Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(38)

“Thank you, Zila, we don’t need a breakdown of the math right now,” Tyler says. “Kal, I’ve sent you the trajectory; just burn hard and follow Zila’s mark.”

“Understood.”

“You can do this, buddy,” Tyler says.

I look down at Aurora in my arms and smile.

“I know,” I say.

“Ten seconds, Legionnaire Gilwraeth,” Zila says.

Aurora tightens her jaw and nods. She slips her arms around my waist, and my stomach turns a dozen somersaults at her touch.

“Eight seconds.”

I grit my teeth, breathe deep.

“Six.”

“Kal?” Aurora says.

“Four.”

“Yes, be’shmai?”

“Three.”

She leans up and presses her faceplate to mine, as if to kiss my cheek. There are only a few millimeters of visor between us. Warm, soft breath fogging the plasteel. The entire universe is perfectly still.

“Two.”

“You got this,” she says, meeting my eyes.

“Mark.”

I engage my thrusters, pushing them hard as we take off through the Hadfield’s wreckage. Moving slow at first, I guide us past massive bulkheads and disintegrating walls, tons of metal, building up to frightening speed. I can see the incoming Zero as a small green blip on my digital HUD, surrounded by pulsing scarlet dots, Aurora and myself rendered as a tiny speck of white.

I thread us through a roiling storm of debris, sheaves of metal as big as houses, ripped apart like tissue paper. We are moving quick now—fast enough that any collision will kill us. The black outside the Hadfield’s hull is being lit by explosions and tracer fire, and I can feel him inside me. The thing I was raised to be, straining at the thought of the battle out there, of blood being spilled.

I’na Sai’nuit.

But I push him back. Away.

“Hold on to me,” I say.

Aurora squeezes, her eyes locked on me in wonder. All is chaos about us, a twisted tempest of broken metal and wreckage as the Hadfield continues to disintegrate. I spiral between immense conduits, tumbling end over end, twenty tons of sundered hatchway scything through the black just a meter shy of my head, the Zero drawing ever closer.

“Your speed is insufficient, Legionnaire Gilwraeth.”

I see the incoming Zero, rusted and ugly but flying toward us swift and straight as an honor blade. I see the Hephaestus fighters swarming around her like fireflies in the dark. I adjust course, cleaving to the path outlined on my HUD, jet-pack at maximum burn now, swooping upward in a smooth arc to intercept our ship, her docking bay doors open wide to receive us, a light in the darkness. Tracer fire spills silently through the night, and Aurora squeezes me so tight it is hard to breathe, my heart pounding against my ribs.

“We are inbound,” I say simply.

“I see you!” Tyler shouts. “A few more seconds.”

“Alpha, adjust course, zero point four deg—”

“I got it, I got it!”

“They’re not gonna make it!”

“Kal, pull up!”

A blur of rusted metal. A gleam of pristine light. A beautiful girl in my arms. And all around us, soundless. I see it in slow motion, the Zero looming before us, the tiny moments of my tiny life strobing before my eyes. My sister and me, standing beneath the lias trees with our father, training in the Wave Way. The Enemy Within, stretching and flexing, blooming like a flower in dark earth beneath his hand. My mother, reaching out to touch my face, the bruises we share bringing tears to her eyes, her words ringing in my soul.

There is no love in violence, Kaliis… .

“Incoming!”

The light swells, and I wrap my arms around Aurora tight as we soar through the open bay doors. I slam on my thrusters to slow us, twisting to shield her with my body when we hit the far wall. My teeth bite my tongue and my brain is rattled inside my skull as we collide with the bulkhead and crash onto the deck. I feel the vibration of the bay doors closing behind us. Aurora is lying on top of me, gasping in my arms. Bruised. Breathless.

But alive.

Gravity is returning and her hair is tumbling about her face, her nose smudged in blood. But as she pulls herself up to look at me, she is still the most beautiful sight I have seen in my life. Atmosphere has returned to the bay and she fumbles with the clasps of her helmet, tearing it loose and dragging her hair from her eyes, shining in triumph.

“Holy cake, that was incredible,” she breathes.

She is grinning, bewildered, amazed. Her eyes are wild, delirious at the simple thought that we are alive, against all odds, alive. And before I quite know what she is doing, she has reached up and pulled my helmet loose, too.

“You are incredible.”

“Aurora—”

And then her mouth is on mine, smothering any thought or word. She grabs my suit and drags me closer, sighing into my lungs as I crush her to my chest, almost hard enough to break her. She is a dream, alive and warm in my arms, and I burn with the feel of her, the smell of her, the taste of her. She is smoke and starlight, she is blood and fire, she is a song in my veins as old as time and deep as the Void, and as I feel her surge against me, the flutter-soft touch of her tongue against mine, she almost destroys me.

Kiss.

It is so small a word for so wondrous a thing.

Our first kiss.