Chapter 49
KAZ
There’s no up, no down. No left, no right.
Only this.
This awful, infinite quiet.
I float in it. Suspended like a heartbeat between beats.
My ship—if you can still call it that—drifts in pieces around me.
The cockpit frame hums with pressure distortion, warning lights pulsing in slow-motion red, like they’re apologizing for giving up.
The controls are dead. My comms are fried.
The override drive’s main screen is frozen, cracked down the middle.
Everything is wrong here. Not broken—just wrong. The laws of physics don’t apply. Light bends sideways. Sound falls inward. I move my hand, and it takes a second for my brain to believe it happened.
“Okay,” I murmur, voice cracking in my helmet.
It echoes back—three seconds too late. Slurred like a bad recording.
I tap the side of my helmet. “Nova, come in. Verzius? Anyone?”
Silence. Not even static now. Just… void.
The wormhole’s gut is a graveyard of echoes. And I’m the only one still breathing.
My chest tightens. Not from fear. I’m too far past that.
This isn’t fear. This is the edge of the universe peeling back to show me what comes next.
And somehow, I know this place wasn’t meant for us.
I grip the override drive, still jammed into its harness near the nav port. My fingers are trembling, but I steady them. The sequence is primed. It’s waiting.
All I have to do is press it.
But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.
This whole damn failsafe’s built like a test. Stark’s final sick joke. The biometric lock let me in, sure—but triggering the collapse stabilization sequence? That’s a one-way ride unless I punch through first.
I stare out into the pulsing madness of the wormhole’s core. It’s like looking into a wound in time—colors I don’t have names for, shadows that twitch like they’re breathing. A flash zips past me, and for a split second, I swear I see her.
Nova.
Not real. Just a ripple. A memory. Her face, framed in light, saying my name like she means it.
Then it’s gone.
I tighten my grip on the override panel. My ship groans around me—metal flexing like it’s praying.
“This isn’t where I end,” I whisper.
Not like this.
I slam the override button.
A low whine tears through the air.
The core stirs. Flares.
A spike of pressure hits me like a gut-punch. The cockpit floods with raw data, spiraling in layers—temperature, mass flux, radiation levels climbing.
But beneath all the chaos, I see it.
The crack.
A seam forming in the wormhole’s skin. Just a sliver of normal space breaking through the madness. I can feel the pull.
My only shot.
“Alright, sweetheart,” I murmur to the ship, flicking switches even though half of them aren’t connected anymore. “One more dance.”
I reroute power from the life-support grid to the thrusters. Oxygen cuts out. The lights go dark. The only thing left is the pulsing beacon of the override drive and my will.
I steer hard, nose tipping toward the fracture.
The ship shudders. Lurches. Something blows behind me—doesn’t matter.
I don’t let go.
The reentry vector is too steep. I can feel it. We’re sliding sideways into the crack like a blade through a tight seam. The ship isn’t going to hold. She’s screaming at me now—metal shearing, panels ripping off in chunks.
The crack widens just enough to show stars on the other side. Real stars. Our sky.
Home.
The control panel sparks. Fire rips across the dashboard, eating into the side panel. Smoke clouds my vision.
My oxygen’s gone. Heat's climbing fast. My suit AI’s blaring warnings in four languages.
I grip the yoke and scream through my teeth. “You’re not taking me, you bastard hole! Not today!
Contact.
The fracture folds open.
Light pours in.
My ship bursts through.
I black out with Nova’s name on my tongue.