Aurora Burning: The Aurora Cycle 2

by Amie Kaufman

  We all stop for a long moment, simply staring up at this destruction, trying to absorb the scale of it. I know each of the boys is worried about me in his own way, wondering how being here might make me feel. But from the outside, at least, I mustn’t seem too rattled. Wordlessly, Fin pushes off the wall once more, and I float after him, Kal bringing up the rear.

  “Still no life signs,” Kal reports, his voice crisp.

  “Good. I didn’t get time to do my hair this morning.” Fin checks his map again. “It’s about nine hundred meters up to the bridge. Old Mr. Black Box will be in our sticky little hands in about five minutes, Tyler.”

  “Roger that,” Ty replies. “Everyone stay frosty.”

  It sounds like good advice, and I do my best to follow it, to ignore the unease I can feel growing inside my stomach. But as I follow the beam of my lamp along the dark corridor, I begin to feel a faint current tingling on my skin.

  It’s like pins and needles, or static electricity, crackling out from my chest toward my fingers and toes. I hear a snatch of conversation ahead of us, my breath catching in my throat as a group of five figures rounds the corner, walking down the hallway toward us.

  Holy cake, they’re people.

  They’re all clad in the gray jumpsuits of the Hadfield mission, and one of the women is laughing—a bright, crystal sound in the dark. The shock of seeing them is like a slap. I try to jerk to a stop, and just like I was warned, the sudden motion sends me whirling backward, head over heels, spinning right into Kal’s chest. He grunts as I slam into him, wrapping one strong arm around me and grabbing at a doorframe to steady us.

  “Okay there, Auri?” Fin asks, twisting back to see what happened.

  Pulse thumping in my temples, I realize the people are gone.

  And I realize none of them were wearing spacesuits.

  And I could hear them, even though we’re in a vacuum.

  And they were walking, when there’s no gravity.

  They were … ghosts?

  No, no, that’s not right. There’s a tingle in my fingers now, a buildup of static electricity. Just like when I crushed that ship in the Emerald City docks. Just like when I dream things that come true. I can feel my powers at work if I close my eyes—midnight blue and bottomless beneath my skin. But this feels less like one of my visions, and more like … one of the Hadfield’s memories come to life?

  “Are you well?” Kal asks, looking intently into my eyes.

  I blink at the spot where I saw the people, shaking my head. “I …”

  “Did you see something, be’shmai?”

  “I …” I swallow hard, my mouth suddenly dry. “I don’t know… .”

  The boys exchange a glance, neither one really believing me, but both too polite to call me out. Fin tries to lighten the darkening mood.

  “What did we forget, Stowaway?” he asks.

  “We forgot the golden rule.” I try to make my voice sound cheerful, but I know I don’t succeed. Still, Fin is a good sport and chants my lesson with me again:

  “Smaaaaall movements.”

  We continue on toward the bridge, and there’s a definite sense of wrongness, of foreboding, building up behind my eyes. Being back here now, seeing this place … I mean, it’s not that I didn’t know I was more than two centuries into the future. Of course I did. Everything around me tells me so—the aliens, the tech, the complete absence of anything familiar. But somehow, that’s different from seeing something I knew, shiny and new just a few weeks ago, now so ancient. So utterly dead.

  I’m just so sad for the Hadfield.

  Zila speaks over comms. “Aurora, your vitals are spiking. Are you in distress?”

  “I’m okay,” I lie, but there’s still a shake to my voice.

  “We’re nearly at the bridge,” Fin says. “There’s an elevator shaft over here. If it’s not blocked, we can float all the way up through it, past the cryo levels.”

  The cryo levels. Where I went to sleep, expecting to wake up on a new world, with a new life. Where Tyler found me, surrounded by the corpses of everyone I’d set out with. My heart’s thumping, my ears are buzzing, and I make myself speak.

  “I’m going to … I want to see them.”

  “Be’shmai?” Kal asks, watching me uncertainly in the gloom.

  “If I’m going to remember … if I’m going to learn anything, it’ll probably be there.” I swallow. “Where it … where it happened.”

  It sounds almost reasonable coming out of my mouth. As if I’m being scientific about it, instead of being drawn to the place I survived, like a moth to a flame. I don’t want to tell the boys, I don’t want to say anything that makes me sound crazy, but the whole corridor around us is alive now. Full of people hurrying along, laughing and talking. I can feel them. I can see them. I can hear them.

  But all of them are dead. Echoes, imprinted on the ship like old bloodstains.

  “Do you wish me to accompany you?” Kal asks softly.

  I nod silently, staring at the figures around me.

  I don’t think I’ve wanted anything more in my life.

  “Goldenboy?” asks Fin. “We’ve got no life signs over here, and I’ll only be a few hundred meters above them. Okay for me to proceed to the bridge alone?”

  There’s a long pause before Tyler replies. “Permission granted. But keep your comms open at all times. Auri, Kal, I want constant updates, understood?”

  “Yessir,” Kal replies.

  With a grunt of effort, Kal pries apart the elevator doors, allowing us to push inside. The shaft is huge and dark, stretching down from the ship’s upper levels, but at least there’s none of those ghostly echoes inside here. We push our way up, Fin leading the way, Kal close beside me. I know it’s my imagination, but as we sail upward, I swear I can feel the warmth of his body through his suit. Despite the echoes around me, I can remember what he felt like, pressed up against me. And somehow, just the knowledge that he’s there makes it a little easier to breathe.

  Mind on the job, O’Malley.

  “Okay, that’s your stop, kids,” Fin says cheerfully, pointing to a door in the shaft above. “I’m a dozen floors up.”

  “Call if you need assistance,” Kal warns. “And watch your back.”

  “Always.” He glances back and forth between us. His eyes are unreadable through his lenses, but his smirk sure isn’t. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Kal wrenches the door to the cryo levels aside, and I touch the walls, feel the sound through my suit. He kicks out into the gloom while Fin heads upward. I push my way gently out of the elevator, following Kal into the hallway.

  The huge doors to the cryo vaults loom ahead of us, melted to slag at some point by a quantum lightning strike. My stomach feels full of cold butterflies. I can hear hollow voices, as if coming from far away.

  My light cuts a thin beam through the murky darkness beyond. I look across at Kal, careful to turn my head slowly. His braids are floating inside his helmet, gleaming silver, his eyes narrowed at the dark ahead. The lines of his face are smooth and hard, his cheekbones so sharp they might cut my lips if I kissed them.

  He meets my eyes, and his stare is beautiful, cold, alien. But behind it I can feel a warmth, a depth, like he can see into every part of me. It makes me shiver. Wordlessly, he reaches across for Magellan, strapped to my forearm. He taps at my screen, then at his own.

  “We are still monitoring the squad channel,” he says. “But we can talk privately now.”

  “… How did you know I wanted to talk?”

  “Your eyes,” he says simply. “They speak.”

  “I’m … not even sure what I wanted to say,” I admit.

  “Who could know what to say at such a moment?” he asks, gesturing at the cryo chamber beyond the melted doors. “This is the place where the future of your people was changed forever. Where your future was changed forever.”

  “At least I got to have a future,” I say quietly. Because that’s what’s weighin
g on me, making my heart beat so hard, drying out my mouth until it’s difficult to speak. “I got out of here when nobody else did. What was so special about me that I deserved to live when all these people had lives and hopes and families and stories of their own, and they didn’t?”

  Kal’s reply is soft, solemn. “It is difficult. To be one who endures.”

  And of course, that’s when I remember that Kal’s whole planet was destroyed. That every Syldrathi who still lives is ultimately homeless, stateless. And here I am, ready to cry over just one ship.

  “Kal … ,” I begin.

  “I know what you would say.” He cuts me off gently. “But there is no comparing loss, be’shmai. I did not mean to do so. I only meant to say that I understand what you feel. And if I could take your pain away, I would.”

  We pause at the vault doors, and I curl my gloved hand through his. As always, there’s a faint hesitation. But then he tightens his hand around mine as if it’s all he’s ever wanted to do. Syldrathi don’t really touch—I learned that from Magellan. But I can’t help it—I need to—and I know Kal’s getting to like it, so I don’t hold back. It’s a way to communicate when words fail us, as they so often do.

  He looks at me, there in the dark, and I can feel how badly he wants me. I can almost see it, the way I saw those echoes—invisible threads of burning gold and silver spilling off him in waves, held in check only for fear of burning me. But looking up into his eyes, I realize I want him to burn me. I want to feel him pressed against me again as he sets me on fire. And I know he wants it, too.

  We’re so far in the deep end, for two people who only just met.

  The moment’s broken when Fin’s voice crackles over comms.

  “Well,” says the squad’s Gearhead. “I have good news, kids.”

  “Heyyyy, that’s a switch,” Tyler replies.

  “I’m kidding. I actually have bad news and other bad news.”

  “Maker’s breath, Finian … ,” Tyler groans.

  “Yeah, I know, I’m a character,” Fin says. “So basically, someone’s already been up here and carved the black box right out of the floor.”

  “Brilliant,” Tyler sighs.

  “So the black box could be anywhere, is what you’re saying?” Scarlett asks.

  “Mmm, nah,” Fin says. “This was a surgical job. Readings off my uni are clocking these burns at maybe twenty hours old. I’d guess the Hephaestus boys chopped it out and have it stowed aboard the lead tug in the convoy.”

  “We got problems,” Tyler says.

  “There’s no way to power these consoles and look for backup, and they’re melted to chakk anyway. Gimme a minute—I’m going to look around, but I am not optimistic. Even with my mighty genius in our corner.”

  “Kal?” Tyler asks. “Have you or Auri found anything?”

  Kal looks into my eyes. “We may be about to. Stand by.”

  I look into his eyes, hoping that he understands.

  I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to see what I know I have to.

  But I have to control this.

  I can do this.

  He squeezes my hand, nods once. He speaks without saying a word. And, feeling stronger, feeling more with him beside me, I finally drag up my courage and step through the cryo-vault doors.

  We find ourselves in one of a series of vast chambers, lined with tank after tank stacked high like endless rows of coffins. The whole left-hand side of the chamber has been blown out, but all the corpses along the right-hand side still rest in peace. I wonder who’s in there. Where the others are. Floating somewhere behind us, back where the ship was wrecked, tumbling endlessly through the Fold?

  “Be’shmai?” Kal says, and I realize I’m squeezing his hand hard enough to break his fingers.

  I’ve been here before, in this very room. And suddenly I’m back in that moment. I’m at orientation, taking my tour of the ship. A cheery lady with hair in a cotton-candy-pink bob is leading a group of us through the room, along the rows, making jokes about how in just a few days we’ll get to take the nap we so desperately need, what with all the preparations for the trip.

  We laugh, some of us nervously—cryo is still relatively new technology, the Fold a mysterious place—and with a sudden flash, like lightning, our tour guide is a desiccated corpse. Everyone around me is dead, the animation gone from their faces, and they begin to float away.

  I can feel Kal shaking me, but I can’t respond. My whole body is humming, like there’s a hurricane building up inside me, and I’m flailing for control. The space around us is full of echoes, people walking, talking, passing over us and through us as if we’re the ones who aren’t real, but dead and forgotten centuries ago.

  I can sense the deep violet of Kal’s mind now, the gold and silver threads woven through it. He told me he didn’t think he had inherited anything from his Waywalker mother, as his sister did, but in this moment, I know he’s wrong. His golden threads are buried so deep I’m not sure he realizes they’re there. But I cling to his mind with the midnight blue of mine, my silver dust of starlight whirling about in a wild dance. I can’t get it to be still. I can’t contain it.

  I have to.

  I HAVE TO.

  I’m not in the hallway anymore, and yet I am—with one flash of lightning after another to herald each change, new places are superimposed over it. The ship is suddenly swathed in the vines of the Ra’haam as they shoot up the framework that holds the cryopods. And then I’m blinded by the white lights of the infirmary back at Aurora Academy. They morph into the multicolored displays in the sports bar back on Sempiternity, where Kal and Tyler fought the Unbroken. Then they swirl into the underwater ballroom of Casseldon Bianchi. I hear the roar of his guests, of dancers, the thump of the music, and then that rhythm becomes the sound of running feet.

  The roar becomes a cheer, and I’m at the running track at home, surrounded by high school students. And then they turn into withered corpses and crumble to dust.

  I can feel a force building up inside me, like floodwater against a dam. I see Cat turning toward me, holding out one hand, and then her eyes flicker and become blue, her pupils turn to flowers, and she screams. I see Admiral Adams gazing down the barrel of a camera at me. I see Kal, clad in the same spacesuit he wears now, though the real Kal is still right at my side. A vision. A ghost. A future. He raises his hands as if to fend off a blow, and then a shot hits him square in the chest. He flies backward with an awful cry.

  “KAL!” I scream.

  I hear his voice somewhere in the distance, trying to call me home, back to the cryo vaults, back to me. But the vision, the ghost, the future Kal slumps against the wall behind him, a smoking hole in his chest, and the hurricane within me explodes in a welter of grief and anger and fear.

  I can’t …

  I

  CAN’T

  And I’m snapped back into my body and I finally lose my grip, and the force surges outward, raging away in a perfect sphere of destruction, Kal and me at the epicenter. The walls of the Hadfield peel outward and the cryopods about us disintegrate, the bodies tumbling away into the void. The deck beneath us crumples, and the ceiling above us is ripped apart, silver light spilling up and out of my right eye, shining like a beacon.

  “Maker’s breath, what the fuck was that?” Finian roars.

  Faintly I can hear the others yelling down comms, the Hadfield trembling about me, and I think Kal is moving, towing me with him. The power is coming off me in floods, the dam inside me broken, my hands pressed against the widening cracks.

  Tyler’s voice penetrates the haze all around me. “Emergency retrieval! I’m locking onto their beacons, bringing the Zero alongside. Go, go!”

  I can’t see Kal—all I can see is a rocky, barren landscape, the sand and rubble a faded gray, the shadows a deep blue, the sky above lifeless and dead.

  I’ve never seen this place, but all I want is to go there.

  Kal’s arms close around me.

  Th
e vision fades.

  Everything turns black.

  9

  KAL

  All is soundless.

  The Hadfield’s hull peels apart in a perfect sphere of midnight blue, the cryo vaults demolished in a moment. Titanium and carbite buckle beneath the force of Aurora’s shock wave, and I hold her close as the belly of the mighty ship is blown apart from the inside out. Shards of plasteel and metal and glass spin outward into forever, and I engage the jet propulsion unit on my suit to hold us steady in the eye of the storm, this chaos my be’shmai has unleashed, her right eye gleaming like a lantern in the dark. And all of it, all of it, happens in complete and total silence.

  “Kal, report!” Tyler demands over comms. “Finian, status!”

  “I’m okay!” Finian shouts. “My underwear, not so much. What in the Maker’s name hit us?”

  “Aurora,” I reply, holding her tight. “The bodies, being here … she saw something. She lost control.”

  “Are you okay?” Tyler asks.

  How could I be otherwise? How could I be anything less than perfect when she is in my arms? Her hair floating loose about her face in the zero gravity, lashes fluttering against freckled cheeks. The blinding flare in her right eye has dulled to a glow now, warm as firelight against my skin. I know her every line, every curve, pressing my fingertips against the visor of her helmet and tracing the—

  “Kal, report!”

  “Aurora is semiconscious,” I reply. “We are still in the cryo vaults. What is left of them, anyway. Hephaestus security will definitely know we are here. Orders, sir?”

  “Hold position,” Tyler says. “We’re retrieving Fin, then coming for you.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  And I do. Hold tight, that is. Cradling Aurora to my chest. The Hadfield is a ruin, the hull around us ripped wide. The tug hauling us is desperately trying to slow down, and the stress of arresting our momentum is continuing to tear the Hadfield apart. A digital heads-up display is projected on the inside of my helmet, and I can see Hephaestus security ships swarming in the dark outside, imagine the panicked transmissions flying between them.