Darker Space (9 page)

Nothing.

God.

Not even any stars. It wasn’t nothing I saw at all, was it? It was something, something big enough and close enough to a Defender to obscure the stars. I’d seen something like it before, from the window of the room I’d shared with Cam on Defender Three: a negative shape. Dark space.

A Faceless ship, blocking out the starlight behind it.

I felt dizzy all at once. My heart beat faster in my tightening chest. My guts churned.

“Cam? Cam, is it a trick?”

Because how the fuck would I know what I was really looking at? I’d been a trainee medic in the black, not a tech.

“Brady? Don’t freak out. Please don’t freak out.”

“Then tell me it’s a trick!”

“Don’t freak out.”

I pushed the printouts back toward Chris. I took a breath and held it, my heart hammering. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know why you’re asking me all this stuff when you could be asking Cam. He knows more about them than me.”

And he wouldn’t freak out.

Chris ran his thumb over the bent-up corner of the top printout.

“You’re a bug,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re an insect. Even if you could understand them, why would they want to communicate with you?”

You buzz around them too much, and they’ll swat us all.

Chris frowned. “You spoke their language once.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No, Kai-Ren put something inside Cam—some toxin, some mutation,
something
—and when I became his heartbeat, it patched me into their frequency. I can’t translate their language because I never heard it. What I hear in my head—
heard
, what I heard in my head wasn’t some alien language. It was ours.”

Chris looked down at the printout, as though staring at it would reveal all its secrets to him if he concentrated hard enough. All the secrets of the Faceless.

I suddenly felt the need to try and explain it to him, when I could barely explain it to myself. “Sometimes there was a lag, almost a stammer, when something wouldn’t translate, but I never heard their actual words for anything. I can’t teach you what I don’t know, sir.”

Chris smiled slightly, crinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes. “Jesus, Garrett. Sometimes even I can’t figure out if you’re lying or not.”

Sure. He might have been a trained interrogator for half a decade or so, but I’d been a liar since birth.

“I’m not,” I told him. “If I could, I’d tell you how to talk to them, because what the fuck do we have to lose? Might as well try negotiating before they wipe us off the face of the planet for good.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Garrett.” Chris sighed. “Look, they could have done that last time. You know it, and I know it. Hell, the entire military command knows it. Have you ever even asked why we have Defenders?”

I shook my head.

“There’s this story; I don’t know if it’s true or not. In the Second World War, when Britain was in danger of being invaded, Churchill asked people to donate metal for making munitions. Whatever they had lying around. Old saucepans, kettles, that kind of stuff. Now, all of this was useless when it came to making munitions, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, it made people feel like they were doing something. That they weren’t helpless. And that’s why we have Defenders.”

He smiled, like he thought it was a funny story.

In that moment I hated him more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life. I balled my fists. “My dad died because he worked in a smelter that produces sheet metal for Defenders.”

His smile faded. “I’m sorry.”

“You think the people at the bottom don’t know it’s hopeless?” I asked him. “You think we don’t notice it’s mostly reffo conscripts that end up on the Defenders, while the citizens get the planetside jobs? It’s more like population control than propaganda. You really think we’re all too dumb to see that?”

His expression darkened. “That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked. “
Sir
.”

He stared at me silently for a few moments. I couldn’t read his expression. Then he shook his head slightly. “You might as well get back to work, then.”

Pushing a mop around the hospital sounded a hell of a lot more fun than whatever this was.

“Yes, sir.” I stood. I could feel his gaze tracking me as I walked to the door.

“Garrett?”

I should have known the bastard had something up his sleeve. I turned. “Sir?”

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if your connection was restored?”

I could feel the color flooding from my face. “Yes, sir.”

I’m pretty sure he didn’t have to be a trained interrogator to know it was a lie.

* * * *

The first thing I did back at the hospital was break a mop. Throwing one against a wall will do that, it turns out. On my way to the basement to get a new one, I passed Marcello’s room and glanced in. He was sitting on his bed, reading a magazine. There was a half-packed suitcase lying open on the floor beside his dangling feet. Long, skinny feet, just like the rest of him. Marcello had another few growth spurts in him, I figured. I’d looked the same at sixteen: scrawny and half-grown, my joints too big for the rest of me.

“You going somewhere?”

He turned his head to look at me. “Ome.”

“I thought you had more surgeries.”

He shrugged. “’Ey say I an eat, I an oh.”

“You can eat, you can go?”

Marcello nodded.

Poor fucking kid. The military blew him up, and now they were going to send him home with half his face still missing. Plenty more where he came from, right? Assholes.

I shifted my busted mop from my left hand to my right hand. “Listen, I’ve got to go and get a new mop. Want to play cards or something when I get back?”

He mumbled something that sounded like assent.

“Okay. See you.”

He looked away.

I headed to the basement.

* * * *

I leaned against my locker and lit a cigarette. Kicked my locker a few times—
bang, bang, bang
—just to see if it made me feel better. It didn’t, not really, but the echoing noise of it in the confined space of the basement was so loud that it drowned out all the voices in my head. All my contradictory voices, and Cam’s voice as well.

With the sound still reverberating, I went and opened up the wire cage where the janitorial supplies were kept. I stepped inside to get a new mop, and the door clanged shut behind me.

All of a sudden I was back in the nightmare I’d had in the stockade, except this time I wasn’t asleep. I was locked in a cage, and there was a Faceless in here with me. Not just any Faceless. It was Kai-Ren. I knew it. Knew it in my fucking bones.

“Bray-dee.”

“Bray-
dee.”

My guts turned to water.

Not real not real not real.

I forced myself to suck in a deep breath, and to turn around and stare into the darkness at my back. Nothing there but cleaning supplies and cobwebs. Nothing to account for the ice slipping down my spine. Nothing except the sick feeling that I wasn’t alone. The shadows seemed to warp and shift, and I twisted my neck to catch movement in my periphery. There was nothing there. Kai-Ren wasn’t in the shadows. He was in my fucking head.

He wasn’t in the basement; he was in my nightmares. And my nightmares were bleeding over into my waking hours, drowning them with fear.

“Brady?”
I could hear the worry in Cam’s silent voice.

“I’m okay.”

Just scared, scared bone fucking deep, but Cam knew that. He’d always known that.

* * * *

“Marcello?” I pulled the pack of cards out of my pocket. His suitcase was still open on the floor. His magazine was lying on his pillow. A set of folded fatigues sat on the end of the bed. His boots were lined up neatly on the floor with the laces removed and the tongues hanging out. A tin of boot polish was shoved in the top of one of them.

Marcello was going home dressed like the soldier he’d never gotten the chance to be.

“Marcello?”

I headed back out into the hall, toward the bathroom a few doors down. I pushed the squeaking door open. The place stank like all hospital bathrooms: the sharp sting of bleach and antiseptic overlaid with stale urine.

“Marcello?” The three bathroom stalls were empty. The last two stalls in the room were larger: showers. One was empty. One was locked. I banged on the door. “Marcello, you in there?”

No answer. There was no water running either.

“Marcello?” I banged on the door again and then got down on my hands and knees to look under the door.

Saw bare feet on the tiles. Not standing. His left foot on its toes. His right foot turned sideways, the side rubbing back and forth against the tiles.

“Marcello!”

Don’t know why I yelled. He wasn’t struggling. He wasn’t going to hear me.

I hauled myself to my feet and shoulder-charged the door. It shuddered in its frame, but the lock held. I hit it again, and again. Pain tore through my shoulder. The impact jarred my bones, sending shock waves through me. The third time, maybe the fourth, the door burst open and slammed against the shower wall.

Marcello’s bootlaces were knotted around the showerhead and around his throat. His eyes were open—the good eye and the bad eye, the blood vessels blown in each now.

“I need some help in here!” I yelled.

One thing Doc had taught me was that CPR was a waste of time, except for when it wasn’t. And it was for those couple of times in a hundred that it actually worked that you did it.

I pulled my utility knife out of my pocket and sawed through the bootlaces.

Marcello fell forward. I tried to catch him, but he was a deadweight. He took us both down onto the tiles.

“Help!” I rolled him off me, onto his back. Scrambled to my feet and hurried to the door. “Help!” Then I hit the Call button near the sinks and dropped on my knees by Marcello again. He had no heartbeat. I tilted his head back and checked his airways. Held a hand across the gaping hole where his right cheek had once been. Filled my lungs with air and bent over him. I puffed a breath into him and felt it hot against my fingers.

I couldn’t cover the hole.

I couldn’t make a seal.

I leaned back. Positioned my hands above his sternum. Began compressions.

Lost myself in the rhythm.

On the twelfth compression, a rib cracked. I repositioned my hands and kept going. Could almost imagine Doc at my side, his voice steady as everything went to shit around us.

That’s it, Brady. Keep going, son.

Doc was just about the only thing I missed about being in the black.

“Come on, Marcello.” I leaned over him for three more quick breaths. I wasn’t sure if any of it was making it to his lungs. I wasn’t sure it even mattered, but I kept going because that was what Doc had taught me. You didn’t stop until a doctor told you to.

More compressions, more breaths, but I think I knew he was gone.

I heard the door squeal open, and I looked up to see a nurse appear. A second later there was another nurse behind her, and one of the doctors, and they pushed me out of the way and took over.

Fine by me.

I stood up to ease my aching back. Leaned against the wall and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

Blinked at Marcello as one of the nurses stuck the defib patches to his skin.

Once, my touch had kept Cam’s heart beating. I wished I could do the same for Marcello. I was stretching out my trembling fingers toward him before I realized how fucking delusional I was.

I slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Pulled my legs up and wrapped my arms around my knees. I wanted to be sitting down when the adrenaline dump hit. I curled my shaking fingers into fists.

I wanted to scream at him:
You were going home! You were going
home!

But I knew why he’d done it. Maybe, if I’d been sixteen and left with only half a face, maybe I would have done the same thing. Marcello could hardly feed himself. He lived in constant pain. He wasn’t ever going to get better. And maybe he just hadn’t wanted to see the horror on the faces of his parents and friends, of the people he’d loved, when they saw what he looked like now.

My vision blurred as tears stung my eyes.

Stupid fucking kid.

I didn’t want to deal with this, didn’t want to watch it anymore, but I wasn’t sure I could stand yet. So I sat there on the tiled floor and watched as the doctor and nurses tried to zap life into the corpse of the kid I’d played cards with every day for months.

Had to slap a hand over my mouth when a sob rose in my throat.

“Brady?”

I closed my eyes and knocked my head back against the wall.

Dead. Marcello was dead.

Dead dead dead.

This time I did sob—an ugly wet noise that tore out of me.

The doctor and the nurses kept working on Marcello for another few minutes—it couldn’t have been longer, although it felt like it. Time wasn’t running right. Everything in the universe had slowed. I could feel it so acutely that I thought maybe I could stop time, maybe turn it back, maybe retrace my steps to the point where Marcello’s heart was still beating. Maybe go back further. Go back to before he was hurt. Go back to before Defender Three and the Faceless, before my dad got sick and died, before I was conscripted, before I grew up, before I was even born. Go back to when I wasn’t even molecules, wasn’t even stardust.

Was that what Marcello had done?

I blinked, and eons passed in fractions of a second.

When I opened my eyes, there were more people in the bathroom. Another doctor. The morgue attendant. And Dr. Hanron, the psychologist. He stood over Marcello, as thin and angular as a praying mantis, and shook his head and clicked his tongue. His gaze slid off Marcello’s body and over to me.

“Ah. Garrett.”

I stared back at him.

He pressed his lips together and smiled a little. Wrinkles appeared in the corners of his eyes. Maybe this was his sympathetic face. Whatever. It didn’t do anything for me. All the small, tight smiles in the world wouldn’t make me forget what an asshole he’d been to me since I’d met him.