“Well done, Jude!”

“Thanks, sir—”

The communication recording crackled with a sharp pop.

Linnea Quincy leaned closer to the vidscreen and pressed the headphones she wore tighter to her ears. As she listened for the hundredth time to the audio track of her sister’s Falconer Elite flight test, Linnea heard Jude’s breathing turn fast with fear.

This was it. This was where it all went wrong for Jude.

The recording hissed with static, obscuring Jude’s next words, but to Linnea, who knew every inflection of her sister’s voice, it sounded like Jude was asking a question, her words ringing with shock and a bit of awe.

Then, her instructor shouted, “Eyes forward! Don’t let the—”

Alarms rang on the recording. Linnea frowned. What alarms would be going off during a test? The oxygen sensors, perhaps? Or had the ship failed?

She yanked the headphones off her ears and spun around in her chair to face her dark bedroom. A lumpy form lay sprawled across her bed. She kicked the end of the mattress, causing the form to stir and grumble.

“Hey,” Linnea said. “Listen to this.”

She unplugged her headphones from the vidscreen and replayed the alarm sounds out loud. Ryann, the command tower tech who’d snuck Linnea a copy of the audio recording in exchange for a date, sat up in bed. Her bed sheet covered his naked lap, and he raked a hand through his dark hair and blinked blearily at her.

“What?”

“Listen! What alarms are these?” She replayed the audio again.

Ryann sighed. “It sounds like her gravity sensors.”

“Gravity sensors? Why would those be going off? Is the alarm for her ship’s interior?”

“There aren’t interior gravity alarms. Just external. Come on, baby. Why don’t you come back to bed? You’ve been listening to that for hours.” His voice softened. “I know you miss her, but everyone has listened to that audio over and over. You’re not going to find something that Commander Gideon missed. She’s gone, Linnea.”

Ryann wasn’t a bad guy, and he’d risked a lot to get her the recording. Even if he’d asked for a date and sex in exchange. It was a price Linnea had been willing to pay. And it wasn’t like she was one to turn down a hot guy who wanted to mess around. Linnea loved sex.

But she loved her sister more. And no matter what, Linnea couldn’t believe Jude was gone. She was the best pilot in the Falconer program. She wouldn’t have crashed without good reason.

She wasn’t dead.

Linnea plugged her headphones in and turned back to her vidscreen. She adjusted the feedback and background noise on Jude’s question.

What are you asking? What caught your attention?

Something had set off the external gravity alarms. Something big enough to panic Jude. To make her seasoned instructor start shouting.

Linnea replayed the audio well into the early morning hours, adjusting feedback levels in micro increments. When her eyes were stinging and her back ached from sitting too still for so long, she hit play again.

“Well done, Jude!”

“Thanks, sir—”

The popping sound was muted. An empty hum came over the recording.

Then Jude’s question. It started as a garbled mess, but Linnea slowed down the audio. “—at a—” The audio fizzled, the static repressed. “—erhmhoh?”

Linnea jerked forward and hit replay. Her eyes stretched wide as she watched the track’s display spike on the screen with each inflection of Jude’s voice.

“Erhmhoh?”

Linnea replayed the audio again.

“Erhmhoh?”

She adjusted a few other settings and sped Jude’s voice back to normal.

“—armhole.”

“Wormhole,” Linnea whispered. “She said wormhole.”

She sat back in her chair, stunned. Jude had run into a wormhole? Linnea wasn’t much for science; as one of the chefs on board the Zynthar International Space Station, she preferred cooking. But even she knew a little something about wormholes.

Mainly that they technically didn’t exist.

She kicked the bed again until Ryann woke. “You’re still up?” he mumbled, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His tanned face looked blue in the light of her vidscreen.

“She said wormhole! I think she saw a wormhole out there!”

Linnea replayed the audio for Ryann. She slowed it down and sped it back up, again and again, walking him through the strangled vowels and slurred consonants of Jude’s harried, panicked question.

“I don’t hear her saying anything about a wormhole. Maybe you’ve been listening to that too long.”

“She’s saying it! Listen!” Linnea’s voice rose to a shout and rang through her tiny quarters.

“Babe—”

“I’m not your babe,” Linnea growled. She threw her headphones across the room. Ryann jerked further awake, his eyes stretching wide at her outburst. “She said it. I heard her.”

Keeping a wary eye on her, Ryann swung his legs over the edge of the bed and started jerking on his pants. He liked to work out, and Linnea guessed he bought steroids to bulk out his frame. She’d never liked the hulking, meathead type of guys, and watching him now, Linnea felt a surge of disgust that she’d been touching him and putting on a great show of moaning and writhing beneath him only the previous evening.

It was only ever a show with Linnea. No guy could ever really make her feel as good as she acted, and she’d put on a damn good performance for Ryann. The asshole didn’t deserve it.

“You shouldn’t be listening to that. For fuck’s sake, Linnea, her funeral is today!” He yanked on his shirt and glared at her.

“She said it,” Linnea whispered. “She said wormhole.”

Ryann threw up his hands. “Now you’re starting to sound like that crazy bitch from the astrophysics department.”

“Who?”

“Maeve Delgado. The psycho nerd who stole a Falconer last month and flew into space to prove her wormhole theory.”

Linnea remembered Jude telling her that story now. Jude had been impressed. She’d laughed about it. But Linnea hadn’t remembered anything about wormholes. “She was trying to prove her wormhole theory?”

“She thinks one exists out there near Saturn. Christ Almighty, Linnea. Don’t look at me like that. She’s crazy! She stole a ship! She nearly got fired! You need to get some sleep. You can’t show up to your sister’s funeral looking like shit.”

He snarled the last few words at her and stomped out of her quarters, slamming the door behind him. But Linnea had already turned around to face her computer. She stared at the paused audio recording.

Maeve Delgado.

Someone else believed there was a wormhole out there, near Jude’s last known coordinates. And Linnea knew what she heard. She knew her sister’s voice.

Jude had said wormhole. If she’d gotten close to one and if it was big enough to have its own gravity pull, it could have pulled her in.

Linnea replayed the audio. Each time she heard the word, she grew more convinced.

Jude hadn’t crashed. She wasn’t dead.

She’d gone through a wormhole.

For all Linnea knew, Jude could be alive right now, stranded on another planet.

She needed help, and Linnea would stop at nothing to find her sister.

It was time to talk to this Maeve Delgado.

* * *

* * *