Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(34)

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?”