Chapter 24 L’appel du Vide
L'appel du Vide
CALL OF THE VOID
Then I defy you, stars!
— ROMEO
ORION: INTERLUDE ??
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth.
An aphorism that feels too immense, too infinite, to fully comprehend. Which is the intention, to feel that immensity, to recognize our fragile, wondrous existence grasped for a mere breath of a moment.
We can debate the factual accuracy of Sagan’s adage—and many have—employing mathematical formulas and astronomical models to prove it, to try to conceive the infinite.
Yet even if we could visualize it on a granular level, in an ever-expanding universe continuously birthing new stars, the number remains staggering, humbling.
It’s terrifying to realize something exists that you’re unable to quantify. Something so vast, so immeasurable and fathomless, it’s impossible to count.
A sea of endless stars.
And she is one of them—a single, radiant point of light adrift in an infinite cosmic ocean. A star once bound in a binary, whose companion was torn from their shared orbit, drifting too far away…losing each other over time to the void of darkness.
Yet sound, like memory, can traverse vast distances, reaching across time and space. And hers reached me in drips of melody, fragments of notes, a beautiful, Euclidean rhythm drawing me into her gravity.
The sheer enormity of the cosmos asserts there must be something more that shapes our existence, some elusive agent hidden in the dark sector of the universe.
And she is the unknown force that shapes mine, in the darkest sector of me.
My dark anomaly.
Like a gravitational wave, she was supposed to pass right through me, undetected, unfelt.
Yet she left a cavernous imprint.
A pang of regret resounds through my chest as I scrape my boot along the rocky ledge, smearing a trail of briny seawater and rain. I dig my hand into my pocket and touch the cool marble of the chess piece, a faint, anguished smile tugging at my mouth.
A star’s life is a constant struggle against the force of gravity. Fighting a brutal tidal force against an inevitable collapse. Nothing can stop it.
But I’m nothing if not insufferably stubborn.
“Should’ve been stubborn enough to do away with you sooner,” I say aloud, tossing a scathing glance down below.
Fucking Leo.
As the new moon descends, the sky caught in that dance between day and night, the first streaks of burnished sunrise touch the horizon to cast shadows across the shore.
It should’ve shocked me more when Collins produced the scan. But I’d always known Leo was selfish enough to manipulate me for his own greedy gain. But damn—that was diabolical.
I’d like to believe he brought Collins here hoping to help me.
That even if his guilt finally got to him, in the end, it wasn’t purely to alleviate his conscience.
Perhaps he didn’t fully grasp the severity of the condition, or perhaps I really was becoming too great of a liability.
A loose, unpredictable thread he was forced to sever.
Six years, and all the while the floodwaters were creeping in, a building tide of pressure eroding neurons, dissolving memories. I didn’t need any results to validate what I’d always known after the wreck. That I was damaged; a glitch in my gray matter.
Even as the unbearable surge rises in my skull this very instant, I feel her there, carving a new channel—a passage for the dark tide to flow.
I adjust my watch, situating it until it feels right. I was able to recalibrate the astronomical clock while I searched for Leo’s body along the shore. Clearly, Collins really hasn’t spent time around the ocean, knowing little about tides. At least on that, she wasn’t lying.
Dropping a body into a rip current during a perigean spring tide under the force of an eclipse is a terrible method of body disposal. The powerful tidal surge washed it right back ashore, pushed by the incoming swells.
“Night—?”
I turn toward the irritated sound of my name, watching as Prescott stalks my way. His dirty-blond hair is unkempt, his clothes disheveled, looking as though he spent the evening out after yesterday’s festivities.
Perfect.
“I haven’t even had coffee yet,” he complains with an exasperated breath as he reaches me. “What are you doing out here? Did Banner message you, too—”
Without a word, I grab hold of his shirt collar and yank him forward. Stunned, he barely puts up a fight as I drop him over the side of the cliff.
His scream fades out, cut short as his body slams into a rocky outcropping, landing not far from Leo’s bloated corpse.
Flexing my gloved fingers, I calmly straighten my tie, smoothing it along my shirt placket as I peer over the edge. “How’s that for resolution, Dr. Holbrook.”
I called myself a hunter.
Yet the terror in my victim’s eyes just now makes me realize I am the thing she branded me, a sinister shadow of myth and nightmare.
Reaper.
I cast one last glance at the basin, ensuring the staged scene looks convincing.
Along with the trail of evidence I’ve strategically left in place, the scene has to tell a specific narrative.
Seems this was always Eugene’s academic doom, such an insignificant death, barely an afterthought.
Fitting, really. Just like his uninspired research.
Which is why he lashed out at Leo during the symposium, then attacked him in a resentful rage. Furious over being dismissed, easily replaced. His hack research stripped of funding.
I mean, someone has to serve as the scapegoat.
Take the fall for the murder—quite literally, in Prescott’s case.
Might as well be my research-stealing rival.
Besides, I’m fairly certain he was the one feeding information to the Feds.
He always did show a bit too much interest in my work, hovering too close, a little too skittish around me.
But I’ll get confirmation on that soon enough.
I pick up my discarded astrolabe from the gritty earth, brushing away the sand. Lifting it to the clear sky, I align the sighting vane to that veiled pattern of stars—the hidden thirteenth constellation.
An ache burrows deep, and I instinctively touch my chest in mimicry of my little Serpent Bearer. Carrying her scar stitched of pain, just as the mythic healer bears the weight of a starry serpent, holding poison and remedy in eternal balance.
It’s an intriguing story, one I’m looking forward to sharing with her. Intimately.
I warned her one taste would never enough.
Now there’s something hungrier stirring with me, something darker that’s emerged.
And it’s insatiable.
Out of habit, my thumb sweeps the rule, its presence resonating like a familiar tune. Maybe Collins was right about how I made such a careless mistake, leaving the rule at a scene. Maybe it was cognitive decline, or maybe—
Sometimes, you have to lose something important to find it again.
And you have to be willing to risk losing it forever.
Ninety-nine percent science, one percent magical thinking. Like wishing on a star—or an entire fucking ocean of them, all scattered like grains of sand across the cosmos. An infinite sea of possibilities, each collapsing until only one inevitable outcome remains.
I slip the astrolabe into my pocket next to the queen, a smile pulling at the corner of my mouth. It’s the knight that takes the leap, the mate inevitable, to deliver the final blow.
My firefly called checkmate too soon. This is far from over.
With my course set, I start back toward the university.
A heavy silence infuses the facility as I ascend the spiral staircase. Before I reach the observatory dome, the distinct trace of Collins’s scent tightens my chest. A current of futile hope sparks, extinguished the moment I enter to see everything the same.
If she’d just stumbled in here before she left me bound to my bed with my own damn belt, things might’ve ended differently.
I look down, halting a few feet away from the gagged FBI agent shackled to my telescope pier. After a dismissive shrug, I sink my hand into my pocket and retrieve the capsule of smelling salts. Cracking it open, I wave it beneath his nose.
“But probably not,” I say, speaking my thoughts aloud as I toss the empty capsule aside. I rip the tape away from his mouth, then smack his cheek to further rouse him. “She seemed highly determined.”
He blinks a few times, his gaze slowly focusing on my face. “Where is she?” he demands, jerking weakly against the cuffs. “If you’ve hurt her—”
“So you did come here for her.” I tilt my head, studying his dark eyes as I assess the truth there.
When I returned to the dark-sky preserve the next day to find the bodies removed, the entire site cleared of any trace of evidence, I questioned my goddamn sanity.
It’s possible I cleaned up afterward in my spiraled state out of compulsive habit.
Or even more alarming—that I’d never been there at all.
“How did you recognize me?” the agent asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“Cops are pretty obvious to spot,” I say, resting my forearm over my knee.
During my speech at the symposium—the one I was giving in order to keep away from the woman bound in my observatory—I noticed this guy skulking through the crowd.
I left mid-speech, shadowing him to the observatory, my thoughts turning violent the closer he got to Collins.
And when I found her missing…that violence erupted.
After I slammed his head against the window, I dragged him to the pier.
Making sure to check him—thoroughly this time—for anything capable of picking a lock before I gagged him, then sedated him heavily for good measure.
And then, when I retrieved his phone near the window, that’s where I watched it all play out between Collins and Leo. A perfect symmetry of violence and inevitability, her light dimming out.
There are still some gaps I need filled.
Like who took care of the evidence at the dark-sky preserve, though I can now make a pretty good assumption on that.
And while I’d like to believe she did it to protect me, that’s likely just my poor, love-sick heart.
No, Collins was willing to risk everything to keep not only me hidden at Stonehurst, but herself.
And whether it was my chaotic kill site that ultimately led this agent here, or if it was Prescott’s doing, once the FBI appeared, I knew my time with Collins was limited. But I’d take every stolen second with her I could get.
Now, this agent and I are about to become very close friends.
“Since you apparently know who I am…” I say, cocking an eyebrow.
He hesitates before giving me his name. “Special Agent Zeke Darby.” He jerks against the cuffs, frustration mounting. “Just tell me where she is,” he demands once more, a resigned breath escaping. “I just need to know she’s okay.”
After studying him a beat longer, I grunt as I stand, striding toward the main console. “She’s gone,” I say bluntly.
“What the fuck did you do to her—”
“She left,” I cut him off. “Got what she needed from me, then took off.”
He releases a harsh curse beneath his breath. “Fucking hell, Hol.”
A fierce knot of resentment tightens in my chest at the familiarity in his voice. I brace my hands against the desk, gloved fingers moving across the keys. Collins is good—impressively good—doing a hell of a job erasing her digital trace from my system. Almost perfect.
But echoes linger.
And those residual patterns are enough for me to follow.
My science once felt heartless—but it’s never been without heart.
A purpose.
I didn’t so much as code an algorithm as score one. Ada Lovelace referred to it as poetical science; the concept that an engine could weave algebra into music, that machines could create composition.
I’d like to think mine achieves something similar, only cast in a far darker register. Written in a minor key.
As I lock onto the pattern, I drum my fingers and tap a final key, the signal resonating deep within this dark, haunted part of me. The piece of my soul waiting, listening, suspended in breath-bated anticipation for the next notes of her melody.
Her whole song.
Our composition.
Once the system is closed out, I crouch down in front of the agent, producing the key. As I unlock one of the cuffs, his eyes narrow on me, expression wary.
“You’re letting me go,” he questions, suspicion threading his voice as I move to the second handcuff.
I halt for a brief moment, my gaze lowering to the worn, braided band circling his wrist. Clicking open the cuff, I meet his eyes. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I know what it’s like to suffer for loving the stars too much.”
The words scrape raw at the confession, knowing too intimately the wrenching agony when their light fades, their celestial bodies extinguished long before that light ever reaches us.
A conflicted look crosses his face. He rubs his freed wrist, watching me closely as his confusion morphs into contempt. “You think you’re in love with Hollyn,” he says slowly, the derision in his tone striking an exposed nerve.
My jaw hardens, a furious fire igniting my bloodstream. In an instant, I have his throat clutched. “Collins,” I correct him through gritted teeth. “That’s her name. The one she chose.”
He holds my menacing gaze, defiant even under my ruthless grip, before finally conceding with a strained nod.
I release him abruptly and stand. “Let’s go.”
He remains rooted, unmoving. “Where?”
“You’re coming with me.”
Dragging himself upright, he scowls. “And why the fuck would I do that?”
I pause, casting him a cutting glare over my shoulder. “First, because you have information I need. Second, because I require your vehicle.” I head toward the landing. “My girlfriend stole mine.”
I’m not sure which part gives him more pause, but after a tense beat, his steps trail behind mine. “Tell me where the hell we’re going first.”
My gaze lifts toward the observatory windows, finding the shadowed horizon. I map her trajectory as instinctively as I sight the hunter in the sky, eternally stalking his prey across the celestial heavens.
There’s nowhere she can run far enough to escape me.
I will hunt her.
I will find her.
A visceral, unrelenting ache pulses behind my ribs as my fingertips tap rhythmically against my thigh, matching the haunting staccato of her cadence, her melody scored deep.
Since the moment her name lit my screen, I’ve been consumed by one singular obsession—the one intrusive thought impossible to silence.
I can save her.
For all the luminous, light-giving bodies scattered across the known universe, there exists infinitely more darkness. The whispering void calling us to answer.
And with no fear to hold me back, I answer it. “To get her a heart.”