Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(111)

It’s pushing me close to the edge of my courage, but I feel it pushing me closer to the edge of something else as well.

I can feel myself on the verge of …

Cat stirs beside me, and I take her hand in mine, giving it a gentle squeeze. Her lashes lift, and she fixes those flower-shaped pupils on me, her eyes the brightest blue. We gaze at each other for a long moment, and then she lets out a soft breath that’s edged with a moan.

“I can feel it,” she whispers, and I don’t know what to say, because I can, too. “It’s taking me.”

“We won’t let it,” I whisper in return.

She fixes me with a look brimming with fear, with pain, with come now, let’s not lie between the two of us, and my heart aches, because none of what’s on her face—on her slowly silvering skin—should be coming from a girl my age.

Except she’s not my age, is she?

The leaves around us shimmer even though there’s no breeze, and I can feel the centuries beneath my skin. The power waiting inside them.

As Kal walks past, he places a hand on my shoulder, just for a second. Just for a breath. And I think about what he said. About walking your true path. And though I don’t quite know how, I know all of this, everything that’s happened, has to do with me. With this power inside me.

There’s a reason the very existence of this colony was hidden from the world.

There’s a reason the GIA are after me, trying to wipe me away too.

There’s a reason I’m becoming something else, something more than human.

There’s a reason I took us to the World Ship, to the Trigger.

And there’s a reason the Trigger brought us here.

And somehow, they’re all connected. And though it’s frightening, I know I can’t be frightened anymore.

Everything that’s happened, all I’ve become … I can’t stop it.

Instead, I have to muster the rage to master it.

I think about this place. What happened to the people here. I think about my family. About my mom and Callie, when they got the news I was gone. About my dad when he heard, about the things we should have said in that last conversation.

I think about everything I’ve lost. I think about being this girl out of time, having this power I don’t understand. And when I look down, when I lock gazes with Cat again, look into the flowers in her eyes, surrounded by the predatory leaves and vines of this planet, my spine twitching to run, the urge building up inside me …

… something shifts.

It’s like fire melting ice. Like positive and negative charges colliding. Like I’m waking up for the first time in two hundred years. I feel my mind stretch, feel the gorgeous elongation of muscles that have lain dormant for too long, a surge of power running through me. Suddenly I’m bigger, stronger, and though I’m exactly the same—I’m still sitting cross-legged beside Cat, holding her hand—there’s an extra dimension to everything.

This is what it feels like to control it.

I may not know what it is, but everything I’ve done while I was asleep, everything that rendered me a passenger, a prisoner in my own body—now I feel a part of it is mine. Something bigger. Something more. Snatched from the nothing with my own two hands.

I turn my head to run my gaze over the squad. There’s an extra dimension to everything, to everyone.

I can feel a flare of empathy in Kal—a restless presence with a violet shimmer to it. It’s almost drowned out by the rest of his nature. It runs through him like fine veins of gold in rock, almost hidden. It shifts and shimmers in response as my mind brushes across his.

I can see it in Scarlett, too, and a touch, much less, in Tyler, flowing beneath the surface of his mind. The Jones twins are human, and for a moment a flicker of doubt hits me—has the planet touched them, too?—but an instant later, I know that’s not true. The power running through the plants and leaves and vines around us, connecting them via a current that now crackles for me like electricity, is completely different to anything in Scarlett or Tyler, or Kal, or me.

But when I look down again, I can see it winding its way through Cat in a hopelessly complex tangle of vines, like a fine network of capillaries. Invading every part of her.

Where do I even begin trying to untangle this?

I know, though I push the knowledge away, that I can’t.

It’s too much, too deep.

It has her.

I try anyway, mentally grabbing a handful of the psychic energy that binds her, burning it to nothing, holding it in my mind’s grip until it’s only ashes. She moans, and as I look down, the fine network of silvery green-gray-blue energy snakes through her to cover the gap as if it was never there.

Like the vines, it’s everywhere.

I try a different way, leaning into Cat’s mind. Maybe I can start there and sweep out, burn her thoughts clear. As I look inside her, I’m hit with a welter of emotion. Her pain, her fear, her anger snakes through me, and I flinch for an instant, fight the urge to withdraw. And then I lean in harder, because nobody should be alone with feelings like these.

I’m here, I’m here.

I squeeze her hand, pushing past the sharp-edged outer defenses. And inside them, I find the real Cat, a whirl of life and love and energy, the reds and orange and golds of her mental signature spiraling into elaborate patterns that remind me of eddies of wind, that remind me of flight.