"So you're telling me I might die in sixty seconds?"
"That's right."
"I told you this would be dangerous. So this is your last chance—do you proceed or not?"
Morro stood at the mouth of the chamber. Behind him, the walls were transparent—cold, isolating glass that bit at his skin. There was a single door. The control room beyond the glass was empty, except for the man who'd brought him here. Thin and stooped, an old, rich scientist with eyes sharp as scalpels.
It'll be the easiest money of my life. Gramps believes he'll create a vortex that'll suck me into another dimension. I've never met anybody like him before. This is what happens when you don't take your pills.
The old man was cracked, sure. But the cash was real, and so was what it could do for his life. He'd seen the zeroes on the contract. That was all that mattered.
"A hundred thousand dollars to my account the moment the experiment is over. That still stands?"
"It does."
"Then I'm in. Close the chamber and start the mechanism."
He didn't wait for a response. With a practiced swagger, he stepped inside. Kael sealed the chamber from the panel—the door sliding shut, bolt slamming, lock clicking with finality. Through the glass, Morro watched him at the console. The main lever jutted up from the panel, ready. For a long moment, Kael just stared at it.
"For science," he said quietly.
He pulled the lever down.
Something began to form on the far side of the chamber—a swirling spiral, a vortex, colors bleeding into each other like oil on water. Morro felt it before he saw it: a pressure in his gut, a tug, gravity getting meaner by the second.
Instinctively, he braced himself and glared at the phenomenon, jaw clenched. "Turn it off!" he barked, fists against the glass, but his voice was drowned in the rising howl.
Kael shrugged. There was nothing he could do. It couldn't be turned off immediately.
Morro fought to stay upright as the pull intensified. He grabbed the door's curve, muscles straining, refusing to give in. Useless. His feet lifted off the floor—he snarled, defiant, as gravity betrayed him. The vortex yanked him upward, legs first, and then he was gone.
Darkness dropped over the nineteen-year-old—black hair, dark-blue eyes, and then nothing. He couldn't tell if his eyes were open or shut. His body went limp and motionless; he didn't react.
He found himself in an endless black void.
There was no up, no down, no sound, no temperature—just black so complete it felt like it was inside his skull.
As if he had stopped mattering. His body began to come apart, not from injury but because there was simply nothing here to hold him together. It wasn't from lack of air; he just didn't belong.
He felt it at the edges first, a loosening and a drift. His fingers and his thoughts were blurring. He was unpicking at the seams, fraying into the dark. Nothing hurt. It was worse than hurt.
He wasn't alone.
Something else was there with him—a presence, the ghost of a shape. A man, or what had been one, with long black hair that spiked and fanned out in the dark. The only thing in the void that wasn't void. He had reason and intelligence, and he was watching.
And this? How did he end up here? Looks like he never cultivated a day in his life.
He watched Morro die—or better, cease to be.
But if fate gives me an opportunity like that, I won't decline.
You're mine, buddy. You're mine.
Morro regained consciousness. The unraveling of his body had stopped. Reversed.
Slowly his senses began to return.
He could think again, but everything felt wrong. He couldn't see where he was. Nothing but darkness.
He didn't even know what position he was in—which way was his head, his feet.
His thoughts were slow. At last he realized his body was moving in some direction. He couldn't tell if it was fast or slow. He couldn't move his arms or legs or any part of himself.
Maybe he couldn't move. Maybe he just had no idea if he did move or not.
He was completely disoriented when he felt it—like passing through a membrane, a thickness, a mass. Then he saw it: a butterfly, prismatic, wings that caught every color and threw them back in a rainbow shimmer, impossible in the black. It was the only thing he could see and the only thing that looked like something.
For a moment he could only stare, no thought, just the wrongness and the beauty of it here in the void.
The butterfly phased into him, just as the presence had before. He was now host to two unknown deities.
This is not a hundred thousand dollars.
Ground under his back, sky above him—beautiful, sakura-colored. He was lying there staring at his hand. There were five fingers.
Am I hallucinating? A bird landed near him.