by Amie Kaufman
“It is a star map!” I shout over the screaming.
The galaxy begins to move. As if time were flowing forward. Swirling around that gleaming black heart, faster and faster. An endless spiral, billions of stars interacting and coalescing, flaring and dying.
The systems closer to the heart spin faster, overtaking the slower stars on the outskirts, flowing over and through them, the force of their passing sending out ripples through the starlight. A cosmic ballet. Hundreds of thousands of years in the blink of an eye. And the red begins to spread, out from those few illuminated stars, the stain flowing like blood until the whole galaxy is drenched in crimson.
Aurora looks at me. Her white eye flickering with inner light, the blood now pouring down her chin and spattering on the deck beneath her. I feel the Pull roaring in my veins at the sight of her bleeding. The desire to protect her overwhelming all thought and reason. She points at the images on the central display. The GIA agents, their faces dead and overgrown.
“Ra’haam,” she says.
“You are hurting her!” I say, stepping forward.
“Gestalt,” the thing in Aurora replies, pointing at the crimson stain. “Beware. Ra’haaaaaa-a-ammm.”
“Release her!”
I reach out, grab her hand. I feel a cold so fierce it burns. I feel the deck drop away from my feet. I feel the vastness around me, how small I am, one tiny mote of animated carbon and water amid an ocean of infinity.
All that I have lived through. All that I have suffered. The destruction of my homeworld. The collapse of my culture. The mass murder of my people. My mother. My sister. My father. The war without and the Enemy Within.
All of it feels meaningless.
“Alllllll,” Aurora says. “Burrrrrrrn.”
Then she closes her eyes, and collapses into my arms.
“Holy flaming nadsacks, is she all right?” Cat asks.
Zila rushes to Aurora’s side, scanning her vitals with her uniglass. The Longbow has stopped shaking, that awful screaming cut off like someone snuffed a lamp. Tyler and the others are staring at the remnants of the star map as it slowly fades from view, like spots on the back of your eyelids after you look at the sun.
“Heart rate is normal,” Zila reports, and I sigh with relief. “Respiration normal. Everything is normal.”
“Um.” Scarlett raises her hand slowly. “I beg to differ.”
“Seconded,” Fin replies, his eyes wide.
Tyler’s eyes are still fixed on the fading star map. That spreading stain has receded once more, leaving those original star systems still picked out in burning red in the black and white all around us.
He shakes his head, glances at me, then down to the girl in my arms.
“Take her to sickbay. Zila go with him. Make sure Auri’s all right.”
I glance at Zila, but she seems composed again, despite our confrontation. And so I nod, lifting Aurora as gently as a sleeping babe. As we walk off the bridge, down the corridor toward the sickbay, I hear Scarlett’s voice, soft behind me.
“What the hells does this all mean, Ty?”
But the door slides closed before our Alpha can answer.
And I am left inside the silence.
27
Zila
I stand over Aurora’s unconscious body, a med-scanner in hand. She is laid out on a bio-cot in sickbay, and I am reviewing her vitals. It is almost five minutes since I stunned her—she should be conscious any moment now.
“Is all well?” Kal says softly behind me.
“There is nothing of concern in her readings.”
“… I meant you, Zila.”
My arm is still slightly numb from his nerve-strike, but there is no pain. I can only see concern in his eyes as I glance back at him. But that concern melts into relief as Aurora slowly stirs, raising one hand to her brow and moaning. I am forgotten as Kal takes a step forward, lips parted slightly, eyes on her.
“Wh-what hit me?” Aurora whispers.
“I will leave you alone,” I hear myself say.
“Zila … ,” Kal says as I turn toward the door. “I truly am sorry. I sought only to take the weapon from you.”
“I understand,” I lie.
My Alpha’s words are ringing in my ears as the door slides shut behind me.
“Your problem is that you know how everything works except other people.”
It’s true, and it’s not.
I learned too much about how humans work when I was six years old.
I know everything I need to.
But I still can’t say I understand them.
28
Kal
I should have seen this coming.
Aurora opens her eyes, and the light catches her iris and turns it to glittering pearl, and the flood of relief in my chest escapes my lips as a soft sigh.
“Be’shmai …”
I help her to sit up on the bio-cot, watch her blink away the grogginess from Zila’s disruptor blast. The thought that she is safe is a balm on the fire that consumed me on the bridge. The mere sight of her is water in an endless desert, if I must speak the truth. But I have never felt so torn in all of my life. Because this cannot go on.
“What do you remember?” I ask her.
I watch, almost hypnotized as a small frown creased her brow.
“Zila … shot me.”
“She intended no harm,” I say. “She wished only to awake that which is within you.”
Aurora looks up at me, and my heart beats a touch quicker as our eyes meet.
“Eshvaren,” she whispers.
“The Ancients.” I nod. “Somehow they are involved in all of this. And you are part of it, Aurora.”
“This is insane.” She closes her eyes, rubs her temples as if pained. “I could see the whole thing. Even though I was out cold. It was like … like I was outside my body. Watching it on a vidscreen. Zila blasting me, and you …”
Our eyes meet again, and my heart sinks. I expect a rebuke. A righteous admonishment for the violence I set free among my squadmates. I can feel the Enemy Within, coiled inside my chest. The shadow of my father at my back.
“… You defended me,” she says.
I blink. Shake my head. “No. I shamed myself.”
She looks at me, then. Up and down, from my boots to my eyes.
“I don’t get you, Legolas,” she sighs. “I don’t understand you at all. One minute you’re calling me a liability or ignoring me entirely. The next you’re blasting your way through a TDF destroyer to break me out of prison or punching face with your own squad to protect me.”
She sighs and shakes her head.
“What is your deal?”
I draw a deep breath, hesitating before I let myself fall. I know once I speak these words, there can be no taking them back. But I should never have let it get this far. And I cannot do this anymore.
“It is past time I spoke to you of this. Why I behave the way I do around you.”
“You mean why you act like a total jackass?” she asks.
Despite the pain in my chest, I feel a small smile curling my lips. I shake my head as I search for the right words. For a way to make any part of this make any sort of sense.
“There is a gravity to everything, Aurora,” I finally say. “Not just planets. Not just stars. Every cell in our bodies, every cell in creation exerts a gravity on the objects and people around it. And … that is what I am feeling. For you.”
She frowns slightly, eyes glittering under the warm lights. For a second, she looks so beautiful, my breath is stolen clean away. But still, I lunge to catch it. Because if I do not say this now, I fear I never will.
“Syldrathi call it the Pull,” I say. “It is an instinctual … attraction we feel. A bond that is elemental. Primal. Just like gravity. I have never heard of one of my people being P
ulled to a human before. But … I feel it for you, Aurora.”
She opens her mouth as if to speak, but my words are a flood now.
“I did not wish the others to know. And you had troubles enough without me compounding them. I thought that because you had seen me before you met me … we might be … fated, or some such.” I shake my head, feeling a fool in every cell of my body. “And so I tried to keep you out of danger without letting you know what was happening. I did not wish to place you under some sense of obligation.”
“What … what obligation might it place? If I were Syldrathi?”
A long silence falls between us.
“The Pull is the bond between lifeloves,” I finally say. “Mates.”
She swallows. Clearly lost for words.
“I should not have let it come to this,” I sigh. “I should never have put a human in this position. It is not fair to you, nor the others. And you should not have to make this choice.”
I breathe deep again, nod to myself. Fighting off the rush of anguish. Feeling the rip widening inside my chest until it is so dark and deep I know I might never find my way out again.
But it is better this way.
“I cannot help the way I feel for you,” I say. “But I can control what I do about it. So once we discover the truth behind this Trigger, the star map, I will resign my position in the squad. I have ignored the war among my people for too long. I can stand apart from it no longer. So, once we reach the end of this road, you will not have to see me again.”
The silence between us is as wide and cold as the Void. For a moment, I cannot imagine an end to it. But my uniglass pings in the quiet, filling that edgeless gulf and breaking the spell between us.
“Kal?” comes Tyler’s voice. “Do you read?”
I touch the device at my belt. “I copy.”
“Zila says Auri’s awake?”
I look into those mismatched eyes, feel the pain cutting through my heart like a blade. “She is awake.”
“I think you two better come up and see this.”
“… We are on our way.”
I touch the uniglass again, cutting off the transmission. Staring at the girl sitting opposite me, centuries and light-years away from anywhere and anything she expected to be. Tasting blood and ashes in my mouth.
What can you say when there are no words for what you’re feeling?
What can you do when there is nothing left to be done?
“We should go,” I say.
And without a word, she slips off the bench and marches out the door.
29
Cat
I’m at work on the navcom when O’Malley and Pixieboy walk back on to the bridge. She looks like ten klicks of rough road, and he looks like someone murdered his puppy and left the head in his bed. But truth be told, we got bigger problems than Feels right now. The Bellerophon is still closing on us, and after what we’ve just discovered …
“Auri, are you okay?” Scarlett asks, obviously rating Feels a little higher than me. She’s good like that.
O’Malley glances at Pixieboy, and I can see the lie in her eyes before she speaks it. “I’m okay.”
“Cat, show them,” Ty says.
“Roger that.”
With a flick of my wrist, I throw my navcom visuals up onto the main holographic display. O’Malley stares at the revolving spiral of glittering stars.
“What am I looking at?” she asks.
“The map inside your Trigger highlighted twenty-two stars in total,” I say. “I’ve plotted those systems onto the known segments of the galaxy.”
“Took her a while,” Finian says. “She couldn’t tell just by looking at them.”
“There’s around two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, skinny boy. I don’t have all of ’em memorized.”
He sniffs. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”
“Shut up, Finian.” My fingers fly over the controls, and twenty-two tiny points of red flare out among those billions of suns. “Most of the systems highlighted on the map are unexplored. And a lot are a deep trek from here, even Folding. But it turns out every one of them sits on a known weak spot in the Fold.”
“They all have naturally occurring gates?” Pixieboy asks.
“Looks like, yeah.” I tap another series of commands. “And you’re never going to guess the closest system to our current coordinates.”
Kal raises his eyebrow in question, and I throw the answer up onto the main display, where the visuals of our creepy-as-hells plant people used to be. A holographic rendering of a star floats above our consoles, burning bright. It’s orbited by seven planets, the third world sitting inside the Goldilocks zone. The system’s name is highlighted in glowing letters beneath it.
“Octavia,” Aurora whispers.
I glance at Ty, then across to Scarlett. At every member of this jank squad on this jank mission that we spent five years at the academy prepping for. We all know this can’t be coincidence. The official records point us toward Lei Gong, but those GIA agents with the funky plant crap all over their faces were former Octavia III colonists according to O’Malley. She said her ship, the Hadfield, was bound for Octavia III when it disappeared two hundred years ago. And now, whatever else this million-year-old map is for, it’s leading us straight back to that same bloody planet.
“So riddle me this, Legionnaires,” Tyler says. “Say you’re the GIA and there’s a system you don’t want people visiting. And say you can’t just lock its gate down because it’s at a naturally occurring Fold spot. How do you keep folks from poking their nose in?”
“Maybe you make up a story about some deadly atmospheric virus,” Scarlett murmurs.
“Maybe it’s no ghost story,” I remind them. “Zila said those colonists in the GIA uniforms were dead before Kal got to them. Maybe they were infected with the virus this interdiction is warning us about.”
“So why change the records to point toward Lei Gong?” O’Malley asks. “Why delete any record of the Octavia colony existing? Why chase down the last person with any remaining link to the place?”
Tyler folds his arms across his broad chest. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting the feeling there’s something on Octavia that the GIA doesn’t want us to see. Or more importantly, something they don’t want Auri to see.”
“Ra’haam,” Zila murmurs.
Kal nods. “Beware.”
I don’t like where this is all heading. Government conspiracies and cover-ups and Maker knows where else. But we’ve got bigger problems.
“Bellerophon is within comms distance,” Scar reports. “They’re hailing us.”
“Main display,” Tyler orders.
The image of the Octavia system dissolves, replaced with a figure in a white suit, white shirt, white gloves. The winged crest of the Terran Defense Force is embossed on the wall behind it. Its face is a featureless white mirrormask.
“Good morning, Princeps,” Tyler says.
“Legionnaire Jones,” the figure replies. “You are responsible for the murder of Global Intelligence Agency personnel, aiding and abetting a wanted fugitive, and violation of countless Aurora Legion regulations.”
“It’s been a funny couple of days, sir,” Tyler agrees.
“You may find yourself less glib once incarcerated at Lunar Penal Colony,” the G-man replies. “You are hereby ordered to power down your engines and maintain position to await our boarding party.”
“And if I refuse?”
“We will destroy your vessel,” Princeps says.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Tyler says, shaking his head. “But with all due respect, I don’t believe you. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to follow us to the Octavia system.”
Princeps raises its voice for the first time since we’ve met it. “That system is
under Galactic Interdiction by order of the Terran government!”
“Exciting, right?”
“You will—”
Tyler makes a cutting motion across his throat and I kill the signal, reverting the image back to the Octavia system. The whole bridge is quiet except for the thrum of the engines. Scarlett has her eyebrow raised at her baby brother, and I can’t help but stare, too. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen Tyler buck authority. Not once. But in the last couple of days, he’s gone from star academy pupil to wanted interstellar fugitive.
And Maker help us, I think he’s getting a taste for it.
“Hell of a gamble, Bee-bro,” Scar says.
“Not really,” he says. “From the beginning, the GIA has been about capturing Auri. They were willing to kill anyone who knew she was in their custody. And this is what it’s all about.” He gestures to the display. “There’s obviously something at Octavia that the GIA doesn’t want us to see. And whatever it is, it’s connected to Auri’s new abilities. Her trances led us to the Trigger, and the Trigger is leading us to Octavia. Now, I don’t know if Battle Leader de Stoy and Admiral Adams knew it’d come to this, but I believe we were meant to be here. I believe there’s something way bigger going on than any of us realize.”
He looks around the bridge at all of us.
“But we’re stepping over the edge here. I won’t blame any of you if you want out. We’re fugitives from the Terran government now. But if we cross a Galactic Interdiction line, we’re going to be wanted by every government everywhere.”
Tyler’s right, and everyone knows it. Galactic Interdiction is the hardest of hard-core codes. It’s only used on the most dangerous sectors in the galaxy—systems ravaged by outbreaks or infestations that present an imminent threat to the rest of galactic civilization. The Lysergia plague. Selmis pox. Temporal storms. You don’t mess around with systems under GI. You break it, they don’t court-martial you. They vaporize you on sight and try not to get any on their shoes.
Tyler looks us all in the eyes. “Anyone who wants to leave, head down to level three, hit the escape pod, and abandon ship. No hard feelings.”