Aurora Rising

by Amie Kaufman

  “That’s my dragon,” she says.

  “I was just holding him for you,” Finian says, tossing the toy across.

  “What for?” she asks, snatching Shamrock from the air.

  “Figured we could use the luck.”

  Cat grins, kisses the dragon on his head, and starts punching commands into her console. “Shut up, Finian.”

  We strap ourselves in, run through preflight check. My hands are flowing over my controls, and I don’t know what comes next. I know the Bellerophon is inbound to Sempiternity. I know the GIA won’t stop till they have Auri in their custody. I don’t know who or what she is, or where she’s leading us. No doubt we’re being hunted by the Terran dreadnoughts that patrol the Fold, too, and I know we just made another deadly enemy in Casseldon Bianchi.

  But that’s the future’s problem. For now, we need to get out of here before—

  “ALERT,” says the PA. “ALERT. ALL DEPARTURES FROM THE WORLD SHIP ARE SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF CASSELDON BIANCHI, PENDING SEARCH OPERATIONS. PLEASE POWER DOWN YOUR ENGINES AND—”

  “Hold on to your undies, kids!” Cat shouts.

  She hits the thrusters, docking clamps shrieking as they try to stop us blasting free. But with a burst of full power, a bone-shaking tremor and a scream of metal, we tear out into the black and leave the World Ship in our wake. Momentum pushes me back into my seat, and for a moment it’s hard to breathe. And then I remember how lucky I am to be breathing at all.

  We’re out.

  We made it.

  I look around the bridge at my crew. Squad 312. This pack of losers and discipline cases and sociopaths, these misfits nobody in the whole of Aurora Academy wanted to get paired with. And I realize the magnitude of what we just pulled off.

  I think about the fact that I just asked every single one of them to walk into the mouth of the beast because they believed in me. The fact that none of them blinked. And the fact that they didn’t just walk in.

  They flew.

  Auri’s curled up at an auxiliary station, knees under her chin. She’s bruised and tired and bloody, but there’s a new fire in her eyes. She has the Trigger clutched in her fist, staring at it as if it holds all the answers to all the questions.

  What am I?

  Why am I here?

  What is this all for?

  And now we’ve got our hands on it, I can’t help but wonder. I know we’re part of something bigger. Something at least two centuries in the making. Maybe even more. Something the leaders of the academy knew about before we did. Something the GIA knows about, too.

  I feel like a pawn being pushed from square to square. And try as I might, I can’t see the rest of the board. But you don’t spend five years at military academy without learning a thing or two about how guns work.

  And if this thing in Auri’s hand is the Trigger…

  Then where’s the Weapon?

  And what in the ’Way is that Weapon for?

  THE UNIVERSE

  ▶ THE FOLD

  ▼ RISKS

  IT’S WIDELY HELD THAT THE ONLY INDIVIDUAL WHO TRULY UNDERSTANDS THE MATHEMATICS OF FOLD TRAVEL IS THE ÜBER-BRAINY DR. RAMASCULUS CH’FAR SI-LIENTO THE THIRD OF VOLI VI. SI-LIENTO HAS CLONED HIS BRAIN THREE TIMES AND HOOKED IT INTO A LOCALIZED BIO-NETWORK CAPABLE OF CALCULATING AT 1 EXAFLOP3, AND HE’S STILL INCAPABLE OF PARSING FOLD CALCULATIONS AND ORDERING BREAKFAST AT THE SAME TIME. IT’S VERY COMPLICATED, IS WHAT I’M SAYING.

  LUCKILY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW YOU’RE GOING FROM A TO B TO KNOW WHAT CAN GO WRONG ALONG THE WAY. A FEW OF THE RISKS OF FOLD TRAVEL INCLUDE:

  ▶ HALLUCINATIONS

  ▶ FOLDSTORMS

  ▶ LONG-TERM CEREBRAL DAMAGE

  ▶ UNANTICIPATED GATE CLOSURE

  ▶ PSYCHOSIS

  STILL, GIVEN THE DISTANCES A SHIP CAN COVER IN THE FOLD, IT’S WORTH WEIGHING UP THESE RISKS AGAINST YOUR GUARANTEED DEATH FROM OLD AGE IF YOU TRY AND MAKE THE JOURNEY THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY.

  We plunged into the Fold ten minutes ago, and no one has spoken since.

  The colors are monochrome, black and white and shades between, bleaching the fire out of Scarlett’s hair, turning Zila’s rich brown skin a dark gunmetal gray. The ship is traveling smoothly, and I’m sitting on one of the long padded benches at the rear of the bridge. The weight of the Trigger resting in my hands.

  Every part of me is aching, from my teeth to my toes, but though I’m light-headed with exhaustion, I’m alive. Not just with the adrenaline of survival but with the sense that I’m on the path I need to follow. I don’t know where it leads—I don’t even know where it goes next—but there’s an indefinable sense of rightness that comes with doing what I’m supposed to.

  Supposed to? By whose rules? And for what reason?

  If I follow this path, will I find out what happened to my father and the others on Octavia? Will I find out why my government wants to erase me, too?

  Will I find out what I am?

  I look down at the statue in my hands, running my fingers over the surface. It looks old, worn smooth with time. It feels right in my palm, like it’s supposed to be there. But I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do with it.

  It’s Tyler who breaks the silence, unbuckling his harness and coming to his feet. He’s still in his formalwear, the black fabric ripped far beyond the dictates of fashion now. “We need to decide where we go next,” he says.

  Then he pauses, looking around the cabin. Surveying the tired faces of Aurora Legion Squad 312. His lips curve to one of those dimpled smiles he does so well. “What I meant to say,” he corrects himself, “is that that was incredible. I couldn’t be prouder to serve with every single one of you.”

  They’re the right words. I see how each of the squad sits up just a fraction straighter after he speaks.

  Still, Fin sounds as he always does when he replies. “Thanks, Goldenboy. But you’re right. We need to figure out where we go from here, or the only thing we’ll be serving is time. And no way am I sharing a cell with you reprobates.”

  Cat speaks without turning her head, though I wish I could see her face. “I admit I could do with some navigational input.”

  I open my mouth, then close it, looking down at the Trigger in my palm again. This thing we all just risked our lives for. Everyone is staring at me now—except for Kal, of course, who’s ignoring me as intently as he always does. But I can feel everyone else on the ship looking to me for answers.

  I have no idea where we’re meant to go.

  I’m saved from answering by Zila, who unbuckles herself and stands. “I will provide medical treatment,” she says, in the same calm voice she always uses, as if she didn’t just help blast six Chellerian bodyguards three times her size after blowing out the gravity of an entire space station. “Scarlett, could you access the supplies? We are due to eat. And we should change our clothes.”

  The idea of food animates us all. So there’s a pause by mutual agreement as the Jones twins grab and distribute shake ’n heat ration packs. Mine says NotPork’n’Apple Casserole and Pie!™ on the foil. I’m not sure whether to worry about the NotPork or the and Pie! and I shake it until the foil warms to the touch, then tear it along the dotted line.

  A now-familiar beep sounds from inside my belt. “YOU REALIZE THERE IS NOTHING CLOSE TO EITHER PORK OR APPLE INSIDE THERE, RIGHT?”

  Squinting inside suspiciously, I suspect Magellan is right, but I shrug and chow down anyway.

  “Ty, we need to talk,” Scarlett says.

  “Uh-oh,” Tyler replies, mouth half-full. “No conversation in human history that began with those words ever ended well.”

  Zila is standing by Fin, dabbing something on the cuts on his face. “We should discuss what we saw at Dariel’s flat. The information may impact our next decision.”


  “Why?” Cat asks, looking between them. “What did you see?”

  Kal speaks beside me, his voice low. “There was something wrong with the GIA agents. We saw it when we removed their uniforms for Scarlett and Zila to wear.”

  Tyler glances across at him. “Wrong? Care to elaborate on that?”

  Scarlett sets down her Just Like Fish Dumplings™. “I don’t think we want to tell. This, we have to show.”

  She’s still wearing gray GIA armor from the neck down, and she pops a release on the chest plate, pulls her uniglass from the sweaty bodice of her dress, aims it at the cabin’s holographic central display, then transfers a picture there with a flick of her finger.

  The image slides up to replace the trajectory readouts, and the whole squad goes perfectly still and silent.

  Cat’s the first to speak, in a voice I’ve never heard from her before.

  “Holy shit.”

  It’s a picture of a woman—a human woman. She’s probably in her thirties, though it’s hard to tell at first. She’s dead, her cheeks hollowed. Her mouth is a little open, and her skin is a lifeless, sullen gray. And where this woman’s right eye should be there’s…a plant?

  It reminds me of the succulents my mother used to grow in our apartment. Thick, juicy, diamond-shaped leaves bursting from her eye socket in a tight bouquet, none much bigger than my thumbnail. They’re a lifeless tinge that matches her skin, with a dark blush along their edges and a tracery of veins running through them.

  Some kind of moss spreads across the right side of her face. It’s made up of soft fuzz and wispy tendrils and covers half her forehead, trailing down to disappear beneath her black undershirt. The same black veins in those leaves also run under her skin like spiderwebs.

  It’s like she’s made of stone, and the plants and moss are growing out of her. No wonder Kal said something was wrong. Deep in the pit of my stomach, I know I’ve never seen anything more wrong. It should just be gross, out of place, but instead it’s sending my every nerve jangling, my spine prickling with panic.

  “I am not well versed with human maladies,” Kal says quietly. “But I assume this is not some common condition.”

  “No,” Ty says, sounding as close to shaky as I’ve ever heard him. “You’re telling me this woman was one of the GIA agents? She was walking and talking?”

  I glance up at the woman’s face again. I don’t…There’s something incredibly wrong about this, but there’s something familiar as well. I hold up my hand to block out the eye that’s blooming with that unnatural plant and stare at the rest of her.

  Then my gut twists.

  “Tyler, I…I know her.” My voice is hoarse, just a whisper.

  Ty looks at me, his scarred eyebrow raised. “You met her on Sempiternity?”

  I shake my head. “I used to know her. Before I ever got on the Hadfield.”

  I feel, as much as see, the six-way glance my companions exchange.

  “That’s impossible,” Scarlett says. “That would make her over two centuries old. Your cryo survival was a freak accident, Auri. Are you saying the same thing happened to her, on some other ship that never made headlines?”

  “Either that, or she really must moisturize,” Fin offers, but nobody laughs.

  “I know,” I say weakly. “But this is Patrice Radke. She was a settler on Octavia III, the head of Exploration and Cartography.”

  I drag my gaze away from the picture, and they’re all looking at me. Some are expectant. Some skeptical. But all of them are hanging on my every word.

  “She would’ve been my boss,” I whisper. “I was going to do a practical apprenticeship in Exploration and Cartography under her. She and my dad…they…”

  “Thanks for the birthday wishes, Dad.”

  “Thanks for the congratulations about winning All-States again. Thanks for remembering to message Callie about her recital, which she nailed, by the way. But most of all, thanks for this. Mom couldn’t get clearance for Octavia, so what…you just replaced her? You’re not even divorced yet!”

  And then I hung up on him. The last words I ever spoke to him were a list of reasons he sucked.

  And now he’s dead….

  I look up into Patrice’s lifeless face, my stomach sinking.

  But if she—

  “Officially, there was no colony on Octavia III,” Zila says. “Records indicate that you were bound for Lei Gong.”

  “Well, the records are wrong,” I reply.

  Zila tilts her head, studying me in that way of hers. “And this Patrice was one of the original settlers for your expedition, some two hundred and twenty years ago.”

  It doesn’t sound like she’s questioning me. Just thinking things through. The others are less certain, though nobody’s offering the flat-out disbelief I’ve seen before. I think we’re past that now.

  “This sounds like I’m crazy,” I say. “But I know I’m right.”

  Except that Patrice Radke has been dead for over two centuries.

  Then again, I’m two hundred and thirty-seven years old myself.

  On a ship full of aliens. Who I just robbed a space station with.

  Nothing is impossible.

  But something is very, very wrong.

  AURORA LEGION SQUADS

  ▶ SQUAD MEMBERS

  ▼ BRAINS

  BRAINS ARE THE SCIENCE AND MEDICAL OFFICERS OF AURORA LEGION (AL) SQUADS. MOST ARE POSSESSED OF SCARILY HIGH IQS, OFFICIAL NERD SQUAD MEMBERSHIP CARDS, AND HAVE A TENDENCY TO RUN TOWARD DANGEROUS SITUATIONS ON THE GROUNDS THAT THEY “MIGHT BE INTERESTING.”

  BRAINS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TREATING INJURIES, PROVIDING THEIR ALPHAS WITH SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION ON THE FLY, AND, OCCASIONALLY, FIGURING OUT HOW TO BLOW THINGS UP WITH ONLY A TOOTHPICK AND A STICK OF GUM.

  I DON’T WANT TO STEREOTYPE OR ANYTHING, BUT PEOPLE WITH THAT MANY BRAIN CELLS ARE SOMETIMES A LITTLE…WEIRD.

  BRAIN’S INSIGNIA

  “The other GIA agent was like this, too?” Tyler asks.

  I nod affirmative. Remembering the way their bodies felt as I hit them. The sounds they made when they fell. Their flesh was…wrong under my hands. Fibrous. Wet. Bones bending like green saplings rather than breaking like dry wood.

  “I have come to blows with many Terrans in my time at Aurora Academy,” I say. “These operatives were not human.”

  “But they’re GIA,” Cat objects. “The highest arm of the Terran Defense Force’s Intelligence Division.”

  “Then your Terran Defense Force may have problems,” I reply.

  I can feel Aurora sitting nearby. Her presence is like the light of the sun on my skin. I feel bathed in it, though I try to ignore it, focus on my Alpha’s face and our predicament. But the pull of her is like gravity. A bottomless pool in which I would happily throw myself to drown.

  “How does a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old Octavia settler get into the GIA?” Aurora asks. I can hear the distress in her voice. She knew this woman. Perhaps even cared for her.

  “Um, slightly more pressing question,” Fin says, nodding at Auri. “As far as I know, Stowaway here is the only person to have survived a cryo period of more than a few decades. How is a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old human even alive?”

  “I do not believe she was.”

  We turn to Zila, who is looking at her uniglass.

  “I did not have long to conduct tests,” she continues. “But both these GIA agents showed signs of epidermal degradation consistent with early necrosis.”

  “You’re saying they were dead before Kal got to them?” Tyler asks.

  “I am saying they showed signs of it, yes.”

  “But they were walking and talking?”

  “I cannot explain it. Perhaps these growths”—she waves at the silvery leaves sprouting from the agent’s ey
e—“have something to do with it. Like Betraskan saski polyps or Terran nematomorphs.”

  Zila looks around an ocean of blank stares.

  “Nematomorphs are parasites native to Earth,” she explains. “They mature inside other organisms, then exert a chemical control over their host’s brain. Urging the creature to drown itself in bodies of water where other nematomorphs breed.”

  “And you put on those uniforms anyway?” Cat asks, dumbfounded.

  “I thoroughly irradiated the GIA garments first,” Zila replies, unruffled.

  “She really likes that disruptor,” Finian mutters.

  “I wish we could have brought one of the bodies aboard to study,” Zila sighs.

  “No thanks,” Tyler replies, looking at the image on the display in horror. “The further away from those things we are, the better. Maybe it was some virus they picked up aboard the World Ship or something?”

  “Doubtful,” Zila says.

  “Even if they did, how’d they live long enough to catch it there?” Fin asks.

  Aurora is staring too, her eyes distant, perhaps lost in memories of this woman, this partner of her father, now become her enemy.

  “Auri, do you recognize this man?” Scar pulls up the image of the second GIA operative I killed. He is like the first—those strange fronds sprouting from his eye, a cluster of bright flowers growing from his ear and through his hair, the right side of his face glazed with mossy growth. I can see a tracery of fine veins within the leaves scrawled across the man’s cheeks. Dark as blood.

  Aurora bites her lip. “Maybe? He might’ve been an engineer.”

  “Another Octavia colonist,” I say.

  “Who should’ve died two hundred years ago,” Scar nods.

  “He looks good for his age,” Fin says. “All things considered.”

  The joke perishes in silence, but a part of me admires Finian for at least trying to lighten the mood. The bridge is quiet, save for the thrum of the engines, the hum of the consoles around us. Aurora is looking at the main display screen, the lifeless skin of these people she knew, the growths sprouting from their heads. I can feel the tremors in her body, feel the fear in her soul. I wish to reach out to her, to take some of it away. But I resist the Pull with all I have, try to keep the want from my voice as I speak to her.