Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(86)

Tyler glances across at him. “Wrong? Care to elaborate on that?”

Scarlett sets down the foil pack that holds her Just Like Fish Dumplings. “I don’t think we want to tell. This, we have to show.”

She’s still wearing gray GIA armor from the neck down, and she pops a release on the chest plate, peeling away the top half of it to reveal the sweaty upper half of her dress. She has her uniglass tucked in there, and she aims it at the cabin’s holographic central display, then transfers a picture there with a flick of her finger.

The image slides up to replace the trajectory readouts, and the whole squad goes perfectly still and silent.

Cat’s the one to break it, in a voice I’ve never heard from her before.

“Holy shit.”

It’s a picture of a woman—a human woman. She’s probably in her thirties, though it’s hard to tell at first. She’s dead, her cheeks hollowed. Her mouth is a little open, and her skin has turned a lifeless, sullen gray, rather than just the bleached colorscape of the Fold. Strangest of all, where this woman’s right eye should be there’s … a plant?

It reminds me of the succulents my mother used to grow in our apartment. Thick, juicy, diamond-shaped leaves bursting from her eye socket in a tight bouquet, none much bigger than my thumbnail. They’re a lifeless tinge that matches her skin, with a dark blush along their edges and a tracery of veins running through them.

Some kind of moss spreads out across the right-hand side of her face. It’s made up of soft fuzz and wispy tendrils and covers half her forehead, trailing down her face and neck to disappear beneath her black undershirt. The same black veins in those leaves also run beneath her skin, like spiderwebs.

It’s like she’s made of stone, and the plants and moss are growing out of her. No wonder Kal said something was wrong. Deep in the pit of my stomach, I know I’ve never seen anything more wrong. It should just be gross, out of place, but instead it’s sending my every nerve jangling, my spine prickling with panic.

“I am not well versed with human maladies,” Kal says quietly. “But I assume this is not some common condition.”

“No,” Ty says, sounding as close to shaky as I’ve ever heard him. “You’re telling me this woman was one of the GIA agents? She was walking and talking?”

I glance up at the woman’s face again. I don’t … There’s something incredibly wrong about this, but there’s something familiar as well. I hold up my hand, block out the eye that’s blooming with that unnatural plant, stare at the rest of her.

Then my gut twists, and my voice is hoarse when I speak, just a whisper.

“Tyler, I … I know her.”

Ty looks at me, his scarred eyebrow raised. “You met her on Sempiternity?”

I shake my head. “I used to know her. Before I ever got on the Hadfield.”

I feel, as much as see, the six-way glance my companions exchange.

“That’s impossible,” Scarlett says. “That would make her over two centuries old. Your cryo survival was a freak accident, Auri. Are you saying she somehow did that, too, on some other ship that never made headlines?”

“Or she really must moisturize,” Fin offers, but nobody laughs.

“I know,” I say weakly. “But this is Patrice Radke. She was a settler on Octavia III, the head of Exploration and Cartography.”

I drag my gaze away from the picture, and they’re all looking at me. Some are expectant. Some skeptical. But all of them are hanging on my every word.

“She would’ve been my boss,” I whisper. “I was going to do a practical apprenticeship in Exploration and Cartography under her. She and my dad … they . .”

“Thanks for the birthday wishes, Dad.”

“Thanks for the congratulations about winning All-States again. Thanks for remembering to message Callie about her recital, which she nailed, by the way. But best of all, thanks for this. Mom couldn’t get clearance for Octavia, so what … you just replaced her? You’re not even divorced yet!”

And then I hung up on him. The last words I ever spoke to him were a list of reasons he sucked.

And now he’s dead. …

I look up into Patrice’s lifeless face, my stomach sinking.

But if she—

“Officially, there was no colony on Octavia III,” Zila says. “Records indicate that you were bound for Lei Gong.”

“Well, the records are wrong,” I reply.

Zila tilts her head, studying me in that way of hers. “And this Patrice was one of the original settlers for your expedition, some two hundred and twenty years ago.”

It doesn’t sound like she’s questioning me. Just thinking things through. The others are less certain, though nobody’s offering the flat-out disbelief I’ve seen before. I think we’re past that now.

“This sounds like I’m crazy,” I say. “But I know I’m right.”

Except that Patrice Radke has been dead for over two centuries.

Then again, I’m two hundred and thirty-seven years old myself.

On a ship full of aliens. With whom I just robbed a space station.

Nothing is impossible.

But something is very, very wrong.





26


    Kal