Page 65 of Collision!
As his universal translator suggested all the complex meanings of that question, he tried to slow his breathing.
He’d once been nearly sucked out into space and then partly crushed by it—an exposure so nearly lethal he didn’t even remember it.Stepping out with her went against safety protocols and his own blaring instincts.
And yet this was the next stitch in the pattern they’d woven, so he answered simply, “Yes.”
The hatch parted with a hollow boom beneath their boots, and then the grappler was lifting the hovercart out of the ship, with them along for the ride.
“Oh.”Mariah’s breath whispered in his ear.“But it’s…beautiful.”
The distant suns of the Zarnax Zone had vanished beyond the cyclonic wall of the null cloud.Flaws along spacetime curved the dark matter into denser waves that slowly ignited along their edges as they merged and parted.
While he’d been refusing to think about his lingering horror of being outside the ship, hearing the awed hitch in her voice erased that lurking memory.Not of the danger, but his fear of it.Because itwasbeautiful—when he saw it through her wondering eyes.
Her busy hands had paused, but then she resumed her knitting.“I thought the resonark’s match would…magically appear.”
Suvan scanned the anomaly and the waning signal of its entanglement.“Maybe the resonark’s mate didn’t win a ticket to this cruise.”
“Chief, are you joking right now?”
“Definitely not.”
“So, how do we summon it?”
“We can’t go any deeper,” he warned.“Our suits won’t be enough to protect us.”
He toggled his comm to the main channel.“Any thoughts on reuniting our anomalies?”
Beyond a faint crackle, only silence.
He cursed under his breath.“The cloud drift is scrambling with our comms.We’ll have to wait until the interference passes.”
They were alone with the resonark.
“Suvan.I’m out of yarn.”
She’d reworked the knot, and the microgravity had returned the fading plasma to its perfect sphere.But he knew that wouldn’t hold it for long.
His suit, his quill-scales, his chest were too tight.“And I’m out of ideas.”
Her empty hands floated up, the oversized needles wandering to the ends of their tethers.“It can’t end here.It just can’t.”
The despair in her voice pierced him, and he reached for her gloved hand.“If our vision of the resonark’s memory is true, then its matchishere.Somewhere in this chaos.But if it can’t find us through all the interference…”
His gaze traced the intricate weaving she’d created—first at Felicity’s request for Remy’s recital, then reinforced with everyone’s contributions, all those hands twisting their hopes and dreams awakened by the resonark’s vision into a beautiful binding.
And suddenly he understood.
“We have to let it go,” he said.
Her glove clenched on his.“Let it… What?”
“The shroud of knots.We need to unravel it—completely.Expose the resonark and release it into the cloud to fix the connection.”
Her dark eyes widened.“But it’s already falling apart.Even the ship can’t go any deeper without damage.It’s too vulnerable.”
“That was the risk,” he agreed.“That is always the risk.”
As she stared at him, all the wild flares of conflicting energies caught and swirled in her incredulous gaze.But the resonark’s shadowlight was mostly shadow now.
