Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(79)

My hand closes around hers again, and I squeeze softly.

“And though it fills me with joy to have been the one you asked to tell you this truth, I have no doubt you knew it already. Because that is who you are. And just one of the infinite reasons why I love you as I do.”

She meets my eyes. “I could die in there, Kal.”

My heart seizes again, but I try to show no fear. She needs me to be strong now, and I can give her that, if nothing else.

“You will not die, be’shmai,” I tell her. “You are more than you ever imagine.”

“… What will you do out here?” she asks softly. “While I’m in the Echo?”

“Finian says he has managed to isolate a particle trail from the probe. He took great pains to explain how difficult it was.” She smiles faintly. “He says he can track the device back to its point of origin. Wherever the Eshvaren launched it from. Perhaps we will find the Weapon there. Or more clues to its location.”

“The Eshvaren will probably tell me where it is. If I pass their test.”

“When you pass their test,” I say, squeezing her hand. “But Scarlett says we cannot risk everything on the throw of million-year-old dice. I am inclined to agree. Besides, it will keep us occupied while you are in this … Echo of theirs.”

“The Eshvaren … ,” she begins. “They told me that time moves differently in there. That moments out here are hours in there. I was wondering if maybe … you might want to come with me? It would be a long time to be in there on my own.”

I blink. “Can we do that? I mean to say … is it allowed?”

She tilts her head. “They’re asking me to risk my life to save the damn galaxy, Kal. I think they can give me a little company on the ride.”

I think on it a moment. I do not truly know what this Echo entails, but I feel confident Scarlett and Finian and Zila can conduct the tracking of the probe on their own. And in truth, the thought of being parted from Aurora has been weighing like a stone upon my shoulders. And so I smile at her, nodding agreement. And for a moment, the smile she gifts me in reply is full of the same joy I feel in my heart.

But the shadow soon returns.

I see it lurking with the fear in her eyes.

“There’s nothing as painful, or as simple, as doing what’s right,” she says.

“No. There is not.”

We stand there silently for a very long time. Letting it wash over us—the enormity of it all, where she must go, what she must face, what hangs in the balance, resting on so small a point as the two of us. Aurora’s eyes are fixed on the dark outside, her thoughts a silent kaleidoscope.

“You know, before I broke him, Magellan used to show me random science facts every day,” she finally murmurs. “I was reading one yesterday about atoms.”

The warmth of her, the press of her body against mine, is a drug, and I am conscious of how fierce and loud my heart is pounding on my ribs. With her back pressed into the curve of my chest, surely she must be able to feel it. But I try my best to listen. To be here in this moment for her.

“Atoms,” I say.

“Right,” Aurora nods. “Every cell in your body is a nucleus surrounded by electrons. And those electrons are negatively charged. So they push away other electrons when they get too close. And this article said that while your brain perceives the force created by electron repulsion as ‘touching,’ the atoms are actually always hovering some tiny fraction of a millimeter apart.”

She runs her thumb across mine and shakes her head.

“So we never actually touch anything,” she says. “We go through our whole lives totally apart. We never actually get to touch another living thing. Ever.”

The hunger in me stirs. I can feel it in her as well—the thought that this fire growing between us, this whisper rising into a storm, all of it could be snuffed out tomorrow. Gently, I turn her to face me. Look into her eyes. She shivers as I draw one finger down the arc of her cheek.

Her voice is a whisper as I lean in closer.

“Magellan said if two particles ever actually touched …”

Closer.

“… it’d create a nuclear reaction… .”

“That sounds dangerous,” I whisper, searching her eyes.

Closest.

“Very,” she breathes.

Our lips meet, and our fires collide, and in that instant, all and everything is utterly right. There is no ship. There is no Fold. There is only this girl in my arms, and the Pull in my core, and the press of her mouth her hands her body to mine. She surges against me, breathless, hungry, seeking that same solace I feel, the shelter of oblivion, the everything of us and the nothingness of everything else. Her tongue brushes mine, and she guides my hands to where she wants them to be, and though I know in some part of me that what she said is true, that we are not truly touching at all, for a moment I fear we truly are, that the heat between us has become some nuclear fire that will consume us both.

She pulls away from me after an eon. Looking up into my eyes with something close to the adoration she must see in mine. She presses her fingertips to my face, my ears, my lips, her touch incandescent on my skin.

“You are the fire I long to burn inside,” I tell her.

She takes my hand.

She leads me to her bed.