Chapter 44
FORTY-FOUR
ELAINA
The swirling colors outside the viewport stretched into eternity—black and blue and violet, bleeding into impossible shapes. They danced, throwing shimmering reflections across the cockpit. Elaina barely blinked, mesmerized by the motion. The wormhole’s shifts reached into her skull, twisting her sense of self until she could almost feel herself dissolve.
“Careful,” a voice beside her said, deep and resonant.
Elaina heard, but her eyes stayed glued to the view, her awareness thin and frayed. “What?”
“Be careful,” the voice repeated. Cyan.
She managed to turn to him, blinking like she was pulling herself out of a dream. He sat next to her, focusing on the ship’s readouts, his hands loose around the controls. Amid the chaos of warping colors and the crystalline hum, Cyan was her only anchor to whatever reality this was supposed to be.
A sudden jolt rattled her, and her vision snapped back into a fragile clarity. A wormhole wasn’t meant for conscious humans. If she were anyone else, she’d be in stasis—sleeping through the madness while the ship automated the passage through this liminal space. But stasis wasn’t an option for her. Not when technology unraveled at her touch. Awake was the only way she could be, and Cyan had refused to leave her to face it alone.
At least Priad was peacefully asleep in his pod. At least he didn’t have to experience his insides trying to leak from his pores.
“How long has it been?” Her words felt off-axis, drawn out like glue strings.
Cyan’s frown was ominous in the dim light of the cockpit. “I don’t know.”
Of course he didn’t. He was just good at pretending he could keep it together. She stared at him, the shadow of his beard. Was it longer than before? Did beards grow in wormholes? Elaina reached across the space between them, but her fingers didn’t quite make it all the way over there .
Her attention drifted back to the swirling void, and it seemed as if the wormhole had seeped into the ship, into her skin. She was disintegrating into the vast unknown. The ship’s heartbeat became her own, the beat vibrating through her nerves, bones, tendons.
A shudder rippled through the craft—deeper this time. The air seemed to shift, electric and raw beneath her skin. Something had changed.
Cyan turned toward her, and there was something dark in his eyes. It pulled her into his gravity until the space between them didn’t exist.