It takes my slowing brain a few seconds to catch up with what’s happening.
The winch. It’s retracting the tether, pulling it—and me, eventually—toward the LINA much faster than I ever could hope to do myself.
There’s only one explanation for that.Kane.
He’s awake and aware. At least enough to recognize that the tether is extended when it shouldn’t be.
I lock my stubborn hands down tighter on the tether with effort, my heart beating too fast. The tether yanks me along, speeding me away.
“One percent,” the suit woman tells me as the LINA grows larger in my view. “Situation critical.”
Dizziness prevents me from screamingno fucking kidding.
My feet collide with the LINA first. I feel it more than see it, my vision going dark from the edges and creeping inward.
Fumbling, I reach for the airlock door and find it already open and waiting for me.
I collapse inside the airlock, and the woman on my suit isn’t even bothering to speak to me. She’s been replaced by an alarming and continuous beep inside my helmet that sounds disturbingly like a heart monitor flatline.
The sound of the airlock closing behind me sounds distant, far away. I have to wait until the airlock is repressurized before I can take off my helmet. But I can’t… I can’t breathe.
My hand flaps weakly near the seal for my helmet.
A muted thumping catches my attention, like a fist against a heavy surface. “No!”
Kane.
He’s shouting at me. Pounding on the airlock door from the other side.
I should look up. Turn my head and see him. One last time, that would be…
34
“Don’t move. Just stay still.”
I’m floating, unaware that I’m aware until those words.
Now, now I can feel the pulsing in my temples, the ache over my whole body, the hard, unforgiving surface beneath my back.
My lungs demand a deeper breath, and I suck air in, only to lose it all in a coughing fit that makes my skull feel like it’s going to explode.
I curl onto my side, dimly recognizing that my head is pillowed on something softer than the floor.
“Claire,” Kane says. His hand moves over my hair gently. “Can you hear me?”
Opening my eyes takes work. It’s too bright for me to see much before I have to close them again. But I recognize the interior of LINA’s airlock.
I made it. Rather, Kane made it.
“Take your time,” he says.
Except I can’t. We don’t have time to take.
I peel my eyes open again, letting them water until they adjust to the brightness, which isn’t all that bright except compared, it seems, to the dimness of almost dying.
When I can look up, I find Kane leaning back against the wall of the airlock, looking as exhausted and filthy as I remember but with the bright spark of intelligence and awareness that he was missing when I last saw him. The door to the LINA stands open behind him. My head is in his lap, the helmet cast off to one side.
“What the hell happened?” he murmurs. Whether to me or himself, I don’t know. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get you. I didn’t know that you needed help. I didn’t even know for sure that it wasyou on the other end of the tether. I was trying to… understand. It was like waking up after a dream. I was here, on the LINA, but that’s not what I remember…” He sounds lost, confused.
