Chapter 29
KAZ
The hangar smells like ozone and blood.
Not fresh blood—the ghost of it. The kind baked into steel after too many accidents, too many pilots who didn’t walk back through the decontam doors. The kind of scent you learn to stop noticing if you want to keep flying.
Daveros is the edge of everything. Cold winds.
Red sky. A horizon so flat it feels fake.
The facility here isn’t even on official maps; it’s buried under sand and secrecy, miles from the nearest colony.
The only real thing here is the sound of turbines grinding and the hiss of my oxygen line when I strap in.
“Test subject 2173, visual diagnostics clear,” the intercom crackles. The voice is clinical, detached. A machine reading from a machine. “Prepare for flight integration.”
I pull the helmet over my head and let the silence settle.
The ship they’ve given me—Threshold Unit-9—isn’t built for comfort. It’s built for endurance. The hull’s black composite, unmarked, seamless. The controls are half analog, half neural-linked. Every switch hums with barely restrained voltage.
They tell me this is progress.
I tell myself it’s just another cage.
Dr. Stark is pacing when I step off the platform. His coat’s too big, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Hair like he combed it with static. The kind of brilliance that eats itself alive.
“You’re late,” he says without looking up.
“I’m three minutes early.”
“Then time’s slow. Sit.”
He points to a chair surrounded by consoles. Holograms flicker to life above his desk—sim readings, wormhole distortion patterns, energy feedback loops. Chaos dressed as math.
He doesn’t ask how I’m holding up. Doesn’t ask if the nightmares stopped. Just dives straight into it.
“The last three simulations collapsed in under ninety seconds,” he mutters. “Probes can’t handle the spatial drift. We need a human pilot again. One who’s survived exposure before.”
“You mean me.”
“I mean the only one who’s still breathing.”
He smiles like that’s a compliment. It isn’t.
“You’ll hold a course through the distortion threshold at one-point-five light microseconds,” he continues. “Our instruments will monitor the cascade. You might see… anomalies.”
“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.
It’s hunger.
Later, in the debrief room, Stark paces like a man on fire.
“You stabilized inside the anomaly for a full twenty-three seconds. Do you know what that means?”
“That you’ll keep sending me back until I don’t come out?”
He stops. Smiles, slow. “You’re catching on.”
I rub at the bandage under my left eye. It’s still tender where the blood vessels burst.
“You should rest,” he says absently, eyes glued to the monitor feed. “Your next run’s at 0500.”
“Do you even care if I make it back?”
He looks up. “I care if you make it through.”
I leave before I break something.
The barracks are quieter tonight. The others—engineers, pilots, ghosts like me—pretend to sleep. I lie awake, listening to the hum of the generators through the floor. My pulse matches the rhythm.
I don’t dream anymore.
Just fragments.
Nova’s laugh in the hangar.
Swan’s grin before the launch.
The porch light flickering.
The smell of dust and skin and goodbye.
The past doesn’t feel like memory anymore. It feels like static—like the wormhole burned it into my neurons. Maybe that’s why it whispers back.
I thumb the locket.
“Still alive,” I whisper. “If that counts for anything.”
The next morning, the hangar’s crawling with new personnel.
They look fresh—too clean, too bright-eyed for a place that eats people. Probably new analysts or communications techs. I ignore them. I’ve got preflight checks to run, and Stark’s in one of his manic moods again, pacing and muttering to himself like the universe owes him an answer.
“Fuel at 94%,” I say, half to myself. “Gyros calibrated. System sync nominal.”
“Skip diagnostics,” Stark snaps. “We’re losing daylight.”
“There is no daylight on Daveros.”
He glares. “Don’t get poetic.”
“Then don’t get reckless.”
That earns me a silence sharp enough to cut with.
I climb into the cockpit anyway. The seat hisses, sealing to my flight suit. I wait for one breath, one heartbeat.
Then the comm crackles.
“Tower control to Threshold-9, confirm readiness.”
The voice freezes me.
Not the words.
The voice.
It’s lower now. Calmer. But it’s her.
Nova.
Every molecule in me locks up. My hand slips off the console. My lungs forget how to work.
“Threshold-9, confirm readiness,” she repeats, steady, professional. But there’s a tremor at the edge of it—a thread of something buried, strangled.
My throat tightens. I can’t speak.
Stark’s voice cuts in. “2173, respond.”
I force a breath through my teeth.
“Copy,” I manage, voice raw. “Ready for launch.”
There’s a pause on her end.
Suddenly, barely audible, “...Good luck, Kaz.”
The line clicks.
Static hums.
I feel something like gravity again, and it hurts worse than any crash I’ve ever survived.