The little boy ahead turned to face Alex, his eyes glowing white-hot behind his mask. “What are you doing here? I didn’t think I would see you again.”
Alex heard the boy, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She stared at him blankly, wondering if that was his body or if he was like her—something outside of a body, floating about, trying to make sense of the universe in which it was merely a speck. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, either.”
The boy pointed to the planet being swallowed up by a darkness vast and perverse. “That’s what he does. That’s how he eats them, and he wants to eat them all.”
“The Eater of Worlds.” Vardis had used that phrase to describe the Dark One. She had thought he was speaking metaphorically. He had explained how the Dark One took a planet’s resources. Alex hadn’t realized he meant the Dark One quite literally devoured planets from the inside.
What exactly was the Dark One? How could something that inhuman be able to control armies or create technology? What Alex was looking at right now didn’t seem to have any more intelligence than lichen or a fungus.
Then something changed on the planet’s surface. The earth broke apart, swirling as if caving in on itself, and something forced itself from the opening rent. Teeth lined the gash as something like a fetus forced itself out of the planet’s wound, its body frail and skeletal, its head encased in a shroud of some sort as clouds gathered, covering the thing’s obscene nakedness.
An eye opened in the caul. It was large and angry, and it turned its cyclopean gaze upon Alex.
The thing knew she was there. It had seen her. She was terrified.
The thing snarled, its tendrils pulsing as they caressed the surface. Another blast of cold hit them as the planet grew larger.
A voice called to Alex from the darkness far behind her, back where the body of the girl and the strange alien were laying. Alex! it shouted. Alex, come back!
Alex recognized the voice. It was Chine. What was he doing out here? Dragons couldn’t survive in space. Not without special equipment. She realized she couldn’t survive in space without special equipment either. How the hell was she out here?
Come back, Alex! Come back now!
Alex didn’t know if she should listen to the voice. Even though she was afraid of the thing clawing its way out of the tendril-filled planet, she knew it wouldn’t hurt her. Or at least, she thought it wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t like the rest of space. She was like the pale boy. Where had he gone?
Then without warning, Alex felt hands on her back. They pulled her hard, and she fell back into the body of the girl who was lying on the floor. Her eyes had rolled back, and she was as rigid as a corpse.
Alex, back in her body, bolted upright fast enough to make everyone in the living room jump. Blood was pouring from her nose and her ears, and she felt sick to her stomach. When she tried to move, she fell over and coughed up a bloody black mass of something she would have preferred not to look at. Then she passed out.
When Alex woke up, she was bundled in a blanket on the living room couch. Vardis was also wrapped in a blanket in her dad’s chair on the other side of the room. Liza and Gill were in the room, both of them looking worriedly at the rider. “What happened?” she groggily mumbled.
Liza rushed over and covered Alex’s forehead with kisses. “I didn’t think my pumpkin pie was that bad,” she managed to joke.
Alex laughed, but her stomach clenched, cutting her laughter off abruptly. “Your pie could never be bad enough to do that.”
Across the room, Vardis was staring at Alex with his deep, dark eyes. Gill was doing the same, but his gaze was much softer and worried as well. “It was an attack,” the alien said. “By the Dark One.”
Alex tried to sit up. Her body ached less, and she felt like she needed to start moving to ease her muscles’ cramps. “Why the hell would he attack me like that?” she asked. “He shouldn’t even know I’m here.”
“The attack was not on you, it was on me. As I told you before, we are linked psychically. I did not know that if someone invaded my mind to inflict harm on me, it would also affect you.”
Alex rubbed her head as she tried to focus. Everything still felt very fuzzy. “Wait, are you saying the Dark One knows you’re here?”
Vardis shook his head as he made a futile attempt to stand. “No, he does not. The Dark One is a powerful psychic. He does not need to know where I am to find me. All he needs to do is search out my mind. Usually, there are defenses up. Unfortunately, the meal provided to me was so delicious that I let my guard fall. It will not happen again.”
There were still things that didn’t make sense to Alex. “How come it stopped? If he caught you off-guard and I can’t defend myself, why did we all of a sudden stop being attacked?”
Vardis glanced at Gill, who was crouched in a chair, watching Alex closely. “Your friend did something he has yet to inform me about.”
When Gill spoke, it was with the measured attention to detail and pronunciation that Alex had started to realize stemmed from a lack of trust. “I connected your mind to Chine’s,” the drow said, “using my own. I amplified the telepathic link between you and the dragon until he was able to help you.”
Alex knew Chine
