Page 7 of Star-Born Anomaly
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she kept murmuring, though he probably couldn’t hear her with the noise of the storm and hum of the decontamination process. “We just need to get through this before I can…” Her voice trailed off, because she could count her options on one hand.
The cleansing deluge finally stopped, and the next set of doors opened. Wynn adjusted her footing and shifted her body forward, guiding him over the threshold into the second decontamination room.
As soon as the door closed behind them, his knees buckled, and he was too heavy for her to stop his fall.
Chapter three
The pain.
He had never felt anything like it.
Unimaginable.
But he could not decide if the physical pain was worse than the emptiness, the quiet inside him.
For hours now, days, he had lain alone in the silence, a never-ending echo of nothingness, his own thoughts repeating back to him in a loop.
An aching hollowness had filled him.
They had not warned him it would be this way, though they must have known.
Along the journey, the silence had grown.
Now it screamed at him in deafening waves, gripped him by the throat and choked his breaths, while the taint of the dead planet soaked throughhis skin and bones.
The urge to leave this place, to return home, drove him hard, but he could not until he completed his task.
Nothing was familiar in this place.
The air suffocated.
The rain drowned.
But he was no longer alone.
His mind remained silent, but an outside source guided him, a light in the darkness.
A lure he could not name.
An energy he could not place.
It would have pulled him forward even if he had not been following orders.
He reached out with his senses, but found his mind empty of thoughts except his own.
But there it was.
A warmth.
A draw.
A distraction.
A comfort from the burning of his flesh.
There were no thoughts to taste, but he could feelsomething, the same pulsing sensation that had led him here, one he could not name.
It hit him in waves, a note of familiarity about it.
