Gavin stared out the window, mesmerized, trying not to miss a single detail of how people lived on this planet. Everything seemed unusual, uncommon and therefore fascinating. Houses didn’t stand in rows, close to each other. They were surrounded by trees, small lakes, brooks and fountains, making themselves place amid what was obviously the planet’s most prized feature — water.

Seconds ticked by one after another, and nothing changed around Zoey. But in a while, she started seeing vague shapes of something that was not Rodomir’s workshop. In a few minutes, the shapes came into sharp focus, drawing a picture of an entirely different world. Somber forest, filled with shadows that moved too fast to make them out, changing direction with dizzying speed and unpredictability. They were menacing and scary.

 

Grayson slammed the car door shut, then rolled his shoulders back to get rid of an ache between his shoulder blades. So what if some rich jerk bought so much uranium he could reduce the entire Earth to rubble with it? Grayson didn’t care. He couldn’t care, because if he cared about all the stuff he had done in the past years, he would go insane.

Zoey tried to scream but the sound failed to leave her throat, cutting at her insides. There was a reason why her brain blocked most part of this memory, leaving her the bare bones. She couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take the pain that threatened to consume her, eat her alive.

One of the fighters, hit by Seraphina’s precise shots, was falling in the abyss, bouncing off the walls in a column of fire and smoke. The second one spiraled down chaotically before hitting a wall and exploding in turn. But a third and fourth fighters emerged behind the fallen ones, moving irrevocably upwards and indifferent to the catastrophes.