Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(113)

“We are here for Aurora O’Malley.”

Princeps.

Fin’s voice drawls over our channel. “Someone want to tell His Highness it’s polite to say please?”

Scarlett leaves her brother by the window and hurries over to take my place, dropping to one knee. “Go,” she murmurs to me, and as I release Cat’s hand, the other girl takes it.

I make my way over to where Tyler’s watching by the window. The vines all around him have been burned away, but I can see one of the charred tendrils moving, questing along the window ledge, looking for a new purchase even as I crouch beside him. If I stay close to the wall, I can look down without giving the figures below a look at me in return.

A shuttlecraft has touched down on the blue-green scrub outside the reactor. It’s marked with the Bellerophon’s ident, and a landing ramp has extended from its belly. Princeps stands at the bottom in its pristine white suit, pollen falling all around it. At its shoulder is a second GIA agent in the usual charcoal gray and, ranged around the shuttle itself are dozens and dozens of other figures.

They’re not GIA agents. And there are so many of them.

There are a few chimpanzees in the throng, their fur coated in moss and tubers. But beneath the cloaks of silver vines, the flowers crawling through their hair and bursting from their eyes, I recognize the rest of them.

Humans.

Colonists.

“Ah, Aurora.” Despite the cover of the window’s edge, Princeps looks right at me. “There you are.”

I risk casting out a tendril of my midnight-blue, star-speckled mind into the green-silver-blue-gray morass of the plants and vines outside. I’m trying to find Princeps’s mind, to see more of it, but it’s like interference on the radio—there’s so much to sense, I can’t find my target in the middle of it.

It’s as expressionless as ever when it speaks again—I have no idea if it even sensed my effort. “We’ve been waiting for you so long, Aurora.”

“Wait a little longer,” I call back, making my voice firm. It doesn’t shake. “Try back in another two hundred years.”

“You were lost to our sight. We could not find you.”

“I was never yours to find!”

“You were hidden in the Fold, we see that now. The Eshvaren were cowards, to hide you there. Such was always their way. Their weakness. The same weakness we feel now in you. You should have let us simply burn you away in orbit. You were foolish to bring yourself to us.”

Behind me, Ty rests a hand on my shoulder, as if he’s afraid I’m going to show myself, to stand up in the window and argue. But I hold still and watch, because Princeps is lifting both its hands to its helmet, and with a flick of its thumbs, it releases the seal.

I’m frozen in place as slowly, so slowly, in a movement that takes two heartbeats and 13.8 billion years, it lifts its helmet free, and shows me the face beneath.

I know, an instant before I see it, what I’ll see.

And yet it hits me like a blow, robbing me of breath, of thought, of strength.

Beneath the fat leaves that bloom from his right eye, beneath the silvery moss that trails down his graying skin to disappear into the neck of his suit, I can still make out the lines of his face. His round cheeks, the lines across his forehead that my mom used to joke were there from the age of fifteen, because the world surprised him so much.

“Daddy …”

The words swell up inside my mind, like ugly, oozing slashes across my silver-speckled nebula. It’s as if I’m back in the moment of our last conversation.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, Dad.

Thanks for the congratulations about winning All-States again.

But best of all, thanks for this.

I hung up on him before his return transmission could come in. Before I could see the hurt on his face. The way my hits landed.

“I’ve missed you, Jie-Lin,” he says.

My heart implodes, caving in on itself.

“It’s been so hard,” he says, shaking his head. “To be apart from you when you should have been with us all along. There were so many things left for both of us to say.”

I hear myself sob. I feel my mental fortress start to crumble, stones falling away. I thought he was gone forever. I thought I was perfectly alone. And now he’s here, and the full weight of my grief finally tumbles down to bury me, an avalanche I can’t possibly resist. My vision’s blurred with tears, my breath coming so fast it fogs up the inside of my helmet.

The helmet separating me from him.

“We are all connected,” my father says, holding out his hand to me. “We are perfectly together. We will be complete, when you join us.”

“Auri,” Ty says quietly from beside me. “That’s not your dad.”

“But it is,” I manage. “You don’t understand, I can f-feel them all in my mind. If it w-wasn’t him, it would be easy.”

But it’s so, so hard. Because now, amid the green-silver-blue-gray of the mental plane of this place—I can feel it, I can see it, I can sense Cat’s gorgeous reds and golds turning to muddy browns as they merge with the gestalt surrounding us.

And I can see so much more.

My father’s reaching out to me. Showing me the connection that could be mine. The brilliance of it. The complexity and beauty. And though they’re all one, all the lives, all the minds this thing has swallowed over the eons merged into one complete whole, I can still sense him inside the many.