Chapter Text
“Bio-rhythm sensors are showing green,” Pidge says, dancing around the precarious nesting of scanners and probes she and Hunk have set up on the lip of the rift. “Hunk?”
A few feet away, Hunk’s buried himself to the waist in an array that’s supposed to give a detailed breakdown of Quintessential composition. One foot sticks high up in the air for balance as he reaches down into the heart of the machine to tweak some wires. “Almost there.” His voice echoes oddly through the metal shell. “You know, this would be a lot easier if the mice were here. Remind me again why the mice aren’t here?”
“Uh, maybe because you guys are in the magical deep-space equivalent of the nuclear hot zone?” Matt suggests. He and Coran are set up a good five hundred feet back, well away from the blazing light and tingling heat of the rift. There’s enough extra layers of protection in the paladin armor to keep Hunk and Pidge from roasting in the energy coming out of the hole in reality itself, provided they don’t actually touch the rift, but the others don’t have that benefit.
Which is why the heavy labor of hauling in all the sensors and setting them up falls on the paladins, while Matt and Coran get to kick back and watch the fireworks on the display screen.
“Ah… hah!” Hunk wobbles, his extended foot catching on the BLIP-tech sensor pod as he extracts himself from the Quintessence mass-spec. Not the perfect analogy, Pidge knows, but a close enough approximation for the sake of keeping all these things straight. She didn’t even realize the castle-ship had half of these machines—and she can’t help feeling a little bit bitter that no one ever bothered to mention them to her.
Pidge steadies the BLIP-tech pod, then grabs Hunk’s elbow as he pops upright, groans, and presses a hand to his head.
“Okay,” he mutters. “Note to self? Massive amounts of Quintessence are highly conducive to bouts of vertigo.”
“Noted,” Pidge says dryly. “Is that everything?” She looks around, taking inventory of their setup. The rest of the team doesn’t know how long they’ll be able to keep Lotor and his generals away from the moon where the rift opened up, which means Team Weird Science has to get in, get as much info as possible, and get out in less than two vargas so they can regroup with the others, form Voltron, and get all Death Star on this moon.
“That’s all of them, Number Five,” Coran calls, flashing her a thumbs-up. “Hold there for a tick while we take our preliminary readings.”
“Roger that,” Hunk says. “I’m just gonna… Go check out Mr. Purple Squishy here.”
Pidge crosses her arms as Hunk crouches beside the glass bell jar they set up to contain the rift spores that have started trickling out of the fissure. There is, of course, an emissions barrier over the entire area, both to delay Lotor realizing what’s here and to keep any of them from suffering the effects of Quintessential overload.
Pidge knows that story, and she’ll pass on turning into Haggar 2.0, thank you very much.
“You know that thing’s dangerous, right?” she asks, watching as Hunk continues to coo at the spore. It’s small and purple and vaguely amoeba-like. Well, if amoeba grew to the size of a small bird. When it pulses, it looks like blood spatter, and Pidge is surprised the sight of it doesn’t make Hunk queasy.
Hunk cranes his neck to scowl at her and turns up his nose. “Uh, no. Come on, Pidge, look at him. He wuvs me. Don’t you Mr. Squishy? Don’t you?”
Vaguely unsettled by the sight of Hunk trying to tickle a trans-reality entity through an inch of glass, Pidge turns her gaze out over the barren landscape. This is the third rift to open since Lotor started smashing the fabric of spacetime with his magic comet-scented hammer. The first two times, Voltron had to destroy the rift before they could study it, or else risk Lotor gaining access.
They still don’t know what Lotor wants with the rifts, but stopping him on principle is probably a good idea.
It’s small, as rifts go—or at least Coran keeps calling it cute and laughing at the notion that it’s a danger to them. The one on Daibazaal was ten times this size at the start, apparently, and Honerva all but lived inside it for twenty-eight decaphebes before the physical and psychological effects became obvious.
So Pidge isn’t too worried about radiation poisoning, or whatever mechanism Quintessence works by. That doesn’t mean it’s smart to go poking at the thing that joined up with a billion of its friends to become the universe’s first Voltron-level threat.
Hunk won’t be dissuaded. While Coran and Matt confer about the readings they’re picking up, Hunk shuffles closer to the edge of the rift, giggling as the rift spore spins circles in its glass prison, butting up against the wall by his finger like a fish in a tank.
Pidge shivers, rubbing her hands along her arms. “It seem cold to you, Hunk?”
“Cold?” Hunk arches an eyebrow at her. “Uh… no. I feel like somebody swapped my armor for a sauna over here.”
Pidge frowns, but she’s not imagining it. The temperature inside her suit must have dropped a good ten or fifteen degrees—not exactly arctic weather, but cold enough to raise goosebumps along her arms. Her suit’s display shows no change in the external temperature, though—maybe some malfunction in the armor’s regulation systems? She shuffles a few feet to her right, focusing on her skin and the temperature display, but nothing changes.
“Hey, Coran? Can you check and see if there’s anything wrong with my suit? I think the A/C might have kicked into overdrive or some…thing?” She trails off, the light coming off the rift drawing her attention. It’s hard to see much of anything with light as bright as a bonfire blazing out of the crack in the ground, but she sees… Something.
For a second the glow changes, and instead of a font of light, it’s like Pidge is looking into a mirror. She sees herself—but not herself. The visor of her helmet is smashed, lines of blood running down her face. Her eyes are wide with fear or shock, and--
The image disappears. Pidge blinks furiously, trying to reconcile the strange vision with everything else she’s heard about the rift. Was that a vision of the future? No. Maybe a glimpse into an alternate reality? Coran said that the boundaries between worlds wear thin near the rifts.
Before she can ask whether anyone else saw anything, Matt swears and something starts beeping. “That doesn’t sound encouraging,” she says.
“Hang on a tick,” Coran mutters. “Just a Quintessential surge. Probably nothing...”
Hunk sits back on his heels, trading a look with Pidge. “Probably, he says.”
“Which means he’s wrong, and we should probably be ready for some eldritch horror to come bursting out of the ground.”
“What, like space Cthulhu?” Hunk frowns. “Wait, is that a thing? Is Cthulhu a real thing? What if all those stories come from some real space monster? What if every kid’s nightmare actually exists in another reality, and they can come through the rift? What if--”
“Hunk!” Pidge cries, holding up her hands. “First of all, breathe?” She waits for him to ball his hands into fists, breathing in noisily. “Okay, second, I don’t think Cthulhu’s coming through this rift. Is he, Matt?”
“Uh…”
Pidge sighs. “That’s very helpful, Matt, thank you.”
“Look, we aren’t really sure what this is.” Matt pauses, the beeping in the background joined now by a second shrill alarm. “We’re picking up some kind of major anomaly, like--”
T hunk!
Pidge jumps despite herself. Hunk lets out a little scream and springs back from the rift spore’s prison as its form shivers, backs up, and rams against the glass a second time.
Thunk!
Pidge lets out a shaky laugh. “Well somebody’s getting excited,” she says. “Holy hell. Hey, guys? I think we’re going to pull back for a minute, just to be safe.”
Coran waves a hand in acknowledgment. “That’s probably a smart idea. This one seems like a doozy!”
The spore slams against the glass again, more frantically, as if to halt Pidge and Hunk’s retreat. The light streaming from the fissure dims once, twice, like clouds passing in front of the sun.
“Should it be doing that?” Hunk asks. He’s summoned his bayard, though it remains inactive in his hand, and it’s an effort on Pidge’s part not to do the same.
“I don’t know,” Coran says. “We haven’t studied the rifts enough to know what’s ‘normal.’ That was never my area of study to be honest—or Alfor’s.”
Matt hums. “Think we should pull the plug?”
“No,” Pidge says. “We need to know how these rifts form if we want to prevent the fabric of reality turning into metaphysical Swiss cheese, and we need to know what they do in case Lotor ever gets to one before we can destroy it.”
“I suppose...” Matt says. “Still. You should come back here and wait with us until--”
Crack.
Pidge’s bayard springs into her hand. The rift spore shudders, pressing at the tiny starburst crack it just made in the glass.
“Uh, Coran?” she asks. “You did say we could contain anything that came through the rift, right?”
Coran hesitates. “In theory...”
The spore slams against the crack, sending a new fissure racing across the glass at a steep angle.
“I think this one might be stronger than you were expecting,” Pidge says. She’s frozen, torn between staying to fight the creature off before it can escape and retreating to the relative safety of the lions.
“Okay, forget data collection,” Matt says. “You two need to get back here before we find out what kind of quantum diseases that thing might be carrying.”
“If they’re quantum diseases,” Pidge asks, smirking as she backs away, “would we even be susceptible?”
“Interesting point. I’m sure your immune system doesn’t know what the heck to do with interdimensional microbes, but who’s to say what effect they’d have on you, if they can survive inside your body at all?” Matt hums. “You know what? No. We can debate this later. Just get back here, both of you.”
Pidge hesitates a moment too long. The spore rams the cracked glass one more time, breaking through into open air. Hunk, tugging weakly on Pidge’s arm, suddenly stiffens, his grip turning painful. The spore spins, amorphous droplets fanning out around it then melting back into the main body. Then it stops, pulses once like a beating heart, and launches itself at Hunk.
He screams, stumbling back as the creature darts around him, pressing at the seams in his armor—looking for a way in?
Doesn’t matter. Somewhere nearby, Matt and Coran are yelling. Pidge barely hears them. Her bayard hums in her hand as she studies the thing’s movement, studies Hunk’s flailing hands, waiting for the perfect time to strike, waiting…
She leaps, blade leaving a dark streak across her vision. The spore screams as she shocks it, and it falls to the ground in two wet, limp chunks.
Hunk gags.
“Puke later,” Pidge orders, hauling him away from the rift. “We have to go.”
The light changes.
A glance backward shows her an entire swarm of spores pouring out of the rift, blotting out the light and replacing it with a sickly violet glow that churns as the creatures slide over and around one another. Pidge’s steps slow, but only for a moment as Hunk charges past her and tows her behind him. He mutters to himself, eyes fixed ahead of him and not on the threat behind.
They haven’t even made it halfway to Matt and Coran when the spores descend, splitting into three streams. One spirals toward Matt and Coran, who spring to their feet, Matt raising his staff to meet the attack as Coran dives for the machine that should have been maintaining the barrier over the rift.
The second stream falls between them, a wall of spores ten feet high that blots out everything beyond except for the occasional flash of light when Matt fries another spore on the end of his staff.
There’s not much time to worry about the others, though; the third cluster, and the largest, heads straight for Pidge and Hunk, who opens fire with his bayard. Spores burst in tiny showers of viscous goop, but the swarm shows no signs of weakening. It just keeps coming, even when Pidge joins in, her bayard frying spores by the dozen.
Pidge is so focused on the assault coming from above that she doesn’t notice the spores creeping up on her from behind until they tighten around her foot like a noose. It yanks her backwards, and she cries out as she falls, striking her chin on the bare rock underfoot.
“Pidge!” Hunk cries, spinning toward her. She wants to tell him to focus on the enemy, but she can’t seem to breathe, and the spores—inexplicably clinging together in a thin, glossy black cord—are dragging her toward the light… toward the rift. She flips onto her stomach, clawing at the ground to try to catch herself. Her fingers find a fault in the stone and catch for an instant, and the spores give another great heave. Her fingers pop loose, and the rock tears a gash across her palm. She leaves a thin trail of blood on the ground as the spores drag her inch by inch toward the light and heat behind her.
With one last peremptory barrage for the watching spores, Hunk lunges toward her, catching her under the arms. The spores continue to pull at her, wrenching her hip until it feels like her leg is moments from being torn clean off. Screaming, she brings her bayard to bear, aiming carefully for the spore-cord just beyond her foot.
She fires, and her blade bites deep into the stone, slicing cleanly through the spores. The sudden release makes Hunk stumble, but he catches himself and hauls her up. She shakes her leg, dislodging the spores that still cling to her, and winces as she puts pressure on her foot.
Suddenly, she is aware of Matt’s voice in her ear.
“--okay? Pidge!”
“I’m fine,” she says, breathing hard. She slashes at a cluster of spores pressing close to her, then summons her shield to fend off several more. Hunk stands at her back, a warm, solid presence that’s more comforting than she cares to admit. The recoil of his gun thunders through her every time he pulls the trigger, but he stands firm, growling as he takes down more and more of the otherworldly creatures. “You okay out there?”
“Could be worse,” Coran says. “These things don’t seem particularly interested in us.”
“They only attack if we try to get closer to you,” Matt adds. “I think they’re trying to isolate you.”
Hunk snorts. “I think they’ve succeeded in isolating us.”
“We need to break through,” Pidge says. “The longer we stay here, the harder it’s going to be to hold them off.”
Hunk’s steady stream of fire cuts off for a moment, then resumes. “Okay… Okay. Stay close. I’ll try to get us closer to that wall and then we’ll… We’ll…”
“We’ll come up with something,” Pidge says. “Let’s move.”
Her mind is already spinning out ahead of her, trying to come up with a solution. She can’t see any chinks in the spore wall, and she can’t tell how thick it is, but she remembers the cord the creatures formed—solid, strong, and cohesive, despite being made up of distinct creatures. How do they hold together like that? Something on their skin? Do they secrete some kind of adhesive substance, maybe?
No, Pidge tells herself. Don’t think about how. Figure out a way through it, then speculate.
Problem is, she doesn’t know how to break through. Matt only has his staff, Coran a small laser pistol. Neither can put much of a dent in the swarm, and neither has ever been able to pilot any of the lions before. Maybe Green will respond to Matt if Pidge is in enough danger, the way Black initially responded to Keith. Maybe one of them will move on its own to help them.
Something slams into Hunk, halting his forward momentum. Pidge stumbles, thrown from her feet by the impact. Her knees scream as they hit the ground, and she has to dismiss her bayard to keep from smashing her faceplate against the rock. She raises her shield as the spores pounce on her moment of distraction, ignoring Hunk’s panicked apologies. Stand up. She has to stand up.
The second noose catches her by surprise. It closes around her wrist and yanks her forward, pulling her off her feet. She skids across the ground, only catching herself when she’s halfway back to the rift. Hunk lands beside her a moment later, cursing as his bayard skids ahead of him and vanishes in a flash of light.
Pidge trades her shield—useless in her current position face-down—for her bayard, but even as she takes aim another string of spores descends from above, lashing around her wrist and yanking her arm up so her bayard shoots harmlessly into the air.
She kicks, screaming as the things drag her closer to the blazing fissure, but with both hands caught there’s nothing she can do. A third strand encircles her waist, lifting her off the ground.
“Matt!” she screams, mind whiting out as the Quintessence glow of the rift envelopes her. “Help!”
A hand closes around her ankle as the physical world ceases to be. All is light and motion, her eyes flickering through a thousand fractured scenes before they adjust to the omnipresent glow of--
The rift.
It hits her as the spores evaporate. Without them, without the ground beneath her, the hand on her ankle is the only thing tying her to her body. She’s in a vast open space, falling—floating? She can’t tell which direction is up, whether there are any physical structures in this space or just the swirling golden clouds.
She thinks they’re clouds, anyway. They’re insubstantial, at least, though they glow with an intense light that reminds Pidge of the refined Quintessence they once found inside a Galra processing plant. Is that what this place is? Pure Quintessence, so dense it gathers in spurts and streams that churn around her like schools of fish swimming in a great, wide nothingness?
“Oh my god,” Hunk whispers. A second hand joins the first on Pidge’s foot, reminding her of what just happened. She twists, trying to look down (up?) at Hunk. It’s like the day the castle was taken over by the corrupted crystal and the gravity generators in Green’s hangar switched off. They drift, weightless, the jagged scar of the rift visible some distance beyond Hunk, so dark against the golden glow it looks almost black.
“What the fuck?” Pidge whispers. “What the fuck?”
Hunk turns a slow circle, his hands clinging to Pidge’s leg. He seems to be trying to climb her, which would be adorable if they weren’t floating in a weird yellow pocket dimension with—yep, those are rift spores drifting out among the Quintessence clouds. Watching. Pidge’s wrist still throbs from that last game of tug-o-war.
“Are we—? Did we just—?” Hunk’s eyes widen, and he twists so fast he momentarily lets go of Pidge, who yelps and flails and just manages to catch hold of his arm before they’re separated.
“Don’t let go of me, Hunk!” she cries. “If we get separated in here, we’re dead.”
Poor choice of words.
Hunk’s face goes ashen, his hands clamping down on Pidge’s arms. He yanks her toward him so hard their helmets smack together, leaving Pidge dizzy and disoriented. The clouds around them grow more agitated at the disturbance, a few tentative tendrils reaching out toward them.
Hunk squeaks, firing his jetpack to get them away from the tendrils. They shoot deeper into the void, twining through yellow vapor and clusters of dark violet spores that perk up at their approach, then flee as they barrel on through. Pidge loses track of herself, and of the dark spot in the sky that marks their way home.
“Hunk!” she cries, clinging to him as he pushes them faster. The sudden turns and the terrifying speeds white out the edges of Pidge’s vision, and all she catches are flashes of gold and violet and stars. Alien planets appear before her, and the castle-ship, and Green—only it’s not Green. It looks like her, but where there should be a familiar presence, warm like sunlight on leaves, sibilant like birdcall and rushing water, there’s only darkness and decay.
They speed on, and Pidge continues to see strange visions in the clouds flickering by. She sees herself, awash in the frosty glow of a computer screen. She sees her team, older than she remembers them, dressed in battered armor but laughing as they file out of their lions and greet each other with exuberant embraces. She sees her mother, dressed in strange clothing and wielding a Galra rifle, her face a mask of fury. She sees—
“Dad?”
The word tumbles out of her in a rush of surprise, and she twists in Hunk’s hold, tugging at his hands, screaming words she can’t hear. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, except that they have to go back. They have to find him. They have to find him.
They stop.
Pidge slams into Hunk, grunting as his shoulder digs into her stomach, and she wonders what she said that finally got through to him.
Then she hears him gasping for air, faint moans escaping him. He’s rigid, his eyes fixed on something up ahead, something that makes his hands shake and his breath come in uneven spurts. He gags, twists, and Pidge sees them.
Corpses.
Floating there, glassy-eyed and coated in too-bright blood in the center of a thick haze of yellow, are three corpses. She sees Hunk first, eyes closed, face peaceful. It might have seemed like he was asleep if not for the ragged hole through his chest. Beside him is Pidge herself, a scream frozen on her face, her gloves burned away and her palms stained black with char.
A sudden spike of heat and fear burrows into Pidge’s skin and she turns away, squeezing her eyes shut. She doesn’t want to see that. She doesn’t want to see who else died.
“It’s another reality,” she whispers. Hunk lets go of Pidge with one hand to claw at his helmet as he retches again, his eyes screwed shut, his hand shaking so bad he’s having trouble with the catch.
Pidge pries his hand away from his helmet. “No! Hunk, stop it!”
“I can’t,” he gasps. “I can’t, Pidge, I—I have to—That was us. Oh my god, that was us. We were dead and that was us and we’re dead, Pidge, we’re—”
“Stop,” she growls, shaking him as best she can with no leverage. “Hunk, listen to me. You have to breathe. You can’t take off your helmet here; we’re surrounded by pure Quintessence. There’s no telling what would happen if you breathed it in! You remember Coran’s story about Zarkon and Honerva?”
Hunk freezes, his eyes finding her face slowly. “You mean we’re turning into space zombies?”
“Not if you stay calm and work with me. Our suits will protect us, Hunk, but we’ve got to find our way back to the rift where we came in.” She has no idea if that’s possible, or if their armor provides any protection at all. But Hunk is listening to her; listening and breathing more steadily than he has since the spores first attacked. “Okay,” she says, pointing toward a patch of vapor that seems moderately thinner than the rest. “We came that way, so that’s the way we have to go. You with me, Hunk?”
“Uh...” His eyes drift to the side, and he starts to turn back toward the vision of their dead bodies.
Pidge grabs his helmet. “Don’t,” she says. He stares at her, wide-eyed. “Alternate realities, Hunk. It’s better not to know.”
He nods slowly, drawing in a shuddering breath. “Okay.”
Pidge smiles, and they turn themselves back the way they came, maneuvering with their jet packs. They grip each other’s forearms, lock eyes, and set off. As they do, Pidge notices a stream of gold coalescing on her right hand. Curious, she lifts her arm to study the mist.
The palm of her glove has a long tear through it, and the skin beneath is broken by a long, thin red stripe.
The rocks. She cut her hand on the rocks when she was fighting against the spores’ pull.
The Quintessence prods at the wound, and Pidge flails her hand, trying to shake it off, for all the good it does. The Quintessence streams into the wound like a sliver of pure ice, and Pidge draws in a sharp breath.
Hunk turns, concern in his eyes, and Pidge hides her hand behind her back. “Alternate realities,” she says brightly. “Nothing to worry about.”
Only when he turns forward again does Pidge risk a second glance at her hand. The wound is gone, the skin fresh and pale as if she never cut it at all. The Quintessence clings to her hand like a second skin, glowing softly.
Well that can’t be good.
“Anything?” Matt asks, breathless. The research site is in disarray, monitors smashed and sparking, sensors offline. Coran still has his palm-sized tablet, which acts as a kind of central collection point for data from their two dozen sensors, and he’s combing through the readouts as he hails the Castle of Lions to let them know what happened. Matt, meanwhile, is trying to fix the machinery that was damaged in the hope that the sensors are still in working order. If Coran can get more data, they stand a better chance of finding out where Hunk and Pidge went and how to get them back.
“Nothing,” Coran says.
Matt swears. His hands are shaking so bad he can barely hold the Altean multi-tool he’s using in his repairs, and he drops the wire three times before he manages to reattach it. Pidge is gone. Pidge is hurting. Those things took her and dragged her, screaming, into the rift. He can still hear it, that scream. His baby sister, crying out for him. Coran had to grab Matt around the waist when the spores finally retreated, or Matt would’ve dived right into the rift after her, never mind he has no better way to get back out than the paladins, never mind that he doesn’t even have their armor to protect himself.
Pidge needs him.
Swearing, Matt pounds on the side of the monitor, and finally—finally the power light flickers on. Coran gives a wordless cry of triumph as the sensors reconnect.
“It’s holding?” Matt asks, already scrambling to his feet. He barely waits for Coran’s nod before he takes off toward the shattered receiver that corresponds to the Quintessence array. Coran is already scanning for biorhythms, heat signatures, and comms signals—all dead or overloaded by the rift itself—and though they aren’t likely to pick up one specific Quintessential signature through the roar of energy pouring out of the hole in the universe, this sensor is more likely to respond to Hunk and Pidge than the ones for gravity, radiation, or temporal dilation.
“All right,” Coran breathes. His voice is soft, and Matt realizes belatedly that he’s speaking into the comms. “All right. Just—hurry.”
Matt rips the cover off the receiver and starts digging trough, trying to figure out what’s salvageable. “What was that?”
“Lance is on his way,” Coran says. “The rest of them are still trying to hold off Lotor, but the Red Lion is the fastest vessel we have, short of opening a wormhole directly to this location.”
“How long are we talking here?”
“Ten doboshes?” Coran guesses. “Perhaps longer.”
Matt grimaces. “Let’s just hope that’s fast enough.”
Hunk doesn’t know where he is.
He supposes, after charging off in a panic, that’s only to be expected, but it still sets his nerves on edge. There are no landmarks in this place, no magnetic poles for his suit’s analogue compass to align with, no signal from his lion or the castle-ship to orient the Altean positioning systems. There isn’t even gravity to give a definite answer on “up” and “down.” Just glowing yellow fog as far as the eye can see and the occasional shadows where swarms of rift spores pass.
“Are you sure we’re headed the right direction?” he asks. He knows he’s holding too tight to Pidge’s hand as they cruise through the fog, but she’s the only concrete thing in this place; if he loses her, reality itself might lose its shape.
Pidge eases up on her jets, letting Hunk catch up to her. She seems to know better than Hunk which way they came—or at least, she’s better at putting on a show of confidence—so he lets her set their course and their pace. They seem to be going too slowly for all Pidge’s talk of Quintessential overload and other dangers of extra-dimensional spaces, but that might just be Hunk’s anxiety nipping at his heels.
“As sure as I can be,” Pidge says, looking thoughtful. “Coran theorized that the rift isn’t a universe in its own right, only the primordial soup between realities, and that might make things like spacetime a little more fluid than we’re used to.”
Hunk isn’t sure he likes the sound of that. “So, what? We’re lost?”
Pidge stills, seeming to register her words for the first time. She cringes. “Uh… not exactly? More like… heading in exactly the right direction isn’t necessarily that important. Or possible.”
Hunk moans. “That’s not helping, Pidge.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
There’s nothing to do but to move on. They might be putting themselves even farther from escape without realizing it, but at least they aren’t just sitting there, waiting to die. The spores stay always in the corner of Hunk’s eye, dark shadows watching him with predatory intent. They make no move to attack, but Hunk still aches where they latched onto his arm and pulled him into the rift. What do they want with them, anyway? Why take them if not to eat them? Is this some kind of game to them? Do they get off on watching people search for an escape, watching them die, lost and alone?
His stomach churns, and he tries to make himself focus on the comms. They lost contact with Matt and Coran when they entered the rift, and though all the armor’s systems appear to be in working order, Hunk isn’t sure he trusts anything in this place. He fiddles with the manual controls on the side of his helmet as they move. It would be easier if he could see what he was doing, or if he had two hands, but things being what they are…
There’s definitely power to the comms, but even when he boosts the signal, all he gets is a burst of static. Probably that’s because Altean tech can’t transmit through the border of their reality—but there’s a chance that the rift only distorts the frequency. If he can compensate for that—if the distortion is small enough that his suit is able to compensate for that—then maybe they can reestablish a connection.
“Hello?” he calls, keeping his touch on the frequency dial light. “Coran? Matt? Can you hear us?” He waits for a count of three, then tries again. “Coran? Matt? Anyone there?”
Nothing.
Hunk twists the dial and tries again, wishing he’d spent more time studying the comms network. He doesn’t know how sensitive to fluxuations in frequency these devices are.
A flash of blue catches Hunk’s eye, and he glances toward it, his mind still turning through the inner workings of the comms, trying to gauge how quickly he dares cycle through test frequencies. It would be best if Matt and Coran keep up a steady transmission on their end, but Hunk isn’t sure how long they’ve already been in here. More than five or ten minutes, and the others might have given up on reestablishing communication. But if the distortion is more than a couple of megahertz—or, well, tremph, the Altean unit—then Hunk could be at this for hours.
He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he stares at the figure in the distance for a good fifteen seconds before he realizes what he’s seeing.
“Lance?” Hunk flips around, firing his jets to slow Pidge’s forward momentum. “Lance!”
Pidge’s head whips around. “Lance?” she demands. “Where?”
“There!” Hunk points toward the figure. White armor, blue accents. He keeps drifting in and out of sight behind clouds of Quintessence and swarms of spores, but there’s no mistaking that armor. “Lance! Wait, quiznak, I’m on the wrong frequency. Pidge--”
“Lance!” Pidge bellows, the sound loud enough to startle a cluster of nearby spores, which go momentarily spiky before they dart off. “Lance, behind you!”
Lance turns slowly. He’s drifting, scanning the rift around him for signs of Hunk and Pidge, but gives no sign that he heard Pidge’s call.
“Something’s wrong,” Pidge says.
Yeah, no kidding. Hunk works himself up to a snarky retort, only to have the words stolen from his lungs when a patch of fog obscures Lance from view. When it passes, he’s gone.
“No!”
Pidge swears, taking off in Lance’s direction. Hunk flails, then gets himself under control and adds his jets to hers, eyes sweeping the glow around them as they hurtle across the open space. Lance has to be somewhere. He can’t just disappear— can he? Just how fluid is spacetime in here?
But there’s nothing. No fleck of blue, no burn of jets, no voice on the comms. It’s hard to judge distance in here, but they slow somewhere near where they saw Lance, by Hunk’s best estimate.
“Where’d he go?” Hunk asks. “Do you think…?”
He’s not sure how to finish the sentence, with every option equally bleak.
“I… I don’t know, Hunk.” Pidge edges closer to him, and he catches her other arm to steady her. “Maybe… Maybe that wasn’t really him. You’ve been seeing the other realities in the clouds?”
Hunk wishes he weren’t. As if seeing his own dead body isn’t bad enough, he’s caught glimpses of other scenes that might as well have been torn straight out of his nightmares. Monstrous creatures, horrific wounds, armies a hundred times anything Zarkon could mount.
“He was here,” Hunk protests. Even to himself, the words sound weak. “He looked real.”
“Nothing looks real to me right now.” Pidge straightens, glances around, then takes off at an angle back toward their original trajectory. They’d probably be just as well off picking a direction at random.
Minutes pass. Hours, maybe. Nothing changes, or maybe everything does. The rift is so nebulous Hunk isn’t entirely certain there’s a difference. They fly long enough that Hunk’s mouth runs dry and his throat aches from the constant calls for his friends. The numbers on his comms display climb slowly, but the static never breaks.
Eventually Pidge begins to flag, her breath turning shallow and quick, as though she’s just run a marathon.
“I’m fine,” she grunts when Hunk mentions it. “Just—keep calling. I think I managed to get some of my scanners back on line. Not sure how accurate they are, but… Oh my god. Is that…?”
She trails off, and Hunk’s heart leaps into his throat. “Pidge?”
“This way!” Pidge cries, tucking and turning like an Olympic swimmer—except, of course, there’s no wall to push off here, and with Hunk’s jets still firing at a different angle, they swing wide for a moment, Hunk’s shoulder screaming as the force tries to rip Pidge away from him.
He holds on, and they slam together, leaving Pidge winded and Hunk dizzy. Static still buzzes in his ears.
Shaking her head, Pidge takes off again without a word, plunging through clouds and spores until, up ahead, they spot it: a great, black scar in the sky. A crack in reality itself.
The rift.
Hunk could cry. “Is that--?”
“Hell yeah it is! Let’s go!”
They’re halfway there before Hunk’s mind starts working again. He pulls Pidge to a stop. “Wait! Lance is still in here.”
“No he’s not. That was an alternate reality, same as everything else.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Pidge hesitates.
“Yeah,” Hunk says. “That’s what I thought. We can’t leave him in here, Pidge.”
“And how are we supposed to find him? How are we supposed to find this again afterwards?” She gestures helplessly at the rift. Hunk can see it in her eyes. The fear, yes, but also the determination.
Heart hammering, he meet her eyes and lets go of her arm. “Go,” he says. “I’ll find Lance. You can come back for us both.”
“Are you crazy? You can’t—”
Something bowls into him, tumbling him end over end, and the static in his ears builds to a crescendo. He hears screaming underneath the roar, but he can’t tell where it’s coming from. All around him is black. Black and violet and a ceaseless, furious motion like a billion maggots writhing all around him.
Spores.
Hunk gives a choked cry, flailing. He summons his bayard, but they swarm over the surface of it, ripping it from his grasp before he can pull the trigger. They press at his neck, at his visor, whispering with a sound on the edge of reason, calling to him.
A streak of green slices through the darkness. “Hunk!” Pidge cries. He can see her now, fighting her way toward him, slashing at the spores that keep pouring in, more agitated than they were before (and why now? Why only attack now?)
Pidge’s hand breaks through the writhing mass, a blessing wrapped in the golden glow of Quintessence, and Hunk latches on, screaming in terror as Pidge spins and fires her bayard at the rift. It plunges into the surface like the rift is a pool of ink, its glow vanishing abruptly, and Hunk fears the worst.
The line snaps taut.
The first jerk forward comes so suddenly, and there are still so many spores writhing against his armor, that Hunk almost loses his hold on Pidge. But with one last, desperate surge of strength, he pulls himself toward her, grimacing as she shouts out in pain, and wraps himself around her. They plunge together into the rift—
—and land hard on bare rock.
“Pidge!”
Matt’s voice breaks through the ringing in Hunk’s ears. With his head spinning as bad as it is, Hunk doesn’t dare sit up, can hardly open his eyes without nausea rising in his throat. Thin, strong hands grip him under the arms, hauling him backwards, away from the flickering light.
“What—?” Hunk breaks off as his dry throat makes itself known. The coughs that overtake him are weak, but they make his whole body protest. He doesn’t fight the hands that hold him down when he tries to move.
“Shh,” Coran whispers. “You’re all right. Just take it easy.”
Groaning as the contents of his stomach try to make a reappearance, Hunk cracks his eyes open. Somehow, despite the world being far darker than what it was inside the rift—dark enough that Hunk has to blink a few times before he can pick out any details—his head still pounds at every flicker of light, most noticeably the glow of the rift behind him.
“Coran?”
Coran leans over him, smiling sadly. There are tight lines around his eyes—and are those tears on his cheeks? He glances back toward the rift, holding his breath like he’s waiting for something, then sighs and turns back to Hunk. “How are you feeling?”
“Like somebody just used me as a chew toy,” Hunk grumbles. He forces himself upright, against the better judgment of the rest of his body, and glances over to where Matt and Pidge form a tangle of indistinguishable limbs. In the relative darkness, they look like a single multi-limbed creature of pale and dark.
“You’re alive,” Matt sobs, clinging to Pidge and repeating the words over and over.
Hunk’s vision blurs, and he groans, barely catching himself before he hits the ground.
“All right,” Coran says. “Take it easy now. You two deserve a good long rest after...” He hesitates, and Hunk fights a nonsensical urge to giggle.
Yeah, he thinks, I’m not exactly sure what to call that, either.
With Coran’s help, Hunk manages to gain his feet, though he sways dangerously and nearly ends up right back on the ground. He feels the rift behind him, watching him with a hunger that’s entirely too intelligent to be safe.
The Yellow Lion purrs a question in Hunk’s head, tentative and afraid. Hunk reaches out on instinct to reassure him, and the force of Yellow’s relief leaves him feeling gutted. He lifts his head, scanning the horizon for the lion’s familiar bulk.
Three lions stare back at him, and dread coils in his gut.
“Lance.”
Beside him, Coran stiffens. Hunk turns to him, fluttering heart rattling in its cage.
“Lance,” he says again. “Where is he? Is he here? Is he—oh, God, he came after us, didn’t he?”
“Hunk, he—” Matt cuts off at a sharp gesture from Coran, who ducks his head to look Hunk in the eyes.
“Why do you ask?”
Hunk jerks back—and, oh god, that’s a mistake. His head pounds, images of the other realities pressing at him. Images of Lance, alone in the rift, looking for him. Hunk left him behind—his best friend. “What do you mean why do I ask?” he demands , edging toward hyperventilation. “That’s his lion, isn’t it?”
Coran lifts his head toward the lions, frowning. He glances toward Pidge and Matt. “Quintessence overload,” he says. “It’s known to cause hallucinations.”
“No,” Pidge says. She sounds halfway past woozy, teetering on the edge of incoherent. “No, Hunk’s right. Green, Yellow, Red—like a traffic light!”
For some reason, that only makes Coran look more confused, and Hunk looks back at the lions. They aren’t seeing things… are they? Red looks real—but so did everything in the rift.
“We saw him in there,” Hunk says weakly. “He was right there. We have to go back.”
But as he tries to pull away from Coran, the vertigo hits him hard. He stumbles, his vision going dark.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Coran says. “Unless it’s into a bed. We’ll figure this all out when you’re feeling better.”
“But...”
He should protest. He should argue. Lance is… Lance… is…
Hunk can’t remember what Lance is. Something claws at his throat, but it’s a distant sensation, and he can’t remember why it matters. He’s so, so tired.
He loses track of himself for a moment, and when the world reasserts itself, he’s lying on something hard and flat, red and gold clouds passing by overhead. Coran and Matt talk in low voices, words slurring together somewhere beyond Hunk’s comprehension.
Yellow purrs in his mind. It will be okay, cub. He doesn’t sound very sure of himself.
The shadows close in, restless, like living things, and as Hunk’s consciousness fades, it seems to him that someone else has joined their procession. Someone with cold hands and eyes that leak golden embers. It’s there for only an instant, and then the darkness sweeps in and washes the watchful eyes away.