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Alex’s eyes didn’t waver. The pirate reached for the wall and made their hallway glow as he worked. Lucca turned back to the screen to share her final moments alive with Caligher. He was glowing, too.
The sound of the window snapping open was chilling—almost deafening. It would be the last sound she ever heard—and even that was sucked out, the world going instantly silent.
She went tumbling into the void.
* * *
OUTER SPACE.
Shit.
Training videos played in her mind’s eye, of all fucking things. Not a loving slideshow of a happy life. Training videos. Don’t hold your breath. Triple-check all equipment. Never go on spacewalks without a buddy. Once the oxygen stops reaching your brain, you pass out. Do not eventryto hold your breath.
It happened so fast.
She glanced off a turret and spun dangerously into the shocking cold bath. She was going to die. There were so many terrible sensations.
The deep, black sky was dotted with twinkling light. The glowing blue planet. Darkness… stars… the blurred line of the Milky Way, spinning around and around like a bright, dizzying pole. The dark wall of the Aerinus spinning opposite to the stars—a dance between light and darkness.
Everything spun so fast.
Something exploded. Bright and violent.
Maybe that was just her eyesight. It lit everything in the vicinity in harsh, contrasted light—which transformed into dancing radiation, glowing brighter.
Her mouth and throat were on fire. Everything was fire. She caught sight of Collins but then he was gone. It was impossible to lock her sights on any one thing.
A memory of drowning in a swimming pool as a child joined her thoughts. Her mom was barely a foot away in the water, speaking with her dad, but she didn’t notice Lucca thrashing. Lucca believed she would drown, right then and there. That helplessness was indescribable. Whenever her head crested the surface and she tried to cry out for help, she was pulled under before so much as a peep could escape.
This was a bit like that but she was spinning and burning on top of it. Space gobbledher up, penetrating every cell and destroying it. A place made of nothingness didn’t feel likenothing. It felt like everything.
But there was a primal sort of beauty in the violent, burning darkness. It was tragically, utterly silent. Even the screaming agony was perfectly mute.
That silence personified, taking on a phantasmic shape come to devour her. A body lined up against hers. She was dreaming. Flying over starlight. Solid arms encircled her.
Caligher’s mouth met hers. They were latched together, kissing in space. She hoped she was dead. Hoped she was wrong and heaven was real and she had gone to the stars with Caligher.
Her time with him—the things they saw—it wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t bad at all.
His tail wrapped around her. Shooting pain struck up her spine, penetrating through the bloody haze and managing to hurt even worse than what she’d felt before. She couldn’t protest, couldn’t reject the acid injection.
Air invaded her lungs, simmering like mercury. Her skin hardened over. Even her organs. The pain was too overwhelming to bear.
The oncoming front of silence was a peaceful thing, a reprieve. She floated to it acceptingly, locked in Caligher’s arms.
CHAPTER28
CALIGHER
Lucca was unconscious in the medical bed. Marks and discoloration mottled her silk-thin epidermis in so many places—one for one with the cracks in Caligher’s shattered exoskeleton. He couldn’t determine which of them had escaped the ordeal with more scars.
Both of them were alive. And free.
Well—a doctor popped into the room with grim news in her eyes—alive and free for now.
Lucca was in critical condition after they pulled her in from the void.
Caligher had injected the remainder of his venom to keep her alive, waiting for rescue, and now was he seeing the… consequences. Of everything.
