Darker Space (20 page)

“And how do we do that?” I asked. “In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got locked elevator doors at one end and blast doors at the other. This is a Defender. You can’t just open locked doors on a Defender!”

All Defenders were built to the same plan, and all of them were compartmentalized to reduce the risk of the whole thing going in case of fire or a catastrophic hull breach. Every few hundred meters there were blast doors that could be shut to seal off a breach, or a fire, or an enemy.

“We go through the elevator shaft,” Chris said.

Cam came back and ditched the radio. “Nothing.”

“We’re gonna need some tools,” Chris said.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We don’t even know what’s happening out there!”

“Which is why we’re going to find out,” Chris said.

“Okay, Captain Logic,” I said and threw him a sloppy salute. “Great plan!”

“You’d rather be a sitting duck?” he asked.

“Who the fuck put you in charge anyway?”

Chris didn’t bother answering. Just ignored me and organized his little gang into a working party. He looked pretty damn pleased when he dug up a crowbar from the back of the fire store.

Yeah, because that’ll break a mag lock.

Chris turned around and shot me a narrow look.

“I heard that, Garrett.”

“Fuck you, then
, sir.”

He caught my gaze and held it.

And fuck him.

Fuck him sideways.

Because now he was in my head, and I had nowhere to hide. Chris could see straight through me, through the bluster and the bullshit, all the way to the pit of fear at the center of me, to that gnawing fucking hole that had always been there.

And under that?

Nothing.

Fucking nothing.

Dark space.

I turned and walked away, pulling Lucy by the hand.

* * * *

There was a lullaby our dad used to sing to me that I sang to Lucy when she was little. It wasn’t in a language I knew. The words were all pressed out of shape, probably, through too many retellings. My dad’s voice had been gravelly, wrecked by years working in the smelters and factories of Kopa, but it had been warm. It had filled my whole universe and chased the darkness away.

“Sasi sasi,” Lucy whispered as we sat in the corridor and watched the guys work at trying to pry the elevator doors open. She was cuddled up against me, her head resting on my chest.

I tried to remember the words. Couldn’t, not really, but I tried to sing them anyway. I could remember the melody, at least. The words didn’t matter. Only the moment did, only Lucy did. The black was all around us now, and we were caught in it, but in this small moment we could hold it at bay. Just for a little while. We held enough light cupped in our hands for that.

It trickled through our fingers like salt water.

The crowbar hit with floor with a clatter.

“Shit!” Andre jammed his hand in his armpit. “Fuck!”

“Hold on. Can you hear that?” Harry pressed his ear against the elevator doors. “What the hell is that?”

Beneath us, the floor shuddered and shook. The vibrations echoed in my bones. Fear, cold and sharp, dug its claws into my guts and twisted.

Harry reeled away from the doors. “What the hell was that?”

I splayed my fingers against the cold metal floor, my palm still tingling. “Luce, go and get your backpack, okay? Real quick.”

She scrambled for our room. I hauled myself to my feet and followed her. I helped her loop the straps of her daisy backpack over her skinny shoulders. Her pale skin and her hair were red under the emergency lighting. This wasn’t how I wanted to remember her.

We headed back into the corridor. Chris and the guys had backed the fuck away from the elevator doors, and we retreated toward the other end of the corridor, to the blast doors.

Another dull whoosh of sound, and the shock waves rippled through the floor underneath our feet.

We weren’t the only ones trying to open the doors that isolated us from the rest of Defender Three. Except the assholes on the other side had explosives.

Chapter Twelve

We were trapped.

“It’s a blast door,” I said. “We can’t break through a blast door. That’s kind of the whole point!”

“What the fuck is going on out there?” Kyle demanded.

I would have thought it was fucking obvious.

“It’s a mutiny,” I said. “The officers have lost control.”

“You can’t know that,” Harry said.

“Can’t I?” I showed him my palms in a conciliatory gesture. “If Leonski wanted us dead, he would have sent a couple of marines to put bullets in our heads. Those guys are trying to break in, which means they haven’t got control of ops yet to open the doors or, better yet, to just turn our air off. But they’ve sure as shit got control of this section of the station, and if Leonski doesn’t get it back, sooner or later they’ll find a way to get in to us.”

I almost laughed at their blank faces.

“Jesus, you guys don’t get it at all, do you? You think you’re saving humanity or something with this plan to connect to the Faceless? You know what that looks like to everyone? You’re not saving humanity; you’re selling it out!”

These guys…these guys were smart. They were officers, university educated. They were in intel. And Chris had picked them because they were more than smart—they were capable of seeing things in a different way, of flipping scenarios to get different results, and breaking the fucking mold. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t afraid of taking risks. But that was exactly why they didn’t understand what they’d done, and the sheer fucking terror they’d caused. Take that terror and let it run back and forth through the rumor mill of Defender Three for a few days, and of course the enlisted men had turned on the officers. Because we were traitors, and the officers were facilitating that.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like to sit here for years with the black at your back, getting kicked from asshole to breakfast by every tiny-dicked fucker with stripes, and knowing that the Faceless could come at any moment, knowing that they could fucking destroy you in a heartbeat.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to have no hope.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing except fear and anger.”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Welcome to my head, assholes.”

“Now you know.”

“Hey.” Cam put a hand against my cheek, and I leaned into his touch. “We’re going to be okay, yeah?”

“How are you even like this, Cam? How do you even believe that after everything that’s happened?”

Cam had looked out at the black and only ever seen the stars.

I took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes. “Love you.”

He pressed his forehead against mine. “Love you too.”

“Cam,” Chris said. “Can we do this, please?”

“Do what?” Cam said. “Brady’s right. We can’t get through a blast door.”

No, not the blast doors. But there was still a way out.

“What about the air vents?” I asked.

“The vents automatically seal when the blast doors are activated,” Kyle said. “Like you said, Garrett, that’s kind of the whole point.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Maybe they do in the event of an emergency, but these blast doors have been locked for days and we’re still getting air. The vents are still open.”

“It’s worth a try,” Chris said.

* * * *

Another explosion shook through me as I stood on the table in our room, Captain Hayashi’s screwdriver jammed in the ceiling air vent. My heart beat a little faster as the vibrations from the explosion rippled through the section, metal shivering, and lodged in my bones.

The screwdriver was the wrong size for the screws holding the vent in place, and there wasn’t enough room to get the crowbar into the vent. An angle grinder would have been nice right about now.

Anything would have been nice right now.

“Brady.” Harry slapped me on the leg. “Want me to take over for a bit?”

“Yeah,” I said. I put my arm on his shoulder to steady myself as I jumped down from the table. I handed the screwdriver over.

I sat on the bed and tore open a ration pack. I picked through it while Cam sat behind me and massaged my aching shoulders and neck. I’d been on the table for almost an hour.

Kyle and Devon were in the next room along, trying the same thing with whatever tools they’d managed to scavenge from Captain Hayashi’s room.

Chris and Andre were keeping an eye on the elevator doors and shifting furniture up against them to make a barricade just in case the assholes broke through.

“You gonna give me a back rub when I’m done?” Harry asked Cam.

“If you actually get it open, maybe,” he said.

Harry chuffed out a laugh and kept working.

Lucy had pulled a chair over to the window and was sitting, gazing out into the black, unafraid. “What’s that over there, Cam?”

“That’s the Core,” Cam told her. “That’s like the station’s heart. All the important stuff is there. Ops and engineering and the medical bay.”

Lucy nodded solemnly. “That’s where we have to get to.”

“Yeah,” Cam said. “But first we have to get out of here.”

“Will Kai-Ren know where to find us?”

I tensed under Cam’s fingers.

Cam kept his voice light. “I don’t know. Why are you asking?”

Lucy pressed her small hand against the window. “I don’t think he wants us to get lost.”

Cam dug his thumbs into my neck and tried to ease away the tension we both felt knotted there. “I think he can probably find us still.”

Across the whole universe, probably. Under any fucking rock we picked to hide. As long as our hearts were still beating.

Kai-Ren would always find us.

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it, just for once.

I tried not to think about anything except the slow press and drag of Cam’s fingers around the base of my neck.

I felt a sharp sting of bright pain flare across my knuckles, and I opened my eyes just as Harry hissed and dropped the screwdriver. It clattered to the floor, and Lucy scurried to pick it up.

“Thanks, Lucy,” he said. When he reached down to take it back, his knuckles were bleeding.

I stared down at my hand. The skin was intact.

“You feel that, Cam?”
I asked.

His breath tickled the back of my neck.
“Yeah.”

Shared thoughts, shared memories, shared feelings, shared pain.

Humans weren’t meant to exist like that.

We weren’t built for that.

I thought of the paints that Cam’s parents’ bought Lucy last Christmas. Mix two colors together, and sometimes something beautiful happened. Blue and yellow might always make green, but the exact shade that appeared was an accident. A dab of extra paint could change the entire thing, and suddenly that pale sun-bleached eucalyptus looked more like a luminous fern, tightly curled fronds dripping with rain.

Mix a few colors together, and the result could be amazing. Mix too many, like the time Lucy did it just to see what new color she could make, and it was messy and ugly. Splotches of dirty color like mud and muck and filth.

How soon until that was us?

How much longer until the final barriers between us dissolved? How long until every one of Harry’s injuries carved itself a ghost on my skin? How long until the memories of my dad blurred with my memories of Kyle’s dad? Until my father’s voice was replaced with a gruff accent I didn’t know. When the girl Andre lost his virginity to—her wrinkled brow and gritted teeth scaring him enough that he couldn’t even call her the next day—became a face in my mind that I couldn’t forget. When the smell of coffee made me think of lazy mornings in an apartment I’d never set foot inside, my arms curled around a redheaded woman I’d never met but Devon still dreamed about. Until Kyle’s morning wood became mine. How long until my little sister could feel what I felt when Cam fucked me?

Sour bile rose in my throat.

Cam rubbed his thumb over the knot at the top of my spine.
“We’ll stop. We’ll stop, okay?”

“Yeah? And the other guys will all promise to stop jerking off too?”

Cam pressed his lips against my shoulder, breathing heat into the fabric of my T-shirt.
“You know what I’m going to say, Brady.”

Yeah, I knew.

“If you say Kai-Ren will fix it, I’ll have to punch you.”

I felt the curve of his smile against my shoulder. More than that, I felt it in the warmth that curled in his belly.
“I can take a punch, Brady.”

I relaxed as Cam rubbed his knuckles gently over my skull, the bristles of my buzz cut crinkling under his touch.

The crash of metal hitting metal was loud.

Harry’s laugh was louder. “Got it! I got it!”

The cover of the air vent lay on the floor.

“I’ll get the others,” Cam said, climbing to his feet and then heading for the door.

I stood up. “Lucy, you ready?”

She eyed the air vent dubiously but nodded.

Harry climbed down from the table, rolling his shoulders. He passed the screwdriver back to me, and I pocketed it.

“Do you actually know where these vents lead?” Harry asked me.

“Nope,” I said. “But I’d really like to be somewhere else by the time those assholes break in through the elevator shaft.”

He nodded, a slight grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah, me too.”

* * * *

It was a tight squeeze in the narrow tunnel of the air vent. Chris went first, Devon behind him, and Kyle behind Devon. Cam went next, with Lucy following him and me behind her. Harry was behind me. Andre was last.

It was hot. More than halfway down the line, none of the cool air was reaching me.

“You okay, Luce?” I asked.

She twisted around slightly—the only one of us small enough to move with any freedom at all—and nodded at me in the dark. “We have tunnels at school we crawl in.”

I’d seen them. Big concrete pipes, each a few meters long, under mounds of grass in the playground. Now I felt them. Smooth concrete, cool to the touch of Lucy’s tiny hands. She sat in the middle of the tunnel, her spine curved to mirror the wall of the pipe, her feet braced to keep from slipping. Other little girls sat beside her, eating their sandwiches out of their lunch boxes and listening to their classmates laughing on the nearby slides and swings. It was a tiny, breathless fragment of a childhood I’d never had but somehow managed to give her, at least for a moment. And now we were here, in the black, haunted by the dreams and memories of lives we’d never lived, caught in the middle of a mutiny.