Shade nodded, raking his gaze over me before turning back to his controls.
Something quivered in my belly. Despite neither of us addressing the giant elephant in the spaceship, there was no doubt in my mind that Shade Ganavan was more than just my navigator. The only time in the last few days he’d come anywhere near my personal space, he’d inhaled deeply enough to stir my hair. Without even touching me, he’d made me want everything we’d had back on Albion 5.
I forced my eyes away from him.
“Coordinates set,” Shade said, swiveling back around.
Wow, that was fast. He was good at that. He was good at a lot of things.
I looked around. We were all on the bridge, even Fiona for once. Everyone was seated. Bonk was curled up on a cushion where he’d be safe.
“Prepare to jump,” I said, sitting as well.
I pressed the button to activate the hyperdrive myself instead of handing the honors over to Jax, as I often did. Instantly, theEndeavorshot through interstellar space, so fast we left time behind, and our bodies seemed to collapse in on themselves before inflating back out.
Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away but only moments later, we slowed, and the Tarrah System loomed before us. I looked for stars with long stretches of pure darkness between them.
“Let’s poke around,” I said, my insides still reeling from the jump. “See if gravity gives us a thump.”
“I thought you didn’t want a planet,” Shade said.
“I don’t.”
“Then how do you expect gravity to give you a thump?”
I think we both knew we weren’t heading into a star, because that would suck.
“What’s invisible except for gravitational force?” I asked.
Shade’s eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about dark matter? Because no one’s really—”
“Figured that out?” Yeah, maybe that was why the Fold was still hidden, right inside a pocket of it.
Or maybe it was something else. What did I know?
“It’s not like a black hole. It’s much subtler than that.” I shrugged, at a loss to explain the inexplicable. There were scientists getting things wrong every day for that. “Just keep an eye on the scanners. If something strange happens, you’ll know it.”
Something strange finally did happen. It took fourteen more hours of searching, but then the darkness between two stars suddenly felt like a sticky wall when we got close enough.
My pulse accelerated, and I forgot all about my gritty eyes and about being so tired I got dizzy every time I blinked. I moved us in closer and felt the Fold’s familiar tug start to lightly rattle the ship.
“Starshine?”
Shade sounded nervous. Basically, a big patch of nothing was shaking us and pulling us in.
“Sit tight,” I told him, glancing up from my controls. “It’ll be all right.”
I hoped. The Fold wasn’t nice to everyone, but I had a feeling that Shade would make the cut. And if he didn’t, that meant he had no place on my ship, or in my life.
Trying not to think about that, I turned us straight into the gluey gravitational warp.
TheEndeavorrattled harder. The point of no return was fast approaching after all these days of combing the Dark. Every single one of us lurched when the Fold finally grabbed us and sucked us in with sudden, jarring force.
The others started screaming like banshees the second the Fold really latched on to us, contorting in pain, and pressure, and I didn’t really know what else.
Merrick and I looked at each other, both of us fine.
“A1,” I said, almost like a bitter toast.
