Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(36)

“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.