Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(109)

My heart is a war drum, pounding against my ribs.

I am standing aboard the shuttle he sent for me, hands clasped behind my back, surrounded by six of his Paladins. The decor on the Syldrathi ship is black, its crimson light muted to gray by the Fold. The Unbroken warriors around me are clad in ceremonial armor, watching me from beneath silver lashes. None are brave enough to give voice to their thoughts, but in truth none need to. I feel it.

Curiosity. Resentment. Fear.

The lost son, returned.

I watch the shuttle’s forward screens as we weave through the Unbroken armada. The sight of it is awe-inspiring, terrifying: the sheer scale of it all, the countless ships ready to unleash chaos at his word. He commands respect, my father. His very name enough to strike fear wherever it is spoken. A man who was prepared to burn his own homeworld rather than sacrifice his honor. A man to whom the murder of billions was preferable to surrender.

I remember him standing behind me beneath the lias trees. His hand on my shoulder. Guiding my strikes as he tutored me in the Wave Way.

I can feel him now, if I try.

My Enemy Within.

And then I see it.

A glimpse between the crescent shapes of two massive carriers. The full scope of it unfolding as the ships part before us like water. The breath is snatched away. I feel like an insect in the presence of a god.

The Weapon.

It is the largest vessel I have ever seen, stretching twenty kilometers from nose to tail and making children’s toys of the mightiest ships around it. Its shape is vaguely conical, and a series of massive concave structures are arrayed at what I presume is the bow, like vast lenses—asymmetrical, arcane, and utterly alien. It is carved of the same living crystal that the Eshvaren wore in the Echo, and the rainbow of light playing upon its every surface, hypnotic, melodic, would have been stunning enough were it not for the thought that suddenly occurs to me: We are in the Fold.

Everything around us should be monochrome. Muted shades of gray. But the Eshvaren Weapon is a song of color, almost heartbreaking in its beauty. This is a device designed to destroy suns, and yet my soul swells to see it.

The war in my blood surges. Something in it calls to me, reaching out across the gulf between us, roiling, rushing, setting my pulse pounding quicker, my fingertips tingling. A power at once alien and familiar. A voice I have not heard in years, and yet have heard every day of my life, echoing now in my head.

Kaliiiiiissssss.

As the shuttle draws closer to the Weapon, we pass through a field of some sort—vaguely glittering, translucent. The ship shudders beneath me. The Paladins around me sway on their feet, and I feel a flood of … power in my head. Thick like syrup. Heavy as iron. Blurring my eyes.

The shuttle lands in a strange docking bay, crystalline structures on the ceiling and floors, the colorscape almost blinding in intensity. I glance at the Paladins beside me, but they remain silent. They bay has no doors—no way to keep the cold and the vacuum out. But the warriors march me down to the shuttle’s airlock and, without hesitation, cycle it open.

We do not freeze. We do not suffocate.

The Paladin commander fixes me in a gray stare.

“We can go no farther, I’na Sai’nuit,” he tells me.

I step out into the bay, the surface humming beneath my feet. I cannot say how, and yet … I know the way. Drawn like a needle to north, I walk up winding paths of singing crystal, whispering, thrumming with power.

I feel … strange. All the emotions within me seem louder. I see an image of Aurora standing with her hand raised aboard the Zero’s bridge, her power striking me in the chest as she commanded me to stop. I hear the venom in Scarlett’s voice as she cursed me, blamed me, hit me. I feel Finian’s bewildered pain, Zila’s silent acquiescence as they cast me out. I who have fought for them. Bled for them. Risked my all to keep them safe. None of them could understand what it was for me to join the Legion, how much I have given, how much I have suffered, how it feels to be utterly alone, even in a crowded room.

Ever since my mother fled back to Syldra, I have never known a moment’s peace. Outcast among my own people for the Warbreed glyf at my brow, the blood in my veins. Outcast among the academy cadets as the former enemy, the pixieboy, the freak: Remember Orion, remember Orion. Among the members of Squad 312, I thought I had found a home. A place to belong. Something worth fighting for.

But I was a fool.

I should have known that the shadow of the past would forever come between us. We cannot deny who and what we truly are.

And Aurora …

“Aurora.” I whisper the name, as if it is poison on my lips. Pushing thoughts of her aside, the memory of our time in the Echo, the things we shared, locking her and them away in a room inside my head and casting away the key.

I am no one now.

I am only this.

What I have always been.

There is not a soul in these vast and glittering halls. Not a single soldier or scientist or servant. The entire ship is empty, save for this power, familiar and unknowable all at once. As I walk farther down the crystal way, I feel catatonia, vertigo, perfect clarity. My pulse is rushing, asynchronous, like a drumbeat out of time. My mouth tastes like rust.

This ship is huge. These corridors seem endless. But eventually, the pathways converge, opening out into a vast, spherical chamber.

Power drips from the air, red and thrumming on my skin. The walls are lost in shadow, and my eyes are drawn to the light, the concentric spires of crystal in the center of the room, aglow and radiant. An ever-ascending dais, rising off the floor, crowned with an enormous glittering throne. Branches of crystal reach out toward it from the ceiling, the walls, like the roots of a tree straining toward water. Squinting, putting my hand up against the rainbow light, I see a figure upon it.