For a long, blank moment, the sight that met her eyes refused to process. He lay on his back, one leg folded awkwardly, eyes open and staring, fixed. Dead. A scream built in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t get it out. It lodged there, choking her, suffocating her.
“He really should have taken the deal. Pity.”
Karma whirled toward the maenad, the scream trapped in her throat louder now, angry and wild and clawing its way out, but before she could make a sound Deuma put her hand on the crate—the suddenly silent crate—and vanished, along with the box that held Prometheus’s heart.
She didn’t want to look down, didn’t want to see again, but she couldn’t help herself. Her gaze went there on its own and then she couldn’t look away. Dead. Prometheus is dead. She should touch him. Check for a pulse. He doesn’t have a heart! Perform CPR. Mouth to mouth. Savage panic shredded her from the inside out with vicious claws. She was bloody with grief and she didn’t care. Do something, you idiot. There had to be something she could do.
He’d died. He’d actually died for her. While she was holding his hand. And she hadn’t seen it coming. Hadn’t even had an inkling. What good were her goddamn instincts if they couldn’t predict this? She might as well have signed away her powers to him for all the use they were. God, why hadn’t he let her? Why hadn’t she tried harder to get him to agree? It had happened so fast. One second they were negotiating and he seemed so confident it hadn’t occurred to her that anything irrevocable could happen. She’d thought he was reliably selfish, that he would never martyr himself for any cause—not even for her—and there had been a comfort in that. And then this. Death.
No. This hadn’t happened. She wouldn’t let it. It was a dream. Only a dream. She would wake up and tell him not to be an idiot. Beg him to take the deal. Beg, plead, bully, manipulate, anything to keep this from happening.
She heard someone screaming, ungodly raw sounds of agony, and realized the scream locked in her throat had escaped. She wasn’t aware of falling to the floor, but she was on her knees, shaking him. Wake up, wake up, all a bad dream. Distantly she registered the door slamming open and Rodriguez grabbing her by the shoulders, trying to pull her away, but she wouldn’t be budged. She was staying until he woke up. Cocky, laughing. I got you, didn’t I? The asshole. Just the kind of thing he would do. Die on her to prove how impossible the idea of living even a single day without him was.
He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be gone. She threw open her power, ripping down every wall, every defense, blasting them all to pieces until she was wide open and the slam of her own power hitting her nearly made her vision go black. But she didn’t let it roll her under. She threw herself into the chaos of it willingly. In this moment she was bigger and badder than it could ever be. She shaped it, wielded it and flung it into Prometheus, willing his blood to flow, his lungs to breathe.
Nothing.
There was a vacuum where his power had been, sucking down all she poured into him and giving back no flicker of life in return. Damn it, Prometheus. You get back here, you bastard. I’m not done with you. She felt it then—not in him, but in her. Deep inside her soul some piece of him was still attached to her. She saw it with the eyes he had opened, the power he’d taught her to see, that string of power connecting them. It stretched out from her into his chest, vanishing into the wormhole that had consumed his power and left him for dead. But it was attached to something on the other end, inside that empty, incomprehensible space. He still existed. Somewhere in the planes of energy and time, he was still there. She would open a channel, blast open that wormhole and do whatever it took to haul him back through it by the string that connected them. They were fighters. They fought for what they loved. She would fight for him.
Rodriguez shouted, dragging at her shoulders, but Karma wasn’t in the physical world anymore. She unleashed the power she’d denied her whole life and crashed through the wormhole into the netherplane, chasing the nebulous thread that was her internal tether to Prometheus.
Her first impression was of a vast sense of space, but it was layered on top of itself—no laws of physics applied here. A thousand objects could occupy the same space at the same time. It was like being inside a universe on the head of a pin. Her regular senses were useless. She was blind and dumb, relying entirely on the sixth sense she’d always tried to cage. She clung to the tether, as much as she could cling without hands or eyes.
Even her sense of self was distorted, emotions blurred and dulled until the sharpness of her desperate grief and need for Prometheus was hazy and soft. Was there really any hurry? She could float here, drifting along, and things would right themselves eventually.
A burn started against her sternum—but she didn’t have a sternum, no body here—intensifying until the pain penetrated her pleasant, floaty inertia. The protection charm. Prometheus’s yin-yang. It was still around her neck, rubbing against her sternum. Warning her.
The lethargy wasn’t natural. Someone or something was slipping her a metaphysical mickey, trying to slow her down and keep her from Prometheus. She pulsed her power around her, the angry surge burning away the fog until her real emotions flared back full force. Pain. Desperation. Fear. Prometheus. She reached for that internal tether, tracking him through the layers of nothing and everything.
What she found at the other end of their link was barely identifiable as a person. It was barely a spark, more an idea of existence than an actual life, but it was him. At the most basic level, the inviolate core that had been at the center of all that wild energy. His soul. And it wasn’t free.
Someone or something had bound him there, trapped in a net of power that gleamed silver against her inner eye, and Karma had a pretty good idea who was responsible. Hang on, Prometheus. I’m gonna get you out of here. She began to tease at the moorings of the net holding his spark in place, operating on instinct and hope. This had to work. She’d free him, bring him back and he’d be fine. Alive. She hadn’t been able to resuscitate him with her power because his soul was missing, but if she brought it back, it would work. Please let this work.
The first of the slick silver moorings came loose and his spark stirred, thrashing itself against the net—that’s it, fight for me—even as the edges tried to reseal themselves. His cage had a consciousness and it wanted to stay closed. By the time she released a second and third mooring, the first had reattached. It became a race to stay ahead of them—a race she was steadily losing. Prometheus’s spark stopped shifting and twisting inside the silver net, falling dormant again.
No no no. She would get him out. She tried pouring energy through the tendril that connected them so he could fight his way out from the inside, but to no avail. She could try slicing her way through the net, but she wasn’t exactly a precision machine with her powers. What if she sliced right through and hurt him? Too risky.
If only she was inside, with him, she could burst them both out. She was sure of it.
As soon as the idea took root, she set it into motion, pouring herself down the thread connecting her to Prometheus, she slipped beneath the net and the edge of her soul brushed against his, causing latent instincts to screech out a warning. No going back from this. If you link to him fully and he stays here, you stay here. But Karma was already wrapping her amorphous self around his spark. They should have fit together like two puzzle pieces, but his piece had shrunk and she had to puff up her power to fill in his blanks. The link locked into place with an ominous finality.