Page 33 of Elanie & the Empath
one of them snapped.
Nearly wouldn’t cut it.
The Aquilinian’s barely suppressed rage rumbled between my ears.
I cut the comm. The last thing I needed was some overbearing wall of muscle threatening my life when blunt force trauma was sure to kill me in a few short minutes anyway.
Grasping the thick black cargo webbing along the curved wall of the pod, I tried to tangle myself into it, wrap it around my arms and legs, weave myself through it. It didn’t work. As soon as the pod detached, I’d be hurled into the walls at supersonic speed, my organs liquefied and my bones smashed to dust. I only had one chance. Elanie had to wake up.
I knelt in front of her, but she wouldn’t look at me, just stared straight ahead with a preternatural calm.
“Elanie, you have to stop the launch.”
Nothing.
I took her face between my hands. “Wake up. Please wake up.” When she still didn’t respond, I released her face and clapped my hands as hard as I could in front of her eyes. Nothing. Not even a blink.
It was over. There was nothing else I could do. “I won’tsurvive this,” I said, hanging my head. “But it’s not your fault. And I don’t regret?—”
“Sem?”
My head whipped up, my heart stuttering between beats. “Elanie?”
She blinked once, twice, her eyes clearing like the sky after a storm. “What are you doing?” She surveyed our surroundings. “What’s happening?”
The outer door slammed down. Then the inner door slid closed. We were locked in.
“Why are we in an escape pod?” Her head tilted at the telltale whirring. “Why is the drive spooling up?” Finally noticing me on my knees in the middle of the floor, she asked with wide, horrified eyes, “Why aren’t you strapped in?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, so relieved I almost laughed, even though I was still probably about to die. “You were being controlled by something, I think. Compelled. You came in here, and I…followed you.”
“You followed me?” She shook her head. “Why?”
We definitely didn’t have time for that conversation. “Can you stop the launch?” I asked as the onboard AI intoned,Please secure your safety harness. Ejection in ten, nine, eight…“You have to stop the launch.”
She closed her eyes, opened them again. “I can’t. I’m locked out.”
I crumpled to the floor as the countdown hitseven, six, five… This was it. I was going to die. Horribly. Painfully. And I’d probably leave a disgusting mess behind.
But then she grasped my shirt and yanked me up, pulling me into her lap. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and squeezed.
“What are you doing?” I grunted.
Three, two…
“Saving your life,” she whispered into my ear as the countdown hitoneand the pod detached from theIgnisar, hurtling us into space.
13.ELANIE
My head spun,wobbling on my neck while our pod tore through space. The faster-than-light drive charged and discharged over and over—five, six, seven jumps with no end in sight. As I clutched Sem tightly against me, fear like I’d never known rattled my teeth.
“Where are we going?” he asked in a rasp. He’d been in and out of consciousness since we launched, the G-forces in the pod surging to dangerously high levels before vanishing completely with each jump. I didn’t know if his fragile organic neurovascular system could survive much more. I could only squeeze my arms and legs around him and hope it was enough to keep his blood pressure from dropping to the point of irreversible brain damage.
“I don’t know,” I said, squeezing him more tightly when his head fell forward. “We’ve jumped too many times.”
“Can you…access the pod’s…navigation?” His speech was slow and labored, the words slurring together.
I tried to communicate with the pod’s AI again, receiving a very rude403 Forbiddenerror in return. “I’m still locked out.”
