Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(65)

“At least forty minutes,” he replies. “Perhaps an hour—”

“RED ALERT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. TIME TO RA’HAAM INTERCEPT: TWENTY-THREE MINUTES. RED ALERT.”

I glare at Caersan, questioning, and with a lazy quirk of one silver eyebrow, he inclines his head. I look Kal in the eye, and he nods once. Hand in hand, we turn and run.

“Auri!” Tyler shouts behind us. “Where the hells are you going?”

“To buy you forty minutes!”





20



KAL





There are so many.

I know in my head the Ra’haam is an It. One hive mind, composed of billions of pieces, interlocked and connected into one massive singularity. When one part of it feels pain, all of it hurts. What one part of it sees, all of it knows. But as I watch that swarm of ships bearing down upon us—more vessels than I have ever seen—it is difficult not to see it as Them.

Terran heavy carriers. Syldrathi specters. Betraskan troopships and Chellerian scions. A hundred different models and classes, stolen from a hundred different worlds, all of them encrusted in writhing growths of blue green and trailing curling tendrils behind them into the dark.

And they are coming for us.

“Holy cake,” Aurora breathes. “That’s a lot of ships.”

“I am with you, be’shmai,” I tell her.

We stand in the Neridaa’s heart, staring at the projection she has cast around us. It is as if the Weapon’s walls were translucent: all the Void around us is rendered in close-up high definition, sharp as knives. My father reclines upon his crystal throne, but I can tell from the slight crease between his brows that he too is concerned about the force arrayed against us. If nothing else, that thought is enough to wake the fear in me.

I am still clad as a warrior of the Unbroken: black power armor painted with pale glyfs, daubed with songs of glory and blood. Twin kaat blades are crossed at my back, gleaming and silvered, a heavy pistol hangs at my hip, pulse grenades are strung at my belt. But I do not feel like a warrior. Not the kind he would want me to be, anyway.

“So many.” My father watches the incoming ships, and my blood runs cold as he speaks. “Your sister would have enjoyed this, Kaliis.”

“We’re too close to Sempiternity to just send out blind pulses through the Weapon like last time.” Aurora turns to meet my father’s eyes. “We’re going to have to take them down one by one. You and me.”

He smiles, eyes on our enemy. “That pleases you, yes?”

“Pleases me?” Aurora blinks. “Look, I’m not a psychopath like you. I don’t enjoy killing just for the sake of it. I’m—”

“I do not mean the killing, Terran. I mean the power.”

My father throws Aurora a dark glance.

“Tell me you do not feel it? Humming upon your skin and thrumming through your bones? Tell me you are not aching to unleash it again?” He tilts his head, eye flickering. “The Eshvaren were wise when they made their Triggers, child. They knew us well enough to make our poison taste sweet. For our deaths to feel like godhood.”

She purses her lips, meeting his stare but saying nothing. The ships are bearing down, swarming in out of the black. Aurora’s right eye begins to glow, and I feel heat upon her skin as she glowers at my father.

“You gonna speech some more, or are you actually gonna help me?”

“Help you?”

He meets her gaze, and without breaking eye contact, extends his left hand. I see his iris start to glow: that dark light within, leaking out through the cracks across his face. His braids move as if in some invisible wind, and out beyond the Neridaa’s skin, I see one of the Ra’haam ships—a massive, lumbering Terran carrier enveloped in tendrils and pulsing leaves—begin to shudder. The vessel must weigh millions of tons, and yet my father curls his fingers into claws, as if crushing the most delicate of flowers, and my eyes grow wide as I watch the carrier shiver and blow itself into a thousand burning pieces by the power of his will alone.

He shakes his head.

“I care nothing for helping you, Terran. I care for victory.”

Aurora grits her teeth, turns back to the display. “Good enough.”

My gaze lingers on my father for a heartbeat longer. I am thinking of those days when I was young and we trained together beneath the lias trees. But then I reach down and squeeze Aurora’s hand.

“What can I do to help?”

I can feel my father’s burning gaze on the back of my neck, but I ignore it. Aurora looks at me sidelong, a tiny galaxy gleaming in her eye as she squeezes the hand that holds hers.

“You’re already doing it,” she smiles.

And so it begins. The Ra’haam vessels roar toward us, an impossible multitude, and one by one, my be’shmai and my father reach out into the dark to crush them. I see bursts of light, soundless explosions in the black, like new constellations flaring briefly in a burning sky.

The carnage they weave is breathtaking. The light burns inside she whom I love and he whom I hate, and for a moment, I am heartsick at the thought of what they could be if only they were to unite and truly work together.

But I know that is a child’s dream. Caersan, Archon of the Unbroken, will never share his throne. Never trust another enough to believe they are driven by anything save the bloodlust and greed that drive him.