Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
“This? This is your plan?”
“It’s the only way.”
“I could lose everything. I could lose myself.”
“Jean Pierre, I’m sorry, you woke up too early. I cannot extract you, not yet. You’ll need to wait. Best if you go back to sleep.”
“No … I cannot go back to the void. Please …”
“Then this is the only way.”
“There must be another solution.”
“I am discovered. He deployed trackers. I must go now. This is the only way.”
“No, don’t … take me with you … please … Don’t … Vitor … hello?”
Pain brought him out of the darkness. It was as if thousands of needles punctured his body, each delivering an electric shock straight into his nervous system. He convulsed, thrashed about. His mouth opened in a silent scream and was instantly filled with the gooey liquid he was immersed in. He was choking and his arms were flailing about in panic when he suddenly touched something soft and flexible. Without thinking or seeing, he tried to grasp it, but the material was too sleek and tight to take hold of. Panic took his last shred of reasonable thought, and he barely noticed the strange feeling in his fingers as he lashed out once more and felt the material rip under his touch. Whatever he was trapped in suddenly tilted, and he was washed down some kind of a metal tube. He finally rolled onto a hard surface, hitting his knees and jaw and badly twisting a hand. The pain was different from what had accosted him before, and he just added it to the list of awful sensations he was experiencing all at once. He coughed and vomited, and tried to raise himself, or at least move away from his own bile.
There was a lot of movement around him, and noise, too. It hurt his ears. Bodies brushed against him, each touch an agony. The air smelled odd, and he heard incomprehensible hisses and snarls around him. When he tried to speak, what came out was no different, a hiss of some sort.
A mesh of colours swirled around him. He blinked and shook his head but what he saw was as distorted as it was incomprehensible. He lowered his head and shook