Chapter 20 Totality
Totality
What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
— MARCUS AURELIUS
ORION
Ionce swore I’d fight an ocean for her.
The instant my arms closed around Collins, I knew I’d fight the dark, violent waters of the tide to carry her ashore.
The wind whips around me, rising into a roaring chorus as waves crash furiously against the jagged cliffside below. Even as the rain breaks and the sky clears, the misty air remains charged with a storm.
I hold the brass object between my thumb and forefinger, feel the balanced weight of it. Its sudden appearance in my observatory stirs an unease, an implication that makes me question my own mind.
There’s a cost to loving anything too fiercely. That only after losing what we love most can we truly realize its value.
It’s a cruel paradox.
With an aching breath, I lift my gaze toward the horizon.
Out there in the vast ocean is my violence. I recognized its fury before the ripples could reach me, before the vibrations could be felt. Like gravitational waves passing silently through one another, we were never supposed to collide.
That’s the law of physics.
And yet, near the shadow of the horizon, laws are bent, warped. Altered.
My thoughts rage like the restless sea stretched endless before me, cast in tossing black waters that absorb the fading light. Two worlds layered one on top of the other.
In the distance, that faint seam of horizon threads the space where the ocean touches sky, blurring the boundary between the two.
Overhead, first contact is being made as the moon kisses the disk of the sun, initiating the countdown to occultation.
The waves push and pull against the shoreline as I stand fixed on the rocky ledge, the towering spires of Stonehurst looming from behind. I clench the brass in my hand, my fingers as numb with cold as my body with indecision.
Soon, a blazing corona will circle a black sun, the moment of totality eclipsing the beach.
And me.
Right here, trapped in this space between, I feel that push and pull on a cellular level as gravity mercilessly dominates my atoms. An inevitability that has tormented me since she first entered my orbit.
As crosses form on the shallow waters, the tide displays the mark of danger. Rip currents strong enough to swallow us whole are building. The gravitational pull churns the tide higher, pulling harder at the ocean.
I recognize the pattern because the science of what I do depends on it. Inherently, we are designed to recognize these patterns. It’s coded in our DNA. To escape predation, to identify danger.
I should have recognized the danger in her.
My gaze tracks over the pier, where blood pools dark on the weathered wood. Salt water surges up, splashing between the planks to wash the evidence of her violence away, yet the stain remains.
Fuck, all this time, I’ve been fixated on the wrong celestial event.
It was never the sun going dark—it was her.
With every escaping second, the eclipse was taking place within Collins, the shadow slowly devouring her light.
I sensed the fury there, the violence, that undercurrent of turmoil simmering just beneath her surface.
Until finally spilling free, bloodying the waters.
Her totality is here.
With fire lashing my sternum, I remove the star-taker from my pocket and fit the piece into place, and her melodic tune sings through me, an intoxicating, haunting refrain.
Nothing is as perfectly measured as the symmetry of a reverberating tune. A sound caught forever in motion, like a melody pulled into a riptide, eternally echoing deep under the surface where no one can hear.
Yet I hear it.
Her echoes that come to me as harmony, the staccato cadence of her pulse, a tender, melancholic rhythm of heartbeats that I could always hear.
Raising the sighting vane, I look across the churning waves and align the astrolabe. Sunlight filters through the aperture, striking my palm as I confirm the measurements—the exact position of Ophiuchus.
And right beneath her constellation, a faint trail illuminates the way.
I lower the star-taker, letting it slip from my fingers.
I’ve suffered this moment on an endless loop. Altering variables, simulating outcomes, searching for the one where I don’t lose her. Dreading the second when I can no longer defy this sinister influence.
Standing at the precipice, I step closer to the edge of the cliff. The waves roar, crashing higher, spitting up against the rocks. Something vicious stirs in my blood as I strip away my jacket and wrench off my tie, allowing the serrated wind to sink its teeth into my skin.
When observing an event, the observer cannot interfere.
I’ve known the exact month, day, hour, minute—down to the goddamn second her heart would stop beating.
And I’ve known there’d be nothing I could do to stop it from happening.
I can’t save her.
When a star begins to die, there’s no preventing its collapse. Stellar death is an intense, violent event. Those fleeting moments before the end are breathtakingly beautiful, the destruction inevitable.
It leaves an impression in the void, an echo felt long after its heart goes dark.
And her absence will leave a cavernous abyss.
As the markers on my astronomical watch align closer, the sky falls darker, and a discordant chord bangs through my vessels. Gravity becomes secondary to this deeper, darker pull within.
The void whispers, the seductive urge to jump. To surrender. To succumb to forces beyond control.
And I answer its call.
With the next frigid gust, I pull in a shuddering breath. My foot slips along the rocky incline as I look down into the turbulent waters below.
There’s no fear of falling in space, only the silent terror of becoming adrift. Frozen, motionless.
Yet there’s a paradoxical truth to the danger of that all-consuming force—a force that can simply be removed just by falling.
Removing resistance.
I once swore I’d fight an ocean for her—a battle now waged against the dark, violent waters of my mind.
Loving Collins was never a jump. Not even a leap.
The instant I saw her, I was already in freefall, experiencing that brief moment of terrifying, exhilarating weightlessness just before the plummet, stretched into infinity.
I close my eyes—
And step off the cliff.
The wind screams in my ears, a rush stealing my breath as adrenaline floods my bloodstream. For a fleeting moment, I surrender to the freefall, right before the ocean swallows me.
Plunged into an icy grave, all light vanishes. The freezing water is a brutal shock to my system. Salt water fills my mouth as a ruthless wave twists my body, wrenching me under.
Disoriented, I claw in every direction until I break the surface. Dragging in a sharp breath, I fill my burning lungs. Every molecule of my body wants to freeze, to let the undercurrent drag my motionless form to the bottom.
With an obstinate will born of sheer stubborn determination, I thrust one arm in front of the other, carving a path through the vicious crosscurrent.
The turbulent waves batter me, but I latch onto that faint beat, the fading cadence of her heart. Fighting the pull, I stroke hard, muscles igniting in fire. Between the heaving waves, the craft comes into view.
I push harder, cutting through the swelling current toward the capsized Zodiac rocking against the jagged sea stacks. Amid the undulating breakers, I catch a glimpse of her—an angel in my scope. Her surf-beaten body clings to the edge of a rock.
Time dilates, feeling as though the seconds it takes to reach her are never-ending, stretched by an impossible distance I can’t close. Each warped strike of a second is a slice through the cavity of my chest as I slowly watch her slip beneath the surface.
“Fuck. Collins—” I shout her name, my throat raw, voice drowned by the thunderous crash of waves. A savage desperation tears through me, obliterating any fear.
Slammed under by the next crash of a wave, I surface gasping, dragging in another painful breath to fill my lungs before I dive below. I swim deeper, arms slicing through salt and kelp. I fight the riptide, hands scraping through the murky depth in search.
And then I feel her.
First contact—a spark of warmth breaking through the icy water and saline, conducting an electric arc between us. Breaching every barrier, my fingers touch hers.
The yielding softness of her skin sends a visceral shockwave through me, surging with heat to ignite my frozen bones.
Arms weightless above her head, Collins drifts suspended in the deep, swallowed by the crushing darkness of the ocean void.
I link my fingers through hers, teeth gritted against the crosscurrent as I drag her higher.
My left hand finds the curve of her cheek, guiding her face toward mine as I strain to see through the stirred silt and murk. My forehead presses to hers, fingers threading into her silky hair, savoring this isolated moment of serene calm, before I wrap my arm around her and kick us to the surface.
“Collins.” My voice cracks as I cough up water. With a fierce groan, I haul her closer. Exertion scorching my muscles, I search her for signs of life.
Tossed by the waves, I tread water, clearing strands of her matted hair from her face. My thumb brushes over a tender bruise along her pale cheek, anger igniting hot. “Starling—”
I smother the flame of panic as I press my fingers against her throat, relief stripping a ragged breath free at the shallow flutter of her pulse.
“Fuck,” I swear, casting a defiant glance up at the sky. The shadow has grown, taking a dark bite out of the sun.
Before the rip current drags us back under, I shift her back against my chest, anchoring my arm across her sternum. Her head rests on my shoulder, and I tilt her face upward, keeping her airway clear of the surf.
“Just stay with me, angel,” I rasp near her ear, my low plea lost beneath the tossing waves.