She swallowed the surge of guilt back down, then caught Erandus’s eye. She nodded a silent order to stay with Griffith, then left the men and rounded the corner toward the central corridor of the command deck.
Jackin stood outside the torus chamber door, hands on hips, boot twanging against the metal floor. Warner stood nearby, arms crossed. A gurgling, rushing hiss of liquid and gasses from within the walls indicated the effusion process taking place—which meant for some reason, the chamber’s dampening effects had been activated, and were now resetting. The counter on the screen beside the door read 95 percent.
“Effusion?” Adequin asked as she approached.
Jackin shrugged. “To discourage the Drudgers from trying to beat the door down, I’d guess. Took us a minute to figure out a way to disengage the mode manually. Where’s Bach?”
“With Erandus, collecting tags.”
Jackin frowned.
“We’ve got a couple of things we should probably discuss…” she added reluctantly.
Jackin closed his eyes, then took a deep breath through his nose before letting it out slowly. He reopened his eyes. “Hit me.”
“For starters, comms aren’t working.” She held up her nexus’s flashing red comm link as proof. “And, time ripples.”
He didn’t react at first, then turned his ear toward her as if he’d misheard. “Sorry?”
“If we’re seeing time ripples here, how long do you think until the Divide reaches Kharon?”
“Well, shit. That … depends. I mean, we used to see ripples when we were still over a million kilometers away.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “We more or less flew straight outward from the gate … so assuming it’s moving uniformly inward, which it very well might not be … maybe twenty-four hours? Thirty-six? That’s a total bullshit guess though, boss. I have no way to know for sure.”
“Before we left the Argus, Puck said it appeared to be accelerating. If it’s still picking up speed…？”
Jackin buried his face in both hands. “Yeah, uh … so maybe definitely less?”
“And, Jack?” Adequin began quietly, though she knew Warner could still hear, so she wasn’t sure why she bothered. “We saw a ripple … of something that already happened.”
Jackin dropped his hands and looked at her steadily for a few long moments. “I’m pretty sure that makes you the ripple.”
She glared. “I’m not the fucking ripple, Jackin.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. You can’t have seen the past—”
Jackin’s voice disappeared under a din of klaxons as the ship violently jerked. A sudden pressure buffeted the air, and the oxygen sucked from Adequin’s lungs as a wall of flame engulfed her vision. She spun away too slowly, and the left side of her face smoldered with heat before an Imprint-induced numbness overcame the pain. Her vision disappeared into inky black as she tumbled away from the burst of fire.
She landed on her back, writhing as she panted ragged breaths through clenched teeth. Her head spun, and her fingers drifted to the tingling, Imprint-coated skin at her left cheek. They’d protected her from the brunt of it, though a subdued twinge of pressure told her they’d been just a little too slow. Her saliva filled with a metallic bitterness as the Imprints buzzed, working to heal the burn.
Groaning, she rolled onto her side to sit up, her still-reeling gaze cutting across the smoke-laden corridor. The fire-suppression system wailed, spewing out a coating of thick white foam across the smoldering debris. To her left, a half-meter-wide hole sat charred in the polished aerasteel wall opposite the torus chamber, blackened chunks strewn across the corridor.