Page 10 of Spectral Seas (Spectral Worlds #2)

T HE BITTER TASTE of metal filled Abby’s mouth. The thin towel he’d pressed against his face was of little use filtering out the poison of the spreading gas. Again, he slammed the emergency release button, but the door remained closed. He pounded his palm against the windowpane, appealing to Uhggwa across the airlock. At first the Viridian prince appeared to do nothing. Then he began jabbing a long-clawed finger toward the side opposite the panel.

Abby looked to his side—a manual intercom. He switched it on and the translation of Uhggwa’s voice blurted through.

“You can’t open the doors,” said Uhggwa.

To take his hand from his from mouth, to steal breath enough to respond with words, could mean a lethal inhalation of gas. Abby simply shrugged. Another Viridian joined the prince with a hazmat suit in hand. Uhggwa grabbed the suit and appeared to speak. The digitized voice followed, “The door is locked as a security measure. The chemical sensors have detected a breach in atmospheric integrity. There is a canister to your left. The canister contains sealant. Abernathy Squire must take the canister of sealant to the source of the breach. The exhaust fans will then cleanse the habitat, and the door will unlock.”

Abby followed Uhggwa’s directions. On the wall to the left of the door was an inset glass compartment containing a tall white canister. He’d seen it before, but assumed it was a fire extinguisher. With his free hand, Abby opened the compartment door, flipped off the release valve’s safety catch, then pulled the canister from the case.

The towel he held over his mouth prohibited him from speaking aloud but he could still communicate with Leta through chin-chip. “ The mist is covering the entire floor ,” he said. “We have to go room to room to find the origin of the breach.”

Leta nodded. She was bracing herself with a hand on the wall. “ We’ll have to find it quickly ,” she said. “I’m getting dizzy.”

Abby stepped from the hallway into the common room and, with the slight flex of his brow, engaged his ocular implants. The chairs, cabinets, and bookcase on the far wall instantly outlined with green and gold augments. But the scan was unnecessary because the source of the gas was obvious. The gas cascaded from the spine of a huge book on an upper shelf in a rapid waterfall flow down to the floor below.

Abby darted across the room with the nozzle of the canister aimed toward the breach.

“Abby,” Leta called aloud, and from behind him came a crash.

He spun his head around to discover her collapsed onto the floor, submerged in the mossy–colored pooled cloud.

He directed his attention back to the breach and squeezed the trigger of the canister to release the pressurized sealant. Foam spewed out from the nozzle onto the shelves, it bubbled and oozed over the breach, mingling with the gas and dripping to the floor beside it. Abby sprayed the shelf again and the breach reduced to a small bubbling fount. He squeezed the trigger a third then a fourth time; and the gas stopped flowing.

The breach sealed, he tossed the canister to the floor and rushed to Leta, her face hidden beneath the thick swirling mist. He let go of the towel covering his mouth, dropped to his knees, and lifted her up onto the white sofa beside them, propping her up straight.

“Leta,” he said aloud. But she was unresponsive. “Leta,” he said again, this time shaking her by her shoulders. “Leta.”

A sharp pain struck his chest, erupting to a sudden, violent, uncontrollable cough. Then another, and another. As the coughing worsened, the accompanying pain grew stronger. In the brief instant he’d moved Leta from the floor to the sofa, he’d taken in a lung full of gas. His chest tightened and spasmed. There was no more air to cough, no air to breathe. He was drowning. The room spun, his body weakened, and his legs gave way. He fell to one knee, then to his side, bracing himself with his hands to keep his head above the mist.

Oxygen deprivation muddled his mind. Augments flickered on and off. The mossy gas, backlit by the light of the airlock, wafted high toward the ceiling. He was there, but he wasn’t. The hallway appeared to stretch out, the airlock door fell away. Then the blurred silhouettes of two figures appeared.

A loud roar filled the room and the mist thickened to a creamy fog and swirled upward, toward the ventilation ducts.

One of the silhouettes kneeled over him and placed something on his mouth .

Instantly, the pain in his lungs sharpened as he fought to breathe, and a surge of searing heat coursed through him. His chest, his arms, his head, all were afire.

Then the world went dark.

~*~