doc with me?”
Harry took the chance to escape with them.
“Oh,” Chris said, turning back and folding his arms over his chest. “I’m about to get a lesson in linguistics from you, am I, Brady?”
“It’s not an armada,” I said, “because they’re not ships. We call them that, but we’re wrong. They’re living things. It’s a herd.”
I felt a thrum of warmth from Cam at that, and I glanced over at him to see the quirk of his mouth as he ducked his head.
“If our ship is here to hatch its eggs, then so are theirs,” I said.
Chris snorted at that because, yeah, there was no way of knowing. But it was as good a guess as anything else, and we were working entirely on guesswork out here.
“You’re an expert now, are you?” Chris asked with a smirk.
“As much as you are.” I leaned back on my bunk. “You can try and lord it over me all you want, Chris, but there’s no fucking rank here, is there? There’s just you and me and the fact that I’m fucking your ex-boyfriend on the regular.”
He didn’t bite, the asshole. Just smirked some more. “You still hung up on that? Are you worried he’s comparing us and you just don’t measure up?”
“He measures up,” Cam said mildly.
Chris rolled his eyes, and I flashed a grin at Cam.
“Brady’s right,” Cam said. “It’s a herd. You’re thinking like a soldier, Chris, and it narrows your focus. If you really want to come anywhere near understanding the Faceless, you need to get rid of your preconceptions first.”
“From the guy who called Kai-Ren a battle regent.” Chris shook his head.
“I did what I had to do.” Cam closed his notebook. “I explained him to you in terms that you’d relate to, and I’m not sorry for that. It was necessary and it worked. But the picture’s gotten bigger since then.”
Chris snorted. “You were always a good liar.”
Cam held his gaze. “You had your moments too.”
Chris glared at him for a moment, and then walked out of the room.
Cam returned to his notebook, and I watched him.
I’d always figured Chris was jealous of me for being with Cam, but maybe I’d misread that, or maybe it wasn’t his only jealousy. He was jealous of Cam too, I realized now, because Cam had been the one taken by the Faceless and then returned. He knew exactly what Kai-Ren had done to Cam, and he was still jealous because Cam knew more than him. Because Cam had seen the bigger picture long before Chris had even guessed there was one. I wondered if it made me a hypocrite for hating him for that, when Cam himself wouldn’t admit what happened to him gave him nightmares.
What was the difference between repressing something and letting it go? Like I could fucking tell. I’d never done either one in my entire life.
I opened my mouth.
“He’s not an asshole,” Cam said.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
Cam raised his eyebrows. “I don’t need to be in your head to read you like a book, Brady.”
Okay, so maybe I was going to call him an asshole. I flopped back down on my bunk and fiddled with my dog tags. I don’t even know why I still wore them. Habit, probably. They were as useless out here as anything else the military had given us, but I was accustomed to the feel of them.
“I can’t figure him out,” I said at last, thinking back to the conversation I’d had with Doc. Did it matter if Chris was thinking like a tactician? We were like apes with pointy sticks compared to the Faceless.
> “He’s not your enemy,” Cam said. “There doesn’t always have to be an enemy.”
“If you think that, you’re just not being creative enough.”
That won an unwilling smile out of him. “You’d start a war with some guy who took the last pudding cup from the mess hall, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t talk about pudding cups. Jesus, I’d kill for a pudding cup right now.”
“You get my point though.”
“Yeah.” I twirled my dog tags. “I get your point.”
Doc once told me that my bad attitude was my worst enemy, and he was probably right. When I was a kid I tried to make friends with this stray dog that was hanging around the town. I thought I could tame it but it never did stop growling and snapping. Made me wonder if Cam was betting against my nature in the same dumb way. Like he thought that maybe one day my first instinct wouldn’t be to snarl and bite. And I’d worked on it real hard back home, with Cam’s parents, and with Lucy’s school, and with our landlord and everyone I was supposed to play nice with, to play normal with, to act like I was a real boy, but sometimes it felt like that world back there was even stranger than this one out here with the Faceless. At least out here I wasn’t the only one who didn’t fit in.
I thought again about how Doc had asked me what I wanted to be when we got home, and how I’d thought that I wouldn’t mind mopping floors for a few years. But would I want to do that forever? Could I keep from snapping for the rest of my life? How far did Cam’s patience with me go?
I’d ruin everything in the end, probably. I usually did.
“I think,” I began, hating the tremulous tone in my voice, “that when we get home I need to talk to someone.”
Cam threw me a questioning look.
“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.