Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(102)

I can do this.


Zila—two minutes remaining

“He’s breathing! Zila, oh Maker, he’s—”

Scarlett’s words vanish into a sea of static as she and Finian near the storm and communications are cut.

I know those are the last words I will ever hear from them.

Nari and I are in our escape pod, watching through the porthole, our faces side by side. The dark of the void around us is lit with hundreds of tiny lights, red and green—other pods blasting from the ruins of the Glass Slipper Station. Beyond, we can see the storm, Scarlett and Finian’s little shuttle hurtling through the inky dark toward its rendezvous with the quantum sail.

In less than two minutes, if all goes well, the pulse will strike them. The last of Squad 312 will be two centuries away, forever beyond my reach.

Except that is not true. Everything I do will reach them, eventually.

We watch the shuttle soar into the tempest.

Nari presses her hand to the glass.

“Godspeed,” she whispers as the ship is obscured by the storm. “And good hunting.”

One minute.

I turn toward her, studying the features that have become so familiar as we lived this day together over and over again. I know so much about her, and yet so little. I have the rest of my life to learn.

“I know they’ve left you behind,” Nari whispers, her eyes locked on mine. “But they haven’t left you alone.”

There are sparks in her words, and they jump between us like static electricity, like tiny quantum lightning strikes. And as they hit, I am like the shuttle, and I am transformed and transported, I am somewhere new, and …

I lift my hand, and so slowly, so carefully, I brush my fingertips down her cheek, curve them around the back of her neck.

Her skin is warm.

She is so brave, and so fierce, this hawk.

So full of life, tied by a thousand bonds to her friends, her family, her world.

And she is beautiful, the lines of her face, the curve of her mouth. I can hear Scarlett’s voice in my mind, rich and amused. She is not tall.

And I am not alone.

I am with her.

It takes only the faintest pressure of my fingertips against the back of her neck, and she is leaning in, and her lips are brushing mine, and in a few moments the pulse will strike outside, but here, I am already afire.


Scarlett—one minute remaining

I wish I was the sort of person who prayed.

But Finian’s chest is moving slowly, and I’m watching him, counting down, counting down. My hands are steady on the flight controls. There’s nothing to do but wait.

I don’t know what we’ll find when we get home. I don’t know if we’ll get home at all. But I know I’ve done everything I can.

I glance through the viewscreen at the storm raging outside, and when I look back down at him, his dark eyes are open.

“Stay still,” I say immediately. “Stay still. We’re going to need to get you to a real doctor pretty soon.”

His brows lift, but he doesn’t try to speak.

“Not yet,” I continue. “A few seconds more. Assuming you’re asking if we made the jump. If you’re asking where I found the skill, courage, and general fabulousness to perform emergency surgery in the middle of all this chaos, well. If you think that after auditioning all those guys to find the perfect boyfriend I was going to let a little thing like a tracheotomy get in the way of true love, you’ve clearly underestimated how tired I am of the search.”

His mouth quirks weakly.

I glance up at the clock again.

This is it.

I’ve done everything I can.

The sail stretches out below us, metallic, rippling, a thousand kilometers wide. The storm around us, endless, impossible, the power to tear through the walls of space and time gathering around us. The crystal at my throat begins to burn. Black light. White noise. I can feel it on my skin. I can hear it in my head. We’re so small, so insignificant in the face of all this, I wonder for a moment how any of it matters at all.

Finian looks up at me with those big black eyes I used to think were hard to read. And as our gazes lock, I realize it’s this.

This is what matters.

“See you in the future, handsome.”

ZAP.





33



AURI





I’m half in one world, half in another, images overlaying each other so that the Echo and reality meld together.

There are tears on Lae’s cheeks, and filthy, muddy rain is falling from the Echo sky, and tiny cracks are spiderwebbing through the Neridaa all at once.

I reach within myself for the power to turn the black rain sweet and crystal clear, and Kal lifts one hand to brush a tear from Lae’s cheek, and a moment’s sweetness holds in his world and mine amid this carnage.

“We will fight to our last breath to honor your father,” he says, gentle, and Lae squares her jaw and nods.

“Yes, Uncle.”

But the collapsed crystal rubble that Caersan brought down to block the doorway won’t keep the Ra’haam out much longer, and his wounds run across the landscape of the Echo like a black blight, and as quick as it came, that moment of respite is gone from the Echo and the Neridaa both.

The cry of warning I sent back to Tyler still rings in my mind, a discordant shriek that won’t fade away.