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 the Endeavor and get new numbers up on her. Then we’d be anonymous again, just one more lonely cargo ship making its way through the Dark.
“From what I’m seeing, it looks like Sector 2.” Miko grabbed the old and yellowed manual to double-check the coordinates that were popping up in rows of green numbers across her controls. “Yes, definitely somewhere in 2.”
Shiori finally turned and groped for Miko’s unoccupied chair beside the navigation console. A thin line of blood trailed down the center of her forehead and curved along the side of her nose.
Damn it. She must have hit something when she’d fallen. She was conscious, though, and looked calm, which was more than I could say for myself.
Miko reached out to steady her grandmother and helped Shiori into the navigator’s chair. Shiori wiped the blood away when it dripped to her chin, leaving a smear of red across the back of her hand.
Miko shot her grandmother worried glances while still dealing with our most pressing issue—locking down our exact location in the vastness of Sector 2.
I tore my eyes away from them.
“Fiona, can you do the honors?” I pulled the first aid kit out from under my console and handed it to our resident scientist. I could fix Shiori up myself, but Fiona could do it better.
Using sterile compresses and saline solution, Fiona started cleaning Shiori’s cut and wiping the blood off her face, all the while telling the blind woman what she was doing in a quiet voice. Shiori was really a grandmother to us all, and Fiona treated her with a gentleness she showed to no one else.
While she worked, I turned my mind back to our new location, a good half a galaxy away from where we’d just been, give or take a few solar systems. Sector 2 wasn’t beaten and battered like the Outer Zones, but it wasn’t exactly a thriving hub of civilization, either. I’d only been here twice before and had never lingered. I didn’t know the Sector well, and I was still a little bowled over by recent events. Ideas weren’t coming to me clearly. A big part of me was still stuck on the fact that we weren’t dead. We were possibly the only living beings to know that the Black Widow did not, in fact, kill you. It spat you out in Sector 2.
The hypothetical wormhole had just gotten real. I was pretty sure we should keep that to ourselves. Having a handy escape route only we knew about was like winning the galactic lottery or raking in all the chips from the biggest game of poker ever played. This