Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(10)

I don’t know how I should be feeling. But looking at Cat’s old toy, at those faceless gray uniforms, I can’t help but think about our confrontation with the Ra’haam on Octavia III. The colonists it absorbed into its hive mind along with her. My father’s face beneath the mask of a GIA agent, silver flowers in his eyes.

Jie-Lin, I need you.

And though a part of me wants to curl up and scream at the memory, most of me is just furious. Knowing how it consumed him, used him, wore him like a suit. I can feel midnight blue tingling at my fingertips. The gifts the Eshvaren gave me crackling just beneath my skin. The Ra’haam’s ancient enemy, somehow alive in me.

I can learn to control this. I know it. I can be the Trigger they made me to be.

But like Tyler said above Octavia, we still need to find the Weapon.

“Okay, Goldenboy,” Finian sighs, head bent over his uniglass. “You want the good or bad news first?”

“Whichever’s less dramatic,” Tyler replies.

“Well, good news is, the Longbow’s already in pieces in an Emerald City salvage yard. Very small, very flat, very expensive pieces.”

Tyler closes his eyes. Even though we all knew the odds of getting the ship back were low, it’s still a body blow to have lost any chance of selling it.

“How is that good news?” he asks.

“I guess it’s good news in contrast to the bad news?”

Tyler sighs. “Hit me.”

Fin continues. “Bad news is, the only ship we can afford with our current funds is a one-hundred-and-seventy-year-old Chellerian freighter with no drive or nav or life-support systems, whose last gig was hauling solid waste from Arcturus IV.”

“Sounds delightful,” Scarlett deadpans.

“Sounds fragrant,” I mutter.

“Sounds useless,” Tyler scowls. “There’s nothing else?”

Finian shrugs, and with a flick of his finger projects his uniglass feed onto the wall display. I can see a complicated network node with thousands of different ships on offer, from massive cruisers to tiny tugs. Every one of them is so far out of our price range I actually feel a little nauseous. I peer at the corp name on the masthead, a glowing logo of a cogwheel wreathed in fire.

“Hephaestus Incorporated,” I murmur.

“They’re the biggest outfit with a salvage yard on Emerald City,” Fin explains. “Maker’s bits, if we had the credits, we could get a chariot worthy of our status as notorious interstellar criminals, but …”

“We don’t have the credits,” Tyler points out, grim.

“Please tell me we’re not considering buying the sewage ship?” Scarlett says. “Because I don’t think I’m dressed for that.”

Kal glances at Scar, one silver eyebrow rising. “How would you dress for that?”

“Wait, wait a minute … ,” I whisper, my breath sticking in my throat. “Fin, stop scrolling, go back to …”

My tone stills everyone in the room. Fin lifts one hand, swipes it from right to left like a conductor, scrolling slowly through the ships in the salvage yard.

“There, stop there!” All eyes turn to me as I stand slowly, pointing at one of the ships on the wall.

“Auri?” Tyler asks.

“That’s the Hadfield,” I say.

Tyler walks closer and squints at the display. Fin punches up the entry, expands it, and there it is. Right out of my memories and into the waking world.

It looks a little like an old Earth battleship, long and cigar-shaped. The hull is blackened, long gashes are torn down its sides, and the metal looks like it was liquefied in places, but I’d recognize it anywhere. The ship I climbed aboard two weeks and two hundred and twenty years ago, setting out for a new life on Octavia III. A life that’s gone now, along with everything and everyone I ever knew.

“Maker’s breath, you’re right, Auri.” Ty shakes his head, staring at the Hadfield with a kind of awe. “Last time I saw her, she was being ripped apart by a FoldStorm. How did anyone get hold of her?”

Fin shrugs. “Search me. I’m guessing a Hephaestus salvage team stumbled across her in the Fold after you rescued Stowaway here? Specs say she’s in a mega-convoy heading for an auction block on Picard VI.”

“Why would anyone want a piece of junk like that?” Scarlett glances at me. “I mean, no offense …”

“None taken,” I murmur.

“Says so right here,” Fin nods. “ ‘The most famous wreck in the age of Terran stellar exploration! Own a genuine piece of history!’ ”

“We have to get to her.” The words are out before I realize I’m speaking.

Tyler turns from the display to face me. “What for?”

“I don’t know. I just … feel it.”

“Is it your gift, be’shmai?” Kal asks.

“Maybe.” I glance around at a sea of uncertain faces, realizing that as much as they’re growing to trust me, the legionnaires of Squad 312 are going to need more than a gut feeling. “Look, we know I’m supposed to stop the Ra’haam from blooming, right? Otherwise it’ll spread through the Fold and consume the galaxy. But we don’t know anything about the Eshvaren. And they’re the ones who set all this in motion, who somehow made me into … whatever I am.”