I take a step into the cold seawater, my body already shaking, and I wade out into the deep, just as the rain stops falling.
Just as everything becomes strangely stilled. I crane my head up, blinking, squinting… my mind reorganizing itself, trying to understand.
Every drop of water sits suspended in midair, caught, motionless, the wind no longer at my neck.
Something that shouldn’t be happening… is happening.
I swallow down seawater, choking when I come up for air, the ocean more violent now. But the current pushes me forward, waves crashing over my back, and I find myself crawling up onto the sand much quicker than it took me to swim out to the island.
I stand on the shore, buckled over, wet hair in my eyes, coughing,coughing. Trying to keep from collapsing completely.
“What the hell did you do?” Holt asks a few feet away, his eyes flashing across the skyline.
The buzzing static in the air makes the hair on my neck rise on end, my eardrums hiss, and I try to keep my eyes from blinking closed—wanting to sink onto the sand and coil myself into a shivering ball. I grind my teeth to keep them from chattering, knowing that this isn’t a storm gathering over the sea—this is the sky breaking apart. Disintegrating. Crumbling open, and there’s no stopping it.
The rain begins to rise back upward… back into the clouds.
Wrong.All wrong.
But the clouds themselves have started to evaporate, and the sky is a carpet of black. Leaving only a splatter of starlight, like paint flicked from a brush.
“I didn’t do this,” I say to Holt.This… is the black hole. It’s spreading like a giant hand over the stars, sweeping them up in its path.Thisis the anomaly shredding through our atmosphere.
It’s finally reached the upper edge of our planet, and now there’s no time left.
We came too late. I got here too late.
Holt’s face has gone slack as he watches the sky fracture apart. And behind him, his men look just as startled. Samuel—a black eye already blooming where Noah punched him—even reaches a hand forward, brushing through the drops of rain that rise upward in the wrong direction.
Back, back into the sky.
I drag myself upright, the air in front of me swarmed with littlesparks, droplets flecked with colors like a rainbow. Watery and translucent. A rumbling fear vibrates up from the bottom of my stomach. The anomaly is here. My eyes find Noah, the blade of the knife still at his throat, but he’s watching me—the only one whose gaze isn’t tilted to the sky.
We’re out of time.
I scrape my wet hair back from my face, finding my clothes where I left them in the sand, and quickly yank on my shirt, my pants, and shove my wet feet into my boots.
I have to get Noah free… but there is a sound behind me, a strange rush of water, the pull of a current like a river spilling over rocks. And when I turn, my mouth falls open as I watch the ocean retreat back from the shore.
The cold, violent mass of churning water is being pulled away from the beach, like a low tide, except happening all at once—a roar of water being sucked back,back, away from us.
I hadn’t imagined this… that the ground and sky would turn themselves inside out. That my lungs would feel like blades with every breath I drew in.
There’s no time. It’s all happening quickly now.
Out at the island, the man has finally entered the water and started swimming back toward shore—the waves crash over him, but the tide is moving the wrong way. It’s no longer pushing him toward the beach, it’s drawing him back.Back, back, just like the sea. His head dips below the water line, once, twice, and through the silvery moisture hanging in the air, I can see the panic in his eyes. He knows he’s not going to make it. His mouth falls open, like he’s going to yell something, ask for help, but I never hear any sound leave his throat.Maybe it’s pulled out with the wind, or maybe the words never leave his mouth, because the water is moving too fast now—he’s pulled past the island, out into the deep, stormy sea. He becomes a small dot in the churning waves, like a tiny, floating beetle, and when he slips below the water line again… it’s for the last time.
He doesn’t reappear.
A brick-hard weight lands in my gut—that could have been me. If I had left the island a moment later, if I hadn’t swum hard enough.
The man is gone.
The ocean is being sucked out, revealing the barren, rocky bottom of the sea—leaving small tide pools in the sand, and wriggling, stranded fish who flop onto their glistening sides, searching for the water, now long gone.
But it reveals something else.
The island where I stood only moments ago, where I slipped down into the hole, is not an island at all.
