Fears bubble to the surface and a little Ghost tests his luck one too many times.
Vertigo
Out here, the air is sweet. Rich. There's no cars. No lorries. Just a bunch of grassy knolls dotted with fluffy, white sheep under a sky that, on rare occasions, might come in blue. Thor knows to stay clear of the sheep. He's a good boy like that. Sure, he stops and stares sometimes, bushy tail a-wag and all, but she doesn't need to worry that he'll chase them. And so she wanders with his leash slung over her shoulder and her head tucked low. Trudging on. Because she doesn't know what else to do.
There weren't any cars now, either. No lorries. And no sheep, because what'd once been picture-perfect hills was now an endless, jagged, torn field of metal clawing for the sky like bones sticking from the ruined ground. Nicole didn't know what to make of any of it when she stumbled up the last inches of the slope, leaving the forest and behind. Her eyes cut left. Then right. Caught, briefly, on towering metal debris her brain couldn't reassemble into a familiar shape. Nothing recognisable and real anyway.
Because big-ass starship graveyards weren't a thing. Were they?
She pulled in a few hasty breaths and kept running. Slid down a sheet of ruined metal. Climbed up another, squeezing through snapped off beams leaning like broken ribs overhead. Something snagged on her coat, then her shirt. Nicked skin. Tears welled in her eyes and she bit down her tongue. Couldn't stop to cry now.
Not with— she slipped on a patch of slick metal and bruised her palms and knees as she came down hard. A panicked spike of ice leapt from the knot of heat in her chest. Snap-froze the fire. Nicole crawled the rest of the way until she reached one of the gaping cracks in the side of the wreckage. Thick wires dangled from it, like a curtain, and everything smelled of rust. Of things sharp and wrong; like rotten fuel. She swallowed down bile and grabbed one of the wires, pulling herself back on her feet. Right then it was really damn hard not to think of them as stringy guts hanging out of a dead metal beast and why her mind was going that way when it wasn't going anywhere else was beyond her.
Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. She'd hide. In there. That'd work. Right? It'd work. They'd never—
She threw a look over her shoulder, just in time to see a group of those four-armed Fallen come out of the forest. They didn't waste any time. Their mangled howls came after her and so did bolts of red and arcs of lightning spitting from their rifles. A volley cracked into the wall next to her, blew it up in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.
It cut her cheek. Her neck. Nicole ducked into the wreckage and kept running.
Bastards.
Ghost, a leaf still stuck in his shell, zipped out over the shattered remains of a— a— ketch. Yep. That'd been a ketch once. Before it'd dropped from the sky so hard it'd gotten scattered all over the damn place. Earth's vegetation had touched the lot, hanging off it in drapes of muddy green. The whole thing was a maze. And vast. It stretched on for as far as he could see straight on ahead, mostly concentrated around the ship's main body towering over everything at an awkward angle. And right now his Guardian was in there. Inside the dead ketch. Being hunted by the aforementioned bastards who'd abandoned looking for him when he'd decided to stop playing Whack-a-Ghost. The Fallen's boss— Captain, whatever —gestured with all four of his arms and his lackeys fanned out. One went into the ketch, while the others pulled ahead easily as they leapt from debris to debris, surrounding her.
He had to find her.
Had to.
Preferably before they trapped her.
Staying well out of sight, he rushed into the gnarly shipwreck, his scans on the lookout for her Light.
She was lost. Didn't know what way to go. Corridor after corridor broke off around her, some gaping and open, the sky winking in from impossible angles, others choked in darkness. And she was pretty damn sure she'd just come in a fucking circle. Why'd she thought hiding in here was a good idea?
Nicole stopped. She turned on the spot, shaking hands grabbing uselessly at the sides of her head. They tangled in her hair. Her knees felt weak. Wobbly. Weightless vertigo washed through her. Chilled her veins. Her vision blurred, pulled tighter by shreds of purple, like the world's most atrocious migraine waiting to happen, and Nicole wanted to—
A puff of blue light gave the shadows a fright.
—scream. Well. She did. Once.
"It— it's just me," Ghost said, hurried. He hovered in close. "Hi. Come on, I plotted you a way out of here, but we need to hurry."
Nicole swallowed her heart. The vertigo ebbed from her. Curled around the knot of fire in her chest like barbed wire, its tips laced with ice.
"Any day now, Guardian. I mean, whenever you're ready." A beam of light sliced away from him, cutting into one of the blackest corridors first before almost blinding her when it swung back around. So he… was also a flashlight? Neat. A tiny and shy (but at its core absolutely hysterical) giggle chittered at the base of her throat. But she didn't move. Just stared at him.
"What?" he said. "You didn't think I'd leave you here, did you?"
The giggle died. "I thought they got you." Truth be told, she'd not thought a lot about him. If any at all, and for a moment she felt just a little guilty.
"Hehe— no. Though if we stand around here for much longer they might."
Jaw clenched tight, Nicole nodded and convinced her knees to move. Wasn't like she had a choice, and with the light leading the way, she almost thought this'd work.
Ghost, unlike her, didn't hesitate between left or right, made her believe he had an actual map to the twisting, broken corridors. He kept them away from the loud, heavy clanking of footfalls surrounding them, too. Sometimes by stopping, cutting off the light and telling her to not make a sound. She didn't dare to even breathe, especially when he jerked back and they ducked into an alcove under a gaping hole in the ceiling. While she pressed herself to the wall, Ghost vanished, blue light scattering.
THUNK-SRRSCHT-THUNK
The metal over them groaned. A shadow leapt over the gap. Landed heavily. Barked twisted words.
"Now," Ghost whispered close by, still invisible, and it occurred to her she'd have liked to ask him how the bloody hell he did that. Maybe she'd do that. Later. After this. Because it'd be okay. "Go."
She slipped under the gap.
"Left."
Followed his voice.
"Up— up— there. Right."
Swung right, scrabbling for purchase on a long stretch of wall where the corridor had been snapped off at a sharp angle. She crawled over shut doors— over torn open panels biting at her palms with exposed wires— and back out into the light.
"Stop."
She froze, daylight just about touching the tips of her fingers. Air tugged at her cheek, making the cuts in them flare sharply, and Ghost's soft clicks and whirrs rushed by her.
"Okay. One, two, three," he counted up there, out in the open. "And there's another one… he's also not looking. Great. Awesome. So, I am going to need you to jump over a little gap now. Don't worry, there's plenty of room to get going and once you land on the other side, just— ah— keep going down. It's a bit of a slide, but you'll be fine. Promise."
. . .
"Jump?"
"Jump. Yeah. With your legs."
Her throat clicked. Anger tickled at it.
"Ready? Go."
How was anyone ever ready for something like this? Nicole kicked herself forward and up until she was surrounded by nothing but sky. Because sometime between her trying to hide at the bottom of this carcass and now, she'd climbed it all the way to the top. Funny how that shit worked— oh no. No. Nope.
She got three steps before her knees locked up. The gap Ghost had mentioned? It fell away in front of her and down into a pit of jagged metal and turned over earth. Water had collected down there, formed a pool covered by a sheet of bright green algae.
She tried to breathe, and instead her lungs filled with thick, cold sludge.
It comes at her slowly. The bottom. Nowhere near as quickly as she thought it would. But when she hits it, the world shatters apart in a flare of blinding white. Blood lines her mouth. You can do it— a voice calls that doesn't belong. Metal groans and tears. Water steals her breath. She forgets to scream. She always does.
Ghost appeared in his flurry of faint blue light and swung in front of her, his shell whirring frantically. "It's not far. Come on, just— jump. You got this. Please."
She came back from the day she'd died to the loud clap of metal being struck and the yips of twisted laughter coming to get her. She was up on that dead ship again. No longer falling down a bridge, hands tightly gripping a steering wheel. Nicole's fingers twitched into fists. Hot air seared by her shoulder.
The Fallen. They were shooting at her. Missing. Though not for long. They got Ghost first.
"Guar—" A bolt of red slammed into him, cut his words off in a burst of sparks. One moment he was here. Then he wasn't. And maybe she should have felt something other than fear. Should have maybe called after him. Maybe tried to grab him, but he'd spun off so quickly, she didn't know where he'd went.
Cold cascaded from her panic and the barbed wire wrapped around the knot of fire in her chest unravelled. It tore at the knot, bled heat into her. Pushed the cold outwards.
A haze of purple quivered into her vision. And when the Fallen opened fire again and something heavy punched into her stomach, she was gone, too.
Her feet hit the ground with the hollow thud of metal under them. There was an impossible vertigo bottled in her chest, pouring from her in shocks of hollow beats that threatened to crack her bones. The world, in a haze of dull purple, spun.
Nicole steadied herself, tried to get the world to stop tilting, but it all kept wobbling. It had also all changed. She wasn't up at the top any more, but down? Down where? A Fallen leapt into view, perched on the round shape of a mangled... turbine? How the fuck did I get here?
The Fallen took aim. Nevermind—
The purple haze of vertigo yanked at her, pulled her through herself. She was gone again.
She staggered, arms thrown out wide, and balanced badly on a narrow slice of metal. Sheer drops fell away around her, threatening her with jagged metal at the bottom. Though she barely noticed, not with how she didn't know what the hell was going on and why her stomach hurt so much. The pain was vivid. Real. Her shirt felt wet. Warm. But before she could do anything more than tilt her chin down, the haze and vertigo pulled together once more and when it released her, her shoulder smacked into a wall. Water soaked into her shoes. Squelched loudly when she took a step.
Stop— Why wasn't it stopping?
The vertigo gathered. Fluttered in tight like moths drawn to light. This time she managed one look down her front at the blood-soaked shirt before her next step landed on grated metal.
"Stop—" She hiccuped, loudly. Pressed her hands to her stomach. It hurt. It really really hurt. "Stop, please—"
Once again the world blinked out around her in a wash of pale purple and Nicole's feet landed on dry earth. Shadows, lively ones, danced in close. Gathered her up in soft, cold whispers while her heart thumped desperately in her ears. All strength ebbed from her and, finally, the vertigo dissipated. Left her hollow. Bleeding. Dying.
Her knees buckled.
The world grew still.