The darknessfeltcrushing, butthere wasn’t a single thing that actually changed. I was no science freak, but as far as I knew, we should have been compressed into nothing by now—the ship, the crew. Everything.
“Hold on,” Big Guy rumbled next to me. He snaked a powerful arm around my waist.
Who am I to argue?I wrapped my free arm around him and tightened my grip on my vibrating console.
The damaged ship rattled around us, noisy and frightening, but I had faith in her. TheEndeavorwould hold tight until something happened. Because something was bound to happen, right? You didn’t fly into a black hole and then just…nothing.
Boom!Tiny pinpricks of light streaked past us. I did a double take.Stars?
What was happening? It looked and felt exactly like flying through hyperspace.
Holy shit!We hadn’t set a destination. We could race straight into a moon, a planet, an asteroid belt. A fucking star!
“Jax!” I screamed.
Jax bellowed something incoherent and took us out of warp speed without the usual slowdown, which was already jarring enough. My feet flew out from under me, but Big Guy stayed upright and kept me upright, too. I lost my hold on my console and swung in his grip, my upper body smacking against his chest while everyone else fell down like dolls with floppy legs.
I got my feet back under me faster than a shooting star when my console started flashing out emergency warnings.Damaged circuits—bridge sector. Living quarters—oxygen at 57% and falling. Starboard door—open.
I hastily typed out the command that would close the safety hatch to the lower deck and cut off the bedrooms from the rest of the ship. They would lose their air, but we wouldn’t. The outer starboard door probably had a hole the size of Bridgebane in it, but the rest of the air lock was still intact. We could fly like this, as long as the engines didn’t conk out.
“We’re not dead!” Jax leaped off the floor, whooping like a maniac and pumping his fists in the air. “We’re not fucking dead!”
We all took a second to absorb that. It was unbelievable. Shock and amazement left my limbs trembling and weak. At the same time, it felt as though someone had just slammed a shot of adrenaline straight into my heart. Numbness gave way to a burst of life, and we laughed and screamed together, jumping up and down. We were completely hysterical.
Except for Shiori, who sat up facing the wall. And Big Guy. Nothing seemed to surprise him at all.
His lack of a reaction calmed mine, and I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. My smile shrank. The Black Widow hadn’t eaten us, but that didn’t mean we were safe.
No one had reached out to us yet, but I used radio waves to verify that we were alone. Nothing came back to me, and the monitors weren’t picking up anything unusual other than low levels of blackbody radiation.
“I’m seeing Hawking radiation behind us. It looks like a small black hole,” I said. Had we come through that? Was it like using a front and back door?
I craned my neck to look around us, but the views outside the window panels seemed perfectly normal. No rip through space, no bright tear, no vast nebular cloud. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and my best guess as to how we’d gotten here was something I could barely wrap my mind around.
Whatever luck had come our way, though—I would take it.
Relief breathed new life into my lungs, driving out some of the remaining fear and tightness. “The Dark Watch didn’t follow.” We’d stolen the serum, we weren’t dead, and the fact that no one knew where we were anymore was the sweetest frosting on this whole messed-up cake.
“We just went through a black hole,” Fiona said, disbelief still heavy in her voice. “And lived.”
Jax gave her a rare, big smile, one that actually stretched his face. “And left those goons in the dust.”
“Maybe the Black Widow is only masquerading as a black hole.” Excitement glimmered in Fiona’s expression. “Maybe it’s using similar properties to camouflage something else.”
“Wormhole?” I suggested, voicing my unlikely thought.
“Yes!” Fiona’s eyes widened. “A shortcut with two mouths.”
If that were true, how had no one figured it out? “But there have been experiments. Probes. They never reappeared anywhere else.”
“Maybe it had something to do with going in at warp speed?” Jax offered.
I shrugged. “Could be.” That was as plausible as anything else.
Everything about this was fascinating and mysterious, but right now, figuring out our new location in the galaxy was more important.
“Where are we?” I asked. We needed to land in a place where we could repair theEndeavorand get new numbers up on her. Then we’d be anonymous again, just one more lonely cargo ship making its way through the Dark.
