Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(45)

We’re in deeper than we could’ve imagined.

“Three votes in favor of pushing on. And three against. Squad Leader breaks ties.” Tyler looks sadly at Aurora and sighs. “Cat, set a course for Aurora Academy. We’re going home.”

“Roger that.” Cat smiles.

Kal sighs and shakes his head, but he doesn’t dissent. Tyler drags his hand through his hair as Cat’s fingers fly over her controls.

“Okay, course locked,” she reports. “Should be back at station b—”

The Longbow shudders, sudden and violent. I reach out to steady myself when the ship bucks again, and I’m suddenly thrown into the wall, gasping in pain as I hit the titanium, then the floor. Brushing my bangs from my eyes, I look around the bridge and see the rest of my squad scattered across the decking, groaning, wincing. Only Kal has managed to keep his feet. Finian’s voice crackles over comms.

“What in the Maker’s name was that?”

“Did something hit us?” Tyler demands.

“Nothing on scanners, sir,” Zila reports.

“Cat, report,” Tyler demands.

“We’ve …” Cat stabs at her console for confirmation. “Stopped?”

“Engines are offline?”

“No, I mean we’ve bloody stopped. Engines are at thrust, but it’s like …” Cat shakes her head. “Like something is holding us in place.”

“Not something,” I breathe. “Someone.”

The rest of the squad follows my eyeline, until we’re all staring at Aurora. Our girl out of time has her head thrown back, her right eye burning with ghostly white light. Her body is trembling with effort, veins taut at her neck, in her arms. As we watch, another thin trickle of blood spills from her nose.

“Maker’s breath,” Tyler whispers.

“T-t-ttrig-ggerrrrr,” Aurora says.

Up on her knees, Cat has her disruptor aimed at Auri’s head, but smooth as silk, Kal steps in between our Ace and her target.

“Get out of the way, Kal!”

“You will not hurt her!”

Aurora turns her eyes on Tyler, her whole body shaking. The Longbow’s shaking, too, violent, terrifying, as if the whole ship is trying to tear itself apart.

“Buh … B-buh … ,” she stutters.

“What?” Tyler breathes, leaning closer.

“B … B-belieeeve …”

Another tremor hits, knocking me back to the floor. The hull groans around us, the rivets squealing as they start to turn. Tyler looks at me. At his squad. At the ship around us, convulsing so hard it might fly to pieces. I can see the wheels spinning behind his eyes. Weighing up the danger to his crew. The warning de Stoy and Adams gave us as we left the station. His hand goes to the lump beneath his tunic—our dad’s senate ring, hanging on the titanium chain about his neck. Ty’s always played it by the book. Ever since we were thirteen years old on New Gettysburg, signing on the dotted line.

The cargo you carry is more precious than any of you can know.

“Believe … ,” Aurora whispers.

Tyler clenches his jaw. His hand slips from dad’s ring to the Maker’s mark at his collar. As the Longbow shudders and shakes all around us, Ty crawls across the bucking floor, up to his command console. And as I watch, he logs into the navcom, sets us a new course.

Almost immediately, the Longbow stops shaking. The engines pick up, I feel the press of thrust through our inertial dampeners.

The light in Aurora’s eye flickers and dies like someone turned off a switch. She slumps down in her chair, blood dripping from her nose, out cold again. Zila runs to her side to check her vitals, Kal offering assistance. Cat’s eyes are narrowed, shaking hands wrapped around her disruptor’s grip. My eyes are on the navcom, the new course Ty just plugged in.

“Where we headed, Bee-bro?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Sempiternity,” he says softly, looking around the cabin.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

He touches the Maker’s mark at his collar again, staring at Auri.

“But sometimes you just gotta have faith.”





14


    Auri




“Jie-Lin, wake up.”

I open my eyes, wondering for a moment where I am. I remember the argument on the Longbow’s bridge. Tyler and Kal and Scarlett and Cat. Bright light. But now I’m lying in a soft bed. A warm glow around me. Posters on the walls I recognize, a familiar stuffed toy squirrel beside me.

My room.

I’m in my room.

“Jie-Lin?”

I look up, and sitting above me is a face I never thought I’d see again. 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?”

“I’ve been waiting for you, Jie-Lin.”

He pulls me into his arms and I can feel his chest shaking because he’s laughing and he’s crying and I’m laughing and crying, too. And all the things I could have said, I should have said, are filling my head because he’s not dead and it’s not too late and I try to pull away and speak because there’s so much I want to say.