by Amie Kaufman
Limping to the window, he squints at the incoming ship, shakes his head.
“It’s just a puddle jumper,” he says. “Meant for short atmo to surface transit. If we want to get back through the Fold, we need the Longbow.” He looks at Tyler. “But that shuttle could get us back to the Longbow fast. If, say, we had a genius tactician with great hair and a daring plan to steal it.”
Tyler glances up from where he and Kal are mounting a disruptor rifle on a makeshift tripod near the window.
“I’m working on it,” he mutters.
“Well, while you find your hairbrush, I’m going up a level to main control,” Fin declares. “See if I can boost the output and override the safety protocols on the power supply.”
“What for?” Scar asks.
“I can run a current through the metallics in the structure. Gantries, stairwells, that kind of thing. Cut off access. Electrify them.”
“Won’t that electrify us, too?”
He shakes his head. “If we stick to the concrete, we’re fine. Before I was saddled with you pack of no-hopers, I was tinkering in the propulsion labs back at the academy in my spare time. I figured a way to give the basic DeBray power systems a seven percent bump, and I’m seeing a few similar components here.”
“The propulsion labs you were messing around in,” Tyler says. “Would those be the ones you irradiated?”
“Hey, don’t complain. You got out of your spatial dynamics exam, too.” He’s trying for his usual grin, but none of us have it in us right now.
“This sounds like a bad idea,” Ty says.
“Yeah, but they’re the only kind we have left. I can do this, Goldenboy.”
Tyler chews his lip and sighs. “Zila, go with him. See if you can help.”
“Yes sir,” Zila says quietly, turning away from the window.
Tyler grabs Finian’s arm as he limps past. “Hey, listen up.”
He looks at me, lowers his voice. But not quite enough.
“These agents are here for Auri.” He glances at Cat, back at Fin. “Letting them get hold of her isn’t a good idea. Can you rig something up quick? I mean, if it comes down to a choice between getting captured and …”
Finian meets Tyler’s eyes, all the jokes and bravado gone.
“I can do that.”
Tyler nods. And without another word, Fin and Zila head upstairs.
My breath’s coming too fast, my heart singing. The new parts of me are trying to push their way to the surface, but I don’t know how to control them, or how to just let them take me.
If it comes down to a choice between getting captured and …
How did this happen? How did we get here?
I flex my fingers and clench my fists, trying to get myself under control as I circle the table to sink down cross-legged beside Cat.
Everything around me is screaming at my nerves, sending my limbs tingling, the back of my neck buzzing with danger. I’m sure the plants and vines are monitoring us, that the pollen drifting in through one broken window and out through another is part of the way the planet’s keeping tabs on our every movement.
It’s pushing me close to the edge of my courage, but I feel it pushing me closer to the edge of something else as well.
I can feel myself on the verge of …
Cat stirs beside me, and I take her hand in mine, giving it a gentle squeeze. Her lashes lift, and she fixes those flower-shaped pupils on me, her eyes the brightest blue. We gaze at each other for a long moment, and then she lets out a soft breath that’s edged with a moan.
“I can feel it,” she whispers, and I don’t know what to say, because I can, too. “It’s taking me.”
“We won’t let it,” I whisper in return.
She fixes me with a look brimming with fear, with pain, with come now, let’s not lie between the two of us, and my heart aches, because none of what’s on her face—on her slowly silvering skin—should be coming from a girl my age.
Except she’s not my age, is she?
The leaves around us shimmer even though there’s no breeze, and I can feel the centuries beneath my skin. The power waiting inside them.
As Kal walks past, he places a hand on my shoulder, just for a second. Just for a breath. And I think about what he said. About walking your true path. And though I don’t quite know how, I know all of this, everything that’s happened, has to do with me. With this power inside me.
There’s a reason the very existence of this colony was hidden from the world.
There’s a reason the GIA are after me, trying to wipe me away too.
There’s a reason I’m becoming something else, something more than human.
There’s a reason I took us to the World Ship, to the Trigger.
And there’s a reason the Trigger brought us here.
And somehow, they’re all connected. And though it’s frightening, I know I can’t be frightened anymore.
Everything that’s happened, all I’ve become … I can’t stop it.
Instead, I have to muster the rage to master it.
I think about this place. What happened to the people here. I think about my family. About my mom and Callie, when they got the news I was gone. About my dad when he heard, about the things we should have said in that last conversation.
I think about everything I’ve lost. I think about being this girl out of time, having this power I don’t understand. And when I look down, when I lock gazes with Cat again, look into the flowers in her eyes, surrounded by the predatory leaves and vines of this planet, my spine twitching to run, the urge building up inside me …
… something shifts.
It’s like fire melting ice. Like positive and negative charges colliding. Like I’m waking up for the first time in two hundred years. I feel my mind stretch, feel the gorgeous elongation of muscles that have lain dormant for too long, a surge of power running through me. Suddenly I’m bigger, stronger, and though I’m exactly the same—I’m still sitting cross-legged beside Cat, holding her hand—there’s an extra dimension to everything.
This is what it feels like to control it.
I may not know what it is, but everything I’ve done while I was asleep, everything that rendered me a passenger, a prisoner in my own body—now I feel a part of it is mine. Something bigger. Something more. Snatched from the nothing with my own two hands.
I turn my head to run my gaze over the squad. There’s an extra dimension to everything, to everyone.
I can feel a flare of empathy in Kal—a restless presence with a violet shimmer to it. It’s almost drowned out by the rest of his nature. It runs through him like fine veins of gold in rock, almost hidden. It shifts and shimmers in response as my mind brushes across his.
I can see it in Scarlett, too, and a touch, much less, in Tyler, flowing beneath the surface of his mind. The Jones twins are human, and for a moment a flicker of doubt hits me—has the planet touched them, too?—but an instant later, I know that’s not true. The power running through the plants and leaves and vines around us, connecting them via a current that now crackles for me like electricity, is completely different to anything in Scarlett or Tyler, or Kal, or me.
But when I look down again, I can see it winding its way through Cat in a hopelessly complex tangle of vines, like a fine network of capillaries. Invading every part of her.
Where do I even begin trying to untangle this?
I know, though I push the knowledge away, that I can’t.
It’s too much, too deep.
It has her.
I try anyway, mentally grabbing a handful of the psychic energy that binds her, burning it to nothing, holding it in my mind’s grip until it’s only ashes. She moans, and as I look down, the fine network of silvery green-gray-blue energy snakes through her to cover the gap as if it was never there.
Like the vines, it’s everywhere.
I try a different way, leaning into Cat’s mind. Maybe I can start there and sweep out, burn her thoughts clear. As I look inside her, I’m hit with a welter of emotion. Her pain, her fear, her anger snakes through me, and I flinch for an instant, fight the urge to withdraw. And then I lean in harder, because nobody should be alone with feelings like these.
I’m here, I’m here.
I squeeze her hand, pushing past the sharp-edged outer defenses. And inside them, I find the real Cat, a whirl of life and love and energy, the reds and orange and golds of her mental signature spiraling into elaborate patterns that remind me of eddies of wind, that remind me of flight.
I find her love for Scarlett, her grief for her mother, her fierce joy in taking to the air. I find her love for Tyler, deep and strong, laced with frustration.
And in response, without my meaning to—but perfectly naturally, just as it should—my mind dances with hers.
We’re not in the reactor anymore. Nobody is around us.
We’re somewhere else, just the two of us, and nothing else matters.
My mind is midnight blue and a dust of silver, starlight, and nebulas to her fiery winds. To touch her I have to be open, my own loves and memories as free as hers. She sees my love for my sister, Callie, she catches the scent of the warm rock and crisp leaves at the top of my favorite hiking trail. My happy place. Through me, she tastes a quick bite of the chilies my father adds to his cooking. She’s with me through the pain of watching my mother after he left, and then instead of watching, she’s moving. Grabbing at that memory and shoving it away.
For a moment I’m bewildered. But without words, with a flurry of images, she’s conveying her purpose—she doesn’t want to know these things, because she doesn’t want to share them.
When it takes her.
We both focus on the door between us—she pulls, I push—and together we jam it closed, and sweat’s running down my back when my eyes snap open, my breath coming quickly.
Her gaze is waiting for me.
“You sh-shouldn’t … b-be here,” she whispers.
Voices ring out behind me. “Try now,” Fin’s yelling from upstairs.
“It is working,” Kal calls, tilting his head back to yell at the ceiling.
“I know,” I whisper to Cat. “Everything about this place is wrong. But the star map showed us this place, the Trigger …”
“Oh, Auri … d-don’t you s-see? The T-Trigger … is—”
Her eyes snap wide, and her gasp’s the only warning I have before her mind assaults mine—but now the reds are the crimson of blood, the yellows too bright, too gaudy. This is Cat’s mind, but Cat’s not at the wheel.
I throw up my defenses, try to force her back, mental walls as strong as I can make them. Imagining them made of stone, surrounding myself in a tiny fortress, my mind in the middle. But I can see my enemy all around me now, I can sense something of the consciousness trying to reach into my mind through hers.
A being.
A single, colossal, impossible being.
It comes from everywhere, a network spread across the planet—it’s every plant, every vine, every flower, every spore floating through the air. I can see the history of it, its purpose and potential. And as if time is nothing, I can see its future.
I’m a speck as I try to understand the timescale on which this journey has been measured. I’m reminded of the ceiling of Casseldon Bianchi’s ballroom, of the slow dance of galaxies as they made their way around it, moving through and around one another on a cosmic scale.
This … thing has been readying itself, first laying dormant, then slowly waking, until now it’s riding the crest of a wave that stretches back a million years. This planet, all the planets on that star map, will grow and swell, ripening until they burst like seedpods, throwing their spores, the infection into those natural, unclosable FoldGates. Into the Fold itself, and from there …
From there, everywhere.
This is the instant before a tsunami breaks.
This is the Ra’haam.
“You can stop it.” Cat’s gasp yanks me from my paralysis, and the attack on my fortress falls away, the reds and golds fading into her colors, then withdrawing. Blood is trickling from her nose, her chest rising and falling now, blue eyes fixed on my face. “They stopped it before. And you can stop it now, Aurora.”
“Yes,” I breathe.
Because I understand how old this story is now. I understand the arrogance of thinking that in the 13.8 billion years the universe has been expanding, this place and this moment—now, in the Milky Way—is the first time life has been forced to fight this war.
I see the last time the Ra’haam woke.
When it last tried to swallow the galaxy.
Tried and failed.
It hid itself here afterward, I realize. Wounded. Almost dead. Because behind the flood, behind the noise of this impossible thing around me, deep inside myself in my tiny walls of stone, I can feel something else. The voice calling to me. The voice that’s been calling me this whole time.
Telling me who I am.
Who they were.
The ones who struggled. Who saw what the Ra’haam would become if left unchecked, and saw their individuality as something worth fighting for.
The Ancient Ones.
Eshvaren.
And though they’re gone now, dead for eons
they left behind
the weapon we’ll need
to beat it
again.
And the Trigger isn’t some ancient statue or some jewel hidden inside it. It’s not some star map made of gemstones stolen from some gangster’s lair.
The Trigger …
“Auri,” Cat gasps.
“The Trigger … is me.”
The leaves around us ripple, and I hear an engine roaring outside. The thrum of a slow descent, the crunch of landing gear touching earth. I know before he does that Tyler will speak.
“They’re here.”
Cat grits her teeth, and I know she’s trying to stop it, them, the thing that’s winding through her and making her a part of it, from knowing what she knows. The voice that comes from outside is smooth, amplified, genderless, and ageless.
“We are here for Aurora O’Malley.”
Princeps.
Fin’s voice drawls over our channel. “Someone want to tell His Highness it’s polite to say please?”
Scarlett leaves her brother by the window and hurries over to take my place, dropping to one knee. “Go,” she murmurs to me, and as I release Cat’s hand, the other girl takes it.
I make my way over to where Tyler’s watching by the window. The vines all around him have been burned away, but I can see one of the charred tendrils moving, questing along the window ledge, looking for a new purchase even as I crouch beside him. If I stay close to the wall, I can look down without giving the figures below a look at me in return.
A shuttlecraft has touched down on the blue-green scrub outside the reactor. It’s marked with the Bellerophon’s ident, and a landing ramp has extended from its belly. Princeps stands at the bottom in its pristine white suit, pollen falling all around it. At its shoulder is a second GIA agent in the usual charcoal gray and, ranged around the shuttle itself are dozens and dozens of other figures.
They’re not GIA agents. And there are so many of them.
There are a few chimpanzees in the throng, their fur coated in moss and tubers. But beneath the cloaks of silver vines, the flowers crawling through their hair and bursting from their eyes, I recognize the rest of them.
Humans.
Colonists.
“Ah, Aurora.” Despite the cover of the window’s edge, Princeps looks right at me. “There you are.”
I risk casting out a tendril of my midnight-blue,
star-speckled mind into the green-silver-blue-gray morass of the plants and vines outside. I’m trying to find Princeps’s mind, to see more of it, but it’s like interference on the radio—there’s so much to sense, I can’t find my target in the middle of it.
It’s as expressionless as ever when it speaks again—I have no idea if it even sensed my effort. “We’ve been waiting for you so long, Aurora.”
“Wait a little longer,” I call back, making my voice firm. It doesn’t shake. “Try back in another two hundred years.”
“You were lost to our sight. We could not find you.”
“I was never yours to find!”
“You were hidden in the Fold, we see that now. The Eshvaren were cowards, to hide you there. Such was always their way. Their weakness. The same weakness we feel now in you. You should have let us simply burn you away in orbit. You were foolish to bring yourself to us.”
Behind me, Ty rests a hand on my shoulder, as if he’s afraid I’m going to show myself, to stand up in the window and argue. But I hold still and watch, because Princeps is lifting both its hands to its helmet, and with a flick of its thumbs, it releases the seal.
I’m frozen in place as slowly, so slowly, in a movement that takes two heartbeats and 13.8 billion years, it lifts its helmet free, and shows me the face beneath.
I know, an instant before I see it, what I’ll see.
And yet it hits me like a blow, robbing me of breath, of thought, of strength.
Beneath the fat leaves that bloom from his right eye, beneath the silvery moss that trails down his graying skin to disappear into the neck of his suit, I can still make out the lines of his face. His round cheeks, the lines across his forehead that my mom used to joke were there from the age of fifteen, because the world surprised him so much.
“Daddy …”
The words swell up inside my mind, like ugly, oozing slashes across my silver-speckled nebula. It’s as if I’m back in the moment of our last conversation.
Thanks for the birthday wishes, Dad.
Thanks for the congratulations about winning All-States again.
But best of all, thanks for this.
I hung up on him before his return transmission could come in. Before I could see the hurt on his face. The way my hits landed.
