Page 68 of Until the Stars Fall

Summer started to cry. “No more daytime. It’s all night from here til Gaia. It’d take that long to rebuild it.”

“Where are you hurt?” I asked.

“I think I just got the wind knocked out of me,” she winced, her voice tight, “but my back really hurts.”

“Ok. Don’t move.” I laid my hands down on her stomach, and she looked up at Hannah confused.

“It’s okay, love,” Hannah said. “Gemma still has her magic. She’s apparently an advanced healer.” She tilted her head and glared at me in mock irritation.

After I fixed her injuries, Summer went back up to the bridge. Hannah and I reported the poltergeist to Zola. Her expression grew more and more confused as we talked.

“And you and Beck never saw anything like that before down there?”

“No, nothing.”

The two-way video rang, and Zola flipped it on. “First things first. Let me tell you what Clara came up with.” She pointed at her screen where Beck’s imaging was pulled up. “She says that his MRI shows activation in several areas on the left side of his brain associated with kinesthetic imagery. But the visual cortex is deactivated.”

I exchanged a confused glance with Hannah. “What does that mean?”

Zola’s face fell. “I have no idea, and neither does Clara. We know he’s not in a coma. We know he’s not asleep and dreaming. I can’t understand why his aura is so dim, but I’m thinking we have a magical problem, not a medical one. Because as soon as I got him in here, I noticed something else unusual about his aura.”

“What is it?”

“Well, your aura’s an extension of your soul. It’s kind of the luminous edges that surround your human body, protecting you from other entities, picking up information for your senses. But his is dim, and it’s also—” She walked around to Beck’s head, looked around the edges of him. “It’s sort of pinched off, here.” She rested her hand on the top of his head. “And there’s an etheric cord that just…goes off into the distance. I can’t see what it’s connected to, but I’m guessing it’s connected to the other part of Beck’s spirit.”

“So part of his spirit has left his body?” Hannah asked.

“That’s my current theory,” Zola said.

As she spoke, a whirlwind of miscellaneous items—pens, herb bundles, medicine bottles, bandages—suddenly whipped up in the room, then showered down on us, and I covered Beck’s head with my body.

But Zola watched the disturbance carefully. I tracked her eyes back to Beck’s head.

“Zola, is the poltergeist...Beck?”

She opened her mouth, but Summer came back over the video.

“Ladies, the antimatter drive went offline, and I can’t get it back up. I don’t know what that intangible fuck in the engine room did, but the pressure’s dropping, the shields are weakening, and the heat exchanger system’s failing. Worse than that—” She flicked a switch on the console. “We got nothing. I’d say we’re dead in the water, but we’re hurtling through space.”

My stomach sank. Out in this frictionless vacuum, a body in motion would stay in motion on the same path, forever, until it hit something. The near-constant state of panic I’d entered since I found Beck on the forest floor ratcheted up a notch.

Eyre put my icy fear into words. “We’re entering our new solar system in just a few hours. If we don’t do something, we’re gonna overshoot it or crash land on Gaia.”

Discussions broke out around me. We couldn’t fix all the problems with the ship without Beck, especially the electrical ones. He wasn’t only my number one priority because I loved him, he was key to our survival.

“Okay look,” I shouted, “listen! The pressurization system can reach twenty percent before we’re critical, same with the shields. If we’re desperate, we have oxygen masks in the storage room. But we need Beck if we’re gonna land safely. Eyre, how long do we have until we’re shot out of the sky on Gaia?”

She tapped at her console. “Five hours.”

I turned to Zola. “You’re the chief séance officer, right? Or was that just a joke? Do you think this entity is really Beck? Can you talk to him and find out what happened to him, and how we can help him?”

She nodded. “I absolutely can.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ten minutes later, the five of us sat around the table where Hannah, Zola, and I had tea. Was it only two months ago? Summer lit three white candles, and their smoke writhed up to entangle in the lemongrass incense that already scented the room.

The others joined hands, Zola and Hannah grabbing onto mine.

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