“Let’s talk, Quin,” my uncle said. “Give me the lab, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…
“I saved you, Quin. You owe me.”
Five, four, three, two…
I turned to Jax, seeing the Black Widow looming through the wall of windows behind him. I felt a lurch and hoped it was the boarding cruiser beating a retreat.
“Quin!” Bridgebane yelled over the com.
A second later, the Dark Watch frigate fired on us. The resulting jolt nearly knocked me off my feet. Silent alarms flared all over my controls—pressurization compromised in three zones. Another blast like that, and they could disable us enough to hold us in place.
I gripped my console to steady myself. The Endeavor was a good ship. It was too bad I had to take her out.
Each beat of my heart felt like an explosion inside my chest.
Some ends are just a new beginning…
My mother’s words to me, when she’d gotten so sick. Too sick for anyone to save her.
The Black Widow stretched before us, ready to snare us in her web. Nothing escaped a black hole. Not light. Not matter. Maybe not even a soul.
Slowly, I exhaled. Some ends were just the end.
“Hit it, Jaxon.” I nodded crisply to my first mate.
Jax looked at me one last time. Our eyes met, and seven years of shared history struck me in a bittersweet rush. Then he grabbed Fiona around the waist and threw the hyperdrive switch with a cosmic roar.
I inhaled sharply. Everything blurred. My bones crunched, and my chest folded in on the thousands of things I’d still wanted to do as the Endeavor shot toward the event horizon—and the end of us all.
Chapter 3
The darkness felt crushing, but there 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. The Endeavor would 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.