Darker Space (21 page)

I would die for her.

It had been true since the moment of her birth. Since the moment I’d held her, and her tiny wrinkled fist had curled around my thumb.

I would die for her, without hesitation. It was the only thing I’d ever been sure of in my life. It was my cornerstone. When the rest of the universe was crumbling in the storm, that was the one truth I could stand on, brace myself against, and trust never to let me fall. I would die for her, except fate, life, the universe, didn’t work like that. Fate never offered people the chance to make a deal like that. Fate rolled over every single one of us like a cyclone, wind screaming, ripping our lives up at the roots and leaving nothing but wreckage behind. All I could do was try to bend with the wind and not break.

I fixed my gaze on the small soles of Lucy’s sneakers, pale in the gloom, and crawled after her.

We didn’t have to go far—only past the blast doors before we found another vent to get down—but every few meters felt like they took forever. It was dark and hot and too cramped to move easily. My elbows kept knocking against the walls of the tunnel. I slipped once and kicked Harry in the face.

We both felt the sting.

Shit. If the tunnel narrowed at all, we were in serious trouble.

When my knees hit the sharp seam of metal, I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Then I realized we must have been at the blast doors, and in the event of a hull breach or a fire, this is where the vent would be sealed shut. We were almost through.

Which was exactly when they heard us.

There must have been guys stationed on the other side of the blast doors in case we managed to get them open. And we must have been making enough noise for one of them to hear us.

There was no warning.

No actual contact, even.

Just a sudden burst of gunfire, the sound reverberating in the narrow space. Shafts of light punching though the vent from below.

“Back up!” Chris yelled. “Back up!”

Then he grunted in pain.

I felt the bullet shred his—
my
—biceps.

Lucy started screaming. “Brady! Brady!”

I grabbed her by the sneaker and pulled her back.

“My arm! My arm!”

“No, no, Luce,” I said. “No, it’s not you. It’s Chris! It’s not you!”

She was still screaming.

Behind me, Andre and Harry were moving back as fast as they could. Harry grabbed my ankles. “Brady, you got her?”

“Yeah!”

Fuck.
Another burst of gunfire, just as Harry pulled. Lucy and I slid backward.

“Lucy, grab Cam! Can you reach him?”

“My arm hurts!” she screamed.

“Just go! Just go!”

So much noise, so many voices. Maybe that was Cam. I couldn’t tell.

“Move him!” That was definitely Cam. “Come on, get past him! Chris!”

More gunfire.

We crawled backward across the barrier of the blast doors, Harry half pulling me, and me dragging a hysterical Lucy. Fuck knows where Andre, at the end of our broken chain, found the strength. We were covered in sweat and dust by the time we got back to the open vent above the room. I hit the table hard, staggering and almost falling off it. Andre grabbed my legs to steady me, and I held my arms up for Lucy. She slipped into my grasp, wailing. I passed her down to Harry and jumped onto the floor.

“You’re okay,” I told her, taking her back and holding her close. Running my hands over her to reassure us both. “You’re okay. It wasn’t you. It was Chris, not you.”

She buried her tearful face in my shoulder.

Harry was back on the table, lifting himself up into the vent. “I can’t see them!”

There had been so much noise, so much shouting, so much panic, that I hadn’t felt it at first. Hadn’t felt that someone was gone, no longer a part of us. A light flicked off, plunging a room into darkness.

Kyle.

Kyle was dead.

I couldn’t even say I hardly knew him. Not when I could still see the proud smile his dad gave him, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. Not when I could still remember the way his dad showed Kyle how to do up his tie before he went away to officer training. Not when I could still feel the warmth that smile filled Kyle with, making him puff out his chest and grin so wide it hurt. His dad had been so proud of him.

“I see them!” Harry exclaimed.

Andre climbed up onto the table and gave Harry a boost.

Then Cam and Chris and Devon were dropping back through the vent hard, puppets with their strings suddenly cut, their useless limbs collapsing under them. They were covered in blood and pain and panic and it hit me like a wall, and I couldn’t pick it apart. Didn’t need to, though. I just needed to act. I shoved Lucy into Harry’s arms and skidded into the bathroom to get the first-aid kit.

“Andre, go and find me some more. Hurry!”

Cam. I focused on Cam first, and on his racing heartbeat. Fast but steady.

“I’m okay.” He was half carrying Devon.

I helped Cam get him onto the bed.

There was a lot of blood. It was soaking through Devon’s tunic. I opened the first-aid kit. Bandages, mostly. Tweezers. Gloves. Antiseptic. Some basic type of painkiller. Nothing actually fucking useful. By the time I’d gone through it, Cam had unbuttoned Devon’s tunic. His T-shirt was covered in blood.

I knelt beside him on the bed and peeled his shirt up.

A sucking chest wound. Great. My favorite.

“Get his shirt off him,” I told Cam and pulled on a pair of gloves. “Chris,” I said over my shoulder, “are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, voice shaking.

Liar.

“Put pressure on your arm until I can take a look,” I told him.

Andre came back with another few first-aid kits.

“Okay,” I told Devon, fighting down the fear that was threatening to overwhelm him first, then me. “I’m gonna tape this up, okay? Because you don’t want a collapsed lung, and that’s what’ll happen if we can’t stop the air from getting in through your chest.”

He nodded weakly, his bloody fingers twitching on the sheets.

“I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.”

“You’re not gonna die, Devon,” I told him. We both thought of the redheaded woman he’d left back home. Stupid, but he’d thought he was doing the right thing coming here. He’d thought he’d known the risks. He’d been ready to meet the Faceless, to sacrifice his future with that redheaded woman for the future of all humanity, and instead he’d been taken out by a human. It was fucking ridiculous. “I know what I’m doing.”

He grimaced, and blood frothed on his lips.
“You mop floors.”

“I’m a man of many talents,” I told him.

I
knew
this shit. I’d been Doc’s best medic once upon a time.

I wiped Devon’s chest down as quickly as I could, then unwrapped a sterile plastic sheet and laid it over the wound. Taped the top and both sides.

“Okay, I’m going to roll you onto your side now,” I told him. I nodded at Cam. “Injured side down.”

Cam helped me ease him into the lateral position.

“Cam, watch him,” I said, peeling the gloves off and reaching for a fresh pair. “Make sure his breathing doesn’t get worse. Check the blood doesn’t stick the dressing to his skin. If you see the veins in his neck bulging, or if his lips turn blue, let me know.”

“That’s it?” Andre asked.

“Unless there’s a fully equipped operating theater in one of those first-aid kits, then yeah, that’s it.” I turned around to deal with Chris next. Apart from the bullet lodged in his shattered muscle and bone, he was okay. He wasn’t going to bleed out or anything, at least. “I’d go in looking for it, but I’ve only got this screwdriver.”

“I’ll pass,” Chris said, his face pale.

“Smart.” I bound his arm as tightly as I could, made him a sling, and then went and pulled a chair up close to the bed.

I watched Devon.

Nothing else to do except watch.

* * * *

Out the window, the lights of the Core blinked in the black. The med bay was right there, right fucking there, for all the good it did us.

“Will Kai-Ren come and help Devon?” Lucy asked me quietly at one point.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Pretty sure a Faceless pod was the only thing that could save him now. He was in shock. His lips were blue.

“He’s coming,” Lucy said. “He’s getting closer.”

I don’t know what terrified me more—that Kai-Ren was coming, or that he wouldn’t make it in time.

With a proper med kit, at least I could have overdosed Devon on morphine and let him go quicker. Let him go without pain. Let him go wrapped in nothing but warmth and the memory of that redheaded woman with her crooked smile and the taste of coffee in her kisses. But I had nothing.

Devon took over an hour to die.

* * * *

“What do you think?” Chris asked, his voice rasping.

“What do I think about what?” I asked him as I adjusted his sling.

“Been a while since we heard anything. You think the officers are back in control?”

“I think those painkillers are pretty fucking strong if you’re even asking,” I told him. “If they were in control, they would have checked on us.”

“Yeah.” He leaned his head back on the wall and closed his eyes. “Wishful thinking.”

Chris was right, though. It had been a while since we’d heard any explosions. Maybe they’d given up.

I thought of the guys I remembered from my first time here on the station. O’Shea, who snored like a bastard. Hooper, the half-stir-crazy, half-actual-crazy fucker from engineering. Cesari, with his silver crucifix and his strange unspoken faith in something bigger than the black and the nightmares in it. Branski, that rat-faced little fuck, and Wade. Fucking Wade. I was sixteen when he jumped me in the showers that time. Nineteen when he kicked the shit out of me, broke almost every bone in my body, and left me to burn in a UV chamber.

Well, fuck him. He was dead. Fuck him.

I thought of those other guys and wondered which side they were on in this. Wondered who was in charge. Wondered what they’d do next.

Maybe their next move was to get control of ops and simply cut our air off. That would have been my next move, but then I was never that creative. Not as creative as those assholes outside, apparently.

Lucy gasped suddenly and turned back from the window. “Brady, look!”

I turned around slowly, expecting to see the Faceless ship looming darkly out of nothing, blocking out the starlight. Expecting Kai-Ren. Instead, I saw a Hawk. It was close, the clean, sharp lines of it lit up by the lights of the station. The lights that blinked on and off like buoys in a dark ocean, marking out safe channels. Lighting the way home.

“Move!” Cam shouted. “Move!”

The Hawk pivoted slowly, as graceful as a dancer
en pointe.

They couldn’t get through the doors, so they were going to come through the walls. Puncture a hole in the side of Defender Three and rip the oxygen right out of our lungs.

We barreled out into the corridor, straight for the fire store. My hands shook as I shoved a mask over Lucy’s small, thin face and tightened it as much as I could, and ripped off her backpack to hook the tank over her shoulders instead. It was heavy.

Wouldn’t be, though.

Not for long.

Not once the hull was breached and we lost atmo.

“Cam? Cam, Jesus. Cam, what do we do?”

Cam slapped a mask over my face. The seal felt loose. I reached behind my head and fumbled with the straps. My fingers slipped.

“The blast doors,” Chris said, his voice distorted by his mask. “They won’t risk a hit near the blast doors.”

I held Lucy’s hand, and we hurried toward the blast doors.

I thought we’d still have time.

I thought it might even work.

I thought that maybe we could get inside a room and wait it out.

Ride out the sudden decompression and wait.

Wait for Leonski to retake control.

Wait for a rescue party.

Then the Hawk punched a hole in Defender Three, and the universe tore us apart.

A rush of noise. Metal screaming. A wall of heat from the missile that tore through the hull. Fire that flared and was gone again in the blink of an eye, ripping through our oxygen and suffocated in an instant. Wind roaring. Debris flying. A maelstrom, and I was sucked straight into it. Straight into the gaping, hungry mouth of the black.

Lucy’s hand wasn’t in mine anymore.

My feet weren’t on the floor. My hands were scrabbling at nothing. I snagged a door frame, maybe. Looked back the way I thought I’d come. Saw the others, linked like a string of paper dolls twisting in the wind.

Just had to hold on.

Had to hold on until the pressure stabilized.

My fingers slipped.

My head hit the wall, the floor, the ceiling, I don’t know. The impact knocked my mask askew. The seal broke. I tried to grab the jagged edges of the mouth the Hawk had made, sharp fangs of metal snapping at me.

Missed.

Blood burst like vapor from the jagged cut in my arm.

I didn’t feel it.

The bracelet Lucy had given me snapped and broke. The blue and green beads floated away on the mist of my blood.

I breathed out. Breathed out, because that was the only thing I remembered to do. Breathed out so my lungs didn’t burst. Buying myself minutes instead of seconds.

Defender Three grew smaller and smaller as I sank into the black.

“Brady! Brady!”
Cam and Lucy, both calling for me.

I could feel the moisture boiling on my tongue.

“Don’t let her go, Cam. Don’t ever let her go.”

And then I didn’t feel anything at all.

Chapter Thirteen

I woke up with sunlight on my face.

I blinked my eyes open. I saw sun-bleached clumps of gum leaves swinging listlessly in the breeze. I saw blue sky so brilliant that it burned its shape on my retinas when I blinked. I turned my head and saw red dirt. Saw a green ant marching over the back of my hand, its feet tickling my skin. I reached out and pinched it before it could sting. I bit its abdomen off, and the sweet sugary taste of it flooded onto my tongue.

The air smelled of eucalypts and hard, baked earth.