TICK, TICK, TICK.
My heart is thumping a hundred klicks a second now. The image of the academy blowing apart is running on replay, over and over in my head. My pulse pistol is clutched in my sweating hand, the knife Saedii gave me is heavy on my wrist.
TICK, TICK, TICK.
Admiral Adams continues his speech to the assembly above, oblivious to the calamity unfolding below.
“You’ve gathered here to discuss the growing tide of unrest among the many worlds of our galaxy. But before talks commence, another matter should be brought to your attention, one that concerns not only every species here present, but the life of every creature in the Milky Way.”
The shape of the reactor core rises ahead of me—three towering cylinders in a vast circular room, running right through the academy’s spine. The walls are lined with heavy conduits, the bright screens of control terminals and monitor stations punctuating the low, pulsing light.
The temperature in here is boiling now, almost too hot to bear. Steam rising, hissing, coiling. Cat has disengaged the cooling lines, pushing the reactor toward overload, while somehow killing the alert systems.
Looking around, I can see shutdown terminals pried open, alarm relays and overrides disengaged. More dead bodies littering the floor. Their necks are broken, spines twisted, mouths open in silent screams.
Cat, what have they done to you?
“The Aurora Legion was established over two hundred years ago, in a time of darkness and strife, in the wake of a war we wished never to repeat,” Adams says, voice echoing through the amphitheater. “Since then, we have functioned as a peacekeeping force, serving the interests of the sentient races of the galaxy. But that has not been our only purpose. And I’m afraid Battle Leader de Stoy and I have not been entirely honest in our reasons for gathering you here today.”
I hear murmurs ripple among the summit audience.
The floor begins shaking beneath my feet.
Adams draws a deep breath, looks around the delegates as the image of a large blue-green planet appears in the holo floating above his head.
“Representatives, delegates, friends, this is the planet Octavia—”
And without warning, the feed sputters and dies.
The lights around me flicker, red to strobing white. The floor shakes again beneath my feet. The light from the reactor burns brighter, the heat more intense, and through the shimmering air I spot her, bent over another terminal, the burning light of the core reflected in her blank mirrormask.
She doesn’t know I’m here. She’s intent solely on her sabotage. I sink slowly to one knee, thumb the power setting on my pulse pistol to Kill. Focusing only on the uniform. The threat. Not thinking about the girl underneath, the girl I used to know, the girl who begged me to stay.
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.
Blood is pooling at my back. My legs are growing cold. My face is numb. The logical part of my mind tells me I’m going into shock, I’m bleeding out, I’m dying. But it’s not the logical part of my mind that whispers.
“You s-saved me.”
She kneels beside me, looking at me with those eyes that were once brown. Still somehow filled with the same love she used to carry for me.
“An Ace always backs her Alpha,” she smiles.
I’m almost crying, sobbing as she reaches out and runs her fingertip down my scorched brow, my mangled cheek.
I’m wondering if I somehow got through to her, if she’s somehow realized what she’s become, my voice just a shaking whisper as I ask, “Why?”
“Don’t you understand? I love you, Tyler.” She smiles, infinitely sad, infinitely gentle. “So we love you too.”
She rises to her feet, arm writhing, and walks back toward the terminals. I struggle to raise my head, follow her through the steam, the flashing red. Her fingers blur across a series of controls, and the blast door comes crashing down, sealing us inside the chamber with a heavy THUMP.
“Wh—” I wince, holding my guts in. “What are you d-doing?”
She keeps typing, the light shifting deeper, the floor shaking harder.
“Ending this.”
I frown, trying to rise. “But … you s-s …”
“We wanted it to be us, Tyler.” Glowing blue eyes fix me through the swirling vapor, the rising dark. “In the end. You deserve for it to be us.”
“Cat … ,” I whisper, heart breaking. “Y-you’ll die too… .”
“NO.” She shakes her head, tears glittering in her eyes. “This flesh will die. But my memories, my thoughts, my love will live on. We wish you could have been in here with us. We wish you could have understood.”
“Cat …”
“We’ll miss you, Tyler. So, so much.”
I try to get up, blood spilling through my fingers, but the pain is too much to bear. I crawl toward her a meter or two, sticky red fingers scraping metal, my fingernails breaking. But I’m hurt too bad. Lost too much blood.
It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. Hard to ignore that vision of the station coming apart, the thought of my friends, my family, everything we’ve given and lost ending here like this and just think, think, think.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
I cough blood, swallow thickly as I nod.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “It won’t be for much longer, Ty.”
I reach toward her, bloody fingers curling. I try to speak, but choke instead. I don’t want to die here. Not like this.
And I’m so scared of it, so scared of dying alone, for an awful moment I wonder what it would be like to be one with it.
Because that’s what the Ra’haam is, I realize.
To never be alone.
I beckon her closer. Whispering. “K … Ki …”
“What?” she asks.
“Kiss,” I whisper, “… g-goodbye?”
The tears are shining in her eyes as she stops typing. I can hear the sound of heavy thumping at the blast doors now, faint voices, an alarm finally being sounded. But it’s all too late, I know. Too late. They’ll never get in here in time. Cat moves through the dark toward me, a small black shadow with a bigger shadow inside her, so vast and hungry it’s going to swallow the stars.
She kneels at my side. Looks me in the eyes.
“Kiss m-me,” I beg her.
She sighs, tears falling from those glowing eyes. And running her fingers down my cheek, she leans in and presses her lips to mine. For a moment, I’m back in that hotel on shore leave with her, the one and only night we spent together. All the love she had for me shining in her gaze, shattering like glass when I told her we shouldn’t, we couldn’t be together afterward.
I should have loved her better. I should have loved her more. And I try to tell her, with the breath I have left in me, with the lips I press to hers, opening my mind and pouring into her, telling her I’m sorry.
I love you.
And then I drive the knife right into her neck.
She reels back, flower eyes gone wide, blood spilling from her throat. But Saedii’s knife is sharper than razors, monofilament edge and Syldrathi alloy cutting clean through meat and artery and bone.
I stab again, again, drenched by the look of hurt and pain and fury in her eyes as she stumbles back onto her haunches, dark blood gushing from the wounds. Tiny tendrils whip from the edges of the stab wounds, pale and bloody, snaking blindly in the air.
The tentacles at her side flare, snaking around my neck, but she collapses before they can squeeze, shock etched on her paling face as her legs kick feebly, heels scraping, breath rattling.
She tries to talk. Choking instead. Glowing eyes on mine.
“I’m s-sorry,” I whisper. “I’m s-so sorry, Cat.”
And I crawl.
Across the soaking deck. A sluice of red behind. Dragging myself with broken fingernails, holding my pieces together with bloody hands.
Ignoring the pain, the hurt, I crawl.
Like the life of every sentient being in the galaxy depends on it.
I crawl.
I reach the terminal. Scrabbling with red, sticky hands. Black flowers bloom in front of my eye, every breath bubbles in my lungs. But finally, I manage to stab the controls, release the blast doors. I collapse onto my back, gasping, coughing blood, as tech teams and comp crews and security goons all bust into the core room, through the swirling steam, the rising red.
But not too late.
Not too late.
… You can fix this, Tyler …
The laser sights of a dozen disruptor rifles light up my chest.
I slump back against the terminal, light fading in my eye.
“Checkmate,” I whisper.