Darker Space (18 page)

You asshole. You fucking asshole.

Lucy was chattering in my ear, but I didn’t hear her, not really. All I could hear was the pounding of blood in my skull, as loud as the roar of the ocean, as loud as a barrage.

“Okay,” Cam said at last, a hand on my back. “Okay, we’re going to our room.”

“Cam,” Chris said. “Let me—”

“I don’t want to hear it, Chris!” Cam led me down the corridor to our room.

Slowly, the numbness receded enough so that I could feel my hands shaking. Slowly, very slowly, I tuned myself in to what Lucy was saying.

“…seen so many stars! I drew a picture, look!” She squirmed out of my grip and shrugged her backpack off her shoulders. It was the same backpack we’d gotten her for school. Purple, with daisies on it. She dumped it on the floor and unzipped it.

I sank down onto the edge of the bed, Cam beside me.

“Cam?”

“Jesus, Brady. I didn’t think they’d do
this.”

Lucy pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her backpack and clambered up onto the bed, wedging herself between us. She smoothed the paper out over her knees. “Look. This is me on the Sh—the
shuttle
.”

Great. So someone had also told her it was called a Shitbox.

“I’ll bet that was a pretty boring ride, though,” Cam said, his voice tempered with a smile. I was glad he could talk, because I wasn’t sure I could. “It takes a long time.”

“Chris and Harry taught me how to play Go Fish. Have you got any cards, Brady? I can teach you too.” She frowned at me for a moment when I didn’t answer, and turned to Cam. “Cam, do you?”

“We’ll make sure we find some.”

Lucy looked at me, then started digging around in her backpack again. She pulled something out. It took me a second to realize what it was. “Chris gave me your bracelet back. Brady!”

She slipped it over my shaking hand and onto my wrist.

Fucking Chris fucking Varro.

“Thanks,” I managed at last. I swallowed and stood. “I’ll go get some cards.”

* * * *

Chris Varro had ended up claiming Captain Hayashi’s room. And our connection obviously wasn’t strong yet, given he had no fucking idea what was going on when, fully clothed, I stepped into the shower behind him, wrapped an arm around his throat, and pressed the point of Hayashi’s screwdriver against his jugular.

“Jesus fucking Christ! Garrett?”

I dragged him out from under the spray, my boots squeaking on the shower floor. He was slippery as an eel, but he also had suds streaming down his face from his hair, so the advantage was still mine.

“Garrett! What the
fuck
!”

I moved my mouth so close to his ear that it felt almost the same as some of those times in Cam’s dreams, except this time it was a promise of violence that quickened his heartbeat and made his jugular jump. I kept my voice low. “You brought my sister to the Faceless, you piece of shit.”

“That wasn’t my decision!” He wrapped his fingers around my arm but couldn’t dislodge it.

“Don’t fucking lie to me!”

“I’m not!” His wet feet slid on the floor as I hauled him out of the shower and spun him around. “I wouldn’t have brought a kid into this! I
wouldn’t
!”

“But you did,” I growled, jabbing the point of the screwdriver in deeper, expecting to feel it pierce his skin at any moment. “You brought her into this the second you decided it was a smart idea to inject yourself with our blood!”

“Garrett,” he said. “
Brady
!”

We both staggered a little as the images hit.

Chris was eleven. His parents were making him lean down and press a kiss to the forehead of an old woman lying dead in a bed. Her skin was thin and wrinkled and dry like paper. Her cold, gnarled fingers were wrapped around a large wooden cross. He’d never seen a dead person before. It scared him so much it would take years before he could think of his Nona without thinking of this.

He was smart. He’d always been smart. The smartest kid in the class. When he was six, a girl beat him in a spelling test, and Chris burned with jealousy for days.

When the bone snapped in his left arm, he heard it before he felt it. He and the other kids weren’t supposed to be exploring the construction site, so the rest of them scattered like rats. Chris walked home alone, cradling his arm to his chest, face set, jaw jutting out. He was thirteen, and he thought of all the heroes from the stories he’d read and knew he could be as brave as them. He didn’t cry.

He was seventeen when he slept with a girl for the first time. Seventeen and a half when he slept with a guy and everything fell into place for him.

And then there was Cam.

Then there was Cam.

There was Cam.

Those green eyes, that brilliant smile, that easy grace. They were perfect together. Both smart, both ambitious, both good-looking. Both officers. They were perfect together in other ways as well, the ways their bodies moved together. Mouths slotted against each other, sweat-slicked skin sliding, breath hot. Minutes that stretched into hours, learning each other. Mapping Cam’s skin with his mouth, his fingers. They were perfect together, except when they weren’t.

It ended with a faint taste of regret and the memory of his name on Cam’s lips.

It ended years after, with the point of a screwdriver jabbing into his throat and Brady Garrett growling in his ear, “Fuck you.”

I blinked and froze.

For a second it was like two pictures superimposed and not quite meeting how they should. Then they shifted, coalesced, and I was in my head again, not his, and not that strange shared place between us.

“Brady.”

I turned my head to see Cam standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Two of Chris’s guys were behind him. I wondered if it had been noise that had brought them here, or the connection.

I released Chris, holding my hands up for a second before slipping the screwdriver back in my pocket.

Chris reeled away, gasping for breath, wiping his wet throat furiously with his hand and then checking his palm for blood. “Jesus Christ! You fucking psycho!”

I jabbed a finger against my temple. “Welcome to my head, asshole.”

I didn’t need to read his mind to feel the fear and anger rolling off him in waves. Didn’t need a Faceless virus swimming in my blood, or a mutation tweaking out the threads of my DNA and twisting them into something new, to know that Chris Varro hated me as much as he was scared of me.

Chris’s guys stepped back as I moved toward them. A path opened up for me.

“Any of you fuckers come near me, and I’ll stab you in the fucking eyes,” I told them.

I headed back down the hallway, boots squelching, my uniform dripping the entire way.

* * * *

“So remember that thing where you were going to work on your anger management?” Cam asked me, rubbing his knuckles gently over my buzz cut.

“That was before they brought my sister into this,” I told him.

Lucy was sleeping beside us, her mouth open, snoring a bit.

“Fighting them is not going to help you,” Cam said.

Always the voice of fucking reason.

“I
know
that. But fuck him, he deserves to be scared.”

Cam sighed.
“As scared as you?”

“Shut the fuck up, LT.”

He kissed me softly. “Chris is not the enemy, Brady.”

“Who is, then? The Faceless? The military?”

Cam sighed. “Maybe sometimes there is no enemy.”

“If you think that, you’re just not looking hard enough.” I propped myself up on my elbow. “There is always someone who wants to fuck you over, Cam,
always
. You’re just too nice to see it.”

“You mean I’m too naive.”

“That’s not what I said.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t need to say it, Brady. I’m in your head.”

I huffed out a breath. “Okay, so maybe I do think you’re naive. You always think the best of people, but guess what? Most people are assholes. Most people would fuck you over in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. You’re like that guy who said that people are born basically good. That’s bullshit. People aren’t good. People are assholes, Cam. Just fucking assholes.”

“You’re not an asshole,” he told me quietly.

“Pretty sure every person in the world would disagree with that,” I muttered.

“What would they know?” Cam asked with a slight smile. “Anyway, why should I believe them? They’re all assholes, aren’t they?”

“Don’t,” I said, sitting up.

“Don’t what?”

“I’m not a kid, LT. Don’t do that thing where you think you can make me laugh and I’ll forget how angry I am. I’m not a dumb kid. Don’t patronize me.”

“Brady, I—”

“Don’t. And don’t you dare tell me you never wanted any of this. I fucking
know
you. I know how much you missed the black. I know Lucy and me were just your consolation prize!”

“My fucking
what
?”

“If you’d had the choice between us and the black, you wouldn’t have even had to think about it!”

“Brady!” His face was twisted. “But they didn’t give me the choice and—”

“I know! That’s my fucking point!” I climbed off the bed and reached for my pack of cigarettes. I paused with my hand on them, waiting for him to remind me I was supposed to be quitting. He didn’t, and the fucked-up little part of me that always had to ruin everything told me that was just fucking typical. He didn’t even care if I gave myself lung cancer.

And Jesus, how fucking immature was that? I’d given him enough shit that I knew the only reason he wasn’t saying anything was because he didn’t want to add fuel to this fire I was busy stoking. But there I was, the emotional maturity of a fucking child, finding blame with Cam when there was none to find, because as long as I could spit and snarl at him, I didn’t have to look at my own shitty behavior. As long as everything could be his fault, I was the victim. And I was a born fucking victim, wasn’t I?

“You ever get sick of defending me, LT?” I asked, my voice rasping.

“Brady, come on.”

I snorted, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t wanted him to give me a straight answer. I shoved the cigarettes in my pocket. “Don’t follow me.”

Cam didn’t, but I could feel his regret curling after me like tendrils of smoke as I walked out.

Chapter Eleven

I sat in the corridor and smoked for hours, until my throat hurt and I was wheezing a bit. The pile of cigarette butts beside me grew higher and higher while I tried to remember how on the Shitbox I’d decided to man up and face whatever the universe threw at me.

I hated myself right then, which was no big surprise. Hate and anger had always come too quickly to me. Except, as they both slowly drained away and weariness settled in my bones, I realized something else too: I really didn’t like myself at all. It wasn’t as strong as hate, not so easily fired up and not so easily shed either. It wasn’t a sharp, hot reaction to something stupid I’d done. It was more pervasive than that, persistent. It was…it was my baseline. I’d spent so long cultivating all my jagged edges in defense that maybe I’d never bothered to worry that there was nothing much in me worth defending.

Cam didn’t say anything when I climbed into bed beside him in the middle of the night, stinking of cigarettes and remorse.

“I know you’re awake,” I told him.

Lucy snored and snuffled on his other side.

Cam twined his fingers in mine. “I would have picked you. I would have.”

“Kind of academic now, isn’t it?”

His silence said more than he could.

“You’re a better person than I deserve,” I told him. “I’m trying to be better, but I guess I’m a work in progress. So, you know, thanks for putting up with me in the meantime.”

“I love you,” he whispered and brushed his lips against mine. “You stink, though.”

“I smoked a lot,” I told him.

“Go and brush your teeth,” he mumbled.

“Fuck you. I’m tired.”

“So that whole better-person kick lasted what? Ten seconds?” He scrubbed his knuckles over my buzz cut.

“Fine,” I said and hauled myself upright again. “But you’d better make it worth my while, asshole.”

He snorted.

I flicked the bathroom light on and grabbed my toothbrush from the sink. I brushed my teeth and leaned over the sink and spat. When I straightened up, Cam was standing in the doorway. I stared at his reflection in the mirror as he shut the door and turned the lock.

Guess he was intending to make it worth my while right now.

I suddenly wasn’t tired anymore.

Cam moved up behind me and held me by the hips. Met my eyes in the mirror. “I want to fuck you so hard right now.”

I swiped my tongue over my bottom lip. “What are you waiting for, then?”

His hands slipped around to my fly and popped the button open. The rasp of the zip made me shiver. How long had it been since we’d done this? It felt like years. Felt like we’d forgotten some part of us that we were only just now remembering. It felt like it had been too long since we’d fit together, our hearts beating in sync.

I reached out for my bag of toiletries and snagged the bottle of lube from it. Cam tugged my pants down, then kicked his bare foot against my ankles to make me spread my legs.

“You fucking me or arresting me?” I asked.

He met my gaze in the mirror. “I said I wanted to do it hard, Brady. You okay with that?”

“Yeah.” I braced my hands on the edge of the counter.

He slicked his fingers up with lube and pushed them into my hole. I winced at the cold, at the sting, but it felt good too.

“Yeah, LT. Just like that.”

He twisted his fingers around.

Fuck. It had been so long since we’d done this with the connection in place that I’d almost forgotten how weird it was, and how incredible it was. I could feel his fingers inside me, opening me, dragging against my prostate in just the right way, and lighting me up from inside. But I could feel what Cam was feeling too; his blood heating, his heartbeat quickening, his dick swelling. There were no boundaries between us, no spaces. Just an echo chamber of sensation and emotion.