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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