Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(7)

Kal and I spent the last few hours sitting in the back as he tried to teach me some Syldrathi exercises he hoped would help me focus my mind. The wild power I briefly controlled on Octavia III is still lurking inside me—I can feel it there, swirling and rolling behind my ribs—but my command of it is shaky at best. If I open the valve that’s keeping it cooped up in there, I have no idea what will come out, but I know it won’t be pretty. Kal’s hope is that with training, with discipline, I can control how I use it.

But as I tried to envision a slowly flickering purple flame, pushing away reality to focus on my sa-mēi—a Syldrathi concept I still don’t understand—it was hard not to peek from beneath my lashes and stare at him instead. Kal gets this little frown when he’s concentrating, and that I could happily push away reality and focus on just fine. But I think he might consider that an undignified version of training.

I spend my final five seconds grabbing the ration packs scattered across the table and shoving them in on top of Fin’s tools, slinging the bag over my shoulder as the others come piling out from the back.

“Let’s go,” Tyler snaps. “Kal, you’re on point. We have two armored hoverskiffs incoming, maybe thirty seconds away. Let’s be gone before they arrive.”

“Yessir,” Kal says simply, glancing across to check my position, then leading the way down the ramp. Tyler’s straight behind him and I’m next, which means I run smack into our Alpha’s back when he pulls up short.

“Hey, watch—”

I lean sideways to see around him, and realize he’s stopped because Kal stopped. And Kal stopped because …

“I think,” our Tank says quietly, “your estimate of thirty seconds was incorrect.”

The three of us are sitting ducks on the Longbow’s loading ramp, which is bad news, because we’re not alone. Two huge floating flatbed trucks have pulled up in front of our ship, lights flashing an urgent blue. And huge, terrifying robot trooper things that look like upright metal cockroaches are jumping down from them, knees bending backward to take the impact as they hit the ground. They’re armed with guns the size of my torso, their polished armor reflecting the strobing lights.

“ATTENTION, SUSPECTS,” one blares, though I don’t see its mouth move. “YOU ARE BEING DETAINED FOR QUESTIONING. RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH FORCE. RAISE YOUR HANDS TO INDICATE COMPLIANCE.”

For a long moment, everything’s quiet. Even the roar of the city around us subsides, and as if I’m underwater, all I can see is the flashing blue light dancing against the armor on the cockroach robot soldiers. Kal adjusts his weight ever so slightly, using his body to shield mine. I feel a tingling on the back of my neck, adrenaline thumping in my veins. I feel the world … shift, and without warning, my mind is aswirl with images.

Another vision.

It’s as if I can see the next few instants play out inside my head, like I’m watching on a vidscreen. I can see the pathways we could follow, each branching away in front of me, clear as glass.

I see them putting us in cuffs, loading us up onto one of those flatbeds, snapping the restraints onto the long bar down the middle to secure us. I see Zila’s hands twisted up behind her back, Ty’s jaw squared in defeat and frustration.

Or, down another path, I see Kal start forward and Ty dive to the side, and I see me standing paralyzed by indecision as the troopers open up, their fire slicing through our bodies.

Or I see …

“Be’shmai,” says Kal softly.

“Yes,” I say quietly, pausing for a long, slow breath. I feel my lungs expand, feel my ribs swell with the pressure inside, the thing I’ve awoken roiling and ready, wanting and demanding to be free. I lift my voice a little so all of Squad 312 will hear me. “Everyone, hit the deck in three …”

I hear a query from behind me, the roaring already rising in my ears.

“Two …”

I hope the squad’s confusion won’t slow them down. That they’ll trust me, though our new trust is a fragile thing, built on heartbreak.

“One.”

Tyler and Kal fold to the ground, and I throw up my hands, letting go of every piece of myself. My body’s gone, left behind where it stands in the doorway of the Longbow, swaying in place. And I’m a tumult of midnight-blue mental energy, laced through with vicious threads of silver, exploding in every direction.

To the rest of the world I’m invisible, or I’m back where my body is, or maybe something in between. But on the plane where I exist, I’m a roiling sphere, expanding at the speed of light to envelop the SecBots in front of me.

It’s a wave I’m barely riding, not at all controlling, and I can’t choose my direction—I can keep the tsunami away from me, sparing the weak, fragile bodies of Kal and Tyler, the squad behind me, but it balloons outward and upward and beyond them in a millisecond.

The ripple of force explodes in three hundred and sixty degrees, and I’m dimly aware of the Longbow crumpling in the same instant the bots do. My silver threads wrap around them, grip deathly tight, and delight roars through me as I squeeze, as I crush, as their metal crumples and their circuits flare and die.

Everything is silent and the roar is deafening, and I’m part of my midnight-blue cloud, I’m gripping them with my silver threads, and I’m snapping back into my body like a piece of elastic stretched too far, and suddenly …