Chapter 16
Dark Skies
Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.
— MACBETH
ORION
If you knew the exact time of your death, how would you spend your last moments?
Would the answer change if you were given months? Weeks? Days?
Hours—?
Would you savor the time left, cherishing the light that remains, or try to defy that dark fate?
For everything beautiful in the universe, there exists a terrifying symmetry. What is luminous and breathtakingly full of wonder is mirrored by its opposite. Shadows that are desolate and horrifying, brimming with destruction and decay.
I’ve been riding inland for almost two hours, battered by wind. The salty coastal air has thinned to the crisp scent of leaves and earthy soil.
If I keep riding, just keep going, could I outrun our dark fate?
I push my Triumph past a sane speed, the roar of the engine failing to drown out the storm inside my head, shadows coiling tighter to mock my defiance.
The road narrows as I take a sharp curve, winding through forests dense with amber and gold. Those hidden hues of her eyes.
The sky grows darker.
By the time I reach the clearing, the skyline is untouched by urban lights, the stars carved into a black canvas.
For the first time since I began the hunt, I accept I have no control. My arrival at the dark-sky preserve of Blue Hills is as inevitable as every annihilation. With the approach of each cosmic event, more of my willpower erodes.
I roll to a stop along a stretch of thin pines, muscles stiff as I drop my feet and cut the engine. Silence rings in my muffled ears, the isolation as stark as the unfiltered view.
Right on time, a twig snaps.
My blood rushes hot in my veins as I remove my helmet and meet his eyes. He stands frozen, shovel halted mid-dig, the blade buried in the earth.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demands, his grip on the handle bleaching his knuckles beneath the pale starlight.
I dismount my bike, boots crunching dead leaves. I don’t bother with an explanation, having already tried that before. It only causes more panic, more confusion and pleading.
And it changes nothing.
Instead, I sling my pack off the bike and slip the astrolabe from the inner pocket of my leather jacket. Like muscle memory, my gloved thumb sweeps the ecliptic plate, tracing the empty space where the rule should lie like a phantom limb.
Without that one piece, I can’t accurately sight the position.
I tap a thirteen-beat count against the brass, the golden sequence triggering a memory of those golden stars in her eyes, and it quiets the roar inside my skull.
I huff out a resigned breath and lift my gaze skyward, finding the hunter’s belt. There’s a twinge beneath my ribs, something residual left over. Sprawled broken on the asphalt, scraped raw. The wisp of a memory that slips away before I can fully grasp it, a wave of anger rising in its void.
Letting it smolder to ash, I shift my gaze. Between Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini, a comet burns faint green—a pale halo fanning across the night.
“Beautiful,” I whisper, breath fogging the chilly air. “Some of the most impressive spectral emissions I’ve observed, but—” I push the star-taker into my pocket, eyes narrowing lethally on Cassian Bevins. “You didn’t come here to gaze at a comet.”
“I asked you who the fuck—”
The dart in his thigh cuts him short. His body jolts in shock, the shovel slips from his grip as he stumbles back. The dual-chamber dart first releases a small dose of sedative before the paralytic kicks in.
He collapses to the forest floor.
I drop the tranq pistol back into my pack, rolling my shoulders to further work out the stiffness. For one brief second, I catch a trace of her scent—sweet, floral, maddening—and my throat constricts at the memory of her pressed against me on the bike. Her soft breath warming my neck.
The climbing, Euclidean rhythm of her pulse as I counted every heartbeat as she fell apart above me.
I came so close to touching her. Aching to link my fingers through hers, hold on tight. Willing to endure the violent loss of control that comes from a bare touch at the boundary.
Yet the instant her skin met mine, the void would open its jaws, ravenous to consume.
And I’d be powerless to stop it.
Just as I am right now, moving toward Annihilation Twelve.
To test my resistance, I tap my gloved fingers to the lingering echo of her hypnotic tune, desperate to be lost in her blink pattern, the rising cadence of her pulse. I picture her beautiful smile, her softly escaping moans, as her notes reverberate through my mind.
Yet it’s not enough to calm the vicious stirring, to dull the relentless pounding against my temples. The impending moment buzzes in my blood, vessels hot and constricting with the rush of adrenaline.
The dark waters churn and thrash.
My fingers seek the scar along my forehead as something acidic scorches my veins, the familiar pain compelling my steps forward until the roar quiets to a whisper and then—
She’s gone.
I drop my pack to the ground, sparing a glance at the discarded body near the shallow hole dug for a grave.
I cock an eyebrow in amusement. “You could’ve at least sealed Julian in plastic. Do you know how many animals will dig your brother up out here?” I tilt my head. “I have to assume you wanted to get caught, Cassian.”
The brothers are wanted in a dozen jurisdictions for serial rape. The duo stays moving, changing names, hiding in cities. Leaving just enough of a signature pattern to pick up their trail.
Starting to rouse, he can only groan in response. The neuromuscular blocker temporarily paralyzes him, locking his muscles without affecting his mind. A small but effective dose so his diaphragm still draws air. Awake, aware, but unable to move.
I release a low hum, slipping my glasses into place before I set to work. Over the next fifteen minutes, both Cassian and his twin are positioned on their backs, limbs impaled to the earth, clothes cut away, hands bound together at the center in mirror alignment to the Gemini constellation.
Symmetry.
Beautiful and terrifying.
For centuries, we’ve aligned stones and structures with the stars. In worship, in sought guidance. In ritual.
While geometry is the language of the universe, ritual is the control over its disorder.
Ninety-nine percent science, one percent magical thinking—a slim margin I can allow, just to quiet the neurosis.
Similar to the way gloves shield against observer interference.
And the ritual parallels the violence of that single catastrophic moment when control was lost, recreating the exact cosmic conditions from that night—conditions I’ve been compulsively chasing since my wreck beneath the Orion constellation.
I retrieve the star-taker, feeling its familiar, balanced weight. Hidden behind the antique aesthetic are quantum sensors and a quartz resonator, designed to record neural signals. And since bone interferes with signal, I need direct contact.
Touch.
Right at the boundary.
That requires boring a small hole through the skull with a cranial drill, just large enough to place the microelectrode a couple millimeters deep at the edge of the cortex, where neurons emit their last patterns before collapse.
The final echo before death.
According to the algorithm, Bevins’s projected Entanglement Entropy at Death will be 75.7% resonance. Which simply means a strong, coherent echo that’s clear enough to retrieve.
Fuck, I can imagine the horrified expression on Leo’s face. If he were here, he’d be appalled for about five-point-two seconds before he saw the data. Then he’d crack Cassian’s skull open himself to get to it.
At every moment, faint ripples from violent cosmic events are passing through the universe, through space and time.
Through us.
Unseen, unfelt—yet can be timed to rare celestial alignments. Like a comet nearing perihelion, its volatile ices erupting in a sudden, radiant outburst.
Like the one happening above us now.
These outbursts are erratic, nearly impossible to predict.
Yet my algorithm pinpointed the precise instant this cometary flare would intersect gravitational waves from a distant tidal disruption event—a star torn apart by the merciless gravity of a black hole, its stellar heart shredded into a luminous ring of gas and plasma, then devoured by shadow.
A brilliant event, beautiful, and devastating.
I draw a slow breath at the drag of my pulse, my fingertips tapping out the broken cadence of hers.
As the ripples wash over us, Cassian’s unique neural signature forms a shadow, a horizon.
The darker the psyche, the louder the echo at the boundary.
Later, when I feed this data into the sonic black hole, I’ll try not to let the ache consume as I recall how Collins watched the vortex, how her eyes lit as I explained how trapped sound waves warp and stretch, pulling hidden notes within reach.
I scrape a hand through my hair, anxious to get back to my sub-level lab and run the signal through the quantum array. If the entanglement entropy climbs, something survived at the shadowed edge.
“All that’s left is to wait,” I say as I crouch next to Cassian. His eyes are open, sheened with tears he can’t blink away, his chest rising with shallow breaths. I sigh and cast my gaze skyward. “Let’s just watch the comet for a while.”
I mean, what’s the life of one homicidal, serial-raping brother worth in the quest to define one of the greatest mysteries of the universe?
What is her life worth?
Dark filaments choke my mind, fury blazing through my viscera at the intrusive thought.
It’s become its own obsession, the incessant thought of taking her life.
Like standing at the edge of my observation deck, staring down at crashing waves, the thought of jumping so consuming that surrender feels inevitable.
Just to make it stop.
Jaw clenched, I reach for my monocular and focus on the comet’s coma, a striking halo streaking through the night.