Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(55)

“I haven’t heard that one before,” she admits, keeping her voice low. “What’s it mean?”

“It means yes, we can trust him.”

That was meant to be the whole of my answer, but she just looks at me, expectant. Trust a Face to want to learn something new when they should be focusing on naptime.

With a sigh, I try my best to explain. “You know we live underground on Trask because of the wind, right? It carries microscopic shards of stone. Get enough in your lungs, it’ll kill you.”

“So the seals on your den help keep it out?” she supposes.

“Right. When you build a new home, your family comes around to make the seals that go around the edges of your door out of peta mud. It’s a whole ceremony, and it’s a gesture of trust. Everybody gets their hands on it.”

“I get it,” she murmurs. “You’re showing your family that you trust them by letting them make the seals. If they didn’t do a good job …”

“Right, you’d die. So, you build strong seals, then you close the door and fight behind it, if you have to. Dariel won’t cross us because he’s family.” I smirk. “That, and my grandmas are pretty scary ladies.”

She’s quiet a moment, and her whisper is gentle. “It must be hard, being away from family.”

I snort. “For me? Not really. I got sent away from most of them early.”

She looks like she doesn’t quite buy it, but she lets it go.

“Get some rest,” she offers. “I’ll stay up and watch for a while.”

The squad is busy claiming their spots—everyone is pretty wrecked after the fight on Sagan, then Bellerophon, then the Fold here. Kal’s big frame is in the top bunk, Auri and Zila are curled up together in the middle. Ty’s on the floor—looks like our noble leader is planning to sleep sitting up against the wall, which I’m sure he won’t regret at all later on. Cat’s opposite, still looking sore she missed out on the brawl.

Scarlett and I both know I’m going to need the bottom bunk, so I wordlessly hand her the pillow and blanket, and she settles on the floor near her brother. I bed down on the mattress, staring at Aurora’s boots where they hang over the edge of the bunk above me. From the glow on the ceiling, I can tell she’s plugged into her secondhand Uniglass again, eating up info as fast as she can read.

She’s such a little thing. No bigger than Zila. Nothing about her hints at the trouble she spells for all of us. Except, you know, when her eye starts glowing.

I know we’re in deep because of her. I know the smart play would just be to sell her to the GIA and pray our court-martials don’t end us in prison. But my whole life, I’ve been on the outside looking in. A problem. A burden. An aberration. Just like her. And it’s taught me to be sure of one thing.

Us outsiders gotta stick together.

I lie in the dark. Watch Scarlett watching over the rest of us. She reaches over, pulls the blanket up under Cat’s chin, tucks another around her brother. There’s something about her—under the bitchy and the sexy. Something almost maternal. Goldenboy looks after us because we’re his squad. His responsibility.

Scarlett looks after us because she cares.

She catches me watching her.

“Go to sleep, Finian,” she whispers.

I close my eyes, and let the slow breathing of my squadmates lulls me to sleep.

I dream of home, of Trask, with its red sun and sprawling city hives running deep beneath the ground. I’m topside in my dream and it’s snowing, tiny flakes spilling from the sky and covering the unforgiving white rock surface in an endless thick blanket, far as my eyes can see.

It’s the weirdest thing, though.

Last time I checked, snow isn’t supposed to be blue. …

?????

I wake up to the sound of Tyler and Cat arguing in whispers.

“I don’t care,” she hisses. “This is bloody creepy, Ty. And we’re in it up to our love pillows already. She’s a wanted fugitive. We need to turn her in.”

“We don’t even know what this is,” he points out, just as soft.

Zila’s voice comes next. “It appears to be repetitions of a single image.”

I roll over from where I’m huddled in against the wall. My major servos and muscle-weave activate immediately, though my fingers take a moment to articulate. Cranking open my eyes, I’m greeted with our grungy little room and …

Maker’s bits.

By the light of Cat’s uniglass, I see a design—the same design—daubed over and over again in the luminescent white ship paint. It’s on every grubby wall, every hatch, every crate, and it’s slowly dribbling toward the floor, where one huge version of the design takes up all the space that wasn’t needed by sleeping squad members.

It’s a figure. Humanoid. But it has only three fingers, growing longer from left to right. Its eyes are mismatched—the left one empty, the right one filled in white. And there’s a shape drawn on its chest where its heart would be.

A diamond.

Kal wakes, and Scarlett opens her eyes after a nudge from her brother. She props up on one elbow with a groan, arches her back, then freezes in place when she spots the hundreds of glowing figures now decorating our temporary home. The six of us sit and stare at the paint on the walls, or stare into each other’s eyes.