Chapter 2
The cargo door hung half-open, fully intending to suck me into the void.
I dug my fingers deeper into the lip of metal, fighting the slide.
Knuckles locked white. Forearm tendons jumped and trembled.
Every starved, Krackus-bred bone in my hands shrieked under the strain, threatening to crack with the next heartbeat.
“Milo!” I screamed it into the roar. “Milo, why—“
The intercom clicked off.
I lost the strut. The vacuum seized me like a cold fist. My fingers peeled away—one by one, slick with sudden sweat despite the plunging temperature.
Then I was gone—hurtling backward through the hold, the roar of escaping air thundering in my ears like a freight train.
My left hand slammed into a cargo rail; bone met metal with a sickening crunch, white-hot pain exploding up my forearm.
Something in my wrist popped and grated.
Hot copper flooded my mouth—I’d bitten my tongue.
Don’t think about it. Move.
I spotted the suits. Port-side wall locker. If I could reach one. If I could seal it before the black outside tore my lungs into ribbons.
I hooked the rail with my good hand and hauled hand over hand, muscles screaming against the icy gale ripping past my face.
The air turned thin and bitter, tasting of scorched wiring and blood.
Every inhale scraped like sandpaper down my throat; my chest burned like liquid nitrogen poured into my lungs.
The cold bit deeper, numbing my fingertips, turning my breath into ghostly plumes that vanished instantly. Faster. Ten feet. Eight. Come on.
Five feet.
I lunged, snagged the locker handle, metal so frigid it stung like dry ice, and tore the door wide with a metallic screech.
The suit spilled out, stiff and rubbery, reeking faintly of recycled plastic and old sweat.
I dragged it toward me with both hands, fresh agony spiking through my ruined wrist like shattered glass.
Legs first.
Shove them in, the inner lining clammy and clinging against my skin like wet latex. Boots sealed with a dull thunk.
Arms next.
Yank the sleeves up, the fabric rasping over gooseflesh, then slam the torso seal shut. The suit’s auto-pressurization hissed, a sharp metallic whine that cut through the dying roar of the breach.
A refrigerator-sized crate cartwheeled past in eerie slow motion, its edges whistling as it grazed my shoulder hard enough to jolt bone-deep pain and send me spinning.
I snatched a vertical pipe, the cold steel biting into my palm, and wrapped my arm around it, crushing myself against the unyielding metal. Hold. Just hold.
Helmet. Still mag-locked. My numb fingers slapped the release once, twice the mechanism finally clicked free with a soft pop.
I yanked it loose and clutched it to my chest. The collar ring dangled open.
My vision tunneled at the edges; black spots dancing from the thinning oxygen.
Ears ringing, lungs clawing for air that wasn’t there anymore.
Get it on. Now. Seal it or die.
I jammed the helmet toward my head, but the suit’s neck seal caught on my jaw. Dammit I was too clumsy, too panicked. The collar scraped skin. Another breath rasped in, thinner still. The roar outside swelled again, pulling at my legs, trying to peel me off the pipe.
Not yet. Not like this.
I wasn’t sealed. Not dead yet, but the clock was screaming.
That’s when I saw Zayne.
He was in the doorway of the cargo hold, already suited up with his helmet sealed, boots mag-locked to the deck. He was holding an overhead rail with both hands, braced against the pull.
I wanted to reach for him. Every part of me screamed to let go of the pipe and stretch my hand out. But I had one hand on the pipe and the other locked around the helmet, and if I let go of either one, I was dead.
So, I held on. I held on and waited for him to come to me.
Zayne reached up. Grabbed the overhead rail. Swung his body forward and stomped his boot down on the hand holding the pipe.
The bones broke. I heard them go, a wet, splintering series of cracks that I felt more than heard, radiating from my knuckles up through my wrist and into my forearm. My vision whited out. My fingers released the pipe.
The vacuum took me.
I spun backward through the cargo hold, past the crates and the stripped shelving, and out through the open door into nothing.
Into black. Into silence so complete it pressed against my skull from every direction at once.
I was tumbling, spinning end over end, the ship already shrinking behind me as inertia carried me away.
I got the helmet on. I don’t know how. My right hand was a ruined, swelling thing that wouldn’t close, so I used my left and my teeth and locked the seal a half-second before the last wisp of air left my lungs.
The suit pressurized with a hiss. Oxygen flooded in and I sucked it down in ragged, shaking gasps.
Why…
That was the only thought I had room for. Not how do I survive this or what happens next. Just why. Playing on a loop behind my eyes where Zayne’s face used to be, where twelve years of trust and what I thought was love used to live.
The ship was a point of light now. Then not even that.
Direction had stopped meaning anything and as I spun, I caught a glimpse of a deep rich blue hue of the planet I was hurling toward.
The entire thing was water, horizon to horizon, no landmass, no ice caps, just a vast unbroken ocean that caught the light of its sun and threw it back in shifting patterns of cobalt and deep, abyssal navy.
I could feel the first tug of real, planetary gravity pulling me in, and my spin was starting to stabilize into a trajectory.
Entry angle. I didn’t know if the suit could handle atmospheric reentry.
I didn’t know if the planet had a breathable atmosphere.
I didn’t know anything about where I was because I’d set the course at random, just anywhere, just away, and now away was a water world with no name or land, and I was going to hit it like a stone thrown from orbit.
The atmosphere grabbed me. Heat flared around the suit, orange and white, and the silence of space gave way to a building roar that shook my teeth.
The blue filled my entire field of vision.
I couldn’t tell if I was screaming because the sound was everywhere, inside me and outside me, and my broken hand was on fire, and my chest was on fire and then—
Impact.
I hit the water like I’d hit a wall. Every part of me compressed at once. Ribs, lungs, the breath I’d been holding, all of it crushed into a single white-hot moment of total, consuming force.
Then dark.