Read Nova for Free Online

heart thudding in panic before I realize there must be walls around me or I would have already been frozen by the vacuum of space. Letting go of the ropes, I move forward until my hands encounter glass, curved and round and impossibly clear. Even the floor is glass, or at least a substance remarkably like glass, for I can see the stars beneath my feet. It is the ultimate observation deck, this little room no more than five feet in diameter. A window into the heavens themselves.
    I stare out into the abyss, and I instinctively know this view is Lia’s. That if she were standing here right now, her memories in my head and her past in my heart, my soul would be bursting with wonder and joy and awe and amazement.
    It would, except Lia is no longer here. I am, and I feel nothing. Nothing at all.

    *00:30:00*
    I sit on my cot and watch the minutes count down toward the end.
    *00:29:59*
    *00:29:58*
    *00:29:57*
    Not quite a half hour left, and I can’t think of a single thing I want to say, a single thing I want to do.
    *00:25:34*
    *00:25:33*
    *00:25:32*
    If I have a specific target, I do not know it. If there’s somewhere else I’m supposed to be, I am not there.
    *00:21:12*
    *00:21:11*
    *00:21:10*
    In all likelihood, it doesn’t matter where I am when I go Nova. The chemicals in my arms, when properly mixed, have more than enough power to take down the hub, and the rings with it.
    *00:18:56*
    *00:18:55*
    *00:18:54*
    This cargo bay is as good a place to go as any, and perhaps better than most, with the darkness breathing softly around me, its thick arms enfolding me in its tender shroud. It’s as close to a grave as I will have.
    It is enough.
    *00:15:03*
    *00:15:02*
    *00:15:01*
    At the fifteen minute mark, it begins.
    My mind suddenly goes lax, as though my brain has been wrapped taut around a spool and only now is loosed. I let it reel out within my head, expanding, stretching, lengthening. The sensation is curiously pleasurable, and I let myself sink into the moment. If anything, the spool only seems to unwind faster with my acquiescence.
    *00:12:52*
    I feel a shivering sensation in my left eye and then a gleam of light—so impossibly bright!—pops into my vision. For a second it is alone, one tiny speck dancing across my vision. Then a second one sparks, gold and twisting, across the corner of my eye, and then another, and another. Gold spots are flickering across my right eye now, and the cot across from me begins to blur, skewing and sliding within the metallic froth.
So beautiful, so brilliant!
Like holding a star before your eyes and looking into it until your retinas burst.
    *00:10:03*
    My heart is racing now. It pulses within my chest, squeezing like a fist pumping rhythmically open and closed, open and closed. I struggle to breathe, my lungs heaving with the effort, but it is a good struggle, like the sprint at the end of a long race, when your mind is fixed only on covering those last few hundred meters and making it to the finish. I can barely see, barely think, barely breathe, and yet I feel like I could fly.
    *00:06:53*
    I look down at my forearms, not that I can see much of anything anymore. Just like they said, heat begins to warm the inside of my skin. It is happening; my sacs are opening, the chemicals are releasing! My destiny is here, my fate come to—
    A sharp pain clubs my head so hard I almost fall off the cot.
    I gasp and grab my temple, twisting my head and searching wildly for the source of the blow.
    A second strike lashes me behind the eyes, and it’s only now that I realize the pain came from the inside, not the outside. My arms are hot now; more than hot, they are burning with the heat of an open flame licking across my skin. I cry out, pain forcing me from my silence.
    This isn’t right! It’s not supposed to feel like this!
    The sparkles in my left eye suddenly go out, the silver stars turned to dark embers roiling about in the black field of my vision. Fear courses through me, pulsing