Page 42 of Adrift!
It took the muscle memory of every performance where she’d fought tenaciously to the final outro not to kiss him. Instead, she channeled that desire and joy into the flawed instrument, focusing all her heart on the song weaving between them.
Judging by the cheer and the electric thrill across her skin, she knew the audience must feel it as she did: searching and finding, like falling and being caught, the distance between almost and always finally collapsing into now.
The crowd wasn’t quite singing along, but lips were pursed with humming, throats vibrating. Some just swayed. But all were caught in the moment and the music.
Entangled…
Opalescent fire burst above the little stage in alien pyrotechnics. Remy choked out a rare “fuck” as fractals spun out of the explosion with a deep, sonic thrum she felt in the marrow of her bones.
The resonark had escaped.
Chapter 14
Fractured spirals of backlit shadow blazed across Ikaryo’s enhanced vision. Before singing with Remy, he’d been unable to perceive the resonark with his augments.
Now he saw how the attenuating filaments of energy sought connection, endlessly reaching…
This had been the risk.
The fractals of dark rainbow hung suspended above the crowd. Someone screamed, and almost everyone cringed away, except the captain who surged around Felicity with a stomp of his boots. Evens was right behind him, his wondering face angled upward to the resonark.
“Keep playing,” Ikaryo warned Remy. “Keep singing.”
She was magnificent. She stood tall in her flowered boots, head thrown back with the wild red waves of her hair rippling down her back, the power of her voice pouring from her arched throat. The pale swath of her gown had become a luminous backdrop for the resonark, its prismatic energy pulsing over her, brightest across the shining instrument.
He could’ve listened forever, awash in her wordless, soaring aria.
But she’d asked him to play with her.
So he stood behind her with his hands barely on her shoulders. Not restricting her spirited dance with the guitar, but holding her, amplifying with the biomech that too often reminded him of what he’d lost and left behind. Now, the augments were a newfound voice, no longer a source of distance, but connection.
The contact between them intensified the song, adding layers of complexity and depth—and the resonark resounded withloops of fractal lightexpandingnow: the anomaly coming into focus.
As Remy spun the harmonic resonance toward a rapturous climax, the shimmering energy swelled too, floating from her and the instrument up into the woven veils. Infinitely fragmenting edges remained, with threads of infrared and ultraviolent and beyond in either direction merging into the yarn, the fringe bleeding into unknown reaches of spacetime…
The resonance overtook all his senses, the apex of energy a vast, engulfing pressure. The monstrous, liquified roar swept his augments offline, leaving him half deafened and blind. But he could still wrap his arms around Remy, holding her even tighter on the edge of this oblivion, and hefelther still singing into that glimpse of the infinite void.
Around them, the air and light itself were compressing, as if they were approaching an event horizon beyond which…
The resonark ignited in a shockwave of energy, arching in omnispectral abandon across the ballroom—though not a thread wavered or a votive flickered.
The shadowlight at its heart belled outward as if it would go on forever…and then with a wild, ringing chime, it finally coalesced into a glowing plasmic sphere, caught within the knitted knotwork.
A charged hush expanded through the audience, almost like a sound. Suspended above them, the resonark radiated gently within wavelengths visible to most of the beings aboard. Even as it unfurled along its outer limits in endless fractals of light, the anomaly’s nucleus sustained.
While his augments rebooted, Ikaryo assessed the situation: the resonark seemed stable and currently contained by…yarn?; its energy was within safe limits; the ship hadn’t powered up and flown off with them again, at least not yet.
Had they done this together, the passengers and crew, their combined attention finally expressing the quantum anomaly?
Because everyone was staring up with species-specific variations of Evens’ rapt expression. No fear or loathing of its otherness. They’d all joined the IDA—willing to step out into the darkness and dangers of space—because they’d believed love was out there, somewhere, waiting for them.
Even the crew, Ikaryo admitted to himself. They’d known what kind of ship they were signing on to. It was right there in the name, after all.
They’d all yearned for connection. And out here, they found each other: the captain and Felicity, the passengers who’d been strangers and were now friends and some lovers, a family.
Out here, those bonds had become clear, the way he’d attuned the view of faraway stars to Remy’s eyes.
He buried his face in the red waves of her hair, breathing the living heat of her. Though she’d never added words to the song, in the shimmering afterglow of his dazzled senses, he heard the resonark call to them.
