Aurora Burning

by Amie Kaufman

  But when she does finally speak into my head, her thoughts are quiet.

  This explains the girl you think of constantly.

  I blink at that.

  …What?

  Cat, I think? She weighs heavy on your thoughts, Tyler Jones.

  I swallow hard. Chest aching.

  She was a…a friend of mine.

  Saedii’s eyes narrow. More than a friend.

  …Maybe.

  And it took her. This Ra’haam. Turned her. Absorbed her.

  I feel anger surge inside me. Welcome and warm.

  Yes. It did.

  Just as it will absorb the galaxy if we permit it.

  Yes, I nod. It will.

  We must escape this cell, Tyler Jones.

  I raise one eyebrow. The scarred one. For extra effect.

  I’m glad you’re here to tell me these things, Saedii.

  Was that sarcasm, little Terran?

  I shrug. My sister inherited most of it. But some rubbed off on me.

  Her eyes narrow again at the word inherited. She looks at me long and hard. Glittering eyes framed by dark lashes and dark paint. Her stare lingering maybe a fraction too long on my bare chest.

  Listen, I know these pecs could run for president and win, I think to her, more than a little annoyed. But you could be a touch less obvious about getting an eyeful. In case you missed it, we’re in it up to our necks here.

  The Unbroken Templar tilts her head at that. Slowly, slowly leaning back on her bio-cot and stretching those long, bare legs out in front of her. I know what she’s doing. I know what she wants. I fill my head with a barrage of unsexy thoughts—my old bunkmate Björkman trimming his toenails with his teeth, that time I caught myself in my zipper, my grandma’s underwear, huge cream-colored monstrosities, billowing like sails on the cl—

  I can’t help it. I glance down for a fraction of a second.

  Dammit.

  I look up into Saedii’s eyes again. Her split lips twist in a small smile.

  I am not “getting an eyeful,” as you so eloquently put it, Tyler Jones.

  She glances back at my chest, thoughtful.

  I am wondering what kind of heart beats beneath those ribs of yours.

  …Meaning what?

  Meaning the foe of my foe is my friend. Meaning that despite the enmity and insult between us, I respect the trust you place in me to speak your secrets. And that there are secrets you are perhaps owed in turn. Secrets about me.

  She looks into my eyes.

  Secrets about you.

  I frown.

  …Me?

  She gives a gentle shrug, toying with one black lock of hair as she looks me over once more. You and your sister, I suppose.

  …What’s Scar got to do with this?

  Twins, are you not?

  Yeah, so what?

  Jericho Jones escaped Syldrathi captivity before the battle at Kireina IV, yes?

  My frown deepens. How’d you know that?

  She smiles again. Your father held back a fleet twice the size of his at Kireina. It was the worst defeat we suffered in the entire war. Know your enemy, Tyler Jones.

  I don’t—

  Jericho Jones was a rear admiral less than a year after his victory. A warrior, born and bred, who fought the best of the Warbreed to a standstill and caused our fall from ascendancy in the Inner Council of Syldra. And yet, he resigned his commission. Became the strongest advocate for peace in your Senate. Why the change of heart?

  I have no idea where she’s going with this. But something in her eyes urges me to run with it.

  He made a speech about it in 2367, I tell her, pride swelling my chest. It still gets taught today at Aurora Academy. “I can no longer look my children in the eye without seeing the wrong in killing other people’s.”

  She sniffs. A pretty lie.

  I bristle. You watch what you say about my father, Saedii.

  When I first spoke to your mind, you said you were not aware that those who possessed Waywalker gifts could speak to other people telepathically.

  I shrug. I wasn’t aware.

  Saedii shakes her head, mild contempt spilling into my mind despite her best effort to hold it in check. That is because we cannot speak to other people, Tyler Jones. We can only speak to others with the gift.

  My stomach lurches. I don’t…

  I am Warbreed by birth and troth, Saedii tells me. But…though I loathed her, I did inherit some of my mother’s talents.

  She meets my eyes, her own glinting like glass.

  It would seem your mother also shared her gift with you.

  The thought knocks the breath from my lungs. My heart is thumping, mind spinning. But I’m trying to hold on to the threads in my head, stitch them together into a tapestry that makes some kind of sense, while Saedii looks on, cool and aloof.

  We never knew our mom—I always wondered about her, but I could tell how much it hurt Dad to talk about her. I didn’t want to push it. And I thought we had a lifetime to ask him about what happened. Where she went.

  But Dad was missing behind enemy lines for months. I admit it always struck me as kinda strange—for him to have turned from the Syldrathi’s greatest enemy into the man who argued strongest for peace. I guess part of me wanted to put him on a pedestal. The noble war hero who came to respect the enemy he fought against. To understand we’re all, in some essential way, the same.

  But it would make a lot more sense if…

  While he was captured, if he…

  It’s funny being a twin. Sometimes I feel like I know what my sister will say before she says it. Sometimes I swear she can tell what I’m thinking just by looking at me. Scar and I were inseparable as kids. Dad said we invented our own language before we could talk. And the way my sister instinctively reads people—like books, like she can actually see into their heads sometimes…

  “Maker’s breath,” I breathe aloud.

  You do not have much of the look about you, Saedii says. Probably why your mother sent you away. But it is undeniable that you and your sister are possessed of a certain—her eyes flicker over my body again—grace. Height. Poise. You saw the images of my torture in your head. You can speak to me in my mind. I feel you in here—she touches her brow—as surely as you feel me. There is only one explanation, Tyler Jones.

  Saedii tucks a long black lock behind her ear.

  Your mother was a Waywalker.

  I swallow hard. Look down at my forearm. My tanned skin. The veins beneath the muscle etched in long scrawls of pale blue.

  Scar and me…we have Syldrathi blood in our veins?

  Saedii’s fingertips drift over the string of severed thumbs at her throat. She is looking me up and down, the tip of her tongue pressed against one sharpened canine.

  The question is, Are you worthy of it?

  My head is spinning, trying to process all this. How did it happen? Why didn’t Dad tell us? Who was our mother?

  …Is she alive?

  Gird yourself, boy, Saedii says. Hold firm.

  The biggest bombshell of my life just got dropped on my head, Saedii. I think I’m gonna need a minute here….

  We do not have a minute, Tyler Jones. If what you have told me about this…ancient enemy is true, every second we waste in this cell among these insects is another second closer to the galaxy’s doom.

  I scowl, my temper flaring blood-red across our shared minds.

  You think I don’t know that?

  Saedii watches me for a long, silent moment. I can feel her, her emotions, her thoughts, all of her. It’s hard to keep straight in my head, to process which parts of all I’m feeling are me, and which are her. It’s like we’re touching…but not.

  I think there is much you do not know, she replies.

>   Maker’s breath, what else?

  Saedii folds her bare legs up beneath her, leans back against the wall, and crosses her arms over her chest.

  You had best get comfortable, boy. This will be a great deal to swallow.

  There is a gravity to everything.

  I told Aurora that, not so long ago. Looking into her eyes as I finally confessed all I was feeling for her. Every atom in our bodies, every atom in the universe exerts a gravity on the atoms around it. Gravity is one of the forces holding all this together. It is inexorable. Nothing rises without falling. It is not a matter of if, but when.

  We Syldrathi believe that everything is a cycle. An endless circle. That one day the expansion of the universe will cease, the force generated by the explosion that began it will be overcome by gravity. And on that day, the universe will begin to contract. No longer spiraling out, but falling inward, every atom in existence dragged backward toward its point of origin, collapsing once more into the singularity that began it all. Only to begin again.

  We are all of us gravity’s slaves.

  All of us pulled by it.

  Back to the place it all began and to where we know it must end.

  It did not take me long to find transport from Meridia. There is no shortage of folks in the galaxy who fear the Starslayer, who watch the unfolding calamity between Terra and the Unbroken with an absolute certainty of who will triumph. The Chellerian smuggler who agreed to ferry me to the Unbroken armada still took a great deal of convincing, considering the dangers of approaching the largest Unbroken fleet assembled since the fall of Syldra. But my share of the small fortune that Admiral Adams and Battle Leader de Stoy left for us in the Emerald City vault was enough to purchase his peace of mind.

  I wonder if our commanders knew what that money would be used for when they left it for us.

  If they knew where my path would lead.

  I stand in the cockpit beside the smuggler and his copilot—a surly Rikerite with one of his horns snapped off at the root. The smuggler is fond of his rocksmoke, and the cockpit is full of the stink, metallic and thick, drifting from the burner on the console. The gabble of news feeds spills over the cockpit sound system.

  The Fold around us is colorless as always, as gray as the storm clouds around my head. I am watching the incoming Unbroken vessels on our scopes—four Ghost-class scouts on intercept course. They cut through the Fold toward us, and beyond them I can see countless ships, sleek and dark and deadly, gathered on the threshold to the Terran system. A force to set fire to the heavens.

  And at the heart of it, he waits for me.

  The shadow I have never been able to step out from.

  A transmission from the lead scout cuts across our news feeds, brought up onscreen with a tap of the smuggler’s fingers. I see a young Unbroken adept, the Warbreed glyf on his brow, black war paint across glittering gray eyes.

  “Unidentified vessel,” he says coolly. “You are either insane or suicidal. Retreat or be destroyed. This is your first and final warning.”

  The smuggler looks to me. I press one finger to the console and speak.

  “I am here to see my father,” I reply.

  The adept’s stare hardens as he takes in the glyf at my brow, the seven braids in my hair. “We are poised to reclaim the honor the Council of Syldra surrendered so long ago, boy. We are death on black wings, and we shall slay a star this day. This is no place for a family reunion.”

  I press the Transmit button again, my voice soft with threat.

  “Archon Caersan may disagree with you, adept.”

  The adept’s eyes narrow, then slowly widen as realization sinks in. He draws one halting breath, his hiss spilling over bloodless lips.

  “I’na Sai’nuit.”

  I press the Transmit button, speak with a voice as gray as the Fold around us.

  “Tell my father I wish to speak to him.”

  * * *

  • • • • •

  My heart is a war drum, pounding against my ribs.

  I am standing aboard the shuttle he sent for me, hands clasped behind my back, surrounded by six of his Paladins. The decor on the Syldrathi ship is black, its crimson light muted to gray by the Fold. The Unbroken warriors around me are clad in ceremonial armor, watching me from beneath silver lashes. None are brave enough to give voice to their thoughts, but in truth none need to. I feel it.

  Curiosity. Resentment. Fear.

  The lost son, returned.

  I watch the shuttle’s forward screens as we weave through the Unbroken armada. The sight of it is awe-inspiring, terrifying: the sheer scale of it all, the countless ships ready to unleash chaos at his word. He commands respect, my father. His very name enough to strike fear wherever it is spoken. A man who was prepared to burn his own homeworld rather than sacrifice his honor. A man to whom the murder of billions was preferable to surrender.

  I remember him standing behind me beneath the lias trees. His hand on my shoulder. Guiding my strikes as he tutored me in the Wave Way.

  I can feel him now, if I try.

  My Enemy Within.

  And then I see it.

  A glimpse between the crescent shapes of two massive carriers. The full scope of it unfolding as the ships part before us like water. The breath is snatched away. I feel like an insect in the presence of a god.

  The Weapon.

  It is the largest vessel I have ever seen, stretching twenty kilometers from nose to tail and making children’s toys of the mightiest ships around it. Its shape is vaguely conical, and a series of massive concave structures are arrayed at what I presume is the bow, like vast lenses—asymmetrical, arcane, and utterly alien. It is carved of the same living crystal that the Eshvaren wore in the Echo, and the rainbow of light playing upon its every surface, hypnotic, melodic, would have been stunning enough were it not for the thought that suddenly occurs to me:

  We are in the Fold.

  Everything around us should be monochrome. Muted shades of gray. But the Eshvaren Weapon is a song of color, almost heartbreaking in its beauty. This is a device designed to destroy suns, and yet my soul swells to see it.

  The war in my blood surges. Something in it calls to me, reaching out across the gulf between us, roiling, rushing, setting my pulse pounding quicker, my fingertips tingling. A power at once alien and familiar. A voice I have not heard in years, and yet have heard every day of my life, echoing now in my head.

  Kaliiiiiissssss.

  As the shuttle draws closer to the Weapon, we pass through a field of some sort—vaguely glittering, translucent. The ship shudders beneath me. The Paladins around me sway on their feet, and I feel a flood of…power in my head. Thick like syrup. Heavy as iron. Blurring my eyes.

  The shuttle lands in a strange docking bay, crystalline structures on the ceiling and floors, the colorscape almost blinding in intensity. I glance at the Paladins beside me, but they remain silent. They bay has no doors—no way to keep the cold and the vacuum out. But the warriors march me down to the shuttle’s airlock and, without hesitation, cycle it open.

  We do not freeze. We do not suffocate.

  The Paladin commander fixes me in a gray stare.

  “We can go no farther, I’na Sai’nuit,” he tells me.

  I step out into the bay, the surface humming beneath my feet. I cannot say how, and yet…I know the way. Drawn like a needle to north, I walk up winding paths of singing crystal, whispering, thrumming with power.

  I feel…strange. All the emotions within me seem louder. I see an image of Aurora standing with her hand raised aboard the Zero’s bridge, her power striking me in the chest as she commanded me to stop. I hear the venom in Scarlett’s voice as she cursed me, blamed me, hit me. I feel Finian’s bewildered pain, Zila’s silent acquiescence as they cast me out. I who have fought for them. Bled for them. Risked my all
to keep them safe. None of them could understand what it was for me to join the Legion, how much I have given, how much I have suffered, how it feels to be utterly alone, even in a crowded room.

  Ever since my mother fled back to Syldra, I have never known a moment’s peace. Outcast among my own people for the Warbreed glyf at my brow, the blood in my veins. Outcast among the academy cadets as the former enemy, the pixieboy, the freak: Remember Orion, remember Orion. Among the members of Squad 312, I thought I had found a home. A place to belong. Something worth fighting for.

  But I was a fool.

  I should have known that the shadow of the past would forever come between us. We cannot deny who and what we truly are.

  And Aurora…

  “Aurora.” I whisper the name, as if it is poison on my lips. Pushing thoughts of her aside, the memory of our time in the Echo, the things we shared, locking her and them away in a room inside my head and casting away the key.

  I am no one now.

  I am only this.

  What I have always been.

  There is not a soul in these vast and glittering halls. Not a single soldier or scientist or servant. The entire ship is empty, save for this power, familiar and unknowable all at once. As I walk farther down the crystal way, I feel catatonia, vertigo, perfect clarity. My pulse is rushing, asynchronous, like a drumbeat out of time. My mouth tastes like rust.

  This ship is huge. These corridors seem endless. But eventually, the pathways converge, opening out into a vast, spherical chamber.

  Power drips from the air, red and thrumming on my skin. The walls are lost in shadow, and my eyes are drawn to the light, the concentric spires of crystal in the center of the room, aglow and radiant. An ever-ascending dais, rising off the floor, crowned with an enormous glittering throne. Branches of crystal reach out toward it from the ceiling, the walls, like the roots of a tree straining toward water. Squinting, putting my hand up against the rainbow light, I see a figure upon it.

  A shadow falls upon my sun.