Aurora Burning: The Aurora Cycle 2

by Amie Kaufman

  “You’re telling me,” she agrees. “I never thought I’d see chamomile again.”

  I lean across to look at her drink, and she holds out the mug so I can inhale the steam. “Smells like flowers,” I decide.

  “It’s one of my faves. It’s traditionally for before bed. Helps you wind down.”

  “Chamomile.” I repeat the word to commit it to memory, in case I need to make it for her sometime. “You want to talk about the dream? A load shared is a load halved.”

  She smiles. “Is that some ancient Betraskan wisdom or something?”

  I shake my head. “Read it on a coaster at a skin bar. But, you know, sometimes dreams aren’t so bad when you say them out loud.”

  Even as I’m saying that, I’m thinking about the dreams she’s probably having. About the one I had, when I saw Trask covered in blue snow that turned out to be the pollen of the Ra’haam. It’s the fate that awaits my homeworld if we fail to stop the Ra’haam from spreading. The fate that awaits the whole galaxy.

  She closes her eyes and sips her tea.

  “It was what you’d think,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t Octavia this time. Too many moons. And the sky was greener. But the plants were the same. Except they felt bigger and stronger. I was trying to look more closely, but the pollen was too thick to see. I think there were … buds. On the plants.”

  A finger of ice traces a path down my spine.

  Her voice is a whisper. “I think it was getting ready to bloom and burst.”

  I don’t really know what to say to that. I’m wondering how I’d feel if it was me in her position—if the whole galaxy was resting on my narrow shoulders, not hers. I’m trying to figure out a way to tell her how brave I think she is. How most people would have just flown to pieces if they’d lived her life over the past few weeks. But I’ve never been good at Peopling. I never know what to say.

  Fortunately, I’m rescued from my struggle by the arrival of Scar and Kal. They both look sleepy, but Kal’s taken the time to pull on his uniform, his hair as immaculate as ever. Scar’s in a silky wrap thing that invites me to imagine what she’s wearing underneath it. I do my best not to, with mixed results.

  “Hey, you,” Auri says, smiling at Kal.

  “Hey,” I say, sounding like a chirpy idiot. “Bad dreams for you too?”

  “I don’t know what woke me up,” Scarlett admits. “I was just …”

  “… uneasy,” Kal finishes.

  I wonder about that uneasiness. I know Kal’s mother was an empath, and if his sister inherited some of her gift, maybe he did too? Maybe he picked up on Auri’s bad dream. Doesn’t really explain why Scarlett can’t sleep, though …

  The silence stretches, Auri letting talk of her dream recede like it’s in the rearview mirror, Kal and Scarlett reaching for a better reason they drifted out here.

  Well, this is about as cheery as a tri-soul departure ceremony.

  “All right,” I say. “I got another half hour before I go off watch. Since nobody’s sleeping, what say we teach Stowaway here how to play frennet?”

  “I am familiar with the game, but not the rules,” Kal replies.

  I reflect for a moment that no Betraskan at Aurora Academy would ever have considered socializing with Kal, let alone teaching him how to play a game—not with his Warbreed sigil tattooed right there on his forehead.

  “No problem,” I tell him. “Howsabout I give you and Auri a lesson, and we put some of those shiny new credits to use?”

  Scar gives me a wink that says she knows I’m on cheer-up duty, and she approves, and I work hard to make sure I don’t give her a big, dumb smile back.

  I know the three of them would take over my watch if I asked so I could get to work on my suit, but half an hour of this feels more important. After our strategy talk earlier, we all know there’s hard times ahead. I figure there’s no harm in making a little light for ourselves, here in the dark.

  “I’ll go get drinks,” Scar says. “Fin, why don’t you pull up the program?”

  “Okay,” I say, swiping through the ship’s submenus to find a decent frennet program, and pulling up a 3-D screen to project on the console. “So in the first round, there are seventeen dice in play.”

  “Seventeen?” Auri splutters.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you.”

  A small line appears between Kal’s brows, a sign of great concern.

  “No mercy, Finian,” he says. “We learn by losing.”

  “I never said I was gonna go easy on you, Pixieboy,” I grin, assigning the player tokens. “You, my pointy-eared friend, are about to learn a great deal.”

  “Mmm.” His violet eyes sparkle at the joke. “We shall see.”

  “You know, if you don’t wanna risk any of that newfound wealth, there’s another version we can play. Strip frennet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah,” I grin. “Everyone bets a piece of clothing per pot, and the loser has to take it off. Makes things more interesting.”

  I admit I feel a perverse sense of delight as Kal’s eyes slip involuntarily to Aurora, and I see a flush of heat spreading across her freckled cheeks.

  “I do not think that is appropriate,” Kal says.

  “Hey, I didn’t know Syldrathi blushed with their ears.”

  “I am not blushing,” Kal glowers.

  Scar returns with the drinks tray balanced on one hand and flicks my ear as she passes. “Stop being a bastard, Finian.”

  “But I’m so good at it!”

  Scarlett grins and shakes her head, and her smile makes me smile harder in return. We get down to it, and in the end, Kal isn’t the only one who ends up learning a great deal. I learn that Auri starts snorting when she giggles too hard. I learn that Kal has a deep, booming laugh you can feel in your chest. I learn that Scarlett cannot be bluffed, no matter how hard you try. And I learn that maybe I don’t suck at Peopling as much as I suspected.

  We stay up past my watch. We play way longer than we should.

  But hey, nobody’s thinking about bad dreams anymore.

  8

  AURI

  I don’t know how well the others slept in the Fold—my dreams were disjointed and weird—but I’m still better rested than I was before. The aches of Saedii’s agonizer are fading, though I’m guessing I won’t be invited to her place for the holidays anytime soon. It was strange to wake up while we travel this way. Everything on the ship was cast in black and white by the Fold, and it felt like I was still dreaming.

  But now I’m in the Zero’s airlock, busy suiting up with Fin and Kal while Zila diligently checks our spacesuits. My gloves click into place, and she takes my hands in hers, turning them over to confirm the seal. Zila pins my hair back from my face—my own hands are too unwieldy in my gloves. I guess I should have thought of that in advance. I’ve had a short lecture from Tyler, and a half hour’s practice in the low gravity available in Finian’s room, which is all anyone ever needed for a space walk, right?

  That’s right. I’m about to walk.

  In.

  Space.

  The Jones twins are up front in the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs, guiding us ever closer to the Hephaestus salvage convoy, the Hadfield, and the black box inside. I can see a display of it from the long-range cams on our hull, and it’s like . . . well, it’s like something out of a science-fiction movie. The convoy is huge—hundreds of ships, all in various states of disrepair, from “mildly beat-up” to “let’s hope it has a good personality.” The shapes and sizes are mind-boggling: sleek and beautiful or bulky but functional or holy cake what. Each ship is being hauled by a much smaller tug, marked with the burning cogwheel of Hephaestus Incorporated.

  From what Ty said, these tugs are mostly engine, made to haul much bigger vessels across space or into starports. They don’t look too scary, but the convoy is also accompanied by a small fleet of heavily armed cruisers. I can see them on the display—wedges of gleaming silver, moving in the predictable
flight patterns of pilots who’re bored out of their minds. Nobody here is expecting to get robbed. The ships they’re hauling are all broken-down pieces of junk, after all.

  And, speak of the devil, out on the fringes of the convoy, there she is.

  The Hadfield is huge, battleship-shaped, her hull blackened and torn. The last time I saw her, this ship was considered state of the art. She was the biggest Ark-class vessel Earth had ever made. She carried ten thousand colonists and the hopes of an entire planet. And now all of them are dead except for me.

  For the thousandth time, I wonder why I was the one to survive. Why, of all those innocent people, the Eshvaren picked me to be their Trigger. Looking at the derelict floating out there in all that black, I feel a shiver run down my spine, something whispering in the back of my—

  “Aurora?”

  I blink, realize Zila is looking at me expectantly. “Huh?”

  “Lean down, please.”

  I do as I’m told, then bend forward so she can ease my helmet on.

  Ty transmits from the bridge. “All right, we’re almost good to go here. The tac-comp and I have been analyzing their security flight pattern, and there’s a gap in their sweep every thirty-seven minutes.”

  “We are still twenty-five hours from the convoy’s destination at Picard VI.” Zila snaps the latches into place, her voice suddenly muffled in real life, but crystal clear over my comms system. “Their security should not be on particularly high alert.”

  “Agreed—most of them are flying on autopilot,” Tyler says. “But nobody take that as an invitation to dawdle. Get in, get what we came for, and get out. Anything else is a bonus.”

  By “anything else,” he means anything I can contribute. Fin is boarding the Hadfield to download the contents of the black box. Kal is there for our protection. And I’m there in case I see anything that reminds me of … well, anything, really. Whatever happened to me, or how. Given we’re not even sure what we’re searching for, we’ll take whatever clues we can get. But I hope that finding out what the Hadfield’s systems remember about the moment I was … transformed … will at least set us on the next steps of our path.

  “The Zero has stealth mode engaged,” Tyler continues. “And her cloaking tech is top-shelf, so we’re not going to show on any of their scopes. But these people still have eyes to spot us. So make sure you don’t draw any attention to yourselves.”

  His sister’s voice chimes in. “We’ll be in position in ninety seconds.”

  On our displays, I’m watching a tiny red dot that represents us, sidling up to the convoy through the gap in the security patrol’s flight paths. I watch us weave in and out of the fleet under Tyler’s expert hand, and my stomach is about to crawl right out of my mouth. Zila is checking Kal’s helmet seals now, up on her toes to reach.

  “You will have sixty seconds to reach the Hadfield before the security fleets adjust formation and the gap closes,” she says.

  “Just don’t look down, Stowaway,” Fin grins.

  Zila backs out of the airlock, closes the door. “Good luck.”

  We’re sealed inside now, only one more door between us and space. My palms are damp. I can feel a cold trickle of sweat running down my spine.

  “Opening outer door in ten seconds,” Zila reports over comms. “Secure positions. Grip the wall restraints in case of sudden movement.”

  I push both my hands through the straps, anchoring myself firmly, even though there’s no real reason I should fall out of the ship and into the endless vacuum. Still, I’m not about to pass up any safety precautions right now. I mean, I trained to travel through it, sure. But there’s a big difference between being loaded into a cryopod and shot through space, and actually, you know, walking in it.

  The outer door slides open, and son of a biscuit, that is Space right there.

  It’s really big.

  I mean, obviously it’s really big; it’s literally famous for being really big. And yet somehow, this is different from seeing it through a viewport or monitor.

  This is the first time I’ve understood that I could float through space forever.

  Kal is beside me, resting one gloved hand on my arm. His gaze is calm, his voice gentle. “All will be well, be’shmai. Finian and I will assist you.”

  It turns out Fin equaled Ty’s perfect score on his zero-grav orienteering exam—apparently the outcome of years spent sleeping in it. He nods sagely. “I’ll be right there, Stowaway. These superhero good looks aren’t just for show.” He shoots me a grin, then crouches over the launcher, all business. “Time check, please, Scar.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” she reports. “Ten, nine, eight …”

  Up on the bridge, Tyler adjusts his controls, and the endless view of space is replaced by the port side of the Hadfield, a stretch of pitted metal filling our view through the open hatch. According to the displays, we’re now flying in perfect parallel with the derelict: same speed, same heading, maybe fifty meters apart.

  I take a deep breath, checking my grip, making sure I’ll actually be able to unpeel my hands when I need to move. Small movements, I tell myself, repeating the words Fin and Tyler chanted at me over and over during my one brief training session. In zero gravity, a sudden jerk or lunge will send me off balance, and momentum will keep me helplessly spinning. Every motion needs to be precise and gentle. There’s no up in space. There’s no down. But one wrong move and I could end up falling for the rest of my life.

  Smaaaall movements.

  Scarlett is still counting down. “… three, two, one, mark.”

  Fin gazes calmly through the sights and pulls the trigger on the grappler. A metal line flies out across the gap between the Zero and the Hadfield, attaching soundlessly to the larger ship right near a massive, melted gash in her hull.

  “Line secure,” Fin whispers. “Transfer under way.”

  “Why are you whispering?” I ask.

  “I … don’t know exactly.”

  “You’re not much of a warrior, are you, Finian?” Kal teases.

  “Will you just get out there?” Fin hisses. “We’ve got mischief to make.”

  With the smallest hint of a smile curling his lips, Kal eases himself out of the airlock, pulling himself hand over hand along the metal line between the two ships. I’m next, and I can hear my breath shaking as I exit the Zero.

  Even though we’re flying at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per minute, there’s no sensation of us actually moving, and aside from my breathing, everything around me is perfectly silent. Kal, Fin, and I are tethered to each other and the main line, and we all have jet propulsion units in our suits in case something goes wrong. But still, the void around us is so sickeningly huge and black and just nothing that I almost can’t wrap my head around it. And so I stop trying, focusing on the cable in front of me instead, whispering instructions to myself:

  “Right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand.”

  I know Fin’s behind me, ready to help if I need it. But that doesn’t change how impossibly small I feel right now. Yet somehow, instead of being frightened, I find myself … exhilarated. Feeling so tiny makes me realize just how big what we’re all a part of is. And being out here in all this emptiness somehow makes me completely aware of everything I am and have.

  These friends, who’re risking their lives for me. Our little light, shining in all this darkness. I’ve never really believed in destiny. But out in all this nothing, I’ve never been so certain of who I am and where I’m supposed to be.

  Ahead of me, across the bottomless stretch of blackness, Kal reaches the gash. Slowly, carefully, he tests the edges until he finds a spot that won’t cut open his gloves. Then, with what looks like an effortless movement, he pulls himself into the pitch-black interior of the Hadfield.

  It’s my turn next, and I have to force myself to let go of the line, grab at the rip in the Hadfield’s skin. As I float into the darkness, I push too hard, and Kal saves me before I sail into the wall. He catches me in
his arms, brings me down gracefully. My heart is hammering and my breath is pounding in my lungs, and now that my time outside is over, I realize all I want is to do it all over again.

  “What a rush,” I gasp.

  Kal looks down at me. “I know just what you mean.”

  My body is pressed against his, his face just inches away from mine, and the starlight reflected in his eyes is like sparks dancing inside violet flames. I swallow the lump in my throat, my heart pounding even harder than before.

  Fin pulls himself in through the gash behind us, pretending not to notice as I reluctantly push myself out of Kal’s arms.

  “Line released, Goldenboy,” he declares. “See you soon.”

  “Roger that,” Ty replies. “Good hunting.”

  I watch through the hull breach as the Zero silently peels away. She disappears behind the arc of the Hadfield’s thrusters and vanishes from sight, hiding in the convoy before the security patrols swing back. We activate our helmet lights, and I see we’re in a long plasteel hallway. It feels almost familiar. It all looks perfectly normal. Except, you know, it’s totally dark. And it opens into space.

  “All right,” Fin says. “The bridge is this way. Follow me, lovebirds.”

  Fin pushes off the ground, moving as naturally as a fish through water. With gentle touches on the wall to propel ourselves, Kal and I float after him, our headlamps illuminating the way ahead of us. Fin’s studying the map on the uniglass strapped to his left forearm. His movements are smooth and graceful.

  “Your suit seems much better, Fin,” I say.

  “I won’t be winning any dance contests soon, but it’s getting there.”

  “I’m sure you’re an amazing dancer.”

  He smiles at me sidelong. “You trying to get me to fall in love with you, too, Stowaway?”

  Kal glances Fin’s way, but with that cool I used to find so infuriating, he doesn’t ruffle. We make our way farther into the Hadfield’s belly, and everything around us is silent and dark. The ship doesn’t actually look that bad from in here, and I can almost imagine she’s still in her prime. But it’s when we round a broken bulkhead that the full scale of the damage hits me like a kick to the chest. To our right is a rip that goes all the way through the ship from the upper decks to the keel. Cables and conduits spill out of the rents between levels, metal and plastic all twisted and torn. Looks like the quantum lightning storm Ty battled his way through to reach me really did a number on the Hadfield. Or maybe she weathered lots of FoldStorms before he found me?