The sensation of falling didn’t end with a crash. Instead, the darkness became thick, like cold oil, slowing Leo’s descent until he was suspended in a weightless, suffocating void. The countdown had vanished. The burning sky was gone. There was only the sound of his own frantic heartbeat and the lingering, icy grip on his hand.
"Nala?" he croaked.
The hand tightened. It wasn't the calloused, warm hand of the woman he had traveled across the obsidian wastes with. This hand was smooth, unnervingly still, and radiated a temperature that shouldn't exist in a living being.
A spark of neon violet ignited in the distance, then another, until a grid of light mapped out a narrow hallway that stretched into infinity. Standing beside him wasn't Nala, but a flickering projection of the woman from t
