Page 92 of My Tiny Giant

Shrugging his shoulders, shoving with his elbows, and kicking his knees, he kept crawling through the opening while it was closing all around him.

The added pressure compressed his suit, squeezing him inside it. He popped his head out of the opening and freed his arms. Pressing his elbows into the outer surface of the membrane, he heaved himself up, straining not to drop the core.

The cut tissues compressed him in a frantic spasm that knocked the air out of him. With his chest squeezed, he was unable to draw another breath. He was suffocating, with enough oxygen in his suit’s tanks to last for hours yet.

Darkness floated on the fringes of his awareness, dizziness made his head spin, disorienting him. With a last desperate struggle, he yanked his body out of the wound of the Mind, letting the core slip from his fingers. He grasped after it with both hands.

Then the impossibly bright light around him went off as darkness claimed him.

* * *

I WAITED, AND WAITED , and waited... Trapped inside the bone cage of the skeleton, I couldn’t get to Agan physically. Yet my heart was with him, leaving a gaping hole the size of the ocean inside my chest while he was gone.

The red string, my only physical connection with Agan, floated in front of me, disappearing into the maze of bone and bright light ahead. He was out there, somewhere on the other end of it. What if something happened to him? Without a communication device, there was no way for me to find out.

I tugged at the string carefully, and it gave slack easily. I folded the slack in half, holding it loosely, ready to release at a slightest pull. But there was no pull. No movement, at all.

What could’ve happened to Agan? A million things that I couldn’t even speculate about because I didn’t have enough knowledge about the Mind and its biology. No one did.

I tugged on the string again, then again. It came in easily, letting me believe I was unwinding it from the spool. After one more tug, I felt a slight resistance—the rope ended. The other end of it was attached to the empty spool in the pouch on Agan’s suit.

With the rope loosely held between my fingers, I waited for any tug from the other end, measuring the time with the beats of my heart that thundered loudly in my chest, its sound echoing in my ears.

Nothing.

No tug indicating movement away from me.

No slack showing movement toward me.

Absolutely nothing at all on the other end...

I pulled. The resistance was there, but the rope gave. I pulled harder, dragging the weight attached to the other end toward me.

Agan . What had happened to him?

The resistance wasn’t strong, possibly just the weight of his body but nothing else. And that scared me even more because it meant he must be motionless.

I pulled the rope faster and faster. My fear threatened to erupt into panic at the thought of what I might find on the other end of the string.

Finally, his dark silhouette cut through the light ahead.

With a few more yanks at the rope, Agan floated through the opening of the tunnel and into my arms.

His body was limp, his eyes closed, his face looked peaceful behind the slightly tinted material of the helmet.

Agan!

I gave him a light shake. His head lolled inside the helmet. He didn’t open his eyes. His arms fell away from his chest, releasing a golf-ball-sized sphere of white-pink light he’d been clutching.

The serene expression on his face sent a chill of dread down my spine. It spread through my heart, threatening to paralyze me with terror.

I heaved short, rugged breaths, fighting the horror of losing him that descended over me, thick and suffocating.

This couldn’t be the end.

You’re still on the mission, Lieutenant Nowak.

I needed to get out of here before I completely lost my composure. I had to get Agan back to the surface.