Aurora's End (The Aurora Cycle #3)(92)

Tyler, I love you… .

I take aim with my pistol, right at her heart.

One shot, and it’s over.

TICK, TICK, TICK.

“JONES!” comes a roar. “FREEZE!”

I turn, heart sinking as half a dozen Legion security troopers pour through the blast door behind me, their disruptor rifles raised. Glancing back at my target, I see Cat whirl away from her terminal, hear a sharp intake of breath turned metallic by that faceless mask.

“TYLER.”

Cat draws a long, sleek GIA-issue blast pistol from inside her uniform.

The troopers behind me roar a warning.

I crack off my shot, but Cat dives aside, unloading her own weapon at the SecTeam. And the air is filled with the BAMF!BAMF!BAMF! of Legion disruptors, the sizzle of Cat’s blaster, the hiss of my own pistol as a three-way firefight for the future of the galaxy breaks out in the reactor room.

I dive behind a bank of computer terminals for cover, roaring to the SecTeam, “She’s trying to blow the reactor core! We’ve got to—”

I hear the bright ping of metal on metal, my eyes widening as two flash-pulse grenades hit the ground beside me. Gasping, I throw myself clear, buffeted by the blast as the explosives detonate. I’m thrown hard into the wall, collapsing to the ground behind a bank of steel piping, tasting blood on my teeth and tongue, ears ringing with static.

“I’m on your side, you ASSHOLES!”

I see movement—a sleek shadow dashing through the dark to another terminal. I duck out from cover to shoot, but a burst of disruptor blasts opens up at my back—BAMF!BAMF!BAMF!—and I’m forced behind cover again, the air about me sizzling.

I’m pinned down.

There’s no way I can get to her.

“Cat!” I roar. “Cat, please don’t do this!”

No reply but the heavy tread of Legion boots on metal. More troopers are pouring into the room now, fanning out to flank me. I don’t want to shoot them, they’re my people—We the Legion. We the light—but if they catch me flat-footed, with all those dead personnel on the ground at my back and the charge of mass murder and galactic terrorism over my head …

“Cat, please!” I shout. “I know you can hear me!”

“Jones, it’s over! Toss your weapon!”

I catch a glimpse of her through the swirling steam. The pulsing light. The thrumming, boiling air. But I don’t have a clear shot. My breath is hammering. My body dripping. That image playing over and over in my aching head: crystal splintering, academy exploding, that voice, that voice now begging, screaming in my head.

… You can fix this, Tyler …

FIX THIS, TYLER.

I draw a deep breath. Think of my sister. Of Saedii. Auri and Kal and Fin and Zila. And whispering a prayer to the Maker, I dive across the floor, pistol in hand as I roll up onto my knee, drawing aim right at Cat’s head.

BAMF!

The blast hits me in the hip. Pain rips through my body, the blast burning clean through my flesh as I gasp in agony, cracking off my shot. I see it strike Cat in the left arm and she whirls, hissing in pain.

BAMF!

The second shot strikes my temple. I feel bone crack, flesh cauterize, my eye sizzling in its socket as I fall forward, pistol slipping from my hand and clattering across the grille.

BAMF!

The third shot hits my lower back, bursts out through my belly. Burned blood spatters onto the metal in front of me. I gasp again, white light in my head, no feeling in my legs as they go out from under me. I hit the deck, blood in my mouth, cracking my brow hard on the metal. There’s blood on my face. I can’t see out of my right eye, I can’t—

Running boots.

Pulsing heat.

A shadow falls over me, and as I roll over, groaning, I see a Legion uniform, a disruptor rifle aimed square at my face. “Game over, trait—”

Something slams into the figure from the side—something long and gleaming, moving like liquid. The trooper’s torso is torn away from his hips, his body collapsing in a spray of gore. I hear roars of alarm, what sounds like a cracking whip, wet, splashing sounds. A shadow flashes overhead, charcoal gray, pale white, tiny pinpricks of glowing blue, flower-shaped.

Cat.

I blink hard, tracking her movement through the steam. She moves among the troopers like a razor, like a demon, like a monster. Her mask is cast aside, blue eyes aglow, burning with ghostly light. Sick with horror, I see the arm of her GIA uniform has been torn off where I shot her. And from that bloody rent, a long cluster of thorned tentacles is spilling, two, three meters long—the same blue green as those awful plants that engulfed the colony on Octavia, lashing through the air, sharp as swords.

She cuts through the troopers as though they were made of paper and she of broken glass. They roar in alarm and fire back, disruptor shots ripping through the air. But she doesn’t stop, barely slows, hardly breathes as she tears them all to ribbons, leaving them smeared up the walls and scattered in pieces across the floor.

And then she stands, head bowed, shoulders slumped, breathing hard, that long mass of thorned whips seething at her side and dripping blood onto already soaking ground.

I close my good eye. Salt and copper in my mouth. Trying to rise.

Trying to reach for my fallen pistol.

Trying to—

“Tyler.”

She stands over me, and my heart breaks at the sight of her. Two tiny flowers of blinding blue burn in her irises. Her uniform is covered in blood. I can see the shape of what she used to be in the line of her lips, the phoenix tattoo at her throat. But my eye drifts to those long, barbed tendrils, spilling from the torn sleeve where her arm should be.