Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(107)

Finian grins, jamming his gun back into its holster.

“Yeah. Not much of a warrior, am I?”





32


    Scarlett




“Hold on, Cat, you hear me?” Tyler says. “We’re almost there.”

The girl in his arms, my roomie, his bestie, only moans in reply.

“T-they’re coming. …”

“Scar, how far to the med center?” my brother asks.

“About eight hundred meters,” I reply, voice trembling.

I can see it in the distance now, standing tall in the falling eddies of pollen. It’s three stories high—probably the biggest structure in the settlement aside from the reactor. The green crosses on its flanks are barely visible under the growth of twisted blue-green vines, blood-red flowers, silver leaves. This whole place looks like some ancient ruin on Terra, abandoned centuries ago by people and left for nature to reclaim. Except I get the feeling the people here didn’t abandon anything. And there’s nothing natural about any of this.

Tyler is carrying Cat in his arms—she’s too hurt to walk. Zila is bringing up the rear, ice-cold as always. I’m walking point, and I’m nowhere near as cool, my eyes darting left and right. I’m sweating inside my biosuit, my breath coming quick. The plant life covers everything, rolling and swaying like waves on the ocean’s face—always toward us. The pollen is thick and sticky, and I have to stop every so often to wipe it off the glass dome of my helmet. And I think of Cat, and I think of the rip in her suit and I wonder— “Movement!” Zila calls, looking at her uniglass. “Three hundred meters!”

I see them coming through the haze, moving in long, loping strides. Their fur is overgrown with weeds and vines and spiny leaves and flowers of blood-red, but I can still see the chimps they used to be underneath. They’re moving quick, crawling across the vertical surfaces of the colony buildings like spiders, or swimming through the undergrowth as if it were water. They’re going to hit us before we reach the med center.

“Open fire!” Tyler roars.

I take a knee, start blasting with my disruptor, feeling the sharp recoil up my arms. Truth is, I’m a bad shot. I spent most of senior year marksmanship classes flirting with my range partner (Troi SanMartin. Ex-boyfriend #48. Pros: loves his mother. Cons: called me his mother’s name), but Tyler scored in the top 10th percentile, and Zila probably sleeps with her disruptor under her pillow.

The shots ring out in the empty streets. It might be my imagination, but as each chimp-thing falls, I swear I hear the plant life around us … whispering. The leaves shiver like the wind was blowing, but there’s not a breath of it. Blue blood spatters, and the animals fall, shrieking as they tumble. But there’s a lot of them.

I can see one bearing down on me, mossy lips peeled back from its teeth, eyes full of flowers. I take steady aim, try to remember my lessons, but my hands are shaking. I fire once, twice. The third shot hits home, striking the chimp-thing in the arm. It spins on the spot but keeps coming. Closing to forty meters. Twenty.

It leaps at me, opening its mouth to scream. And as it does so, its head just keeps … opening.

Lips peeling away from its face.

Face peeling away from its skull.

Skull peeling away from its torso until the entire top half of its body has opened up like some awful flower, ready to swallow me whole.

I’m pinned in place by the horror of it, five meters away now, and I can’t help but screa— BAMF.

The chimp-thing pops like a water balloon, Tyler’s disruptor blast knocking it sideways and spattering it across the undergrowth. As the blood touches them, the plants shiver and sigh, but Zila blasts them to ashes before any of them can move to attack us. My heart is thunder inside my chest and my legs are shaking and I’m looking for something bitchy or sassy to say, but I can’t quite manage it anymore. Ty’s already up and moving, Cat back in his arms. I can see the blood on her biosuit, the patch job over the tear, the blue pollen clinging to the silver.

As Ty wipes at her faceplate, I can see her eyes are blue, too.

They used to be brown.

“T-Tyler,” she moans. “They’re c-coming.”

“Scar, we need to move,” my brother says. “Now.”

His voice is like iron, but I can feel the fear in him. We’ve known each other since before we were born. I can read him better than anyone. And I know that under the facade, beneath the even tone and steady hands, he’s terrified.

For us.

For her.

I blink hard. Nod once. And then I’m up off my knees, moving quick. We run through the overgrown streets, through the swaying fronds, the med center finally looming up ahead of us.

We have to blast our way past the vines to get in through the entrance, but I’m not sure what he’s hoping to find here. Even if the place wasn’t being swallowed by this … infection, the facilities are two centuries old. It’s only now, up close, that I’m realizing how desperate and hopeless this plan is.

The insides of the building are dark, the windows covered with growth, the power long dead. We arc up the searchlights on our biosuits, bright beams cutting through the gloom. The place is completely overrun—the floors carpeted in moss, the walls crawling with creepers and sticky flowers.

“Zila, what do we need?” Tyler asks.