Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(118)

I tip my head first to the left, then to the right, hearing the crack of the vertebrae in my neck. Because I’ve been to the future, and I’ve seen how this could end. And this version of the Ra’haam, here and now?

I say it out loud, feeling the power thrum within me, throwing down my challenge as the light shines from my eye, and the cracks in my skin slowly spiderweb out. It’s agonizing, and exhilarating.

“That all you got?”

My hands curl to fists.

“I’ve seen worse.”

Kal pushes painstakingly up to his knees, the violet and gold of his mind tangling with mine. “So many,” he whispers, staring out at the battle, at the fleet that was once the army of hundreds of worlds. “So many lost.”

“So many left to save,” I say quietly. “So many more left than in the future. And look, Kal. Do you see?”

I tug his mind along with mine to show him the Ra’haam—the thousands, the millions of connections, the singular, the we, that comes from what should be many, should be individual, should be us. That writhing mass of souls bound together with but one purpose: to increase itself, to consume everything before it.

I show him the gloriously tangled web of mental energy linking every one of its bodies to every other, every ship to every other.

It’s beautiful, really.

He recoils, but I hold him tight, and next I turn my focus outward, and show him what I couldn’t see before now—before I’d been elsewhere, elsewhen, and fought it up close.

There are other veins that lead away from it, mental highways and alleyways that pulse with its bluegreen energy, stretching into the unimaginable distance, making journeys our minds can’t comprehend. Journeys that would take us millions of years to make in our feeble ships.

You see … His mind tries to shy away from the scale of what we’re observing, and he takes hold of himself, tries again. You see all of it now.

I see all of it, I agree. And I know how to kill it.

The Weapon was designed by the Eshvaren to be fired on twenty-two sleeping nursery planets, one by one. But there’s no time for that now. And I’m not sure I have it left in me, after the battles I’ve already seen.

But the Eshvaren never knew we’d stumble on one planet before the others. That humans, with our endless, insatiable curiosity, would find a natural FoldGate that nobody else thought worth investigating, too far from anywhere to be interesting. That we’d push through it and land somewhere no one else had been.

They never knew we’d awaken the Ra’haam before it was time.

And now that this small part of it is awake, it can act as a conduit to the rest of it. If I can destroy this fleet—the nursery that bloomed and burst early, that took over the Octavia colony—then I can push that destruction out through its endless network, like a virus, like a wildfire.

I can destroy the nursery planets before they awaken.

You can kill all of it, Kal wonders.

I can kill all of it, I agree. Light a flame to burn it from the inside out.

And I will be the fuel.

I start to laugh, brushing away the blood that drips from my nose, and ready myself to begin the assault. I will kill this thing here, now, and that death will spread, infectious, until it dies everywhere.

Kal reaches for my hand, and doesn’t ask again if I can survive it. But I feel the flicker of hope inside him, and I keep the truth from him.

Just for a few minutes more.

He weaves his fingers through mine, braiding us together, determined to stay with me for as long as possible.

You are not alone, he says, deep in my mind.

And I resolve to cast him free at the last moment, to send him on to live the rest of his beautiful life without me, in the world I’m going to make for them—but for now I hold him close.

He was always going to live a century longer than me, and there is so much for him to see, and so much for him to do. I wish I could be there, at his side. But I’ll willingly give myself, knowing I’ve made it possible for him.

In the calm before the storm, I reach out to caress the places I will protect, and I find there’s no limit to how far I can stretch.

I run my fingertips across the shining hull of Aurora Station, and the fleet, and then I throw myself out farther—I see Emerald City, I see Sempiternity, as gorgeously grubby and alive as ever, teeming with life and with promise. I brush past the hulking wreck of the Hadfield to the worlds where Dacca’s people and Elin’s people and Toshh’s people are still alive, still safe. I see broken FoldGates, the planets that have shut themselves off in the vain hope of survival, and far away I see Earth, where my story began.

I am boundless now, and I know why.

It’s because I’m not holding anything back. Not keeping any part of myself safe. I don’t need to have anything left when this is finished.

I just need to last long enough to see it through.

Beloved, Kal says, so small in this endless galaxy, but never, ever unheard. We must act.

Gently, so gently, he tugs my attention back to the place my body is, and I see it—of course. The battle continues. And around me, tiny lights like fireflies are snuffed out one by one.

A ship explodes into a million glittering fragments, and five small specks of life that were there before are gone.

It’s as I am contracting in to focus on this time and this place—Aurora Station, the Ra’haam’s armada—that I see the flicker of his mind.