Starlight
Dark Space Series Book 3
Lisa Henry
M/M Sci-Fi
Release Date: 12.01.19
Cover Designer: Mayhem Cover Creations
Blurb
Brady Garrett is back in space, this time as an unwilling member of a team of humans seeking to study the alien Faceless and their technology. It’s not the first time Brady’s life has been in the hands of the Faceless leader Kai-Ren, and if there’s one thing Brady hates it’s being reminded exactly how powerless he is. Although dealing with the enigmatic Faceless might actually be easier than trying to figure out where he stands with the other humans on board, particularly when one of them is his boyfriend’s ex.
Cameron Rushton loved the starlight once, but being back on board the Faceless ship forces him to confront the memories of the time he was captured by Kai-Ren, and exactly how much of what was done to him that he can no longer rationalize away. Cam is used to being Brady’s rock, but this time it might be him who needs Brady’s support.
This time Brady is surrounded by the people he loves most in the universe, but that only means their lives are in danger too. And when Kai-Ren’s fascination with humanity threatens the foundations of Faceless society, Brady and Cam and the rest of the team find themselves thrust into a battle that humans have very little hope of winning, let alone surviving.
*Starlight can be read as a standalone but probably words better with knowledge of the first two books in the series.
Thank you so much for hosting me today, and for letting me ramble about my latest release, Starlight. If there’s a theme to Starlight, and to the whole Dark Space series, I think it’s about being truly known by another person, and what that means.
There’s a quote that I’ve always loved.
“The truth is we all want to be known. And we’re simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Dying
And it turns out this is very much a theme in the Dark Space series. In the earlier books I think it’s all about Brady, who both wants and fears being known, but in Starlight I flipped that a little, and it became about Cam, and about Brady finally seeing him.
It sounds a little strange to say that, since Brady and Cam have shared thoughts, dreams and memories since the first book, but thoughts, dreams and memories don’t always tell the whole story, do they? Cam might be able to read Brady like a book, but that’s because there’s nothing in Brady that isn’t perfectly straight forward. He’s stubborn and angry and scared and has a chip on his shoulder the size of a planet—it’s a mess in his head, seriously—but while his emotions might be all over the place, every one of them is completely honest. Cam is a slightly different story, and I don’t mean that Cam is lying to Brady, but Cam is definitely lying to himself.
It takes Brady a while to realise it. It takes Cam even longer.
I think that wanting to be known is a universal human thing, so it’s important to note in Starlight that the alien Kai-Ren, even when he is literally unmasked, still remains unknown. He is so far outside the scope of human understanding that he will never be known, and he certainly doesn’t want to be known by the humans when, even if he is sometimes intrigued by them, he doesn’t see them as anything approaching equals deserving his respect. He remains unknown to the humans and, in keeping with the theme of the quote, the humans remain unrespected by him.
It’s also serendipitous that the quote I love, and one that turned out to resonate a lot with Starlight, comes from a book called Fear of Dying. Because hasn’t that been at the core of Brady since the very beginning? He’s terrified of dying, because of what it will mean for his sister Lucy, and that fear certainly hasn’t faded. He’s also terrified of Lucy dying, and of Cam dying, and of everyone he loves dying. Brady doesn’t love many people, but in Starlight they’re all on the same Faceless ship as he is, and they’re all facing the same dangers, which makes Brady’s fear sharper than it’s ever been before, and everything so very precarious. And Brady, like he’s always done, feels the weight of his fear acutely, even when he tries to pretend he doesn’t. But with Cam, Brady is always known:
“What are you smiling about?” Cam asked, grinding into my hand, his breath hot against my mouth.
“You know,” I said, rubbing my thumb over the head of his cock to make us both squirm. “The usual. I’m never entirely sure I’m alone in my own head, but at least the sex is amazing.”
“Mmm.” Cam caught my bottom lip between his teeth and tugged gently. Then he released me, and licked the small hurt away. “Look at you. Brady Garrett, the optimist.”
“Lies.” I left his cock alone for a moment to tackle his fly, and mine. He leaned up to let me shove his pants and underwear down. “I’m not an optimist. Life is bleak and the universe is meaningless and we’re all gonna die.”
A joke.
Just a joke, but Cam stilled. He reached out and held my face between his hands, and his gaze searched mine.
“Life is a gift,” he said softly. “And the universe is a miracle, and we have each other as long as we live. And…” He brushed his lips against mine in a kiss that was way too soft for a quick fuck in a dark corner. “And I love you.”
There was no echo of a lie in his heartbeat, no twist of one in his gut when he said those words. There never had been.
“Sometimes you look at me like I’m drowning, Cam,” I said, swallowing around the sudden ache in my throat. “And you gotta jump in and save me a hundred times a day. Do you ever get tired of that?”
His gaze was open. His heart was too. “Never.”
The Faceless ship was silent, but the anger and the adrenaline rush of the battle ran on a constant feedback loop in our skulls. Spikes of pain, of fear, were like blasts of static in our heads. And sometimes, more than once, we felt that same dizzying sensation of sudden loss—and of that hole immediately being filled in again. The Faceless felt no grief for the fallen. The hive barely even noticed the loss of one drone.
I thought of my dad and how acutely I still missed him and how his loss was written in my bones, and in everything I did. A day didn’t go by when I didn’t think of him. And I thought of how my grief and my fear for Lucy had captured Kai-Ren’s attention in the first place.
I wondered which one of us was the most incomprehensible to the other. The most alien.
We made our way carefully down toward the core of the ship. Everything seemed dimmer. There were fewer lights drifting in the walls, and the fluid itself seemed darker than usual. The ship was hurt. Was she dying too?
Chris and Doc carried the hybrid between them, his thin arms held across their shoulders. His pale feet dragged more than stepped, but his eyes were open now. They were dark and wide and fearful, just like mine.
Cam and Harry led the way, and Andre and I brought up the rear. I held Lucy’s hand tightly. It was warm and damp with sweat. She was quiet. Her face was pinched. But she didn’t even stumble as we moved forward through the dimly-lit curving passageway of the ship.
As we moved toward the fighting.
“If anything happens,” I whispered to her, “run back to where we just were, okay?”
She nodded, and squeezed my hand more tightly.
We kept moving, right up until we didn’t. Cam and Harry had stopped, and I craned my head to see.
“It’s okay,” Cam said. “Keep moving.”
There was a dead Faceless lying in the corridor. His mask had been removed. His eyes were covered in a white film. His yellowish skin was stained black around his throat, and over one cheek, like someone had spat ink over him. And then I realized that no, it wasn’t a stain. It was necrosis, or something like it. His skin had been ruptured in several places, punctured, and the flesh around it had turned black.
Venom. It had to be venom.
I looked at Doc and Chris, and at the way the hybrid was slung between them. The hybrid’s fingers curled around their shoulders, and I thought of claws digging into their flesh and wondered how long it would take Faceless venom to kill a human. And then I thought of every time that Kai-Ren had run his hands over my skin, and of how the Stranger had prodded my stomach, and how each time I’d been staring death in the face. I’d thought of Kai-Ren as a god once, hadn’t I? A god who could strike any one of us down on a whim.
I held Lucy’s hand tightly as we passed the dead Faceless.
There was a voice in the back of my head—mine, for once—that told me we weren’t going to make it to the pods. That told me we’d be caught here, in a curving corridor with nowhere to take cover and that the Stranger’s Faceless would kill us, but whatever was happening in the rest of the ship was keeping all the Faceless busy.
My heart was beating out of my chest by the time we descended to the bay where the pods were kept, and the doors shut behind us, the sticky seams sealing closed.
There were six pods here, and seven of us plus the hybrid. It didn’t matter, because Cam and I had shared a pod before anyway. There was plenty of room. But mostly it didn’t matter because we had no way of getting the pods to work, let alone launching them.
And then it really didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t be launching them into some tranquil sea anyway.
“Holy fuck!” Harry exclaimed from the one of the windows that looked out into the nebula.
I look past him just in time to see a Faceless ship being torn apart by a massive explosion. It was colossal. It was blinding.
And it was close enough that the shockwave hit us like a tsunami.
Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.
Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn’t know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she’s too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.
She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.
She shares her house with too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.
Lisa has been published since 2012, and was a LAMBDA finalist for her quirky, awkward coming-of-age romance Adulting 101.
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