Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(97)

“Where did that come from?” Fin demands.

“It popped up in front of us, like, five minutes ago.”

“Why are we still flying toward it?” he demands, slightly panicked.

“Because we can’t stop.”

“What?” he asks, abandoning slightly panicked for totally.

“I tried to turn around. I tried to cut our engines. I even punched the console like Cat used to do when she was annoyed. The flight computer just yelled at me.”

The ship shakes again, way more violent this time. Shamrock falls off his perch. Finian blinks around the bridge, frowning up at the PA speakers.

“… What’s with the electropop?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you’re not a Brittneee fan, de Seel.”

“We’re getting sucked into a spatial anomaly at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second with no engine or nav control. Shouldn’t we have a metric buttload of alerts screaming about that? Sirens and whatnot?”

“I turned them off.”

“… WHAT?”

I swivel my chair, release the Mute button on my console. Brittneee’s sing-along-able tones are drowned out as the bridge is plunged into a deafening cacophony of warnings from the flight computer.

“WARNING: POWER CORE FLUCTUATIO—”

“NAVIGATION SYSTEMS OFFLINE, REP—”

“ENERGY SURGE IN ANOMALY CORE, RECOM—”

I stab the button again.

Brittneee asks Finian if he’d like to Get It.

“See?” I say. “Much more relaxing.”

“Great Maker, we’re going to die … ,” Fin declares.

“No, we’re not,” says a voice.

My carefully cultivated facade of chill in the face of certain death slips away as I look past Fin and catch sight of her standing on the bridge threshold.

“Auri!” I breathe.

I rise to meet her, to throw a hug around her, just overjoyed to see her back on her feet. I have no idea what she went through in the Echo. I know her brain wave activity was off the charts—Zila said she and Kal were living weeks of time in just minutes. But the look on her face, her pose, everything about her …

She’s changed.

I can feel it when I look into her mismatched eyes. When I study her body language. Somehow, even the air around her. She’s … alive. Cracking with purpose, with power, so much so that just the sight of her raises goose bumps on my skin. Kal looms at her shoulder, always just a whisper away. Zila is behind them, eyes fixed on the anomaly we’re being rapidly drawn toward.

“You know what this is, Stowaway?” Finian asks.

Aurora stares at the whirlpool, its light reflected in her right iris. For a second, I swear I can see the light inside her, pulsing in response.

“It’s a gateway,” she whispers.

“To where?” I ask.

“Not where.” Auri shakes her head. “What.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll bite. A gateway to what?”

She draws a deep breath into her lungs.

Her right eye glimmers like a tiny sun.

“The Weapon,” she says.

· · · · ·

We plunged into the anomaly forty seconds later, just as the opening beats of Disasterpiece’s drunken-hookup dubpunk classic “Last Heartbeat in the Club” started pulsing through the PA. They’re not as good as Brittneee, but hey, no one is.

Anyway, I’m pleased to report we didn’t die.

The colorscape of the galaxy shifted from the Fold’s monochrome to every shade of the rainbow, crashing right into my head. As we crossed the breach, the Zero bucking beneath us, I caught sight of Aurora standing in the center of the bridge—hands held out, eye burning like a beacon—steady as a rock while the rest of us clung on for dear life. I got the distinct feeling that if she hadn’t been there with us, we’d have all been ripped into disappointed subatomic pieces by the gateway. As it was, plunging through it felt a little like getting hit in the head with a naked astrophysicist.

Slightly amusing.

Definitely weird.

But mostly painful.

And now we’re on the other side. I’m guessing the anomaly was some kind of FoldGate—hidden, semi-sentient, waiting for someone like Aurora to trigger it into opening. The alerts have calmed down to almost normal levels. I’ve killed the dubpunk—the moment seems to demand a little gravitas. Because as we all gather around the central holographic display, we can finally see the origin point of the probe. The place this journey—Aurora’s, all of ours—started, countless millennia ago. The point in space where the Eshvaren made their last, desperate gamble to stop the resurrection of the Ra’haam.

It’s a planet.

An utterly dead planet.

Lifeless. Waterless. It hangs in space, framed against the soft light of a pulsing red dwarf star, barren and alone.

“What is this place?” I whisper.

“Their home,” Aurora says, her eyes on the display. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

“The Ancients,” Kal says reverently.

“Eshvaren,” Finian breathes.

Aurora sighs. “I wish you could have seen it like it was.”

“I can detect no tectonic activity,” Zila says, looking over her scopes. “The core is frozen solid. Atmosphere almost nonexistent. No life signs.” She looks around the bridge, dark eyes finally settling on Aurora. “Not even microbial.”