by Elsa Jade
Deep in the bottom of the last pocket, almost lost in an ill-fitting wrinkle because the pants were too large for her, she felt a small bump. She pulled out the little wrapped candy.
She couldn’t remember the rules for rationing supplies, but it wasn’t like this candy was going to last. And anyway, this might be her last moment.
She popped the niblet in her mouth and closed her eyes at the almost piercingly sugary spurt of caramel-like sweetness. She let herself imagine Nor’s lips following, the simple sweetness turning to deep passion…
When the candy melted away, she was left with nothing. The booster drug was gone from her system, she had nothing in her pockets, and honestly no chance of escape.
But she would remember her two nights with Nor until her very last atoms were wrenched apart.
When the door opened some hours later, she bum-rushed the two aliens standing in the way. There was some advantage in knowing they weren’t going to kill her right away but that they did intend to kill her eventually—that certainty canceled a lot of potential guilt about biting, kicking in the general direction of ball sacs, and screaming her head off.
Not that it did her any good.
Apparently mantid aliens didn’t have balls and tasted like corroded pennies, yuck. It clacked at her—angrily, maybe—as it grabbed her with three hands which, stripped of the Christmas mittens that had protected it from the stun net, looked like grappling hooks. It lifted her off her feet, raising the fourth hand menacingly, and Trixie shrieked her defiance as she struggled in its hold.
The other alien—the humanoid-shaped one wearing the full suit of armor—grabbed the mantid’s arm and said something harsh. Why hadn’t she gotten that universal translator? Because she’d been too scared? The old version of her had no idea what scared was!
The armored alien clamped its hand over her mouth.
She choked on the heavy weight of its metalled fist, and she knew if she bit down, she’d just break her teeth.
The alien grunted something. When she didn’t respond beyond narrowing her eyes, it spoke again, the words slowly resolving into English. “…Or we’ll hurt you.”
Since she wasn’t struggling anymore, it lifted its smothering fist.
She kept her glare going strong. “I’ve been abducted—twice!—drugged and shot, and I know you’re going to eject me into the black hole, but you think threatening to hurt me will make me be good?”
The mantid thunked her down on her feet out in the hallway. “Many kinds of hurt,” it crackled. “Dumb pink crawler.”
Trixie scowled at it. Pink crawler? That sounded worse than mishkeet.
Since she was back on her feet… She ran.
The mantid jumped over her and lashed out with one blunted foot, striking the side of her head. She reeled into the wall, her shoulder and then her skull banging hard. Unable to catch herself, she sagged to the floor.
The armored alien pulled her upright and shoved a blaster muzzle into her ribs. “Be good.”
The warning, in a hollow sepulcher voice, made her shiver. Okay, well, the possibility of getting stunned again was more incentivizing than vague threats.
She subsided, letting her shoulders sag.
And she counted every step as they marched her through the Grandy.
From her brief time aboard after the rescue, she’d memorized some of the hallways, but she hadn’t been down this way before. Though her head was bowed, she watched every turn.
And so she noticed the smear of darkest crimson on the armored alien’s boot.
Blood. Alien blood.
She might’ve stumbled, but the armored alien yanked her along. Had this vile mechanical monster stomped through Nor’s blood?
The streak of crimson glistened, as though fresh, and her own heart seemed to bleed along with it, every drop a reminder of how much life she’d missed because she’d lacked the courage to look up and even wish upon a star.
She sidelonged another fulminating glare at the armored alien. That pistol he’d shot her with had been small enough that maybe she could steal it from him and hide it in one of her pockets…
Dang, he must’ve traded that little peashooter for the larger weapon now hanging alongside his thigh. No way he’d not notice if she tried to pickpocket that. Swaggering brute, probably trying to intimidate her…
And she had to admit, it might’ve worked if she hadn’t gotten used to Nor’s towering bulk.
For all her determined bravado, as they approached the portal, she quailed, and if not for the armored alien’s grip on her upper arm, she would’ve tried to run again. She’d been in this room once on her earlier stay in the Grandy and it almost made her sick to her stomach. When the door shushed open, she averted her gaze from the navigation array.
The three-dimensional, holographic, scale reproduction of space that the ship used for navigation was zoomed in close to their present location. As if she needed a better view of the black hole.
When Rayna had shown her and Lishelle the reproduction of the Azthronos solar system, she’d been as giddy as a kid showing off, zooming in and out to the different planets, spinning the whole galaxy like a toy. Trixie had wanted to hurl. It wasn’t just the spinning sensation in her stomach. Seeing just how small and pointless she was hadn’t helped her mental state at the time. It was helping even less now to get an intimate view of the black hole in all its false-color glory. Mesmerized by the slow churn of spiraling energy being sucked into the singularity, it took her a moment to realize the room was already occupied.
A hulking, wide-shouldered man dressed in a strange mix of the familiar spaceship combat fatigues and a midthigh Thorkon day robe was silhouetted against the swirls of color. With his hands clasped loosely at his back and his stance wide, he looked as though he commanded the black hole.
“Blackworm,” she murmured.
He didn’t turn at first, giving her another moment to study his menacing form. God, he was bigger than any of the Thorkon males she’d seen so far, and that was saying something. Unlike most of the other Thorkon men, his black hair was shorn close to his head. Maybe from his time in prison? How she wished he was still there. Now he had galaxies spinning beneath him. And her too.
Slowly, he pivoted to face her. “That is the name I was given,” he acknowledged. “But that isn’t who I am, any more than you are a Black Hole Bride.”
For a heartbeat, she was taken aback. Really? He was the only one who wasn’t going to use that larfing name?
She stiffened. She wasn’t going to fall for any sort of Stockholm syndrome bullshit. “Then I’ll call you criminal, kidnapper, and crazy.”
When he inclined his head, the scintillating lights of the star map glinted on the ragged ends of his dark hair. “Cruel it seems to you, no doubt, and perhaps it will be hard for you to comprehend.”
“Why?” she challenged. “Because I’m an ignorant closed-worlder?”
“Because you have never loved as I have.”
She blinked in confusion, and she was peripherally aware of the armored alien at her side shifting restlessly. Well, maybe he didn’t want to hear this villain-splaining, but the longer she kept Blackworm talking, the longer before she found herself in a life pod launched into the singularity.
“If you think you’ll find love in a black hole, why don’t you dive in?” she suggested.
His lips quirked, and for a split second, she caught a glimpse of the Thorkon elegance and charm in his lean, austere face. “I’m not seeking love in the black hole,” he said, with a note of infinite patience in his voice. “I’m trying to lure it out.”
“Nothing comes out of the black hole,” she said, striving to match his tone. “I don’t know much about space, but I do know that.”
He gestured, and after an almost imperceptible hesitation, the armored alien hauled her forward. It was everything she could do not to pull back; if this big, mean alien in all his armor with his big blaster didn’t want to get closer to Blackworm, neither did
she.
Or maybe armor boy just didn’t like the stomach-churning hologram any more than she did.
Blackworm gestured again, his gloved finger following the hypnotic vortex of light and matter eddying down the black hole. “The universe is vast,” Blackworm mused. “So cold and empty. And yet this is all there is.” He gestured, closing his fist and contracting the holographic view so that the black hole became just another point of nothingness in a huge sea of black punctuated by small pools of color: swirls of spiral galaxies, clouds of nebular gas, feathery streamers of interstellar winds.
Trixie gurgled. “Can you…not do that?”
“That is indeed my wish. To make the universe less cold and empty. Because I know there is more.”
Now her head was spinning as bad as her stomach, but rather than puke, she spewed her rage at him. “The universe had a few more innocent souls in it until you dumped them in a black hole!”
Blackworm stiffened, as did the armored alien next to her, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. Well, if she had, it was their fault for hauling her halfway across the galaxies.
“I did not speak to the others because I thought they shared my purpose,” he said quietly. “And yet I failed. So I am explaining to you in the hopes that your acquiescence will lead to a different outcome.”
“My acqui— No.” She wrenched her arm out of her guard’s grip. “No, I’m not your willing victim and I’m not consenting to you sending me into a black hole. There won’t be any different outcomes because nothing. Comes. Out. Of a black hole.”
“It’s not a black hole,” he said. “It’s a wormhole.”
She hesitated. As much as she didn’t know about black holes, she knew even less about wormholes. Weren’t those just a science fiction thing? Of course, she’d been abducted by aliens, so maybe she should read more science fiction.
Into her doubtful silence, Blackworm continued, “However, the passage doesn’t lead to another equally cold, empty part of this cold, empty universe.”
Before, she’d wanted to keep him talking to delay the inevitable. Now she was reluctantly intrigued. “Are you saying…there’s an exit to the wormhole? Are the other women alive?”
He paused, his dark eyes glinting in the small remaining lights of the astral map. “I do not know. But I sent them not as victims, rather as emissaries.”
God, if he had to villain-splain, did he have to make her tractor beam out every clue? “Emissaries to where? To who?”
“To the other side.”
Frustration churned in her with more sick confusion and fury than the event horizon. “You just said it didn’t go anywhere else in the universe, and the universe is all there is.”
He shook his head. “The other side of everything: the void. Where the gods live.”
It seemed to her that the wheel of the universe stilled as she stared at him. “The void. Where the gods live. That’s death!” She took a stomping step toward him—not with any intent, just because she couldn’t stop herself—but armor boy yanked her back.
Blackworm didn’t seem impressed by her outrage. “And what the gods took, they can give back. I’ve done the calculations.”
If not for armor boy, she would’ve smacked him. His right to be delusional ended with those women. “You can’t bring someone back from the dead.”
Shoot, she’d just said she needed to read more sci fi. What if zombies were as real as aliens?
Blackworm turned to the astral map and gestured again, zooming back to the area of space around the singularity. He stalked around the hologram, his jaw clenched so hard that the lights glinted off the skin tightened over bone. “Scientists on your Earth don’t understand much about these cosmic phenomena,” he said. “They theorize that black holes are not the perfect abysses they seem, that blackbody radiation escapes the vicinity.”
Oh, how she wished she was escaping this vicinity…
“But how could anything escape a black hole?” he mused. He glanced over his shoulder at her with an arch look that told her he was about to answer. “They speculate that irresistible quantum forces on the verge of the event horizon actually split reality into particles and virtual particles. Even as the particles disappear and become one with the singularity, the virtual particles break free. They stay in this universe.”
He paused, still staring at her, and the simulated eerie dying light of the black hole shone in his fanatical eyes. Was he waiting for her to understand?
“Ghosts,” she whispered. “That’s all it would be.”
“No!” He swept his hand violently through the hologram, as if he intended to reach inside it and pull out…whatever he sought. “Once safely on this side of the event horizon, the quantum uncertainty would resolve itself. The virtual particles would become reality. What was lost would be regained.”
He was insane… Wasn’t he? She knew the Thorkons had a god for every occasion. Rayna’s Raz wasn’t just a duke, he was an avatar for the God of Oaths, and at the estate on Azthronos she’d seen statuary for dozens and dozens more gods and heard their names invoked for everything from winning at games of chance to drinking toasts. But to think that their gods were real and living on the other side of a wormhole with the Earth women Blackworm had sent as emissaries…
“Who did you lose?” she asked quietly.
His head was held at such a high, stiff angle, she thought he might break. Instead, he twisted to look away from her. At what, she couldn’t tell.
His answer was quieter than her question. “My consort. I could not take her to wed because she was not titled. But she was the only one who…” He let out a shuddering breath. “I swore I would never let her go.”
Trixie stared at the profile of his averted face. The anguish was real, and the sorrow—nothing virtual or uncertain here. At this angle, pain creased his face like a dead moon bombarded to the verge of cracking. But knowing how he’d treated the Black Hole Brides, what he was planning on doing to her, she wondered about the consort.
Had that unnamed woman escaped him the only way she could?
“Even if a few particles return,” she said with as much gentleness as she could muster for a madman, “it wouldn’t be your lost love.”
Slowly, he raised his head, and despite her earlier recklessness, she fought a shiver.
If anybody wasn’t all here, it was Blackworm.
He resumed his thoughtful, commanding stance with his hands behind his back. “Do you know why I chose females who’d registered with the Intergalactic Dating Agency?”
She forced herself not to roll her eyes. “Because they’d already been vetted for leaving Earth and no one would miss them when they were gone?”
“That,” he acknowledged. “And because they’d already shown themselves committed to finding love, however far away it might be.”
Not on the other side of a black hole, she wanted to scream. She swallowed hard. “I never signed up with the IDA. I lived in Sunset Falls where the Big Sky outpost was, but I didn’t even know it existed.”
He pursed his lips, and for half a second, her heart stopped as she wondered if he might be swayed.
With a tilt of his head, he asked, “Do you want to find love?”
In the second half of the hesitation, her heart finished its beat.
And she thought of Nor.
“Yes,” Blackworm said with satisfaction. “Ignorant closed-worlder you might be, but you do understand.”
He reached out and grabbed her arm. Ignoring her sharp cry, he wrenched her forward into the whirl of the black hole. She cringed, as if that current of light might rip her apart, but the harmless photons of the holographic projection just beamed beatifically on her skin, like party glitter.
“I sent the others, and now you, to find the God of Eternity and the God of the Beloved on the other side, to petition the return of my consort.” He loomed over her, the obsession in his eyes brighter than the reflected stars. “I know I am close. Once enough of you have gone and been b
lessed, the virtual particles on this side of the event horizon will be sufficient to reanimate my beloved.”
Trixie wanted to laugh, albeit hysterically. As if zombies and ghosts weren’t bad enough, Blackworm was actually hoping to create a zombie patchwork-particle Bride of fucking Frankenstein ghost.
Gifted to him from the gods of Thorkon.
That last part sobered her. She’d prayed more than once in her life, and meant every word.
Blackworm was insane, but… Maybe she did understand him a little.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
His grip on her arm drove muscle into bone, hard enough to bruise. “Your keenest scientists couldn’t do my math. How could you know differently?”
“I know the gods don’t answer cowards and unbelievers.” She stared up at him harder than he was holding her. “If you want your beloved, go after her yourself.”
His upper lip curled back, flashing white teeth in his anger, but he didn’t answer, only slung her out of the hologram.
The mantid alien jumped aside, and she stumbled and would’ve fallen if not for armor boy who hauled her upright.
Blackworm snarled. “Since you are so brave, you can go awake and aware before the gods. Perhaps your screams will move them where your sisters’ sleepy whimpers did not.” He jerked his head at the two guards. “Prepare her and meet me at the launch bay.”
She strained against the armored hand over her bruise. “Don’t do this,” she implored. Then, hating the sound of her own desperation and suspecting Blackworm wouldn’t care anyway, she added, “You shouldn’t be wasting time with me. The captain of the Grandiloquence is on his way, I know that too, and he will destroy you for taking…his ship.” To cover her hesitation—why would she even think Nor would be angrier about her than the Grandy?—she soldiered on, “And the Duke of Azthronos will be right behind him.”
