Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(11)

Kal stands slowly by my side, peering at the Hadfield’s wreck. Of every race in the galaxy, the Syldrathi are the only ones who truly believe the Eshvaren ever existed. The light from the projection plays across his violet irises as he speaks.

“And you believe we may be able to learn more about the Ancients aboard?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I do know something happened to me on that ship. I was just a regular person when I stepped into that cryopod, and when Tyler pulled me out, I was …”

I glance at my reflection in the helmet again. The stranger looking back at me.

“… this.”

“They might have salvaged the black box,” Fin says. “The flight recorder would tell us if the Hadfield ended up anywhere she wasn’t supposed to, if anything unusual happened that the instruments could measure. When. How. Where.”

“We will be better equipped to support Aurora’s mission if we understand the nature of it,” Zila agrees. “And the ones who gave it to her.”

Kal nods. “Know the past, or suffer the future.”

Tyler glances across at Scarlett for a long moment. She tilts her head, gives an elegant shrug.

“Okay,” he says then, his fingers tightening around Shamrock. “It’s a place to start. And we don’t have any other clues to go on. Sun Tzu said, ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles.’ ”

“Who’s Sun Tzu?” Fin asks.

“An old dead guy,” Scarlett replies.

“And we’re taking his advice because … ?”

Tyler’s eyes are on the Hadfield, and I can see the fire in them as he speaks. “We know a little about our enemy. Let’s learn something about our friends.”

“Okay,” Scar replies. “Can we start by learning how we get off this junk heap?”





3

SCARLETT

My girls are too big for this uniform.

Don’t get me wrong—I love my ladies. Chi-chis. Ta-tas. Whatever euphemism you want to use. Those days when you’ve managed to sculpt the perfect cleav and you can hear people’s necks snapping when you breeze past? Yeah, that. They’re a fantastic idiot detector. (Hint: I don’t blame you for peeking, but if you’re talking to them rather than my face, you have failed the Test.) They’re often a lot of fun to have around at night.

But some days, they’re just a bitch to own.

I’ve got to hold on to the damn things when I run, for starters. I’m not doing that to point them out to you, people—it just hurts if I don’t. Good bras are expensive, and you have to wash them extra carefully or you quickly find yourself buying another expensive bra. Don’t get me started on the whole underwire thing. Humanity is a race capable of interstellar travel, and nobody’s invented a bra for girls my size that doesn’t feel like prison. Here is a truth universally acknowledged—taking that thing off at the end of the day is the single greatest feeling in the world.

Sorry, boys.

And then there’s moments like this one. Trying to defy the laws of physics by compressing matter into a space far too small for it to fit. I’m sure Zila has an equation for it somewhere in that big brain of hers: Area.??[Bewbage+?{where. ?=brassieredensity}] = PAIIINNN.

“I always hated physics,” I mutter, adjusting myself for the seventeenth time.

“You what?” Tyler asks across comms.

“Nothing,” I sigh.

Zila and I are marching along Section 12, Ceta Promenade of the Emerald City docks, wearing the uniforms of two operatives of Earth’s Global Intelligence Agency. We stole these outfits during our daring heist back on the World Ship, right off the bodies of two GIA goons who tried to arrest us. Tried being the operative word—Legionnaire Kaliis Idraban Gilwraeth, adept of the Warbreed Cabal, took those GIA agents apart like jigsaw puzzles with his bare hands.

I admit I used to get a little hot and bothered watching Kal work. Our squad’s Tank isn’t at all hard on the eyes. But I can tell from the not-so-secret glances they’re constantly exchanging that he and Auri have got some kind of Thing going on now. So, solidarity among sisters, I must now (mostly) avert mine eyes. Le sigh.

Pity, I’ve never dated a Syldrathi before… .

ANYWAY, stolen uniforms usually mean ill-fitting uniforms. Though I swear this thing didn’t fit as bad the last time I put it on. But nobody in the squad can lie half as well as me, and posing as a GIA operative is a con I’ve run before. So I’m clad head to foot in charcoal-gray nanoweave, doing my best to walk it like I own it. Zila is marching beside me, studiously ignoring my eighteenth attempt at bap adjustment by watching Adams’s public denouncement of us on her uniglass again.

“… this squad has clearly gone rogue. They have violated our trust. They have broken our code. Aurora Legion Command offers every assistance …”

“Do you ever have this problem?” I ask her.

Zila mutes her uni, glances up at me.

“PROBLEM? ”

“You know,” I say, waving at my chest. “Size … fluctuation.”

Zila tilts her head, her voice turned even flatter than usual by the GIA mirrormask. “HORMONE CHANGES DURING OVULATION CAN LEAD TO SWELLING. ESTROGEN PRODUCTION PEAKS JUST BEFORE MID-CYCLE, AND THIS CAN CAUSE ENLAR—”