Light blazes off our stern, impossible and blinding. Amid the swarm of Ra’haam ships, dark shadows across a darker sky, I see Sempiternity lit from within, like a fire float on a festival day.
Her hull cracks and her body shakes, and I can only watch helpless as her core ruptures. With one final, silent scream of light, the World Ship blows apart, and I wince at the faint echoes of ten thousand lives being taken into the Void’s embrace.
“Amna diir,” I whisper.
“No … ,” Aurora breathes, tears aglow in her shining eyes.
“… Jie-Lin …”
The voice rings in the emptiness around us, warm as springtime, oily and slick. And through her grief, her battle-born fire, I see Aurora’s jaw clench.
“… Jie-Lin …”
“Ignore it, girl,” my father warns.
“I am.”
“It seeks to distract you, it—”
“LOOK, SHUT UP, WILL YOU?”
The gateway looms ahead, filling our view: an eternal spiral, the secrets of the Ancients just beyond. We hit the threshold, thunder past, as the grays and whites and blacks of the Fold suddenly, painfully flare into full and vibrant color—a rainbow-hued thunderclap ringing in my skull.
The gateway ripples behind us, like water, like blood, and my heart sinks as I see Ra’haam vessels riding the shock wave of our passing, flooding through the wound we have torn.
The battle spills over into realspace.
Sempiternity is gone.
We have nowhere to run now.
Free Peoples ships follow the Ra’haam vessels, the Vindicator among them, Tyler and his crew riding beside us to the end. Ahead, I see the homeworld of the Ancients—once a place of beauty and music and light, now dead and gray. But more enemies are coming through the spinning breach behind us, seemingly endless in number, the ruins of a once-beautiful, kaleidoscopic galaxy now rotten and lost. Twisted into one mind, one view, one will, bent to one awful purpose.
To make everything else like it.
See as I do.
Think as I do.
Do as I do.
The closest Ra’haam ships unleash a barrage at the Neridaa, spiraling, spinning, spitting. The projectiles are strange: barbed and dripping venom, shrouded in grasping pseudopods.
“Kal, those are boarding pods, go evasive!”
My father lashes out, fingers curled into claws. Aurora roars, hair blown back in some invisible wind, blood on her teeth. I feel something slam into the Neridaa and shatter its skin, shaking the ship to its bones.
“Kal, you’re hit! Twin strikes astern!”
Another impact shakes us, and I look to Aurora, desperate, her face twisted in pain and blood-soaked joy.
“Be’shmai?”
“I can feel it, Kal,” she whispers. “It’s … it’s …”
“It is here,” my father hisses. “It is aboard.”
I look around the room, the ships still arcing and blooming across the stars. Neither Aurora nor my father can leave—not with the battle still raging outside, the task of guiding the Weapon down to the Eshvaren world. But the enemy is among us now. Inside us. So there is no one to stop it but me.
“It is moving,” my father says, eyelids flickering. “Thirty. Forty bodies. Traveling through the central spine.”
“We have boarders, Tyler,” I report, drawing my pistol. “Three dozen hostiles. Perhaps more. I am moving to intercept.”
“Roger that, we’re on our way! Hold them off till we reach you.”
Aurora grabs my hand as I turn to leave. “Kal, be careful.”
I pull her into my arms, press my lips to hers, tasting blood between us. Iron and rust and ruin. “I will return, be’shmai. I swear it.”
As I stalk across the floor, my father’s voice brings me up short.
“Kaliis.”
I turn to look at him, this man who was once the center of my world. He stands amid the glow of dying ships, of shattering engines, of burning fuel, bathed in the crimson light of carnage. His chin drips blood, thick and violet on the floor at his feet, his eyes, aglow, are focused on the battle outside—that symphony of destruction he plays with my be’shmai.
We are drawing closer to that dead world even as I watch—the salvation that may lie within. But for a second, he glances my way. Long enough to whisper the only wisdom he knows.
“Make it bleed.”
27
ZILA
TICK.
TICK.
TICK.
I am moving on autopilot, allowing the conversation to wash around me like white noise, lost in my own thoughts.
My body is crammed into Nari’s Pegasus with Finian and Scarlett.
We are crawling through the waste disposal.
I am in the morgue, stealing the passkey from Pinkerton’s corpse.
All this we have done before. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand times.
My mind is freewheeling, spinning through every loop I have lived.
We have attempted to eject the core sixteen times, and every time we have failed.
We approached the task with stealth, and we were detected.
We experimented with brute force, and we were outmatched.
We even attempted logic, not once but twice. We appealed to the station commander, laying out the facts of the matter as simply and nonthreateningly as we could. Reason did not succeed where cunning had failed.
I close my aching eyes and let my mind slip loose of its bonds, allow it to explore. My intellect is extraordinary, I have always known this. Though I have stretched it, challenged it, I have never found its limits. But now, everywhere I turn, I slam up against one of two walls.
On the first, engraved in large letters, the words:
YOU CAN TRY A THOUSAND TIMES MORE, IT CANNOT BE DONE.
And carved into the second, even larger:
YOU ARE OUT OF TIME.
This is our last chance.
We stand once more in Pinkerton’s office. A broken half circle of us. The massive storm of dark matter churns out there beyond the station’s hull, our future waiting to pulse within. Our path out. Our journey home.
If only I could see the way …
Finian’s desperate voice brushes past my consciousness. “If we could modify the Stun setting, get the disruptor to emit a broader pulse …”
“Medical personnel required immediately, Deck 12,” calls the PA. “Repeat, medical personnel, Deck 12.”
I let him drift away. A labyrinth unfurls around me as I try every possible permutation of the facts, but each time I meet a dead end. Every what-if and perhaps-we-could trips up somewhere. And all the while we are following the same steps that have killed us every time. Marching toward the same fate, going knowingly to meet our doom.
“Maybe there’s some way to secure the probe chamber to give me time,” Nari says, the same note of desperation in her voice. “Something manual that station security can’t override.”
“But that will mean you’re locked in when the core blows,” Scarlett says. “You have to get out, Nari, or all this is for nothing.”
This is unacceptable. We cannot be in a no-win scenario, or we would not have come from a reality in which Nari founds the Aurora Legion.
There must be a way for her to survive.
There must be.
There must—
And then the numbers suddenly stop scrolling. The endless fractal of possibilities stops unfolding. And I see the answer.
I open my eyes to find Scarlett studying me intently. Even now, exhausted, worn thin by grief and fear and relentless pursuit, she cannot hide the gentleness in her gaze. Despite her carefully cultivated outer shell, she has a limitless heart. I am glad she has discovered the same is true of Finian.
“You figured it out?” she asks quietly.
“Yes.”
She simply stares. Part of her already understanding. And I begin to see the genius in her ability to do that. Here at the last. At the end.
I am sorry I shouted at her.
I am sorry for many things.
TICK.
TICK.
TICK.
“Nari,” I say. “The hallabongs your cousin brings to your halmoni’s house. They’re good?”
“Delicious.” She’s startled. “But what … ?”
I look into her eyes. And when I do, I know… .
I am not feeling nothing.
“I would like to taste one,” I tell her.
I would like to be in a home like that. With a large family coming and going. With traditions, and family jokes and stories, and fruit so juicy it runs from your wrists and drips off your elbows.
“I wish you could,” she frowns. “But—”
Finian finally begins to understand what Scarlett already knows.