Free The Midnight Mercenary by Cerberus Jones Page A

swimming straight for her – his claws stretched out, his mouth split into a grin, and those red eyes locked onto the guiding string dangling beneath her feet. He turned his head, and she saw that gills had opened along his neck.
    He doesn’t even need to hold his breath! He’s probably more dangerous underwater than he was on dry land! And it’s me he’s angry with.
    But as Krskn reached for the string, the entire chamber was hit by a shock wave, and he faltered. In that split second, Amelia realised the tremor must have come from the gateway. It was still open. And there was nothing between this chamber and the gateway itself.
    Amelia remembered the fear in Tom’s face when he’d had to walk down the stairs to the gateway the day that Grawk had arrived. And that was after the wormhole had passed and the gateway had closed. He’d told them that the gateway was never safe, that anything could come through, that they could be sucked into the Nowhere and lost forever.
    And if she’d had any doubt that Tom was telling the truth, the flash of alarm in Krskn’s eyes convinced her otherwise.
    He lashed his tail again, reaching for the string of Amelia’s bubble. It was almost in his hand when a deep, juddering noise boomed through the waters, and a flurry of bubbles rushed out from the gateway tunnel. Instead of grabbing the string, Krskn turned his head to look. It was that hesitation which saved Amelia, because the same moment, all the water was sucked back out of the cavern.
    It was unimaginably violent. Even faster than the chamber had flooded, the water was torn away – and by a force far greater than Earth’s gravity or the caves’ intense magnetism. This was the vacuum of space itself, or not space – the terrible wrenching power unleashed when space was twisted open.
    Krskn was nothing to this power. Amelia saw one last glimpse of his beautiful red eyes wide with horror before he was dragged away by the current and vanished through the gateway.

It was James and Tom who got them all out of the containment fields. They couldn’t find Krskn’s silver containment tube; it had probably been sucked through the gateway with him. And without that, Tom couldn’t just reverse the fields and set them free instantly. Instead, he had a long consultation with Control while James paced around the empty chamber, wordlessly examining the glassed rooms, the glowing spheres, the size of the vaulted ceiling above them. Every now and then he just shook his head.
    When Tom got back, he was carrying a big bottle of white vinegar and a bag of salt.
    â€˜We have to erode the fields manually,’ Amelia heard him say.
    â€˜Huh?’ James stopped studying the carvings on the pillar closest to Amelia, and turned.
    Tom handed him an old rag. ‘You add vinegar, sprinkle on salt, and scrub until the membrane wears away.’
    Len frothed and foamed anew in his field. Understandably, he was very unhappy about the prospect of being saved with salt and vinegar. James, on the other hand, was equally wary about bursting a bubble filled with toxic green mucus, so in the end Tom had to work on Len, while James started on Amelia.
    It was the nicest time she’d spent with her brother in ages. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her prison, unable to talk back, while James, still sore and swollen from the burns, chatted away to her as he rubbed salt into the bubble. She could tell he was embarrassed by what had happened that night. It took him ages to meet her eye, but it didn’t matter. He was working hard to cheer her up. He was taking care of his little sister, just like he would have done a year ago, before things went so wrong with him.
    When he had finally worn a hole big enough for Amelia to crawl through, she hugged him tightly.
    â€˜It’s so good to see you, James,’ she said, and she knew he understood what she meant.
    Then Tom limped past, handed her