Aurora Burning

by Amie Kaufman

  “I flew in the direction of the probe trail like I was supposed to.”

  “Yeah, but…” His eyes grow wider at the sight on the central monitor. “Maker’s breath, what is THAT?”

  Up on the console, rendered in high-def, is a holographic image of the…well, I’ve got no damn idea what it is, honestly. It’s about a thousand kilometers across, which sounds big until you sit through a three-hour astrometrics lecture on how brain-breakingly big space actually is. It sort of looks like a whirlpool—strange, multicolored-gray energy spinning in an endless spiral. It’s very pretty. But judging by the fit my controls are throwing, it’s also very dangerous.

  “Where did that come from?” Fin demands.

  “It popped up in front of us, like, five minutes ago.”

  “Why are we still flying toward it?” he demands, slightly panicked.

  “Because we can’t stop.”

  “What?” he asks, abandoning slightly panicked for totally.

  “I tried to turn around. I tried to cut our engines. I even punched the console like Cat used to do when she was annoyed. The flight computer just yelled at me.”

  The ship shakes again, way more violent this time. Shamrock falls off his perch. Finian blinks around the bridge, frowning up at the PA speakers.

  “…What’s with the electropop?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend you’re not a Brittneee fan, de Seel.”

  “We’re getting sucked into a spatial anomaly at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second with no engine or nav control. Shouldn’t we have a metric buttload of alerts screaming about that? Sirens and whatnot?”

  “I turned them off.”

  “…WHAT?”

  I swivel my chair, release the Mute button on my console. Brittneee’s sing-along-able tones are drowned out as the bridge is plunged into a deafening cacophony of warnings from the flight computer.

  “WARNING: POWER CORE FLUCTUATIO—”

  “NAVIGATION SYSTEMS OFFLINE, REP—”

  “ENERGY SURGE IN ANOMALY CORE, RECOM—”

  I stab the button again.

  Brittneee asks Finian if he’d like to Get It.

  “See?” I say. “Much more relaxing.”

  “Great Maker, we’re going to die…,” Fin declares.

  “No, we’re not,” says a voice.

  My carefully cultivated facade of chill in the face of certain death slips away as I look past Fin and catch sight of her standing on the bridge threshold.

  “Auri!” I breathe.

  I rise to meet her, to throw a hug around her, just overjoyed to see her back on her feet. I have no idea what she went through in the Echo. I know her brain wave activity was off the charts—Zila said she and Kal were living weeks of time in just minutes. But the look on her face, her pose, everything about her…

  She’s changed.

  I can feel it when I look into her mismatched eyes. When I study her body language. Somehow, even the air around her. She’s…alive. Cracking with purpose, with power, so much so that just the sight of her raises goose bumps on my skin. Kal looms at her shoulder, always just a whisper away. Zila is behind them, eyes fixed on the anomaly we’re being rapidly drawn toward.

  “You know what this is, Stowaway?” Finian asks.

  Aurora stares at the whirlpool, its light reflected in her right iris. For a second, I swear I can see the light inside her, pulsing in response.

  “It’s a gateway,” she whispers.

  “To where?” I ask.

  “Not where.” Auri shakes her head. “What.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll bite. A gateway to what?”

  She draws a deep breath into her lungs.

  Her right eye glimmers like a tiny sun.

  “The Weapon,” she says.

  * * *

  • • • • •

  We plunged into the anomaly forty seconds later, just as the opening beats of Disasterpiece’s drunken-hookup dubpunk classic “Last Heartbeat in the Club” started pulsing through the PA. They’re not as good as Brittneee, but hey, no one is.

  Anyway, I’m pleased to report we didn’t die.

  The colorscape of the galaxy shifted from the Fold’s monochrome to every shade of the rainbow, crashing right into my head. As we crossed the breach, the Zero bucking beneath us, I caught sight of Aurora standing in the center of the bridge—hands held out, eye burning like a beacon—steady as a rock while the rest of us clung on for dear life. I got the distinct feeling that if she hadn’t been there with us, we’d have all been ripped into disappointed subatomic pieces by the gateway. As it was, plunging through it felt a little like getting hit in the head with a naked astrophysicist.

  Slightly amusing.

  Definitely weird.

  But mostly painful.

  And now we’re on the other side. I’m guessing the anomaly was some kind of FoldGate—hidden, semi-sentient, waiting for someone like Aurora to trigger it into opening. The alerts have calmed down to almost normal levels. I’ve killed the dubpunk—the moment seems to demand a little gravitas. Because as we all gather around the central holographic display, we can finally see the origin point of the probe. The place this journey—Aurora’s, all of ours—started, countless millennia ago. The point in space where the Eshvaren made their last, desperate gamble to stop the resurrection of the Ra’haam.

  It’s a planet.

  An utterly dead planet.

  Lifeless. Waterless. It hangs in space, framed against the soft light of a pulsing red dwarf star, barren and alone.

  “What is this place?” I whisper.

  “Their home,” Aurora says, her eyes on the display. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

  “The Ancients,” Kal says reverently.

  “Eshvaren,” Finian breathes.

  Aurora sighs. “I wish you could have seen it like it was.”

  “I can detect no tectonic activity,” Zila says, looking over her scopes. “The core is frozen solid. Atmosphere almost nonexistent. No life signs.” She looks around the bridge, dark eyes finally settling on Aurora. “Not even microbial.”

  “This is the place,” Auri says, her voice like steel. “Where they made the probe. Where they made the Weapon. I can…see them. Feel them.” Her brow creases, and she presses her fingers to her temple. “Their echoes. Their voices.”

  She looks at Kal, reaches for his hand.

  “I know where we need to go.”

  Kal nods, eyes glittering. “I would follow you to the end of all things, be’shmai.”

  The rest of us look tired, wired, halfway between shabby and comatose. As usual, Kaliis Idraban Gilwraeth doesn’t have a single silver hair out of place on his head. But there’s something different about him, too.

  Something I can’t quite put my finger on.

  “What happened in the Echo?” I ask, looking between them.

  “Was your training successful?” Zila says. “Can you wield the Weapon?”

  Auri looks out on the dead world below us. I can feel fire in her. A heat, burning like a sun. But also…uncertainty?

  She looks at Kal. Squares her jaw, curls her fists.

  “Let’s just find it first.”

  * * *

  • • • • •

  We touch down seventeen minutes later, after a frictionless decent into the atmo-free skies above the Eshvaren world. Zila politely suggested she be allowed to take the controls—well, as polite as Zila gets anyway. After my time at the stick, having somebody who knows what they’re doing flying us was a welcome relief.

  There are no oceans on this world anymore, no continents, but we touch down somewhere near its south pole. Zila brings us in for a perfect landing: a gentle thump and a soft navcom ping are the only indicators that we’ve landed at all.

  “You
’re just showing off now,” I smile.

  “Yes. But do not fall in love with me, Scarlett. I will only break your heart.”

  I laugh and throw her a wink. “I’m too tall for you, remember?”

  Her lips curve in a small smile, and she tucks one dark curl behind her ear. I notice that her stare lingers on me even though she’d usually look away.

  Interesting…

  Soon we’re gathered in the docking bay, gearing up. The Zero is equipped with enough enviro-suits for the whole squad. They’re bulky, ugly, scandalously drab—fitted for us personally and neatly stored in lockers marked with our names. Zila’s assisting Fin with pulling his over his exosuit. Auri and Kal are helping each other change with the casual ease of people who are absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent sleeping with each other now.

  Lucky girl.

  Of course, my musings on the extracurricular activities of Mr. Perfect Hair and Little Miss Trigger are brought to a crashing halt at the sight of Tyler’s locker. One glance at his name stenciled on the metal is enough to make my stomach drop and roll inside me. Despite where we are, the scope of all we’re doing, I find myself worried sick again. I know we’re saving the damn galaxy here, that we’re doing exactly what he’d order us to do. But he’s my twin brother, and I’m still wondering, hoping, praying he’s okay.

  Fin seems to pick up on it, sliding a little closer, trying to ease the tension.

  “Good thing these suits are heavy-duty,” he jokes, nodding at the spectrograph beside the bay door. “Definitely not bikini weather out there.”

  “Shame.” I smile weakly in response. “I look amazing in a two-piece.”

  “Hey, what a coincidence, me too.”

  But it’s not his strongest effort, and as he speaks, he glances at Tyler’s locker. Swallows hard.

  “He’s gonna be okay, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I sigh.

  “Seriously,” Fin says, looking around to the others for backup. “After we’re done here, we’ll get him back, Scar.”

  Kal bows, which is Syldrathi for a nod. “I vow it on my honor.”

  “No question,” Auri agrees, steel in her voice.

  “I know this is difficult, Scarlett,” Kal continues, looking at me intently with those picture-pretty eyes. “But we are on the right path here. Of all people, Tyler Jones would understand that.”

  I buck up a bit, stand a little taller. Buoyed by these people around me, these squaddies who’ve become my friends, friends who’ve become my family.

  I sniff and nod, drag my helmet down into place. “I know he would.”

  Fin pats me a little awkwardly on the shoulder.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go find this damn shooter.”

  We load ourselves into the airlock, and soon enough we’re stepping out onto the freezing surface of the Eshvaren planet. I glance at Aurora, remembering the last time we did this, on Octavia III. She was a nervous wreck back then, struggling to come to grips with who she was. But now she takes the lead, marching across the crumbling rock. The landscape is gray and lifeless. The arctic wind is blowing at hundreds of kilometers an hour, but the atmo is so thin, it’s barely a breeze.

  Even the air in this place is dead.

  Kal and Zila carry disruptor rifles, me and Fin walking with hands on our pistols. There’s no real sense of danger here as we follow Auri. Nothing close to the strange, otherworldly hostility we met on Octavia III. I’m struck by it then, how unfair that is—that the Ra’haam got to go on, and the race that gave everything to cut them away ended like this. I feel sad. Small. Cold despite my suit.

  We march for twenty minutes, up a steady rise, until finally we find ourselves on a bluff overlooking an impact crater: a massive, circular indentation in the skin of this dead world, stretching to the horizon. But in the center of it, I’m astonished to see—

  “A doorway,” Finian whispers.

  At least, that’s what it looks like. It’s huge—at least ten kilometers across. Open like a mouth to the sky, it leads into a vast, dark passage beyond. The surface of this planet is a wasteland, but the tunnel interior is virtually untouched by the elements.

  “Should it…be open?” I ask, uncertain.

  I glance at Aurora sidelong, feel the tension coming off her in waves.

  “Be’shmai?” Kal asks, looking at her intently.

  “This is where the crystal city was, Kal,” she says, her voice not quite her own. “This is…”

  She shakes her head.

  “All of you. Hold on to me, to each other.”

  She offers her hands, still staring into the abyss below us. Kal takes her right one, and I take her left, holding tight. Zila grabs Kal, and Finian locks fingers with me, giving me a small squeeze of reassurance.

  “You okay, Stowaway?” he asks Auri.

  “Just hold on,” she replies.

  I feel it tingling on the back of my neck. A power, a rush, a greasy tang in the air. And without warning, I’m lifted off my feet, up into the colorless sky.

  I gasp, tempted to shriek girlishly for a bit. And, looking at Aurora, at her mouth pressed thin, her eye burning with blinding white light, I realize she’s the one doing this—moving us with nothing but the power of her mind.

  When the Ra’haam attacked us on Octavia III, she lifted us to safety then, too. Kept the Ra’haam at bay. But she was barely in control of it—I got the feeling she wasn’t even really herself, just a puppet for the power inside her. But I can see, I can feel, she’s herself now. This is Aurora, wielding the gift the Eshvaren gave her like a master. Lifting us up like we’re kids’ toys, over the blasted landscape, down into the crater, and then into that long, dark tunnel beyond.

  “Wow,” Finian says, watching Aurora’s face.

  “I concur,” Zila murmurs.

  We move into the tunnel, accelerating under the force of Auri’s will. I can feel that each of us is having a time of it, each reacting to this display of newfound power in a different way. Kal takes it best—he probably got a taste of this in the Echo, after all. I can feel his adoration as he looks at his girl, admiration at how far she’s come. But again, I get the feeling he’s uncertain somehow. About what, I can only guess.

  Zila is looking at Auri with something like fascination. Taking readings on her uniglass. That big brain of hers in overdrive. Fin is a little more gobsmacked, and I’m right there with him. Less than a day ago, Auri was a tiny, frightened kid, afraid of using this thing inside her for fear of hurting the people around her. Now she wields it like she was born to it. Like this is exactly what she’s supposed to be doing.

  We leave the surface behind. The light of the red dwarf we’re orbiting fades, but the light from Auri’s eye illuminates the tunnel before us. The shaft is kilometers across—so big I can’t see all the edges. The stone is perfectly smooth, beautiful patterns woven by the layers of sedimentary rock we’re cutting through. My enviro-suit warns me the temperature is falling, gravity decreasing, our speed climbing. I look at Auri, a little worried, but she seems totally in control, determination written in the lines of her face.

  The walls change from rock to rainbow-colored crystal. The temperature outside our suits is now a hundred below. I can hear my heart thumping against my ribs, and the tunnel stretches on so long and empty all around us as we float downward into the core of this dead world that I’m almost about to say something, I’m almost about to speak when—

  “Great Maker…,” Finian breathes.

  Before us, the tunnel opens out into a massive chamber. A giant hollow space, carved far beneath the surface of the Eshvaren world, blanketed with the dust of a million years. I can see bizarre structures made out of the same crystal that lines the walls, their purpose totally unknowable. The sense of space in here, the utter alienness, is almost frightening. Each of us looks around in awe and
wonder at those impossible shapes, glimmering and shifting in Aurora’s light.

  “What is this place?” I whisper.

  “A…workshop?” Finian breathes.

  “A weapons factory,” Zila says.

  We fly on toward the center, between the alien machines, the sense of excitement in my chest building. All the time we’ve spent, all the loss we’ve suffered, it’s all going to be worth it. I can see it in front of us now: a massive scaffold rising out of the darkness. I can feel Aurora’s elation spilling into me, the thrill of this discovery, the thought that despite the enemy we’re pitting ourselves against, this war can be won, the Ra’haam can be beaten, because this girl beside me, this tiny powerhouse thrumming with midnight-blue energy, is the Trigger, and now at last…

  …we have the Weapon.

  We reach the crystal scaffold. Tall as skyscrapers. Wide as a city. My eyes straining as I peer into the dark beyond, looking for the key to everything.

  “Um…,” Finian says.

  “Yeah…” I frown. “Um.”

  “Oh no,” Aurora whispers.

  “Be’shmai?” Kal murmurs.

  “No, no, no…”

  We all look to Auri, to her face, and it doesn’t take a Legion-trained diplomat to know that something is horribly wrong. We soar on into the dark, weaving through the scaffold, crystal shimmering around us. But it’s obvious that this scaffold was built to hold something. And, as alien as it is, we can all of us tell that it’s empty.

  As I see the tears begin to spill down Auri’s cheeks, as I see her face crumple, feel the air around us ripple with her power as her frustration, her horror, her despair comes bubbling to the surface, I know the awful truth.

  “It’s not here,” I whisper.

  I look to Finian, to Zila, to Kal, and finally, to Aurora.

  My heart sinks in my chest as she speaks.

  “The Weapon’s gone….”

  * * *

  • • • • •

  We head back to the Zero. And from there, back into the Fold.

  We don’t know what else to do.

  I wish Tyler were here. I wish it so badly, it’s like a knife in my ribs. We shared a womb together, he and I, we shared everything, and to find ourselves without him, leaderless, rudderless, reminds us all just how badly we need him. We stand on the Zero’s bridge, the colorscape once more reduced to black and white.