Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(16)

Zila speaks as if there wasn’t already a conversation under way. “That station is trailing a quantum sail at the edge of a dark matter storm.”

“That’s classified,” Lieutenant Kim snaps.

Zila’s eyes shift, as though she can see through the shuttle’s hull. “My colleague Finian suggested it is trying to harvest dark energy?”

“Except nobody does that anymore,” I say. “Not anywhere.”

“Not anywhere,” Zila whispers, a little creepily, if I’m being honest.

“I’m asking the goddamn questions,” Kim growls. “Who sent you? Are you bleach-head spec ops? How did you find us all the way out here?”

Scarlett tries to smooth things over. “Lieutenant, I give you my word—”

“Your word?” Lieutenant Kim scoffs, points her pistol right at me. “You two are working with this bastard against your own people? Betraying Terra? You know what happens to traitors in wartime?”

“Wartime?” I blink. “Are you drunk? We haven’t been—”

“Shut your mouth, Bleachboy!”

I blink. “Bleachboy?”

“Not anywhere … ,” Zila whispers again.

“Look, what the hell is wrong with her?” Kim demands, glowering at Zila.

Scar waves dismissively. “Oh, she does this sometimes.”

Zila looks at the lieutenant again, nodding toward the airlock doors. “Your fighter ship. It is an old Pegasus model. Mark III, yes?”

“Old?” the pilot scoffs. “Sweetie, she’s so new her paint is still wet.”

Zila nods. “Not anywhere.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Nobody does this anywhere,” Zila says softly. “But Terrans did briefly try dark quantum farming. Back when we were at war with the Betraskans, in fact. During the first days of our exploration into the Fold.”

I realize at last what Zila’s implying, and my brain stutters to a halt.

She can’t be serious.

There’s no way.

Except …

“I don’t recognize her uniform,” I whisper. “And the station is so old-fashioned… .”

This. Cannot. Be. Happening.

“Not anywhere.” Zila nods. “Anywhen.”

“Maker’s breath,” Scarlett whispers.

Lieutenant Kim has obviously had enough and raises her gun. “You will explain what you mean right now. Or I start shooting.”

“You will not believe me,” Zila assures her.

“Try me.”

“What year is it? Right now?”

Lieutenant Kim scoffs. “Are you serious?”

“Please,” Zila says. “Indulge me.”

“… It’s 2177.”

“We are from the year 2380.”

A pause. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“I did warn you,” Zila shrugs.

My brain starts fizzing, this-is-impossible fighting with this-is-so-cool. And underneath it all, a little voice is whispering, Surviving that explosion was impossible. So was getting blown up eight more times. So was being transported wherever the hells we are in the blink of an eye.

I see the precise moment Lieutenant Kim checks out. “All right, this is above my pay grade. I’m taking you in.”

“You are obviously experiencing temporal distortion, too, Lieutenant,” Zila insists.

Kim ignores her, taps a mic on the side of her throat. “Glass Slipper, this is Kim, do you read?”

“You are repeating this encounter, just as we are,” Zila says.

“Slipper, this is Kim, do you copy?”

Still no response. The lieutenant curses under her breath.

“If it is indeed the year 2177,” Zila insists, “Terra is in the middle of a war with Trask. Your station looks severely damaged. We have no proof of our identity. If you bring us aboard what is clearly an experimental military installation during wartime, this will end poorly.”

“I wasn’t asking you to vote,” Kim snaps, waving her pistol. “Move.”

? ? ? ? ?

Lieutenant Kim herds us up to the cockpit at gunpoint, and controlling her fighter via some kind of remote console on her wrist, she begins towing our damaged shuttle toward the station. The task is slow, laborious—Kim seems to know what she’s doing, but it’s not as though fighter ships are really made for this kind of job.

Zila, Scar, and I are on our knees in the center of the cabin, fingers laced behind our heads. Kim looms behind us. Every now and then, she tries to raise the station on comms.

Bad news is, she seems to be getting angrier every time she fails, and this girl has already killed us a lot today. Good news is, we can whisper while she swears up a storm.

“Was Zila serious?” Scar murmurs, leaning close. (How does she still smell good, doesn’t she sweat?) “Time travel?”

My shoulders rise and fall in the tiniest of shrugs, and I glance at our Brain, who’s lost in her thoughts again. “I don’t know. It sounds insane. But I don’t have another explanation that fits the facts.”

She chews her lip, eyes wide and worried.

This is bad, bad, bad.

If the year our angry dirtgirl gave us is right (which it can’t be, because time travel), Terrans and Betraskans are at war. We will be for another two decades. And I’m being transported onto some classified military base drifting on the edge of a dark matter storm in the middle of some station-wide catastrophe. Zila’s promise that this will “end poorly” might just be the understatement of the century.