It’s not too late, I realize.
She’s here.
“Aurora,” I whisper.
38
AURI
I am everything.
I am everyone.
I am everywhere.
In a flash, we are in the place we need to be, the hymn of the Neridaa slowly winding down to a low chord that tingles and reverberates through my very bones.
The Eshvaren crystal sings its song, and the energy-that-was-Caersan is fading from me, and I lift my head to discover Kal lying wounded in the center of the throne room, and I’m curled over him, my body protecting his.
And we are alone.
There is no sign of the Ra’haam in here. Caersan has vanished.
The bodies of the Waywalkers remain, but the bodies of Tyler and Lae are gone, because they are no longer reality, only … possibility.
Because we’re home.
“Be’shmai,” Kal whispers, trying to prop himself up on one elbow.
“I’m here,” I whisper in reply.
I love you, my mind tells his.
I chanted it to him as we hurtled back in time, as I shielded him, and the words live between us still, and that’s fine by me, because I don’t want to take them back. I want to say them as many times as I can in the time I have left.
“I’m all right,” I say, pushing to my feet. Because I am. I should be exhausted after the battle to repair the ship, but I’ve never felt more powerful, or more purposeful.
All of the future’s survivors gave their lives to bring us here. To offer me one chance to change the way our story unfolds. I’m not going to waste it.
At my request, the Weapon projects the view from outside onto the walls of the throne room, a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the battle in progress, as if the walls weren’t crystal but shining glass.
Life and death play out around us, an Aurora Legion Longbow veering to avoid the Weapon in a panicked maneuver, pursued by a Ra’haam vessel trailing vines behind it, and as I look up and out, I see the same thing over, and over, and over.
The Aurora Legion makes its last stand here alongside a fleet of sleek, bloodthirsty Syldrathi ships, Unbroken glyfs painted down their sides. Whoever has taken over Caersan’s leadership, it seems they’ve decided the Ra’haam is a foe worth fighting.
Together, the fleets are confronting an armada that endlessly outnumbers them, an armada the size and shape of every race it’s overtaken, wreathed in vines and mindlessly hungry.
The little Legion ship rounds the edge of the Weapon and swings away, like a fish that saw a shadow, and I see how the fate of its crew will play out in the next few seconds.
I see how their frantic scramble to avoid their pursuers, to shake the hungry Ra’haam from their tail, will send them straight into the side of a Ra’haam flagship, to end in a quick explosion of soundless fire, each of them given only a millisecond to know their fate before oblivion swallows them.
Kal sees the way it will end too, and his reflexive horror is mine, so I reach out and nudge the course of the Longbow, and it sails up and over the flagship, darting instead to the shelter of its fellows as a bloody fight to the death rages on around us both.
The Ra’haam is so much bigger than it was, its presence so much more powerful, so rich now. This new armada represents countless lives lost, snuffed out in an instant as the mindless whole of the Ra’haam took them over. But as I let my mind brush against it, and as it shivers, shudders, and turns its attention toward me, my lips curve slowly into a smile.
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.