Chapter 19
Cadet Nida Harper
She woke up. Slowly.
It took a long, agonizing time to open her eyes, let alone differentiate the sounds and feelings swirling through her blackened consciousness.
In fact, the first sensation to resolve was a deep, powerful tingling right in the center of her chest.
With all the energy she could muster, she brought up a hand to touch it.
"She's awake; registering conscious activity, but it's still pretty low," a woman said from her side.
Nida tried to open her eyes, but the effort almost sent her back to sleep.
She groaned. At least that she could manage.
She felt like hell. No, worse than hell - she felt as though she'd been plunged into some gut-wrenching realm of pain and agony from whence there was no return.
"I don't like those readings," someone snapped from her other side, "get one of the technicians in here. This field needs to be strengthened."
?.
Field needs to be strengthened? Readings? Where was she, and what was happening?
She rallied to open her eyes again but gave up with another groan.
"We need to move fast to secure that thing before it sets off another one of those pulses," the woman spoke again.
Suddenly, a blast of tingles surged in her chest, and Nida sucked in a gasp.
"It's ramping up again. Where the hell are those technicians? We need that field doubled, now."
The tingles in her chest kept building and building, pouring into a single point.
She tried to clutch a hand to it, but she couldn't lift her arms.
"Come on, come on, come on," someone snapped.
With a twitch that traveled violently through her shoulders, back, and arms, she screamed. But her voice was far off, distant, and no longer sounded like her own.
In fact, with a wash of detachment, the tingles raking over her skin began to fade as she fell back into unconsciousness.
It was the most welcome sensation she'd ever felt.
Then, almost immediately, the dreams began.
She walked through the halls of the Academy, forcing the walls to buckle with a single outstretched hand. Then she made it to the grass. It withered and died under her feet. Then, with a glance up to the sky, the ships high above stopped, shuddered, and fell to the ground in burning chunks of metal.
It was horrible. Terrible.
Flash after flash of destruction.
Yet eventually it stopped, and she was back on the planet.
She stared at the dust below her. She leaned down, picked some up, and let it trickle between her fingers.
She watched as the wind caught it and blew it away, the fine particles tumbling into the distance until she could see them no more.
She looked up, tears filling her eyes, misting her vision as she stared at the stars above.
One by one, they blinked out.
Twinkle by twinkle, they flickered off like dying fireflies.
With every star that disappeared, she twitched. Her body rocked back and forth as if she'd been shot.
Then it started.
She felt that by-now familiar sensation.
An energy building in her left hand and shooting through her arm and up into her chest.
She barely had time to gasp before the dust by her feet kicked up into the air as if caught by the strongest of gales.
Then it pushed toward her, swarming down toward her chest.
She screamed, swatting at it.
Then she saw through it. To the world around her.
Gradually everything lifted into the air.
From the barren rocks to the destroyed buildings. They floated up from the ground, then hung in the air for several amazing seconds.
They didn't stay there, though. With a crack like a world being broken in half, they shot toward her. All of them. Every rock, every crumbled-down ruin, every pile and heap of dust. All of it. It all shot toward her.
She backed away, but there was nowhere to go. In every direction, dust and rock and debris swirled.
With one last scream, she stumbled to her knees. In a flash, she saw the sky above.
The lights of the stars were back.
But there was something wrong.
They were bigger, and growing bigger at an alarming pace until, with a violent shudder that felt like it snapped every bone in her body, she realized what was happening.
The stars in the sky, the planets, the constellations, all were drawn toward her.
The night was dark, lit only by the incredible color of the starscape above. But with every nanosecond that passed, that light grew and grew.
The swirling dust and stone cascaded around her but didn't touch her. It merely twisted and spun around her body, less than a few centimeters from her face, chest, torso, and legs. But it left enough of a gap for her to stare at the night sky.
The stars kept getting closer.
She could feel their heat. She could see the trails of light they left streaking through the black sky.
Second by second they neared, and second by second the debris slashing around in front of her closed in too, until she could see nothing but the tightly packed stones and dust.
She fell to her knees and waited for the sky to fall and the world to crush her.