Her grip loosened, and one by one, her fingers peeled away from the bar. The force of his whole body pressed against her, but she grunted and roared and somehow kept her grip.
“Done.” He let off the plasma torch, which fell away over his shoulder. He immediately grabbed the bracket with both hands, using his Imprints to pull himself forward—upward—and take the pressure off Rake.
“Do it now, Griffith,” Rake barked.
“Are you in—？”
“That’s an order!”
“Shit—”
The comms cut away, and for an infinitesimal moment—peace. Silence. Just nothing. His world was zero.
A nanosecond later, his heart fell into his gut. A horrifically loud noise tolled, one he knew couldn’t exist in the vacuum of space, so he must have been making it up, must have. Like the hollow twang of an enormous metal string being plucked. He could feel it as much as hear it.
Then the outside rushed in and expanded, like a thousand tiny balloons inflating inside him. It tried to diffuse him, pull him apart, cell by cell, atom by atom.
His breath fogged his visor, and though he couldn’t hear it, he knew he’d started yelling, screaming, really. He thought Rake did too. Her hands still held the bracket on either side of him, keeping him tucked into the hull. He held on, Imprints clamping into his muscles to keep his grip, but he was suddenly unsure whether he was getting pulled away or pushed back in. The two forces battled, struggling against each other.
The notifications in his visor had gone haywire, flashing every awful warning that’d normally make his pulse race faster. But his heart-rate monitor had disappeared—he figured it’d moved past orange, into red, then cruised right into infrared. So fast, it was no longer in the visible light spectrum.
Every other possible warning remained active: breach imminent, loss of pressure, scrubbers off-line, oxygen levels dropping, a dozen more. The suit’s fleet of nanites had fully deployed—repairing apparent blunt force damage.
Cavalon refocused his attention from the pointless slur of suit activity onto Rake’s vibrating hands. Because they were slowly being wrenched open. She was going to lose her grip.
He kept an Imprint-assisted iron hold on the bracket and craned his neck to look over his shoulder as the static light ceased and the pressure began to lift. Because the Divide had started to move back outward.
It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t, not in the least, because Rake was floating away along with it. Falling. Whether he turned too late or it happened too fast to react to, he wasn’t sure. He blamed himself either way.
Her harness had ripped. He had no idea how. It floated off her back, torn at the shoulders. She twisted to grab it, but she’d gotten ahead of it somehow, and she couldn’t reach it. She swiped at her MMU controls, but nothing happened.
She was moving away faster than the tether. Free-falling. Careening.
Cavalon spared the briefest moment to confirm his harness remained intact, then checked his own MMU. Nothing, no response.
His visor’s display still flickered in chaos, but his suit couldn’t listen to him in its schizophrenic state. It’d have laughed at him if it could. Stupid request, stupid mortal.
So he threw “no sudden movements” out the window and yanked Rake’s empty tether and harness toward him. He pulled the broken harness free from the tether, then hooked it to his hip. Double the tethers, double the chance of this working.
Cavalon counted to himself as Rake floated away, then did the quickest math he’d ever done to calculate the force he’d need. Not too slow, because, well, that would be the most pathetic way to fail her ever. But not too fast, or it could break his harness when the tethers ran out.
He turned and pressed his feet to the hull, then launched himself toward Rake.