The Core: The Dark Enemy

42. The Thirteenth Floor

After the strange sensation passed, everyone was hesitant to speak. Just the feeling that something had happened, cosmically, powerful enough to almost kill us all, was concerning.

The good thing was that, whatever had happened, it had not wiped us out.

"Ess, Meditati, are you both okay?" I asked after taking stock of myself and finding nothing wrong.

"Yes, Kevin. We seem to be fine," Meditati answered, her voice slow and careful, as though she too was testing her own stability. "What Submili—what Ess was about to tell you, is that I think the Skii might have done something to everyone aboard the vessel and skipped them forward in time. At least, I hope that is what happened." She paused, uncertainty creeping into her tone.

I spun in place, trying to fixate on the spot in the vast emptiness where their ship had been. It was impossible. There was no trace of where they had been. Nothing to reference, no debris, no distortion, not even a ripple of energy left behind.

Nothing at all.

Still, if my sense of direction was right, they would have been somewhere behind and below where I hovered based on my original orientation.

"Meditati, can you help me find the rough location of our ship's last point in space?"

"Sure," she replied, and a faint overlay appeared in my mind, segmenting the void into loose grids. The thin luminous lines gave me a sense of direction, a tangible framework of up and down in a universe that had been stripped bare.

I traced the section where the ship had once been and drifted toward it, hoping to feel something—any residual echo of what had happened, any sign of them at all.

I felt nothing.

I flew back and forth, combing the empty space with my presence, trying to force Time to reveal something. Any clue that they might still be alive. Trying to feel anything at all.

Nothing.

"Kevin..." I faintly heard Meditati call to me several times, her voice a soft vibration against the silence. I ignored it until it became only a faint buzzing in my mind.

I pushed at Time. I begged it to show me something, to give me even the smallest fragment to pull my friends back to me. But Time did not bend. It did not answer. It simply existed, indifferent to my will.

An indigo star exploded before me, washing out everything in blinding light. For a moment, I thought I had died again. The memory of my first Disha tah—the moment I had been integrated into the Tela guest network and into that blue expanse—flashed through my mind like a painful echo.

"Daddy! You need to stop whatever you're doing!" Ess screamed in my ear just as my vision snapped back into focus.

"He is still lost in his time ability," Meditati said calmly. "I suggest we use the swarm to hit him with an asteroid next. I'm curious if it will bend around him as well. Since your light pulses haven't worked, physical matter might get his attention."

I blinked hard, realizing both of them were right in front of me. A vast cloud of swarm drifted nearby, keeping its distance like a silent perimeter guard.

"Wait... when did you get here?" I asked, still trying to process everything. To me, only moments had passed since everything had ended. Surely it should have taken them longer to return.

Ess tilted her massive head slightly, confusion rippling through the motions of her long body. "We've been camping out here for a week," she said. "After Meditati showed you where to go, you stopped talking to us and started flickering back and forth over this tiny patch of space."