Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(103)

I close my eyes, reaching for what I know about Butler settlement, trying to picture the maps I’ve studied a thousand times. My exhausted, overloaded brain glitches for a long moment before I remember.

“There’s a med center,” I say. “On the west side of the settlement.”

Tyler rises to his feet, peering down to the settlement’s eerie layer of green-gray foliage. “I think I see it. Fin, can you walk?”

“Yessir,” Fin says simply. He straightens with a wince, his exosuit spitting out a low, hissing whine. His eyes are narrowed in pain. But he doesn’t complain.

“Okay,” Tyler says. “Scar, Zila, we take Cat to the med center. Kal, you get Fin to the colony spaceport and look for a replacement reactor core.”

“I know the way,” I say, sounding braver than I feel.

Ty nods. “Keep Auri with you, and comms open at all times. When you find what you need, call it into me immediately.”

Kal stands in one graceful movement, nodding at me. I rub my hands against the mossy grass to rid them of some of Cat’s blood, and my stomach turns as the color shifts—green blue to a deeper purple. There’s a warning screaming in my head. I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it under my feet, and in the skies full of dancing spores above me.

Something here is completely, horribly, unnaturally wrong.

I hear a whisper inside my mind. An echo of my own voice in my head.

Beware.

Ra’haam.

Cat’s jaw is clenched, and the fact that she doesn’t fight the splitting of the party, doesn’t try to join the conversation, tells me just how badly she’s hurt. I let Kal pull me to my feet, and we stand side by side for a moment, looking down at the wounded girl, her friends around her.

I brought them all here.

This is because of me.

“Go,” Tyler says, without looking up. “Good hunting.”

Kal retrieves his disruptor rifle from the ashes. As the two of us set off after the already-limping Fin, I can’t resist one last glance back.

I can’t escape the feeling I won’t see Cat again.

?????

It’s a lot more than twenty minutes to the flat expanse of the spaceport now, with Fin moving slowly and painfully, concentrating on walking and carrying the containment unit for our new reactor core. Even though I can’t see it under his biohazard gear, I can hear the protests from his exosuit from a few meters away. Kal and I both keep guns at the ready, even though I’m really not sure how to shoot mine. All three of us are trying not to jump at imaginary sounds.

We skirt the edge of the ruined colony—it would be faster through the middle, but Kal says the terrain is too good for an ambush. His voice is steady and his movements are sure, and I find myself drifting a little closer to him.

My mind’s whirling—jumping from the shuttle that’s now vanished from overhead, to Cat’s pale face and bloodied side, back to hazy memories aboard the World Ship, to another monster I destroyed without even touching it. I told the others I didn’t remember doing it, but that was a lie. Like I confessed to Kal in the sickbay, I can see it in my head now. As if I was a passenger in my own body, watching through the screens of my eyes. I remember killing the ultrasaur. I remember after Zila shot me, I remember shattering the Trigger, the words I spoke as the star map glittered in the Longbow’s bridge, the word I’ve been hearing in my dreams since I woke up two centuries too late.

Eshvaren.

The word draws me in, calls to me, in exactly the same way this planet repulses me. The need to find out more about that ancient species is at the forefront of my mind, the only thing that keeps returning to shove my fears and questions aside.

Well, not the only thing.

Kal is prowling beside me, his disruptor rifle raised, moving with that strange, ethereal grace. His every motion is sharp, fluid. The warrior he was born to be is so close to the surface now, it’s almost all I can see. I can’t forget how he threw himself at the chimp when it turned on me. Heedless of his own safety. Fearless and fierce and braver than anyone I’ve ever known.

He looks at me. Looks away again just as quick.

He’s not like anything or anyone I’ve ever known. I mean, I’ve dated before, but there’s a world of difference—a galaxy of difference—between a movie and popcorn on a Friday night and a guy telling you he’s bonded to you for life.

But when he spoke to me in the sickbay, it was like he switched on the lights, and I found myself somewhere so completely unexpected that I had no idea what to say. After all that time he spent ignoring me, trying to keep me away from anything resembling action or responsibility, I was so sure he really did think I was a burden. That if he defended me, it was out of a sense of duty to Tyler’s orders.

Except that now I know that all the times he kept me at arm’s length, that was his duty showing. The times he defended me, they were something else entirely.

Now he walks alongside me, his gaze ahead, every line of him alert and ready. And even with all the chaos and insanity around us, it’s so much better just being beside him.

He makes me feel safe.

The three of us arrive at the spaceport, easing past the vines that cover the open gates, and my heart sinks at the sight before us. The docking bays and control tower and ships are overrun with the same plant growth that seems to have infected everything else in the colony. The skiffs, the freighters, the orbitals, everything. Their hulls crawl with long snarls of creepers and strange flowers, coated in a blanket of this sticky blue pollen that’s falling about us like rain.