Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(114)

I can see the threads of the whole cloth that were once his. That are still his. I can find the parts that are him inside this hive mind.

He’s still there. I could still apologize to him. Feel him pull me close as he laughs. Have you been fussing over such a small thing all this time? he’ll say.

“Jie-Lin,” he calls. “I need you.”

Kal looks across at me from where he sits against the wall, his purple eyes catching mine. And though I’m sure he doesn’t know it, the golden tendrils of his mind stretch toward me, strengthening me, twining with my midnight blue.

“I know what it is to lose family, be’shmai.”

There’s endless compassion in him, but his face is bleak. I can sense the pain of that memory—I can sense a story there I want to know.

His loss is like my loss.

It’s a story about losing people who aren’t yet gone.

“When we leave this place”—and Kal leans on that word, when—“we will seek out word of your sister. Your mother. What became of them. Perhaps something of your blood remains. But you have no family here, be’shmai. Because that is not your father.”

And in a moment of stillness, I know that he’s right. My father was once in this place, and was once taken by the Ra’haam, once made a part of this whole.

But he’s not here now.

These are just echoes.

I nod slowly, tears rolling down my cheeks, and push the rest of my strength into my mental walls, fending off the touch of this planet and the thing inside it.

I was never meant for the Ra’haam, and I will not join with them.

I am of the Eshvaren, now.

“Jie-Lin,” that thing outside calls. “Come with us.”

“No!” I yell.

“It is pointless to resist. Join us.”

“Never!”

And finally, that smooth voice from Princeps, from the thing that was my father, changes. And I hear the regret and resolve in it as he replaces the helmet and speaks one more time.

A word.

A whisper.

“Cat.”





34


    Cat




I’m everything.

I’m nothing.

I’m me.

I’m …

“Cat.”

I’m a baby wrapped in clean white and I’m resting against my mum’s chest and I’m cold and I’m frightened and this is the first voice I’ve ever really heard and somehow it’s all right because I know it’s someone who loves me “Catherine, but I’ll call her Cat.”

I’m a little girl on the first day of kindergarten and a boy shoves me in my back and I turn and I see blond hair and a dimpled smile and I pick up a chair and smash it over his head and somehow it’s all right because I know one day he’ll love me “Ow, Cat!”

I’m fifteen years old sitting in front of the vid screen and I can see the death in mum’s eyes and even though she’s sixty thousand light-years away and this is the last time I’ll ever speak to her it’s somehow all right because I know she loves me “I’m so proud of you, Cat.”

We’re eighteen years old and the empty glasses are stacked in front of us and the tattoos are new on our skin and we know exactly where we’re heading and it’s somehow all right because deep down I know you love me “Oh, Cat …”

And I’m lying there the morning after and even though he left ten minutes ago I can still taste him on my lips and smell him on my skin and even though everything he said made an awful kind of sense I can’t stop crying because because

he

doesn’t

love

me

I can see so far. I am one thousand eyes. The eyes inside the skull I was born with, the flesh slowly succumbing to the poison corruption

infection

salvation

in my blood.

But more than that, I can see through them. The fronds that wend and twist around the building my body lies corroding inside. The seedlings that dance in eddies of iridescent blue in the air around us. The shells it inhabits, wrapped in the shape of simple primates or GIA uniforms or colonist skins.

Everything it’s touched.

Absorbed.

Embraced.

I’m everything.

I’m nothing.

I’m me.

I’m …

… we.

“Cat.”

I hear the Ra’haam’s voice through the threads it winds inside my body. I feel how big it is. How impossibly old. A vast consciousness, stretching across countless stars. A legion of one and billions, growing with each mind it enfolded.

Encircled.

Invited.

“Why are you fighting us, Cat?” it says, inside my head.

“Because I’m frightened,” I reply. “Because I don’t want to lose myself.”

“There is no loss through this communion. Only gain. You will become so much more inside us. You will never be unwanted or unloved. You will be us. We will be you. Always.”

“But the others … Scarlett and …”

“He will join us. One day, we will encompass all this. Everything.”

“Encompass?” I shake my head. “You mean devour.”