Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(92)

But it is better this way.

“I cannot help the way I feel for you,” I say. “But I can control what I do about it. So once we discover the truth behind this Trigger, the star map, I will resign my position in the squad. I have ignored the war among my people for too long. I can stand apart from it no longer. So, once we reach the end of this road, you will not have to see me again.”

The silence between us is as wide and cold as the Void. For a moment, I cannot imagine an end to it. But my uniglass pings in the quiet, filling that edgeless gulf and breaking the spell between us.

“Kal?” comes Tyler’s voice. “Do you read?”

I touch the device at my belt. “I copy.”

“Zila says Auri’s awake?”

I look into those mismatched eyes, feel the pain cutting through my heart like a blade. “She is awake.”

“I think you two better come up and see this.”

“… We are on our way.”

I touch the uniglass again, cutting off the transmission. Staring at the girl sitting opposite me, centuries and light-years away from anywhere and anything she expected to be. Tasting blood and ashes in my mouth.

What can you say when there are no words for what you’re feeling?

What can you do when there is nothing left to be done?

“We should go,” I say.

And without a word, she slips off the bench and marches out the door.





29


    Cat




I’m at work on the navcom when O’Malley and Pixieboy walk back on to the bridge. She looks like ten klicks of rough road, and he looks like someone murdered his puppy and left the head in his bed. But truth be told, we got bigger problems than Feels right now. The Bellerophon is still closing on us, and after what we’ve just discovered …

“Auri, are you okay?” Scarlett asks, obviously rating Feels a little higher than me. She’s good like that.

O’Malley glances at Pixieboy, and I can see the lie in her eyes before she speaks it. “I’m okay.”

“Cat, show them,” Ty says.

“Roger that.”

With a flick of my wrist, I throw my navcom visuals up onto the main holographic display. O’Malley stares at the revolving spiral of glittering stars.

“What am I looking at?” she asks.

“The map inside your Trigger highlighted twenty-two stars in total,” I say. “I’ve plotted those systems onto the known segments of the galaxy.”

“Took her a while,” Finian says. “She couldn’t tell just by looking at them.”

“There’s around two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, skinny boy. I don’t have all of ’em memorized.”

He sniffs. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”

“Shut up, Finian.” My fingers fly over the controls, and twenty-two tiny points of red flare out among those billions of suns. “Most of the systems highlighted on the map are unexplored. And a lot are a deep trek from here, even Folding. But it turns out every one of them sits on a known weak spot in the Fold.”

“They all have naturally occurring gates?” Pixieboy asks.

“Looks like, yeah.” I tap another series of commands. “And you’re never going to guess the closest system to our current coordinates.”

Kal raises his eyebrow in question, and I throw the answer up onto the main display, where the visuals of our creepy-as-hells plant people used to be. A holographic rendering of a star floats above our consoles, burning bright. It’s orbited by seven planets, the third world sitting inside the Goldilocks zone. The system’s name is highlighted in glowing letters beneath it.

“Octavia,” Aurora whispers.

I glance at Ty, then across to Scarlett. At every member of this jank squad on this jank mission that we spent five years at the academy prepping for. We all know this can’t be coincidence. The official records point us toward Lei Gong, but those GIA agents with the funky plant crap all over their faces were former Octavia III colonists according to O’Malley. She said her ship, the Hadfield, was bound for Octavia III when it disappeared two hundred years ago. And now, whatever else this million-year-old map is for, it’s leading us straight back to that same bloody planet.

“So riddle me this, Legionnaires,” Tyler says. “Say you’re the GIA and there’s a system you don’t want people visiting. And say you can’t just lock its gate down because it’s at a naturally occurring Fold spot. How do you keep folks from poking their nose in?”

“Maybe you make up a story about some deadly atmospheric virus,” Scarlett murmurs.

“Maybe it’s no ghost story,” I remind them. “Zila said those colonists in the GIA uniforms were dead before Kal got to them. Maybe they were infected with the virus this interdiction is warning us about.”

“So why change the records to point toward Lei Gong?” O’Malley asks. “Why delete any record of the Octavia colony existing? Why chase down the last person with any remaining link to the place?”

Tyler folds his arms across his broad chest. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting the feeling there’s something on Octavia that the GIA doesn’t want us to see. Or more importantly, something they don’t want Auri to see.”