Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(91)

“And now you would lose everything else to stop it?”

“I’m not saying I want to,” I sigh. “I’m saying I have to.”

I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know what to do. So in the end, hating that I’m doing it, I push to my feet and walk back silently toward camp.

And though I can feel it tearing at him …

He lets me go.

· · · · ·

I’m expecting to see Callie the next day, but I’m expecting her to be a child like she was when I left her. Instead, as I slip into my vision, I see a woman in her thirties, sleek black hair reaching the small of her back, rippling with her movements as she plays the violin. She’s standing by a sunlit window, playing the song from memory.

“Callie,” I whisper, my voice sticking in my throat.

Her smile blossoms, and she sets down her violin and bow. “There you are,” she says simply, opening her arms to me.

I’m across the room in an instant, smacking into her chest as she folds me up in a hug, holding me tight.

She’s older than me, which feels strange, but this is how it must have been almost all her life. I wonder what it felt like for her to reach my age, and then her eighteenth birthday, knowing she was now older than I’d ever been.

“I’m so sorry,” I sob, tears soaking through the green silk of her shirt. “I’m so sorry I left you. I never meant to do that.” “Stop it,” she chides me gently, one hand smoothing down my hair.

“But I left you,” I insist.

“Nothing’s forever, Auri. Everything has its season. The world keeps turning, and the stars keep dancing after we’re gone, just as they all did before we came.”

“I was your big sister, Cal. I was supposed to look after you.”

She looks me in the eye then, a small smile on her lips.

“Come with me.”

One arm around my shoulders, she leads me out through the door. We make our way along the hall in silence, and pause in the doorway to another room. I see a toddler in a crib, curled in a tiny ball. There’s just a mop of black hair and a small face, slack with sleep, visible above the quilt.

“This is Jie-Lin,” Callie murmurs.

“She’s beautiful,” I breathe, tears in my eyes.

“I miss you, Auri,” my little sister tells me. “But I’m all right. Everything continues without us. The dance carries on.”

She’s beginning to fade away, and I want to reach out and grab her, hold tight and refuse to leave this moment. But instead, gazing one last time at her face, I let her go.

I let all of it go. Finally. Completely. I look at that little face, that beautiful baby girl who shares my name, and I feel it wash away. The anger and the rage and the pain and the sadness. The thought that I missed all of this. Because I didn’t, really. I was here all along. In the hearts of the people I left, but never truly left behind.

I let it all go.

And as I open my eyes, I find the Eshvaren above me. I feel the Echo around me shiver—a ripple that runs through the length and breadth of this whole plane, changing the sound of the horizon and the taste of the sky. And I feel it smile down on me with all the colors in its memory.

At last, it says.


Kal

The world around me trembles.

My fingers fall still; the music coming from the siif in my hands fades into silence. I look to the sky and note that it is a different shade of perfect. For a moment, I sense a shadow at my shoulder, and inexplicably I am put so deeply in mind of my father that I turn, almost prepared to see him standing there.

My fists are clenched.

But there is only the Eshvaren, wearing its crystalline form. It peers at me intently, as if truly looking at me for the first time. I can feel the power in it, in this place, the legacy of the Ancient Ones flowing in this plane’s every atom.

Remember what is at stake here, it says. This is more than you. More than us.

I blink. “I do not understand.”

Only one obstacle remains. Only one hindrance that binds her to what she was, and stands in the way of what she must be.

I feel a scowl at my brow, growing slowly darker. “And that is?”

The Eshvaren tilts its head and smiles a rainbow.





25

ZILA

Finian is leaning in close to Aurora’s face, studying the rapid fluttering of her eyelids. “It’s been nearly twelve hours since they went under,” he says. “Shouldn’t something have happened by now?”

“I take comfort in the fact that nothing has,” I say. But the truth is, although my tone is calm, I am also concerned. Based on Aurora’s account of her first visit to the Echo, it appears that during the two minutes of unconsciousness we observed, she subjectively experienced a period of approximately twelve hours.

This suggests that she would pass a day in four minutes, and so the almost-twelve hours that have now elapsed mean that she and Kal have been in the Echo for nearly six months. Their brain activity is off the charts, which implies they are indeed experiencing the passage of time at astonishing speeds.

The question that troubles me is how long a human or Syldrathi brain can maintain this kind of workload without suffering permanent damage.

“How is the tracking of the probe’s particle signature progressing?” I ask.