her babies.
Has to lead to Earth.
Well, no. We think it leads to Earth. It could lead back to Wayward Station for all we know.
And wouldn’t that be poetic justice on a galactic-fate kind of level?
I walk through this thing and end up right where I started.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility. It could happen. I have no sun-fucked clue how time works in the real, let alone inside a spin node.
I walk over to the spin node and stand there, trying to work up the nerve to touch it.
I glance at Delphi, but I can’t see her face. The front of her body is facing her destination. I wonder for a moment if she’s aware that she’s stuck. Has she been looking out onto this new place for weeks? Months? Years? Lifetimes?
No idea how long we’ve been stuck in this time freeze.
She could be dead for all I know.
I reach out and press my fingertips against the node. It’s very hard. Like the rock walls surrounding this room. Impenetrable. Which kinda sucks. Because I can’t walk through that.
I turn back to the console and walk over there, studying the controls. There’s a screen where Luck put in the coordinates.
Oh. Interesting. He used both coordinates. His and Jimmy’s.
I’m not sure that was a good idea. But it’s more than I have. Because I didn’t come here with coordinates. I, apparently, have no other place to be.
God, that is so sad, I have to laugh.
But then that first dream of Corla comes back to me.
Dying was a very weird, confusing experience. After Luck… killed me, I went somewhere. Was it some afterlife? I’m not sure. But I was, well, maybe not awake, per se. But I was aware. And now that I have something to compare it to, I think I was in that in-between place—the place where SB19 was talking to me earlier.
Corla was there with me during my trip to the afterlife and she was repeating numbers. Over, and over, and over. Just long strings of numbers. No talking, just numbers. Like she was some kind of… machine. Only programmed with one purpose. Like a servo.
Nothing like the Corla who lives in that house with that other Crux and their kids. And nothing like the copy that split in two, either. She was something else.
Something very much less… real.
I close my eyes and pull the afterlife dream back up. It felt like a haunting. Like she was trying to drive me insane. Those numbers were rattling through my head for what felt like forever. Right up until the time I woke up. Then the constant string of numbers was gone.
I didn’t think much about the numbers. The string was so long it felt random. But random things don’t get repeated a thousand times, do they?
There was a beginning and an end. It took me a while to figure that out because there had to be at least sixty or seventy alphanumerics in the string of code. She probably cycled through the sequence more than a dozen times before I picked up on the patterns.
And I only noticed it because there was one particular section—two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen—that caught my attention. The first set of seven prime numbers. I saw the pattern because they were the only low numbers in the whole sequence. The rest were things like seventy-five, and two hundred and two. Big numbers. And the letters, of course. The prime sequence—as good a name for it as any—always began after the first letter of the Akeelian alphabet. And the first letter of the Akeelian alphabet was always preceded by the last.
That’s how I figured it out. It was zed, alpha, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen—then blah, blah, blah. On, and on, and on. Until I heard zed, alpha again.
It wasn’t random. That’s all I knew. But what if… what if that long string of numbers was actually a spin node destination?
That would be something fortuitous.
But can I remember them?
There was a pattern. Her voice had a cadence to it that gave the whole thing a rhythm.
I start humming it under my breath, playing it over and over. If I had known I was meant to memorize it when she was reciting it to me, I probably would’ve panicked. Maybe Tray could memorize something like that, but not me.
But to my surprise, the rhythm comes back to me and soon the numbers that go with the skeleton of the song manifest.
I open