“I’m not long for this world,” he said quietly. “Let me do this.”
She bobbed her head slowly. He pulled her into a hug, and she let a couple of tears get lost in the sweat of his shirt. “I love you, Griff,” she murmured.
“Love you too, Mo’acair.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cavalon sighed as he looked out across the black void. Static light sparked in thin lines in the not-distant-enough distance, illuminating the matte-black hull of the station in flashes of sharp white light. It was weirdly peaceful. Like watching lightning flash across thunderheads as a storm rolled in off the sea. Except it was nothing quite so tedious as a thunderstorm.
One good thing about being out on the hull with Rake was that he no longer sweat buckets out every pore. Instead, the sweat had chilled into a viscous film all over his bruised, aching, tired, beaten body, and his icy, wet clothes stuck to every part of him. Life was good.
The discomfort proved a solid distraction from the fact that Rake had to pull him thirty meters to their destination, and the only thing they could tether to was each other.
Though, the whole excursion had yet to feel the proper amount of dire. Rake had been the picture of cool, calm, and collected as she palmed her way carefully across the surface toward the purge valve, making small, expert adjustments with her MMU, lugging him behind like a weightless anchor.
The whole time she’d been telling him all about Titan hazing rituals—he assumed for his benefit, but now he wasn’t so sure. Wistful sighs and heavy silences cluttered her words, and she’d lost her place and repeated the same bit a few times.
Cavalon had just realized she might be the one who needed a distraction, and intended to take over the task of storyteller, when she let out a particularly resounding sigh and said, “This is it.”
He looked up to where she hovered three meters above … or, to the left. He cursed to himself as he realized he’d completely lost track of which way was up—or which way had been up when they’d exited through the access hatch. Though he supposed it didn’t really matter, so long as Rake knew where they were.
Rake looked down at him, and the spotlight on her helmet blinded him briefly as it flashed across his face. She tugged on the tether and his bruised stomach smarted as she pulled him toward her.
The stupid harness hit in all the wrong places, and though it had hooks in a multitude of spots—along the back and shoulders and chest, and lots of less-bruised places—Rake had insisted it needed to be as close to his center of gravity as possible.
He’d moaned, “But there is no gravity,” like a petulant child, and she’d glared and grumbled back, “Well, you still have mass,” and he’d scowled and said, “Oh, you think you’re a scientist now?” Then Jackin had hushed them, reminded them the Divide sped toward them at thousands of kilometers a second, and could they be bothered to please shut up and go stop the universe from collapsing.
Rake finished pulling him toward her, and Cavalon found himself hovering in front of a less-than-one-meter-wide circular breach in the otherwise pristine hull. He turned his helmet to aim his suit’s light down the vent shaft, which descended deep into the structure, no end in sight. Charred and scorched metal lined the lip of the vent, the tubing within melted and warped.
A bracket of sorts encircled the breach: a raised rectangle of thick bars around the vent’s opening. Likely the mounting that had once held the outlet cowl in place. Now, it made a perfectly acceptable anchor point, and Rake busied herself unhooking and rehooking their long tethers until they each linked to the bracket, and no longer to each other.
Cavalon watched in silence—his heart-rate meter a golden yellow.
A flash of static light illuminated Rake’s face as she turned to stare at him through her visor, amber eyes expectant. “Ready?”
A particularly violent bout of flashes made his pulse spike to red. Panic took over again, and it made him feel like an idiot.