Hayes spins and pulls me into his arms. I feel the tension snap through his body, every muscle coiled tight beneath his skin.
“What’s that noise? What’s going on?” I ask.
This doesn’t feel romantic—at least, I don’t think it is—but my body didn’t get the memo. Every inch he touches sparks like flint on steel, pulse flaring as his arms tighten around me.
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs in my ear. “This part doesn’t last long.”
The whirring deepens into a deafening roar, like a tornado. Then the ground beneath us starts to tremble, subtle at first, then violently.
“What’s happening?”
“Just hold on,” he says. “Whatever you do—don’t let go.”
My mouth opens, but I don’t get a chance to respond because the earth suddenly shudders beneath us—and then splits wide open.
An enormous black hole yawns at our feet.
I blink. Rub my eyes.
It’s still there.
“Oh my God… what is that?” My voice shakes asI stare down into the hole.
Dark.
Endless.
Impossible.
“It’s a portal,” Hayes says, inexplicably calm. “And you and I are going inside.”
“You’re joking, right?”
Panic spikes through me as the air around us slowly begins drifting toward the hole. I try to imagine what falling inside would feel like.
Would it hurt?
Would my atoms come apart?
Would I be ripped into tiny little pieces?
“Don’t be scared,” Hayes whispers against my cheek as the whirring grows louder, hungrier. “I’ve got you.”
Argyros barks a sharp warning and then, without hesitation,leaps—as in voluntarily, gleefully jumps—into the black nothingness beneath us. He disappears from view almost instantly.
I don’t even have time to scream before a violent force yanks Hayes and me downward, like the pull of two magnets snapping together, only a hundred times stronger. Not gentle. Not slow. Like the ground itself has woken up and is swallowing us whole.
And then wefall.
Nothing but darkness surrounds us as we plummet through the cavernous hole, my body being pulled in a million different directions at once.
Deeper and deeper we go into an endless abyss. The airwarps around us, shrieking past like we’ve been swallowed by something ancient. Something massive and unrelenting.
Amid all the terror, my brain coughs up the strangest memory, and I think of thoseAlienmovies. Not about Hayes and his reenacting the chestburster scene, but the part in the sequel when Ripley expels the queen xenomorph through an airlock and into space. For the first time, I actually feel bad for the alien. Because this? This feeling of being hurled through endless nothing?
It’s absolutely horrifying.
We fall forever.
