Darker Space (4 page)

That’s right. Go and get some backup from an officer. Hopefully
my
officer.

The guy he’d been talking to turned around to glare at me. He was only a crewman like me, but he didn’t belong on base according to the patches on his uniform:
Def 1
, along with the wings that marked him as Shitbox crew. He had the pallor of a guy who’d been living in the black for a while.

I remembered what Jones had said about all the traffic coming in from the black. I guess it hadn’t been bullshit.

The guy shook his head at me, then turned back as the clerk reappeared.

“Are you Garrett?” the clerk asked.

“Guilty as charged.”

“Lieutenant Rushton says he’ll see you.”

I grinned and walked behind the counter. Waved my work order at the clerk.

Cam’s office was the third one down the corridor on the left. He was waiting for me in the corridor, leaning against the wall. “Wallace said there was a crewman from the hospital here complaining about syringes.”

“And you knew it was me?”

“He might have said an insubordinate, loudmouthed little fucker from the hospital.” Cam shrugged. “You fit the description.”

I shoved the work order at him. “The hospital needs syringes, LT. It was an
emergency
.”

“Of course it was.” He smiled, but it was strained.

For the first time I noticed the door to his office was ajar. And there was someone inside. Just a figure in gray fatigues, like every other guy on base. Something about him seemed somehow familiar, though. Height, stance, the general shape of him. Something that itched at my memory.

“You’re busy. Sorry. But I really do need the syringes.”

Cam glanced at his door. The itch at the base of my skull deepened.

He sighed. “Come in for a minute, Brady.” He pushed the door open.

The guy in gray turned.

Well, fuck me blind.

Captain Chris Varro. Dark blue eyes, an olive complexion, a sharp jaw, a straight, prominent nose, and a smile that was just a little lopsided. Cam’s ex-boyfriend, current intel officer, and someone I’d last met on Defender Three when his colleagues were basically torturing me for information because they’d thought Cam was in league with the Faceless. Also, a guy I still got the occasional wet dream about since sharing Cam’s memories of him.

Hoo-fucking-ray.

I glared at him as I stepped inside Cam’s office. Cam closed the door behind us.

“Recruit Garrett.” Chris’s gaze was stony. “It’s been a while.”

“Crewman,” I corrected.

Chris raised his eyebrows, waiting for something. Then he shook his head and looked to Cam. “I see he still doesn’t know how to salute.”

Cam’s mouth quirked. “Oh, he knows. You know, don’t you, Brady?”

I kept my hands jammed in my pockets. “Yep.”

“There,” Cam said in a that-settles-it tone. His eyes shone. “I was certain he did.”

Chris looked from Cam to me and back like he didn’t know which one of us to punch first.

Cam was so getting his dick sucked tonight.

“Right,” Chris said at last. “I’d better report in at the office. Good to see you again, Cam.” He shouldered past me and left the room.

“Asshole,” I said before the door snicked shut. I made a face at Cam. “What the hell was that about?”

Cam frowned slightly. “I’m not sure. He said he’s on secondment here, heading up some project for intel.”

“Here,” I said. “Of all the bases on the planet, he’s on secondment
here
. This has something to do with us, right?”

Cam sighed. “It’s a pretty big coincidence otherwise.”

“I heard there’s a lot more traffic this week, coming from straight out of the black.”

“Yeah.” Cam rubbed his forehead as though he was trying to smooth the frown away. “I heard that too.”

I wondered if it was something to do with us, or something to do with the Faceless. Same thing, as far as the brass was concerned. Cam and I would never be free of Kai-Ren, not as long as we were in the military. Which meant, for me, another six years of pushing a mop and trying to keep my mouth shut. And I wasn’t much good at either one of those things.

Sometimes I liked to imagine we could run. Go and build some shack out in the bush and live off the land. Except it was just a bullshit dream, the sort that crumbled in the face of practicalities like food and money, and Lucy’s future. I still held on to it, though, in a corner of my mind. I always would, probably. Someplace, untouched and unassailable, where Cam and Lucy and I could always be safe and happy. Red dirt on my feet, the sun on my back, and the air alive with the rasping hum of cicadas. A place where the military—and the Faceless—didn’t even exist.

“Hey.” Cam caught my hand and pulled me close. I leaned into his warmth. “We’re not going to freak out about this, okay? It might be nothing.”

“Yeah.” I pressed my mouth to his neck and inhaled his scent. His aftershave smelled better on him than it did on me. “It’s probably nothing.”

Cam held me tight, and I knew he didn’t really believe it either.

* * * *

Cameron Rushton had the most famous face on the planet. He’d been the poster boy for the war effort.

Join the Military and Save the Earth.

Buy bonds.

Conserve resources.

Work harder.

And none of it would matter anyway, if the Faceless wanted us dead. Treaty or no treaty, we were nothing but insects to them.

Once, walking along the underpass from the train station on our way to get Lucy from school, Cam stopped and stared at his face on the poster. Faded a little, weathered, the colors leached out. Jagged graffiti crossing his skin like angry scars.

He’d stared at the poster, expressionless, as though he didn’t recognize what he was seeing. Just stared, until I touched him on the arm and he shook his head and smiled, and we kept walking.

Sometimes I wondered if he even recognized the guy he’d been before the Faceless came for his Shitbox. Before they killed everyone in it except for Cam and left their bodies spinning in space. Dragged Cam away for a different horror story altogether.

Sometimes, when the lab techs took our blood or made us stare at flash cards to be sure our psychic link was really dead, or when the brass asked us the same questions about Kai-Ren and the Faceless every fucking time, sometimes I wondered if we’d ever be free of it.

And sometimes I wondered if Cam wanted to be.

That night, at home, I watched Cam’s famous face while he sat on the balcony and gazed at the stars.

Cam loved the black. Even after everything, he loved it. And I hadn’t had to be a passenger in his head to know it. Cam had felt freedom out there in the stars, diving into them, reckless, breathless. I hadn’t. The whole time I was on Defender Three, I could feel the black creeping at my back, threatening to suffocate me. Threatening to rip the breath right out of my lungs and crush me.

Space will kill you.

I watched him in profile, with the darkness behind him. I’d seen him, once, framed in starlight. I’d seen him floating underwater like a pale corpse too, with silver writing glowing on his ribs, while he dreamed of the stars.

I lit a cigarette—the only reason I ever came out here at night—and we sat together quietly and let the remains of the day drift away from us like curls of smoke.

“I thought you were quitting,” Cam said at last.

Here again?

The pattern of our life.

Cam was still looking out for me, just like he had since the moment we’d met. The only guy I let close, just like when it had been him and me against the black. I didn’t want to lose him. I couldn’t lose him. But I was scared this was it. This was how it was always going to be. It was better than I’d ever dared to hope, and I was sabotaging it with my attitude, just like with everything.

He couldn’t want me forever.

Not the same angry, fucked-up kid I’d been when we met.

The same angry, fucked-up kid I still was, and would always be.

Cam turned his face to look at me and smiled slightly, then looked again to the stars.

Here again.

Same old nightmares, same old dreams.

I sighed; my breath escaped me in a smoky haze.

“Did you make Lucy’s lunch for tomorrow, or should I do it?” Cam asked.

I licked the bitter taste of nicotine off my lips. “Your mother dropped her off with a full lunch box.”

After school, most days Lucy went to Cam’s parents’ place until one of us finished at the base. It shouldn’t have rankled, but it did.

“Hey.” Cam put an arm around me, and I leaned into him. Rested my head on his shoulder and remembered that time it was just us against the universe. How scared I’d been—so scared that the nightmares still gathered in the back of my skull, regrouping there throughout the day, waiting for me to sleep before they attacked—but how simple it had been as well. All that fear I had, all that anger—I still had it, except now I had nowhere to point it. It hung over me like a cloud, and I breathed it in. Couldn’t get past it, couldn’t get through it. It was just there.

Maybe it was just
me.

Maybe it wasn’t Kopa or my dad’s death or Lucy. Maybe it wasn’t Defender Three or Cam or the Faceless. Maybe it wasn’t the tests or the questions or even Lance Corporal Lingard and those endless fucking halls that needed to be mopped. Maybe it was none of that at all.

Maybe, if you took all those things away, I’d still be the exact same fucked-up asshole I was now.

“Love you.” His breath was warm against my ear.

Because underneath everything, the shitty truth of it was that Cam really did love me. I was less than he deserved, but he loved me. Sometimes I thought if he could only tell himself that a hundred times a day, tell me that, then he wouldn’t have to notice the empty void behind those words. He wouldn’t have to notice that Brady Garrett, and that everything about our life together here on Earth—his job, our apartment, Lucy—was just the consolation prize he’d won when they’d told him he couldn’t go back into the big black. When they’d told him he couldn’t keep chasing that starlight.

He wasn’t happy, not really. He would never have admitted that to himself, let alone to me, but Cam wasn’t the only one faking it.

I put my arms around him. Held him tight.

Cam held me too. I don’t know if he noticed I didn’t answer. He was staring at the sky again, lost in the stars.

* * * *

That night it wasn’t my nightmare that ripped me from sleep. It was my sister’s.

“Brady?” Lucy’s voice was a whisper in the darkness.

“Yeah?” Half-awake, I pushed the sheets away and reached out for her.

She leaned into the space in my arms and filled it. “Had a bad dream.”

“Okay.” I shifted back and made room. On the other side of me, Cam sighed in his sleep. “What about?”

Lucy tucked her head under my chin. “You went away. I looked for you, but you got lost in the stars.”

“That’s not going to happen.” I held her tight. “Never again.”

You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep, but I didn’t know then that it was a lie.

Chapter Three

Lunch was the highlight of my day. Not because the food was decent—it wasn’t—but because Cam and I would meet up behind Armory Store Twelve and eat together. His food, from the officer’s mess, was a lot nicer than mine. We shared, of course, and I laughed at the faces he made when he had to eat my half.

There was a small, shaded table behind Armory Store Twelve, and in all our time back planetside, we’d never run into anyone else who wanted to use it. It was sheltered a little from most of the traffic on the base. Sometimes we’d get a few stares from guys taking a shortcut between admin and the barracks, but we didn’t care what anyone thought. Why shouldn’t an officer share his lunch with an enlisted man?

Today, though, Cam was antsy. Kept checking his watch.

“You got something exciting waiting for you back in the office?” Like anything exciting ever happened in logistics. Cam had flown Hawks in the black once. Now he oversaw the guys who loaded supplies onto the Shitboxes and sent them to the Defenders. He hated it. He never said he did, but I could tell.

He rolled his shoulders and made a face. “Got landed with a bunch of newbies today. I’m worried if I leave them alone too long, they’ll burn the warehouses down.”

I drew my finger through the remains of today’s enlisted men’s slop. I think it was supposed to be mashed potatoes and gravy, but it was kind of hard to tell. “Fuck it. Let ’em.”

He huffed out an exasperated breath. “God, Brady. They’re kids, you know?”

I knew. I’d been conscripted at sixteen as well.

Cam sighed. “I was better dealing with recruits when I was younger. Now I feel like instead of yelling at them, I should be patting them on the heads and tucking them into bed.”

“Pretty sure I’m the only guy you should be tucking into bed, LT.”

He smiled. “If we were at home right now…”

His fingers curled with mine under the table. I tried to draw his hand into my crotch, but he was having none of it. “That’s not fair. Stop teasing me.”

“You started it,” he said.

No. Pretty sure he started it, with that smile that was somehow hardwired to my dick.

He looked at his watch again. “Time to go.”

I let go of his hand, and we slid out from behind the table.

“I’ll see you after.”

“Bye.” One day I wanted to surprise him with a kiss. And surprise anyone walking past at the time, I guess. The military kind of overlooked our whole fraternization thing. I mean, we’d gone right past fraternization to cohabitation. But it turned out that being taken by the Faceless—Cam for four years and me for a few days—got us some major leeway. Making out at work would probably be pushing it, though.

I watched his ass as he walked away.

That wasn’t against regulations, at least.

* * * *

Lucy had made me a picture of space once. Yellow dots on a piece of black cardboard and a pair of white stick figures floating in the middle of it all: me and Cam. We were holding hands, our splayed fingers crossed like lattice.