Chapter Forty

Almost every day since the battle at Aura’s, Viktoriya had made it a habit to hide out in her room for a couple of hours. Her parents thought she needed time alone to process the event, even more so now that she had her entire arm replaced with the new CyberArm.

And they weren’t entirely wrong. She did, in fact, need time to process—but not the event. She only really needed to process one thing. She needed space to process her flash-outs.

To process what she had seen.

To see it again and understand.

She had, once again, become obsessed with getting to the why.

She lay in bed on top of the covers. Her CyberArm—fit with a carbon-fiber cuff attached to her shoulder. She allowed her eyelids to lull close, soothed by the sounds of the subtle breeze outside. She breathed deeply, trying to bring herself into a flash-out.

She found that she no longer needed patterns to hypnotize her if she concentrated hard enough. Instead, if she focused, she could bring the flash-outs all on her own.

She realized, with focus and discipline, she could control them.

Her breathing slowed even more, and then she finally found the exit.

Time, as always, was the first to drift away. The nothingness that took hold followed it, then embraced her like a delicate caress.

Viktoriya opened her eyes. She was standing inside of the nothing—in the flash-out. She was everywhere and nowhere all at once, surrounded by wholeness and emptiness.

The enormous bright light flashed and subsided.

The feelings welling up inside her were confusing and overwhelming.

And then the sensations started. A vibration began humming in the nothingness. It surrounded her entirely, impossible to ignore even if she wanted to, but her interest in the experience was overwhelming.

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She let the feeling resonate in her core. Her body shook with each beat. And then she saw a web—fine lines of silvery, translucent, glowing strands, coursing everywhere into the void, like a never-ending spiderweb. The corridors seemed to connect everything, vast, long channels between larger bodies in the universe.

She’d never seen the web lines so clearly before, but just like her, they hummed with the rhythm of the vibrations.

She picked a random web segment and followed it, stepping forward warily into the abyss. Following the path was easy—an intuitive feeling of sorts—pulling her along as if they were one and the same, connected on a deeper level than that of an Earthly existence.

What may wait for her on the other side of the corridor concerned her—what she may find. This place was already addicting enough to her. What if it was so engulfing that she never wanted to return?

The journey could have been seconds or years—any concept of time was completely swept away when she flashed out. However long it’d been, a figure finally came into view in the distance.

The figure was round a sphere. As she moved closer, she saw the colors of blue and brown, and even some green—Earth?

No, no, it couldn’t be, she reasoned. The land was all out of place, wonky—not where she understood it should be, and the air looked a little too bluish, too clean. She gasped, though no sound resonated in the nothingness.

This wasn’t Earth.

“It’s HH190,” she said, though her words were lost in the void yet again.

She pulled closer to the planet that hovered right in front of her. She reached out to touch it, and, to her surprise, she immediately descended through the sky to the surface, as if flying like a graceful bird. She reached her hand downward, and it splashed against the top of the water as she sped along. Complex quantum formulas sprayed into the air like a plume instead of the spray of water she expected to see. She pulled back for a moment, causing the splash of mathematical formulas to diminish behind her in the wake.

She looked outward as she continued to speed along, wondering what to do, where she should adventure to next.

“It all feels so, so right.”

Was this where they all were meant to be? Where she was meant to be?

She scowled as a familiar tug began pulling her from the flash-out. She hadn’t yet figured out why, but she couldn’t sustain them on her own.

The flash-outs kept her longer than she expected, and when it was done, it simply dismissed her.

The planet and glowing, silvery webs faded into the distance, and the humming ceased. A faint light replaced the nothingness creeping in through her eyelids.

She gasped, jolting up and opening her eyes.

She was in bed. Just as she’d been when she flashed out. But something was different. Something was off.

She looked at her hand, the one she used to touch the water at HH190. It felt wet and still engulfed in the translucent bluish formulas, which still faintly swirled around her fingers as they eventually faded out of view.