Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(117)

The Ra’haam senses something is wrong, its rearguard vessels halting their maneuvers, the vanguard slowing its assault.

But the FoldGate is in our sights now, just a few more moments till it’s in range, till we fire, blowing it apart and trapping the enemy in here with us.

“Two minutes to critical.”

The voice in my head told me I could stop it. I could fix it. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe the station dying, the dream of the Legion along with it, bursting apart in the middle of the enemy and burning it to cinders, is the best we can hope for.

I reach for Scarlett’s hand, squeezing tight.

Beside her, Fin slips his arm around her waist.

This end is no ending.

“One minute to critical.”

We’ll see each other again.

In the st—

The galaxy around us inverts.

The thunder of a billion storms rings inside my head.

I stagger with the force of it, the people around me gasping, stumbling, the battle outside falling still. I see the medallion around Scar’s throat, glowing now with kaleidoscopic fire, cascading through the bridge, an echo, a roar, a birth cry ripped across the darkness and burning all into blinding white.

A shape smashes its way through the walls of time and space. Torn across the breadth of eternity, dragging itself through past and future and infinite possibility, screaming as it comes. The light burns so bright it’s blinding, splintering and fracturing now into all the colors of the spectrum, red to yellow to blue to indigo, no, not a spectrum but a rainbow

A RAINBOW

etched in the spear of broken crystal as big as a city, now floating there in the dark before my wondering eyes.

Unbelievable.

Impossible.

“Maker’s breath,” Finian gasps.

“The Weapon!” Scarlett cries.

It’s not too late, I realize.

She’s here.

“Aurora,” I whisper.





38



AURI





I am everything.





I am everyone.





I am everywhere.





In a flash, we are in the place we need to be, the hymn of the Neridaa slowly winding down to a low chord that tingles and reverberates through my very bones.

The Eshvaren crystal sings its song, and the energy-that-was-Caersan is fading from me, and I lift my head to discover Kal lying wounded in the center of the throne room, and I’m curled over him, my body protecting his.

And we are alone.

There is no sign of the Ra’haam in here. Caersan has vanished.

The bodies of the Waywalkers remain, but the bodies of Tyler and Lae are gone, because they are no longer reality, only … possibility.

Because we’re home.

“Be’shmai,” Kal whispers, trying to prop himself up on one elbow.

“I’m here,” I whisper in reply.

I love you, my mind tells his.

I chanted it to him as we hurtled back in time, as I shielded him, and the words live between us still, and that’s fine by me, because I don’t want to take them back. I want to say them as many times as I can in the time I have left.

“I’m all right,” I say, pushing to my feet. Because I am. I should be exhausted after the battle to repair the ship, but I’ve never felt more powerful, or more purposeful.

All of the future’s survivors gave their lives to bring us here. To offer me one chance to change the way our story unfolds. I’m not going to waste it.

At my request, the Weapon projects the view from outside onto the walls of the throne room, a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the battle in progress, as if the walls weren’t crystal but shining glass.

Life and death play out around us, an Aurora Legion Longbow veering to avoid the Weapon in a panicked maneuver, pursued by a Ra’haam vessel trailing vines behind it, and as I look up and out, I see the same thing over, and over, and over.

The Aurora Legion makes its last stand here alongside a fleet of sleek, bloodthirsty Syldrathi ships, Unbroken glyfs painted down their sides. Whoever has taken over Caersan’s leadership, it seems they’ve decided the Ra’haam is a foe worth fighting.

Together, the fleets are confronting an armada that endlessly outnumbers them, an armada the size and shape of every race it’s overtaken, wreathed in vines and mindlessly hungry.

The little Legion ship rounds the edge of the Weapon and swings away, like a fish that saw a shadow, and I see how the fate of its crew will play out in the next few seconds.

I see how their frantic scramble to avoid their pursuers, to shake the hungry Ra’haam from their tail, will send them straight into the side of a Ra’haam flagship, to end in a quick explosion of soundless fire, each of them given only a millisecond to know their fate before oblivion swallows them.

Kal sees the way it will end too, and his reflexive horror is mine, so I reach out and nudge the course of the Longbow, and it sails up and over the flagship, darting instead to the shelter of its fellows as a bloody fight to the death rages on around us both.

The Ra’haam is so much bigger than it was, its presence so much more powerful, so rich now. This new armada represents countless lives lost, snuffed out in an instant as the mindless whole of the Ra’haam took them over. But as I let my mind brush against it, and as it shivers, shudders, and turns its attention toward me, my lips curve slowly into a smile.