Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(115)

“We are not destroyers. We are deliverers. From the prison of self, into the liberty of union. We are acceptance. We are love.”

It’s the same voice I heard when I was new and cold and frightened, staring out at the world for the first time from the bastion of my mother’s breast.

But I don’t feel cold or frightened now.

I feel warm.

I feel welcome.

Annihilate.

Assimilate.

And I’m lying there on the floor of the reactor in some forgotten colony in some nowhere sector and I’m losing everything I was and ever will be and somehow it’s okay because I know I know

I KNOW

it

loves

me.

?????

We stand. In the skin that was Cat.

She is ours and we are hers.

Once we encompassed whole worlds. Communed with entire systems. But there is so little of us left now. An impoverished network, barely remembering the grandeur that came before. We have slumbered for countless eons. There is so little of us awake—just enough to weave small tendrils through the tiny skins that stumbled upon this cradle centuries ago. Sending them out to protect us while we slept a few hundred years more.

But soon, we spawn. Begin anew.

Bloom and burst.

We gaze out through the Cat-skin’s eyes. The skin named Scarlett looks back at us. A tiny, frightened thing, locked in a prison of its own flesh and bone.

“… Cat?”

We ignore her. Staring instead at the other.

The enemy.

“Aurora,” we say.

We sense the imprint of our old foe on her genes. Her mind. The last Eshvaren died a million years ago. But we knew they would find a way to strike at us from beyond their well-deserved graves. Some long-dormant device hidden in the Fold. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for a catalyst.

Waiting for her.

We are Cat. Cat is us. And so we know that the skins called Finian and Zila are upstairs, setting the reactor to implode rather than see Aurora consumed. If we have her, we have the means to find the Eshvaren’s weapon. If we have her, we have the only one who can operate it. Who knows what we are, and where we sleep, and how we might be stopped.

If we have her, we have the galaxy.

“Cat?”

The skin named Tyler speaks. The apex in the folly of their hierarchy, looking at us from near the window. He is alone.

All of them.

So unimaginably alone.

“That’s not Cat anymore,” Aurora whispers.

We strike. Moving with the many skins we have embraced since first the Octavia colonists stumbled upon us, deep beneath the planet’s mantle. We writhe. We bend. We flow. The one called Kaliis is our primary objective—Aurora’s protector. The vines and leaves snake out, grasping, thorned and barbed. We are many, he is one. And though he is our better in this nascent state, we need only put the slightest tear in his biosuit and he will be ours.

He knows. He flows and crashes like water. The other members of the squad break into frantic motion. The Scarlett-skin raises her weapon. We slap it aside. The Finian-skin and Zila-skin upstairs cry out as we strike, ripping the tools from their hands. Wrapping them all in twisted fronds and blankets of flowers.

The Tyler-skin stands paralyzed. Seeing only what the Cat-skin was. Unable to see what she has become.

More.

“Cat, stop it!”

Outside, the Princeps-skin raises its arms. Our growths on the reactor building shiver. Grasp. Pull. The concrete in the structure shudders and groans, the cracks spread. The electrical current that the Finian-skin has sent through the metal crackles and burns us. But we are many—the cooked and blackened pieces of us falling away, only to be replaced by more. The building splits, the walls parting, the roof peeling back. The skin-things scream as the structure is torn away in showers of concrete dust and the shriek of dead metal.

The gantries tumble.

The shell collapses.

The floor drops away beneath them.

But they do not fall.

“No.”

The Aurora-skin floats upon the air. Right eye glowing white. Arms outstretched. The light from her burns us. The power of the Eshvaren thrums inside her. Just a fraction of its true potential.

But so sharp.

So bright.

We lash out at her—the Cat-skin, the Princeps-skin, the agent-skin, the many forms we have subsumed and embraced in our time here. She fights back with shock waves of psychic rage, tearing the pieces of us away, ripping our grasping tendrils from her friend-skins and bringing them softly to the ground.

But fierce as she is, the power in her is only newly wakened. She has no understanding of its extent. No comprehension of what she might become. And she is one.

We are many.

Too many.

We hit her. Grasp her. Claw her. The disruptor fire from her friend-skins are but summer rain against our totality. For every piece they burn away, another rises in its place. Gestalt. Myriad. Hydra.

And she looks at us, our ancient foe shining behind her eyes.

And she begs.

“Cat, help me!”

We laugh. Feeling the pulse of psychic energy she sends into the Cat-skin’s mind. But embraced and loved, encompassed in the warmth of singularity, in the living, breathing completeness inside us, there is no Cat anymore.

There is only Ra’haam.

… but

then …

…