“Define anomalies.”
“Voices. Shapes. Fractals. Don’t talk to them.”
I almost laugh. “Good advice.”
He looks up then—eyes wild, pupils too small. “I’m serious, Kazimir. The wormhole interacts with cognition. It remembers who passes through.”
“Good thing I’m forgettable.”
He doesn’t smile.
The cockpit seals around me like a coffin.
“Engage throttle at my mark,” Stark says through the comm.
I exhale once. Twice. The engines roar.
“Three. Two. One. Go.”
The sky rips open.
Light folds in on itself—blue bleeding into violet, then white, then nothing. The edges of the world blur, and the instruments sputter. Gravity loses its grip. My stomach lifts, spins, drops.
The wormhole opens like an iris. Jagged. Breathing.
I push forward.
For a second, it’s beautiful. Infinite. Every star stretched into a thread of gold and glass.
Then the voices start.
Whispers. Too faint to make out but too close to ignore.
They sound like her.
Nova.
I grit my teeth, fight for focus. The readings spike red. Static floods my visor.
“2173, report,” Stark’s voice snaps. “Telemetry’s erratic!”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not! You’re bleeding?—”
I glance down. My nose. A thin line of red drifting upward in zero-G. I wipe it away and push the throttle harder.
“I said I’m fine.”
The ship screams through the distortion. Time folds sideways. The void stretches, convulses—and then spits me out the other side.
Silence.
Black space. Stable readings. Heart pounding.
“Transmission solid,” Stark says, voice shaking with excitement. “You did it.”
But his tone isn’t relief.
