Darker Space (5 page)

Cam had put the picture on the fridge at home.

I’d left it there for as long as I could stand it, then threw it out.

It was a nightmare.

I couldn’t even look at it without feeling the black at my back, threatening to rip the air out of my lungs and boil the moisture off my tongue.

Lucy had painted it like a dream, but it was a nightmare.

I don’t think Lucy noticed the picture was gone, but sometimes I caught Cam looking at the white space left behind and then looking at me.

* * * *

I liked to sneak off in the middle of the day to play cards with Mike Marcello. Back on Defender Three, Doc called that patient aftercare. Here, they called it bludging. They were half right, but it was more than just laziness that made me ditch work to hang out with the kid. Who the hell else did he have? I stashed my mop behind a door, made sure no nurses were watching, and slipped into his room. I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, his legs tangled in his sheets and his bedpan halfway across the floor.

“Arrett!” He sounded like he was choking.

“Hey.” I crossed the floor. Got a hand on his back and leaned him forward a little. “You breathing okay?”

He nodded, a high-pitched whimper rising in him.

The source of his distress became apparent soon enough. His legs were wet. The mattress and sheets were. He’d pissed himself.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. Marcello’s catheter had only been taken out a few days ago, and he was still having trouble adjusting. “It happens a lot. Particularly when guys are on strong pain meds, you know. You can sort of sleep through the warning signals, and by the time you wake up, it’s too late.”

“Orry.”

I slapped him on the back. “It’s not even a big deal.” I stood back and retrieved the bedpan from where he must’ve kicked it in his panic. I set it on the cabinet beside his bed. “You want me to take you to the shower?”

The remaining side of his mouth jerked up slightly.

I showed him my palms. “Hey, none of that. I’m taken, remember?”

“Ee-yot.”
Idiot.
But he let me untangle the wet sheet from his legs and help him to his feet. I walked him across the hall to the shower room and left him there getting clean while I went back to strip his bed.

Actual patient contact wasn’t in my job description anymore, but it had been once. Back when I’d been a trainee medic, I’d actually liked looking after people. I’d liked being useful. If there was anything I missed about the black, it was that. For a couple of hours a day when I was working in the med bay, I’d felt like more than I was. Not just some dirty reffo from Kopa. Not just some invisible dumb fuck of a recruit. Someone else. Someone who wasn’t Brady Garrett.

I hauled the sheets off Marcello’s bed, then headed to the nearest supply closet to get some fresh sheets and some spray to clean down the plastic mattress. I checked on Marcello on my way back.

“You okay in there?”

“Es!”

I went back to his room and remade his bed. My hospital corners were as crap as ever. I could almost hear Doc’s gravelly voice behind me:
Call that rat’s nest a bed, do you, Garrett?

I missed Doc as well. He always said I needed the occasional clip behind the ear to keep my attitude in check, and I think he was probably right. I mean, there were plenty of assholes in my life now who’d line up for the opportunity to smack me in the head, but none who counted for shit. None that I respected. None that I
loved.

Doc had always been more than my boss. He’d looked out for me, and he’d done it without making a big deal out of it or making me feel like he wanted something in return. He’d called me
son
, and I’d needed to hear that word so badly at that time in my life that I’d ached for it. He’d made my miserable existence somehow tolerable.

And then Cam came. And my entire universe shifted.

It was still shifting, still spinning, a maelstrom, but Cam was at the center of it. He’d become my anchor. All I had to do was hold on. So why did I suddenly feel like everything I had, everything we had, was about to get ripped out of my grasping fingers?

It was because Chris Varro was here, and it couldn’t be a coincidence.

The first wet dream I’d ever had about a guy had featured Chris Varro. I’d been in Cam’s head at the time, and his wet dream was my wet dream, and Cam and Chris had fucked. The memory of Chris’s hands on Cam’s skin became Chris’s hands on me, his teeth on
my
shoulder, his fingers wrapped around
my
cock.

I closed my eyes and groaned. “Fuck!”

How unfair was that? Chris Varro could still make my dick hard.

That asshole.

I rubbed my dick through the coarse fabric of my fatigues, then figured that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to get caught doing while on duty. I jammed my hands in my pockets instead.

I hated Chris, and not just because he was Cam’s ex. I hated him because he should have been on Cam’s side, but he hadn’t been. Not when it counted. Cam had been gone for four years by the time the Faceless sent him back, and everyone, even Chris, had suspected he was a traitor. And Chris should have been different. He should have been better than that.

They’d fucked in Cam’s dreams, but they’d talked as well, and laughed and touched and loved each other in a hundred different ways that had nothing to do with getting off. That should have counted for more than it did when they met again on Defender Three.

Jesus. Not that I wished Chris had been nicer or anything. The fact he’d been a dick had worked out pretty well for me, after all. I wasn’t asking for competition. It’s just that Cam was worth more than a thousand Chris fucking Varros, and the whole universe should have known it.

And maybe in some weird, fucked-up way I hated him because I felt rejected. Because the first time I’d met Chris, I’d thought—infected by all of Cam’s dreams and breathless with the shock of seeing him in the flesh—
I loved him
, and he hadn’t even looked at me twice. Okay, so my first bitter taste of unrequited love had lasted all of thirty seconds before I reminded myself that I was nothing but an echo chamber for Cam’s emotions, but it had hurt all the same.

Stupid.

I climbed off Marcello’s bed and headed down the hall and fetched him from the shower. He was a skinny kid. Most of that was from eating mush, I guess. He still had a faint scar on his gut from where he’d worn a feeding tube for the first few months after his accident, but the doctors had taken him off it now because he needed to know how to feed himself again if he was ever going to get the hell out of this hospital.

Marcello dressed quickly, avoiding his reflection in the mirror.

“Hey, you’ll be as good as new when they fix your face up,” I told him. We both knew it was a lie. He’d never look like the same guy he must have been before the accident, but at least he wouldn’t look as monstrous as he did now.

He shrugged, and we headed back to his room.

“Want to play cards?”

He sat down on his bed and shrugged again.

I sat down on the other end. “You don’t seem real enthusiastic. Seriously, you think you’re having a bad day? You won’t even believe what happened to me yesterday.”

“Ot?”
What?

“I walked into Cam’s office, and who’s already there? His fucking
ex
.”

Marcello’s eyes widened.

I pulled the cards out of my pocket, knowing I could tempt him into a hand after a few rounds of our other favorite game: the continuing saga of why my life sucked more than anyone else’s. Marcello knew I was at least 90 percent bluster and bullshit.

Probably 95.

So Marcello let me bitch and moan about how much my life sucked, shaking his head and making all the right sympathetic noises. Then I dealt the cards and we played a few hands of poker, and we both pretended, for that brief hour, that we were normal guys with normal lives and no nightmares hiding just under our skin, waiting for the darkness to tear its way free.

* * * *

Later that afternoon, halfway through mopping Ward Four, I got word that I needed to be out of my fatigues and into my dress uniform and at Tribunal Room B, five minutes ago. The requirement for dress uniform was a giveaway; it was time for another grilling in front of the brass.

It did not go well.

In retrospect, it was probably not a good idea to call an officer a cocksucker. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, right? Pretty easy to see where you fucked up when you’re stuck in a cell in the stockade.

But it started off okay.

Cam met me out front. “You ready?”

I wiped my sweaty palms on my trousers. “Yeah.”

I should have been better at these interviews by now. I’d done enough of them since coming home, and they were always the same. I sat on a chair in front of a panel full of assholes wearing enough medals you could melt them down and build a shiny new Defender to blast into orbit, and they asked me a hundred different questions. And most of them I couldn’t answer.

“Your tie’s not straight,” Cam said and reached up for it.

I let him undo the shitty knot I’d put in the thing, then straighten it and start again. Cam looked good in his dress uniform, just like the guy off the posters. The heroic, handsome young officer. I looked like some guy wearing a bad disguise, who was probably only sneaking in to try and steal stuff like the filthy reffo I was.

“Hey,” Cam said. “Stop thinking that.”

“Fuck off,” I told him in an undertone, since we were in the hallowed halls of HQ and he was an officer and all. “You’re not in my head anymore.”

“It’s written all over your face, Brady.”

Cam still had hold of my tie. He used it to pull me forward until we were standing inches apart, and then kissed me.

Right there. Right outside Tribunal Room B, in District Fourteen Beta Headquarters. Right in front of a pair of guys walking past.

I pulled back and glowered at them, and at him. “You wanna get us court-martialed for fraternization, LT?”

“They won’t court-martial us.” Cam grinned. “You and me, Brady, we’re special.”

I pushed him away, smoothed down my tie, and muttered, “We’re freaks.”

“Uh-huh,” Cam said. “
Special
freaks.”

I rolled my eyes, but he was right.

It was because Cam and I saw the Faceless.

Not that long ago, I was just a lowly recruit with a bad haircut and a worse attitude, stuck in a tin can out in the big black. Totally fucking unimportant and totally fucking fine with that. Then Cameron Rushton came barreling into my miserable life—into my
head
—and we saw the Faceless. Now there wasn’t a general or a field marshal or a what-the-hell-ever on the planet who didn’t know my name. And fuck me if it wasn’t always written right under Cam’s on every top-secret, classified, I’ll-tell-you-but-I’ll-have-to-kill-you report they churned out.

I hated these interviews. Really hated them, and Cam knew it. He was okay with talking about everything that had happened with Kai-Ren, the Faceless battle regent who’d kept him like a pet for years, except Kai-Ren had done shit to him that you’d go to jail for doing to a house cat. Cam was okay with having all those assholes stare at him like he was some sort of scientific curiosity and trying to pick apart his answers, looking for lies. My dealings with Kai-Ren had only been brief. Fucking nightmarish. I hated to rehash it all, over and over again, in front of assholes who had no idea how terrifying it had been.

I hated it, but also, this was us again, against the universe again.

We knew this.

We
had
this.

Cam lifted his hand and cupped my jaw. “When this is done, I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

“Fuck off.” But I smiled.

The ice cream thing was our joke. Ours and Lucy’s. When we’d brought her back to the city from Kopa, she’d been terrified of everything: getting her shots at the clinic, visiting the dentist, the traffic, the crowds, and mostly of going to school since she was a dirty reffo from Kopa and behind all the other kids. That first morning, she’d crawled under her bed and refused to come out until Cam promised we’d buy ice cream when we picked her up in the afternoon. We did that for a week.

Then one day, she said,
“Brady, I think I like school. I don’t need ice cream this afternoon.”

And I said,
“Don’t tell Cam that. I haven’t tried the macadamia yet.”

She told Cam, so now he bribed me with ice cream as well. Ice cream or blowjobs. And both of those were pretty fucking sweet.

Cam’s wicked grin told me he knew exactly what I was thinking again. Cam was right about me. Every thought I ever had was written across my face. Which was another reason I hated these interviews. Those assholes knew exactly how much I hated them, and they hated me right back. I’d already been written up twice for insubordination. Once for refusing to answer a question, and once for my attitude.

My
attitude
? Fuck them.

See, there was the problem right there.

Luckily Cam was there to keep me more or less under control most of the time. Or at least deflect attention from me when I was busy digging myself into shit.

The door opened, and a rat-faced junior officer stuck his head out. “Lieutenant Rushton and Crewman Garrett? They’re ready for you.”

I swore under my breath.

“I’ve got this, Brady,” Cam said, when what he really meant was
I’ve got you
.

We walked in together. If the junior officer who closed the door behind us noticed the way Cam’s hand lingered on the small of my back as we entered, he didn’t comment on it.

I knew what these assholes thought, but I knew they figured we were only together because of the connection that Kai-Ren had fabricated so that I was Cam’s unwilling pacemaker back when they’d cut him out of the stasis pod on Defender Three. And maybe that was
how
we got together, but it wasn’t
why
we were still together. Because once we weren’t in each other’s heads anymore, and once I got over the shock of being with a guy, I still wanted to be with Cam.