Blood is pooling at my back. My legs are growing cold. My face is numb. The logical part of my mind tells me I’m going into shock, I’m bleeding out, I’m dying. But it’s not the logical part of my mind that whispers.
“You s-saved me.”
She kneels beside me, looking at me with those eyes that were once brown. Still somehow filled with the same love she used to carry for me.
“An Ace always backs her Alpha,” she smiles.
I’m almost crying, sobbing as she reaches out and runs her fingertip down my scorched brow, my mangled cheek.
I’m wondering if I somehow got through to her, if she’s somehow realized what she’s become, my voice just a shaking whisper as I ask, “Why?”
“Don’t you understand? I love you, Tyler.” She smiles, infinitely sad, infinitely gentle. “So we love you too.”
She rises to her feet, arm writhing, and walks back toward the terminals. I struggle to raise my head, follow her through the steam, the flashing red. Her fingers blur across a series of controls, and the blast door comes crashing down, sealing us inside the chamber with a heavy THUMP.
“Wh—” I wince, holding my guts in. “What are you d-doing?”
She keeps typing, the light shifting deeper, the floor shaking harder.
“Ending this.”
I frown, trying to rise. “But … you s-s …”
“We wanted it to be us, Tyler.” Glowing blue eyes fix me through the swirling vapor, the rising dark. “In the end. You deserve for it to be us.”
“Cat … ,” I whisper, heart breaking. “Y-you’ll die too… .”
“NO.” She shakes her head, tears glittering in her eyes. “This flesh will die. But my memories, my thoughts, my love will live on. We wish you could have been in here with us. We wish you could have understood.”
“Cat …”
“We’ll miss you, Tyler. So, so much.”
I try to get up, blood spilling through my fingers, but the pain is too much to bear. I crawl toward her a meter or two, sticky red fingers scraping metal, my fingernails breaking. But I’m hurt too bad. Lost too much blood.
It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. Hard to ignore that vision of the station coming apart, the thought of my friends, my family, everything we’ve given and lost ending here like this and just think, think, think.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I cough blood, swallow thickly as I nod.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “It won’t be for much longer, Ty.”
I reach toward her, bloody fingers curling. I try to speak, but choke instead. I don’t want to die here. Not like this.
And I’m so scared of it, so scared of dying alone, for an awful moment I wonder what it would be like to be one with it.
Because that’s what the Ra’haam is, I realize.
To never be alone.
I beckon her closer. Whispering. “K … Ki …”
“What?” she asks.
“Kiss,” I whisper, “… g-goodbye?”
The tears are shining in her eyes as she stops typing. I can hear the sound of heavy thumping at the blast doors now, faint voices, an alarm finally being sounded. But it’s all too late, I know. Too late. They’ll never get in here in time. Cat moves through the dark toward me, a small black shadow with a bigger shadow inside her, so vast and hungry it’s going to swallow the stars.
She kneels at my side. Looks me in the eyes.
“Kiss m-me,” I beg her.
She sighs, tears falling from those glowing eyes. And running her fingers down my cheek, she leans in and presses her lips to mine. For a moment, I’m back in that hotel on shore leave with her, the one and only night we spent together. All the love she had for me shining in her gaze, shattering like glass when I told her we shouldn’t, we couldn’t be together afterward.
I should have loved her better. I should have loved her more. And I try to tell her, with the breath I have left in me, with the lips I press to hers, opening my mind and pouring into her, telling her I’m sorry.
I love you.
And then I drive the knife right into her neck.
She reels back, flower eyes gone wide, blood spilling from her throat. But Saedii’s knife is sharper than razors, monofilament edge and Syldrathi alloy cutting clean through meat and artery and bone.
I stab again, again, drenched by the look of hurt and pain and fury in her eyes as she stumbles back onto her haunches, dark blood gushing from the wounds. Tiny tendrils whip from the edges of the stab wounds, pale and bloody, snaking blindly in the air.