I drop into the comm chair, bury my face in my hands, and exhale like it’s my last breath.
I don’t know if he made it.
I don’t know if I’ll ever hear his voice again.
But I know what he said.
Hehasto come back.
Because our son is waiting.I’mwaiting.
Because if I lose him now, if that light swallows him forever, I’m not sure I’ll survive it.
CHAPTER 49
KAZ
There’s no up, no down. No left, no right.
Onlythis.
This awful, infinite quiet.
I float in it. Suspended like a heartbeat between beats.
My ship—if you can still call it that—drifts in pieces around me. The cockpit frame hums with pressure distortion, warning lights pulsing in slow-motion red, like they’re apologizing for giving up. The controls are dead. My comms are fried. The override drive’s main screen is frozen, cracked down the middle.
Everything is wrong here. Not broken—justwrong.The laws of physics don’t apply. Light bends sideways. Sound falls inward. I move my hand, and it takes a second for my brain to believe it happened.
“Okay,” I murmur, voice cracking in my helmet.
It echoes back—three seconds too late. Slurred like a bad recording.
I tap the side of my helmet. “Nova, come in. Verzius? Anyone?”
Silence. Not even static now. Just…void.
The wormhole’s gut is a graveyard of echoes. And I’m the only one still breathing.
My chest tightens. Not from fear. I’m too far past that.
This isn’t fear. This is the edge of the universe peeling back to show me what comes next.
And somehow, I know this place wasn’t meant for us.
I grip the override drive, still jammed into its harness near the nav port. My fingers are trembling, but I steady them. The sequence is primed. It’s waiting.
All I have to do is press it.
But there’s a catch. There’salwaysa catch.
This whole damn failsafe’s built like a test. Stark’s final sick joke. The biometric lock let me in, sure—but triggering the collapse stabilization sequence? That’s a one-way ride unless I punch through first.
I stare out into the pulsing madness of the wormhole’s core. It’s like looking into a wound in time—colors I don’t have names for, shadows that twitch like they’re breathing. A flash zips past me, and for a split second, I swear I seeher.
Nova.
Not real. Just a ripple. A memory. Her face, framed in light, saying my name like she means it.
