“Lu-na.” Her name scraped its way up his throat and came out raspy and weak.
“I’m here, Boone! I’m here.” She sounded so scared. “Just listen to my voice, okay? Just keep listening to my voice.”
“I … love”—he coughed, and a blinding pain seared through his rib cage—“love you.”
His body screamed in agony, and his mind became fuzzy.
The world became eerily silent, like a vacuum had sucked all sound from existence.
Luna appeared before him in the pitch-blackness of the cave. Golden and glowing like his very own angel, she held her hand out to him, as if beckoning him to her.
Boone tried to reach for her but couldn’t move.
Luna’s brilliant smile was the last thing he saw before the inescapable grip of darkness dragged him to its ominous depths.
BOOM!
Luna stood so fast, her chair rolled across the room and bumped into her mini fridge.
“BOONE!”
His body camera instantly went dark, and she thought she heard a thudding sound, like objects landing on something.
“BOONE!” She screamed his name again.
“Lu-na.” His voice was barely audible.
She rushed over to the console and tried to adjust the volume.
“I’m here, Boone. I’m here.” She pressed her headset closer to her ears in an effort to hear him better. “Just listen to my voice, okay? Just keep listening to my voice.”
“I … love”—he coughed, and it didn’t sound good—“love you.”
“I love you, too.”
There was the scratch and crackle of static, then nothing but a chilling, dead silence.
She stared up at the screen, desperate for his body camera to miraculously start functioning again.
Minutes that felt like decades ticked by. She clicked a few keys and still nothing.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, no, no, no, no.”
In her headset, she heard Calliope shouting. “Boone!” She ran toward the front of the tomb. “Come on, Boone, answer me. Please say something.” Her anguished plea to her brother was heartbreaking.
Cole and Hawk were running to join her.
The rest of the team remained in position, ominously silent—all of them waiting for some sign that their teammate, their friend, their brother was still alive.
Lunachecked Boone’s bio-patch reading, but it no longer appeared on the screen with the others.
Her body instantly felt numb, and she forgot how to breathe.
“Boone—” Her voice sounded frail and small.
The letter in the drawer taunted her, and a horrible vision of him in a dark cave, alone and hurt or worse, tore at her soul.
The ominous silence and painful loss were too heavy a burden to bear, and as if in slow motion, her legs gave out and she collapsed to her knees on the floor.
