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 sovast, 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 dayand 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.
