Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(7)

?????

Oh, hello touch. I see you’ve decided to join us. And now that you’re here, I can tell every single part of me is hurting in ways I didn’t know had been invented yet.

Another wave of pain catches me, sweeping away the last of that creepy memory-that-wasn’t-a-dream thing and reminding me my body seems to be just as messed up as my head is right now. I’m reduced to panting, to whimpering with a raw throat that catches and gags at the effort, to just existing until the hurt starts to ebb away. But with pain, and touch, comes proper mobility. And that means I can push up onto my elbows, looking across for the guy once more. His lower half has turned dark gray, and from this I deduce he is now, unfortunately, wearing pants.

This day really is turning out to be a bust.

The pants discovery prompts a tickle of a question in my head, and I look down to check what I’m wearing. Turns out that beneath the light, silvery sheet that currently covers me, the answer is “nothing at all.”

Huh.

I look back at the boy, and at the same moment, he turns to me, his eyes widening as he realizes I’m awake. I draw breath to try and speak, but I choke, my throat stinging like someone’s ripping out my vocal cords one by one.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Is this Octavia?” I wheeze.

He shakes his head, blue eyes meeting mine. “What’s your name?”

“Aurora,” I manage. “Auri.”

“Tyler,” he replies.

And I should ask him where I am. If we’re on the Hadfield and I was pulled out early, or if I’m on Earth and they aborted the mission. But there’s something in his gaze that makes me shy away from the question.

He lets his forehead rest against the glass between us with a thunk. Like I did at that window on Eighty-Ninth Street. The memory catches me unawares, bringing with it a sharp wave of I-want-my-mom. This boy looks just as lost as I feel.

“Are you okay?” I whisper.

“I missed it,” he finally says. “The Draft. I missed the whole thing.”

And I’ve got no idea what a Draft is or why it’s so important. But I ask anyway.

“Had somewhere else to be?”

He nods and sighs. “Rescuing you.”

Rescuing.

That’s not a good word.

“Who knows who I got,” he says, and we both know he’s changing the subject. “I was supposed to have four of the first five picks, and now I’m stuck with the bottom of the barrel. The dregs. And I was just following reg—”

“The news isn’t all bad, Ty.”

The low purr comes from somewhere outside my field of vision. A girl’s voice.

Tyler swings away from me like I’m yesterday’s news, plastering himself against the front of his holding tank. “Scarlett.”

I carefully turn my gaze that way—it still takes thought and strategy, my body refusing to do anything without a plan—to see who he’s greeting. There are two girls standing there in blue-gray uniforms, the same color as the pants he seems to have acquired. One has flaming-red hair—orange, really, amazing dye job—cut in a sharp asymmetrical bob that swings around a chiseled chin just like his. She shares his full lips, too, his strong brows. Her uniform’s skirt is impressively short. She’s tall. And she’s gorgeous. Presumably, this is Scarlett.

The second girl has a narrow face, and a soaring phoenix tattooed right across her throat (ouch). Black hair, longer and spiked on top, shaved to fuzz down the sides with more tattoos underneath. I can tell she has dimples even without a smile, and I can tell that smile would be huge, but I have to deduce it all without seeing the real deal, because right now she looks like somebody killed her grandmother.

“Cat?” Tyler says to her. His voice is low, pleading.

“Ketchett tried to draft me,” Cat says. “And a bunch after that. I told them I already had an Alpha, he just couldn’t make it.”

“Told them, huh? Is Ketchett still breathing?”

“Yeah.” The girl smirks. “Next time you go to chapel, you might wanna say a prayer for his testicles, though.”

He exhales slowly and presses his palm against the glass, and she lifts hers to press it back in return.

The girl with the orange hair watches them. “I didn’t have to insist quite as hard,” she says, wry. “But I could hardly let you out there alone. You’d probably get yourself killed without me to talk our way out of trouble, baby brother.”

Tattoo girl pulls up her uniform sleeves, revealing more ink. “Speaking of getting yourself killed, you wanna tell us what you were doing Folding by yourself? Thinking with your other head again?”

Scarlett nods in agreement. “Rescuing damsels in distress is very twenty-second century, Ty.”

Say what?

Tyler holds up his hands, like What do you want from me? and the girls turn to look at me on my slab with curious eyes. Checking me out. Weighing me up.

“I like her hair,” Scarlett declares. Then as if remembering I’m an actual person, she speaks to me, louder, a little slower. “I like your hair.”

The second girl sniffs, obviously less impressed. “Did you tell her the bad news about her library books yet?”

“Cat!” the other two snap in chorus.

An adult voice cuts in before they can get any further. “Legionnaire Jones, your quarantine has cleared, you’re free to go.”