“When?” I repeat. “What do you mean, when?”
Caersan looks past me to Kal, raising the brow over his good eye. “Really, Kaliis? The entire universe before you, and this is what you chose?”
Kal steps forward, and I take his hand, curling my fingers through his.
“Bigger problems,” I remind him quietly, as if I’m not about a heartbeat away from lunging for his father myself. Then I speak to Caersan, not bothering to reach for politeness: “Indulge my tiny Terran brain and tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I speak your vile language with the fluency of one born to it,” the Starslayer replies, his gaze brushing past our joined hands as he turns back to the projection of the stars. “So I will assume you fail to comprehend the concept rather than the word. Kaliis, the FoldGate to Taalos. Observations?”
“It is damaged,” Kal says slowly. “Neglected. Which makes little sense. It should have been attended to by tech crews on the Taalos colony.”
“Which is no longer there,” Caersan nods. “Just as the population of Terra is long gone.”
“It’s not long gone,” I begin. “It was there just—”
But it’s starting to sink in now. What he means.
When.
The sheer depth of the Ra’haam presence on Earth, the layers of it, coiling in and doubling back upon itself—it was just as dense as the growth on Octavia. The entire planet was thick with it.
But the Ra’haam hasn’t bloomed and burst yet. That was the point of the Weapon—to destroy it while it slept, before this could happen.
It would take years for the Ra’haam to populate Earth like that.
I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t sensed it myself.
But maybe … maybe it did take years.
“When,” I whisper.
“Aurora?” Kal asks softly.
“Ah,” says his father. “At last, the child comprehends.”
“Kal,” I say. “We’ve—I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but I think we’ve … jumped forward … in time.”
He’s silent a long moment, his eyes darting back and forth between his father and me. But then, slowly, he nods. “The Eshvaren did have a different relationship to time from we who came after them.”
He agrees so calmly that I’m almost bewildered. But I remind myself Kal’s people are the oldest race in the galaxy—that they’ve always told stories of the Eshvaren. Stories so old, their origins are lost to history. If anyone was going to buy what’s happening right now, it’s a couple of Syldrathi.
“The Echo,” his father agrees.
“Half a year passed in no time at all,” Kal nods. “And when you first came into your powers, be’shmai, the night you pointed us to the World Ship, you spoke backward, as if time around you was twisting in on itself.”
“Precognition,” Caersan adds. “Time dilation. They knew more than we. I do not believe this conjunction was intentional, however. The Eshvaren did not anticipate two Triggers aboard their weapon simultaneously.”
“No,” I agree. “Because they anticipated that the first one was going to do his damned job.”
“They anticipated total self-sacrifice,” he agrees, lip drawing back into a sneer. “For their Trigger to die on their knees.”
“As opposed to taking this thing they left behind, the culmination of their entire species’ efforts,” I snap, “and using it to wipe out whole suns in the name of conquering the galaxy. Your own people, billions of them, so you could do what? Rule for the next few years until the Ra’haam bloomed?”
“We were born to rule!” He throws the words back at me like a spear, but it veers off course—it’s Kal who takes half a step back, his breath uneven. “And my people were cowards and traitors!”
“You had a chance!” My voice echoes off the walls of the crystal chamber around us. “You had a chance to catch the Ra’haam while it was sleeping, and instead, you did this!” A wave of my hand takes in the floor around us, littered with the bodies of his people. They’re probably the lucky ones—they didn’t live to see the Ra’haam takeover that must have followed our disappearance.
The Starslayer doesn’t spare his dead prisoners a glance. The anger inside me thickens, and I shift my weight, because I swear there is nothing in this time or any other that would be as satisfying as getting my hands around his throat. But Kal’s mind brushes against mine, violet twining around midnight blue, calming, quieting me. He finds me effortlessly now, something unlocked inside both of us. And he’s enough to bring me down.
“How did this happen, Father?” he asks.
Caersan turns away and navigates a path through the corpses carpeting the floor. When he reaches the wall of the chamber, he lays one hand on the crystal and glances up at the vaulted ceiling.
“It is unclear,” he says. “Psychic dissonance caused by the presence of two Triggers, perhaps. But if the Neridaa performed such an extraordinary act once, then I believe it could be replicated. I know this ship as well as my own self. The power that hums through it as well as my own breath. It is less a weapon to be fired than an instrument to be played.”
A sliver of hope creeps into my mind, like the smallest beam of sunlight breaking through the clouds. “You think we could play it again?”
He’s thoughtful. “I know the note of the song I heard as we moved across time. I could replicate it, with enough power. Your mind could provide the unsophisticated push, for want of a more precise term. I believe I could channel it into that same song and return us to the moment we left.”
“Aurora … ,” Kal begins, but I’m already laughing.
“It’s okay, Kal, I’m not volunteering for that.”
“Oh, but …” Caersan turns to me, hands over his heart. “You are the Trigger of the Eshvaren, Aurora! You have a chance to catch the Ra’haam while it sleeps! Is it not, as you so eloquently put it, your damned job?”
His mock sincerity drops like a mask, his hands to his sides.
“Not so eager to serve them now, eh? Now that you know what it will cost?”
My fingers creep up to brush my cheek, and though most of my anger is directed at the arrogant bastard standing in front of us, a little flame within me flickers, and whispers: How were you meant to fire this thing twenty-two times? You would have died piece by piece.
That’s what they asked of you.
But even still, I feel the power tingling at my fingertips, aching for release. Again, I feel that sense of exhilaration at the thought I might get to unleash it. It’s like a river, welling up inside me even now, and even though I’m still weak from the last time, even though I can feel it hurting me every time I use it, I almost …
I almost … want to.
“All this is irrelevant, regardless,” Caersan sighs.
“Why?” I ask, pushing the want down to my toes. “What do you mean?”
“Do you not sense it, Terran? In the air? In the walls?”
I let my mind quest outward, to the pulses and flickers that flow through the walls around us. And I know what Caersan means. It’s like Kal already said. “The music. The song in this place … it feels different now.”
The Starslayer nods. “The Neridaa is damaged. During the battle for Terra. I cannot play the note if her strings have been cut.”
“Well, we have to repair it, then,” I declare.
Caersan scoffs. “As simple as that.”
“I’m not saying it will be simple,” I say, hands curling into fists. “But we can’t just float here doing nothing. If this is the future we made, we have to get back to the past and fix it.” I wave toward the corrupted Syldrathi colony, that moldy slick of oil in both our minds. “This is our fault, Caersan!”
“We should continue this debate in a place more sheltered than beside a FoldGate,” Kal says. “If the Ra’haam has taken Taalos—”
His father scowls. “Turn tail and run, you mean? What else has she gifted you? What other Terran weakness now poisons your veins?”
“Only a fool strikes a blow in haste,” Kal shoots back. “A warrior strikes once, and well.” A flash of contempt crosses his face that’s all Caersan, from the lift of his chin to the curl of his lip. In this moment, I can see the same blood running through them. Our minds brush together, mine reaching for his as instinctively as his does for mine. We don’t need words—silver and gold wrap together, confirming our shared intent.
When we make it back, we’ll take him on again. We’ll be ready.
We’ll be together.
Caersan’s mouth only quirks, though, and he inclines his head. “At least you retained something of my teachings,” he murmurs. “We passed by a FoldStorm not far back. It should provide cover. You will assist me in propelling the Neridaa into the storm, Terran.”
He glowers as I hesitate, and I size him up, studying that face so similar to Kal’s—and so completely different.
“You moved it fine on your own before,” I point out.
He scowls. “You are too cowardly to make yourself vulnerable to me.”
“We’re surrounded by people you killed. Can’t think why I’d hesitate.”
“You are right to fear me, girl,” he smiles. “But I may require your mind to return to my own time. I would be a fool to destroy you now.”
He turns his back, contemptuous, unafraid, and the display projected in the center of the room shifts as he plots out a course to the storm. Slowly, tentatively, I ease down my barriers to observe the way he interlinks with the Weapon—the Neridaa, in his mind—and propels it forward by will alone.
His mind is rich and deep and strong, layers of the same gold as his son’s, and a dark, dried-blood red. I can feel the strength in it, a coming together of his Syldrathi heritage and his training in the Echo. He would’ve been a stronger Trigger than me, if he’d been willing. And as he glances back toward the corrupted Taalos colony, I can feel it in him, beneath that ice-cold demeanor. He might play the imperious one, the faultless one, but I can tell he’s furious at the sight of that fallen world. Much as he loathes me, I can sense there’s something he loathes even more.
Defeat.
He bats me away before I can look more closely, and we each put our mental shoulders to the wheel, easing the city-sized crystal through the quiet of the Fold. We work side by side, rather than weaving together as I do with Kal. But we’re moving through the black and white, fast as thought.
The storm looms in the distance ahead, massive and roiling, bigger than planets and crackling with power. As we cruise toward it, Caersan climbs onto the throne and, red cloak splayed beneath him, makes himself more comfortable. I settle on a step at the bottom, and Kal takes his place beside me, our hands still joined.
“Don’t look at them,” I whisper as his gaze falls—how can it not?—on the dead bodies littering the floor.
“They remind me of someone I knew,” he murmurs, and I close my eyes, resting my head on his shoulder.
As the minutes draw out, I let my mind range, stretching and pushing out into the Fold around us, testing my limits. I’m exhausted, but something has awakened within me—like a new set of muscles I never knew I had. Like an extra gear, and I want to explore it. I want to use it. Lose myself in it. Let go of my tiny body and embrace everything beyond it.
“You feel it, don’t you, Terran?”
I glance to Caersan, the air thrumming between us. He looks down at his hand, closing it slowly into a fist. And he smiles at me.
I ignore him, turning away, back out into the dark beyond. The space is infinite, too big to wrap my head around. But out there in all that nothing, I realize it’s not completely empty after all. The first time I brush against something, I shy away instinctively, midnight blue flaring around me—then I understand what it is I’ve found. It’s a dead ship, surrounded by a cloud of debris. A minute later, I find another derelict. And another. There’s no life here in the Fold, but this sector of it isn’t empty.
It’s a graveyard.
Is everyone gone? Has everyone in the galaxy been subsumed by the Ra’haam? I can’t imagine the people I’ve met, the places I’ve seen, all destroyed. The bright lights gone dark, the busy streets empty and quiet. Hundreds of worlds, quiet forever.
I let my mind range farther toward the storm, past another ship, this one broken open like someone took it in both hands and ripped it apart to spill the contents out into the Fold and—
I freeze, then jerk back into my body, my eyes snapping open.
“What?” Caersan’s mind is already focusing in the direction I came from, and I feel Kal try to do the same, but he lacks the power. Carefully I join my mind with his and bring him with me as I creep back to take another look.
It’s like one of those puzzles where you have to squint and try to unfocus your eyes, and the moment you stop looking, the image pops out. I quiet my mind, arcing outward, as still and silent as I can be, and there on the very periphery, I sense them again.
One.
Then two.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
There are ships out there at the edge of my range now, just a whisper of them. But they’re converging on us. And these ones aren’t dead. They’re closing in from multiple directions, and even as I watch, their presence becomes firmer, closer, their images coalescing in Caersan’s projection.
“Amna diir,” Kal whispers. “The Ra’haam.”
The ships are of a dozen different styles, built by a dozen different races. They’re huge—battleships all of them, bristling with weapons. But their hulls are overrun with what looks like moss and lichen, a sickly white edged with blue green, and they drag long tendrils behind them, like creeper vines, or maybe roots, searching for new soil to pollute. They remind me of the bones of Octavia, buried underneath the mass of the Ra’haam. There’s a wrongness to them that turns my stomach, makes my blood run cold, like something’s alive inside them but a blanket’s been thrown over it, smothering.
“Those are big ships,” I murmur.
“Capital war vessels,” Caersan replies. “There are more inbound.”
“Can we fight them?” Kal asks.
“We will not fight them. We will destroy them.” Caersan looks at me calmly, his right eye glowing faintly. “You will fire the Weapon, girl. I will shape the pulse toward the enemy. Even damaged, the Neridaa is more than a match for—”
“No,” Kal says.
Caersan tilts his head at his son. “No?”
“You know what it will cost, what it will take, to fire this thing again.” Kal glances at me, those cracks around my eye, before turning back on his father. “You simply do not wish to pay the price yourself.”
I know Kal is right. The pulse wouldn’t have to be anything close to what I’d need to destroy a sun, but fighting that many ships, I’ll be weakened afterward. My skin will keep breaking open, the spiderweb of cracks I see in Caersan will start to spread in me. Still, my fingertips tingle, goose bumps rising on my skin in anticipation… .
“I can do it, Kal,” I tell him.
“Be’shmai, it will hurt you.”
“Will you allow these maggots to destroy us, then?” Caersan asks.
“Will you?” Kal demands.
“We are Warbreed, boy,” he spits. “You know as well as I what that means. From the moment I took the glyf, I accepted death as a friend. I do not fear the Void. To die in battle is a warrior’s fate.”
“You lie, Father,” Kal spits. “It is not in your nature to accept defeat. You will not sit idle and let those things blow us to pieces.”
The Starslayer raises one silver brow, smiling at me.
“Will I not?”
Caersan leans back on his throne, adjusts the line of his cloak, flicks a bothersome speck of dust off his shoulder guard. Steepling his fingers at his lips, he just stares at me. I can feel the Ra’haam battleships drawing closer, more of them coming now—a corrupted swarm, launching fighters, descending on us out of the black.
Caersan does nothing.
The closest warship opens fire; a missile maybe, bursting against our crystal hull. I feel the Weapon shift under us, a psychic sound—almost as if the Neridaa felt the pain. Another blast rocks the Weapon, another, the light around us dimming as violent shudders run the length of the ship.
And still, the Starslayer just stares.
I close my hands into fists, feeling that power surge inside me.
“Be’shmai … ,” Kal whispers.
“‘Be’shmai’ … ,” Caersan sneers at his son. “This is who you name beloved? This weakling who will let you die here in the dark?”
“You will not do that,” Kal spits, rising. “You’ll not use me against her!”
“You allowed yourself to be used, Kaliis. When you bound yourself to a cur such as she. Your sister would never have shamed me so, to lie with a Terran maggot. Saedii would have done her duty. Saedii would have put her people, her honor, her family first.”
“Family?” Kal shouts. “You killed our mother! You tore our family apart, just as you did our sun! What do you know of family?”
Kal seethes at his father, teeth bared, but I’m past the boundaries of simple words. Instead, I close my eyes, heart pounding now as more and more of the enemy ships draw near. I can see the different shapes, some of them sickeningly familiar—Syldrathi and Betraskan and Terran—all of them corrupted by the Ra’haam. The power builds inside me like water against a dam. It’s warm. Inviting. I can feel the depths of it, just like Caersan said. It’s limitless. It’s overwhelming. Maybe even a little …
Blasts rock the ship, Ra’haam vessels pounding our hull. Corrupted fighters scream down the Neridaa’s length, chipping away at her skin with living shots that eat away at her hull. The Weapon is vast, but I can feel her bleeding, cracks spreading across her face. And all the while, Caersan’s eyes are fixed on me. A small smile on his lips. He’s playing a game of chicken with all our lives, and if it were just me at risk here …
But I look to Kal beside me. My lips pressed thin. I can feel the pull of it. The strength of it, waiting to be unleashed. I know if I let it out, I’m just going to want it again. And again. This is what they made me for, after all. But …
“Aurora … do not let him manipulate you like this.”
I can’t lose you again.
And then I draw up every ounce of my mental energy, holding the power within myself until my skin is tingling, until I’m bursting at the seams, current coursing through my veins. I’m consumed for a moment, caught up in the utter, boundless thrill of it. I feel Caersan in my head then, cold and triumphant, channeling the force into a pulse, spherical, like the ones I let loose on Emerald City, on Sempiternity, releasing it in a blinding burst.
It balloons outward, thousands of kilometers into the Fold, striking a dozen Ra’haam ships and ripping them to bleeding splinters. A stab of pain rockets through my head in response, and I grit my teeth, blood spilling from my nose as I heave for breath.
“Again,” Caersan says.
“Aurora … ,” Kal whispers.
“Again!”
“You cannot do this!” Kal roars. “She’s hurting herself!”
“Mercy is the province of cowards, Kaliis.”
I fire again, another pulse, blossoming outward and annihilating the enemy ships beyond. I feel like a giant, smashing children’s toys. I feel ten thousand feet tall. But I can already sense more at the edges of my range, homing in on us, like we’re a beacon in the dark.
Kal stands beside me. Squeezing my hand, looking into my eyes. I can feel his strength adding to mine, but the Ra’haam ships are still swarming in, another blast rocking us now, crystal splinters raining from the roof and shattering on the ground around us—
“Help her!” Kal roars. “The two of you together could annihilate—”
“No, wait,” I gasp.
Squeezing Kal’s hand, I nod to the dark outside.
“One of those isn’t a Ra’haam ship… .”
I feel it, out there amid the rot and the mold—a blur of rusting metal, cutting like a knife through the Fold. Missiles curl and bloom, blinding white spheres of nuclear fusion, immolating the remaining Ra’haam ships in sudden bursts of light and heat. I can hear a scream of frustration in the back of my mind: the rage of the enemy denied. But it knows now, it knows we’re here, and I can feel it, even now, gathering its strength to strike again.
Again.
Again.
Until it has everything. Is everything.
Caersan rises from his throne, brow creased, one bloodstained hand outstretched toward the newcomer.
“Strange design,” he murmurs.
“Who are they?” Kaliis demands.
“I do not know.” His eyes narrow. “But they are hailing us.”
I wipe the smear of blood from my tingling lips, sit back on my haunches, and try to catch my breath as Caersan throws the transmission up onto the projected screen in the heart of the room.
His face twists into a scowl at what he sees.
A group of people appears on the monitor, sitting at stations on the bridge of this new ship. I see two women, a Betraskan and a Syldrathi with a Waywalker glyf tattooed on her forehead and deep cracks scored in the skin around her eyes. Behind them is a gremp that must be standing on a box and a Rikerite with long horns sweeping back from her forehead. Farther back, bodies are crammed in together—Chellerians with blue skin turned gray by the Fold, more Betraskans, half a dozen types of aliens I’ve never seen before.
And in front of them all, in the commander’s chair, is someone my hammering heart twists at the sight of.
A man.
“I can’t believe it,” he hisses, staring at Caersan. “It is you.”
He’s out in the Fold, and without the effect of the Weapon, his pale skin is washed paler still, his fair hair turned gray. His uniform is threadbare and battle-scarred, he has a black patch covering one eye, and he’s older than he was the last time I saw him—maybe in his forties. But even after more than twenty years, even under the scars and the stubble and the grief that marks the skin at the corners of his eyes, I’d know him anywhere.
But Kal’s the one who speaks. Who sucks all the air out of my lungs with just two words. Who names the man before us, this man who’s been to hell and back and is somehow still holding on, looking at us with a mix of confusion and accusation and bitter rage.
“Tyler Jones.”