Chapter 18
Transporting the resonark’s shroud to the supply hatch via two hovercarts was straightforward. Bracing through two more null cloud disturbances was mostly sideways staggering but still simple enough.
The hardest part was getting Mariah into an EVA suit while she kept knitting.
Suvan did his best with the needles while Griiek affixed her gloves, all four Monbrakkan arms quick and precise. But the stitches loosened when he passed the needles back.
Fortunately, she’d gotten ahead of the unraveling, so she was able to catch up while he suited. But he saw the trembling in her hands.
“Almost there,” he murmured to her.
Because of the thick gloves, her stitches were open and airy, exposing more of the resonark’s fading polychromatic glow. With that unveiling, it was clear the anomaly was decohering.
Dying.
When the null cloud boundary had swept over the ship, he’d had a vision too.
In that moment, he’d recognized all his formulas and fabrications, all the fixing and fine tuning and his finest flux spanner had been spun from the nothingness he’d once feared.
The energy boosting his engines between stars was the same as the power in a kiss.
In Mariah’s kiss.
“Chief.” Delphine’s usually bracing tone sounded subdued; they’d all been impacted by the emotions more than the battering. “I’ve told the captain, if I take us any deeper into the cloud, the turbulence will likely collapse the ghostform. Our mask will be gone.”
“How close are we to the signal source?”
A hesitation before Nehivar said, “Not close enough.”
Suvan glanced at Mariah, how she had not faltered, every stitch looping to the previous. “I say we risk it.”
Another pause before the captain growled, “I would have bet every credit we earned on those freighter runs that I would never hear you say such a thing.”
“Save your credits,” Suvan said. “A chief engineer doesn’t gamble; he does the math…and then he does what matters.”
Griiek signaled the completed safety check. “Ready, Chief.”
“Helm, take us the rest of the way,” Nehivar said.
As the ship rocked on the battering waves, Suvan, Mariah, and Griiek clung to the unswerving hovercarts. With one free hand, Griiek toggled through external monitor views showing the crumpling ghostform, the relays snapping loose in all directions.
She croaked out a sigh. “All that work, for nothing.”
“Nothing is for nothing,” Suvan said.
Stuck in the supply bay, they had no view of the cloud except through Griiek’s datpad. But even that visual was imposing as the sleeting energies alternately blacking and whiting out portions of the overwhelmed screen engulfed them.
And he was taking Mariah out into that?
For a heartbeat, his brusque response to the captain mocked him. Because this was a gamble.
But when he turned to Mariah, a question on his lips, she was already watching him. “Griiek,” she said, “get to the inner hatch. We’ll be spacewalking soon.”
Suvan switched to their private channel. “Am I wrong to tell you I’d sacrifice love to not risk you?”
“Those aren’t the only choices, Chief. We have infinite chances. And at least some of them are mine.” When she smiled, the visor partly obscured her face so she looked like the little moon woven into the side of the bag she’d given him. “But it’s true, none of this was in the brochure.”
The ball of yarn they’d brought with them was quickly depleting as the atmosphere in the bay vented. Suvan checked their tethers and the grappler that Griiek had positioned behind the cart, ready to carry them out to…whatever awaited.
The dream teased him again, more a sensation than a vision of Mariah close against him.
If that promise awaited, he’d take any risk.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
As his universal translator suggested all the complex meanings of that question, he tried to slow his breathing.
He’d once been nearly sucked out into space and then partly crushed by it—an exposure so nearly lethal he didn’t even remember it. Stepping out with her went against safety protocols and his own blaring instincts.
And yet this was the next stitch in the pattern they’d woven, so he answered simply, “Yes.”
The hatch parted with a hollow boom beneath their boots, and then the grappler was lifting the hovercart out of the ship, with them along for the ride.
“Oh.” Mariah’s breath whispered in his ear. “But it’s…beautiful.”
The distant suns of the Zarnax Zone had vanished beyond the cyclonic wall of the null cloud. Flaws along spacetime curved the dark matter into denser waves that slowly ignited along their edges as they merged and parted.
While he’d been refusing to think about his lingering horror of being outside the ship, hearing the awed hitch in her voice erased that lurking memory. Not of the danger, but his fear of it. Because it was beautiful—when he saw it through her wondering eyes.
Her busy hands had paused, but then she resumed her knitting. “I thought the resonark’s match would…magically appear.”
Suvan scanned the anomaly and the waning signal of its entanglement. “Maybe the resonark’s mate didn’t win a ticket to this cruise.”
“Chief, are you joking right now?”
“Definitely not.”
“So, how do we summon it?”
“We can’t go any deeper,” he warned. “Our suits won’t be enough to protect us.”
He toggled his comm to the main channel. “Any thoughts on reuniting our anomalies?”
Beyond a faint crackle, only silence.
He cursed under his breath. “The cloud drift is scrambling with our comms. We’ll have to wait until the interference passes.”
They were alone with the resonark.
“Suvan. I’m out of yarn.”
She’d reworked the knot, and the microgravity had returned the fading plasma to its perfect sphere. But he knew that wouldn’t hold it for long.
His suit, his quill-scales, his chest were too tight. “And I’m out of ideas.”
Her empty hands floated up, the oversized needles wandering to the ends of their tethers. “It can’t end here. It just can’t.”
The despair in her voice pierced him, and he reached for her gloved hand. “If our vision of the resonark’s memory is true, then its match is here. Somewhere in this chaos. But if it can’t find us through all the interference…”
His gaze traced the intricate weaving she’d created—first at Felicity’s request for Remy’s recital, then reinforced with everyone’s contributions, all those hands twisting their hopes and dreams awakened by the resonark’s vision into a beautiful binding.
And suddenly he understood.
“We have to let it go,” he said.
Her glove clenched on his. “Let it… What?”
“The shroud of knots. We need to unravel it—completely. Expose the resonark and release it into the cloud to fix the connection.”
Her dark eyes widened. “But it’s already falling apart. Even the ship can’t go any deeper without damage. It’s too vulnerable.”
“That was the risk,” he agreed. “That is always the risk.”
As she stared at him, all the wild flares of conflicting energies caught and swirled in her incredulous gaze. But the resonark’s shadowlight was mostly shadow now.
“The resonark has been reaching across spacetime,” he continued. “It’s never stopped. We can’t hold it back now because we are afraid nothing is here at the end.”
“So we’re supposed to…hope it will find its way?”
“Believe in the power of love.”
After a shocked moment, her choked laughter filled his helmet, sweeter than fresh air. “What’s happened to my grouchy, grumbly chief engineer?”
“I’m still here,” he admitted, “but also maybe…someone more than that.”
The sparkle in her eyes morphed and darkened as she gripped his hand. His reflection in her visor reminded him he was suspended in one of the most dangerous regions of space, holding his breath, hoping she would believe him because that would mean…
It would mean that, like the resonark, he still had a chance.
Finally, she rotated between him and the resonark pulsing erratically in the veil of yarn. “Mr. Evens said the resonark would prove the connections the IDA promises are possible.”
“Still a gamble, not a guarantee,” he warned. He would not lie to her, not even for love.
“So we’ll roll a resonark. Luckily it’s already round.” She grasped the weave where she’d tied a last knot. “I can’t undo this with my big gloves.”
“I have a cutter.” He patted at the suit’s utility belt and brought out the small laser blade. “Shall I?”
“Please. It’s getting so dark.”
One brief flare and the end of the thread floated free.
“It’s all coming undone,” she murmured with a quiver of sorrow.
“And I can’t wait to see what we make next.”
She reached for him, and they clasped hands. “Suvan…”
A loud crackle in both their helmets stopped her.
“—you hearing this?”
“Captain,” Suvan said. “Comms keep dropping out. We’ve released the resonark.”
“—signal lost—”
Mariah clutched his glove. “They’re losing our signal? Or the echo we followed out here?”
Compressed in the suit, his quill-scales ached—or maybe that was his heart. “Hurry. Unravel the knot so the threads spread as far as possible, like…” His vision of the questing resonark following a memory across the universe flashed behind his eyes. “Like an antenna array, or…”
“Or a goblhob’s lure times a thousand.” Her fingers plucked at the tangle of yarns. “Cut here and here. And here.”
As she loosened the outermost loops where he cut, strands of the colorful yarn began to drift in the null cloud’s strange currents. The freed ends stretched and spiraled, catching the ghostly light of the dark matter waves, each fiber a delicate line reaching out.
She’d had him cut near the napkin fragments from the Starlit Salon, and the end of each strand held a tiny flag of hope: Love. Love. Love.
As more of the knotwork came apart, the resonark’s sphere expanded as if breathing, no longer confined by the weaving. Its shadowlight flickered—nearly all shadow now but still calling into the depths.
Partly severed, partly knotted, the threads ballooned slowly outward in an intricate, tangled web around them.
Chaos, but also connection.
And impossible. He’d seen the blisters forming on Mariah’s fingers, but she hadn’t knitted this much yarn. The resonark was using the last of its energy to unravel itself at the atomic level, reaching out past its last chance.
“Suvan.” Mariah’s voice was barely a whisper. “Am I imagining this?”
Deep in the cloud nucleus, something stirred. A darkness within the interference waves.
One thread of shadowlight, extended until it was all but invisible even with his visor finely tuned, seemed to bridge the emptiness—though by his quick calculations he would’ve sworn the distance was too far.
The cloud…broke.
Just as the final strands of the knotwork tore free, and the flags at the very end drifted into space.
Love. Love. Love.
The resonark hung suspended against the backdrop of shimmering darkness. One by one, the severed strands disappeared, as if burned out.
In his ear, Mariah’s breath caught on a sob, and he knew what she was thinking. They were too late? Had the last tenuous connection been broken?
He reached for her, wishing they weren’t trapped in their bulky suits, to hold her for real as decoherence claimed the connection they’d followed all the way to the end of the line.
As he wrapped his awkward arms around her, she turned toward him—
And the silent, belling energy wave from the cloud break reached them.
The surge lifted them to the limits of their tethers, and they clung together, helmets tucked against each other’s shoulders, limbs entwined in their own singular knot.
Another perception distortion seized them.
Again, the nothingness before the universe becoming, exploding into the pain and sorrow of separation, the yearning for reconnection, the ecstatic bliss of reunion— But then further along…
the dawning consciousness that only in the break was the return, and in that distance between was the experience that mattered.
They would face loss and fear. They would find connection and meaning.
Always the shadow would follow the light would follow the shadow would follow…
And the task for those who sought such love would be to hold and release like a heartbeat, in balance but always flowing, each stitch linking to the rest…
A prismatic brilliance seared across their sky.
The lingering molecules of drifting filaments around them caught the radiating energy, flaring like a star map, interwoven but distinct.
For a moment, Suvan saw the pattern—not chaos at all but an intricate web of how they were all linked, each soul a bright point, each relationship a shining strand.
And somewhere in that newborn constellation, burning in all the colors of the rainbow: Mariah.
“I remember,” he blurted. “I remember all of it, every moment with you.”
Through the barrier of their visors, she stared into his eyes. “Everything?”
“You taste sweeter than soda pop.”
Bright color bloomed across her face, and her dark eyes sparkled. “Suvan!”
“I fell in love with you.” He pressed his visor to hers. “And then I forgot. And then I fell again. I will love you every time, through all time—and all of space too.”
“We’re not falling anymore,” she whispered. “We found it.”
Framed in the heart of the broken cloud, the resonark’s shadowlight illuminated the dark surges. Fractal threads spiraled out in all directions, a celestial signal fire of elemental joy.
“Chief.” The captain’s urgent voice broke through the static. “Are you there? Answer.”
Suvan toggled his comm. “Sir, I’m having a moment, if you please.”
“A moment? Oh, by all means. But when that expansion wave hits—”
Together, they craned their helmets to see the sparkling ball of prismatic plasma unfurling toward them, like a nebulous polychrome flower.
“I’ve had enough mystical revelations for one day,” Mariah whispered. “I can love you inside the ship too.”
“Say again?” Nehivar growled.
Clasping Mariah even tighter—which wasn’t possible, considering how close she already was, but he believed in the impossible—Suvan punched the tether return, high speed.
“Hold tight,” he warned.
“Always.”
They hit the deck hard, and the moment their boots cleared the lock, the hatch slammed closed. Even with inertia dampeners, as the Love Boat I fled ahead of the wave, they rolled across the bay floor, still tangled together, helmets knocking.
They came to rest, staring dazedly into each other’s eyes.
She reached up to touch his visor, her gaze searching his intently. “You didn’t forget again?”
“That I love you?” He echoed her gesture. “If you remind me every day, I promise I’ll prove it every night.”