Sleepless: Chapter Thirty-One

Drowning.

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Soon enough, everything was gone.

The rain. The ocean. Felix.

The void stretched wide in all directions, giving no impression of end or beginning. Carina’s voice was all that remained — soft, but close enough to be within her own skull.

“…Do you really hate me that much?”

Her tone was mist in a forest after dusk. Fishing line being threaded through a needle. Her arms around Margo were collapsing them both like a dying star.

An eternity seemed to pass between the question and her response.

“I don’t hate you,” she answered, her words like ripples from a pebble thrown hours ago, still reverberating in miniscule waves long after the disturbance that caused them. “But I hate this. I hate what this has become.”

A horrible shattercrack sound echoed endlessly into the darkness as the amalgamation of their forms slammed into the ground unseen, scattering them both upon an endless floor of polished darkness.

Reforming herself was like sifting through glassdust, parsing out which infinitesimally small and disparate pieces were hers and which weren’t. As she struggled to gather herself, a hand stopped her, resting on her knee.

Suddenly, she recognized this cold, sterile room, the fog spilling from the mouth of the cryopod and the door, only slightly ajar, through which something Carina-shaped had slipped through.

The beating heart of the beast had been replaced by something deeper that rumbled far beneath her hands and feet, near to the core of the world.

Margo was sitting with her knees tucked to her chest, just as she had that day. She pulled away from Carina’s touch, forcing herself to her feet. The venom that tainted her words couldn’t keep her voice from cracking.

“All you had to do was leave me alone! Is that so hard!? Is that so horrible to want?!”