The empty pocket of the outer void had teeth.
Ten miles above the Spire apex, the Cosmic Rift had transformed into a raging, swirling vortex of black gravity.
It wasn’t pulling with wind.
It was pulling with the raw, twisted curve of space-time itself. A huge gravity drain tube created by the dying rift as it tried to draw the five-hundred-ton Harmonic Core into the deep pit before its boundaries collapsed forever.
The physics of a collapsing flat rift were governed by pure heat-powered suction.
When a tear between dimensions begins to heal, the boundary layers contract rapidly. That created an extreme pressure differential between the space-folding voids.
On one side was the mortal air of Aethel-Terra. On the other was the total, negative pressure of the non-Euclidean deep pit.
“The suction force is speeding up at forty pounds per square foot per second,” Toby Karr shouted over the howling magnetic hum, his hands flying across the electric-shock sensor terminals.
