“How long till we hit critical?”
“Three minutes. Let’s hope this plan of yours works.”
“If you gotta die, die with your boots on.”
A faint radiation spike flares behind us, through Aurora Station’s skin, the reactor tripping ever closer to overload. I remember the feeling of that rising heat in the core, the flickering light, Cat’s blood on my hands. And I see it again in my mind’s eye, that vision, that dream awake—Aurora Station blowing itself apart over and over.
The Ra’haam senses something is wrong, its rearguard vessels halting their maneuvers, the vanguard slowing its assault.
But the FoldGate is in our sights now, just a few more moments till it’s in range, till we fire, blowing it apart and trapping the enemy in here with us.
“Two minutes to critical.”
The voice in my head told me I could stop it. I could fix it. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe the station dying, the dream of the Legion along with it, bursting apart in the middle of the enemy and burning it to cinders, is the best we can hope for.
I reach for Scarlett’s hand, squeezing tight.
Beside her, Fin slips his arm around her waist.
This end is no ending.
“One minute to critical.”
We’ll see each other again.
In the st—
The galaxy around us inverts.
The thunder of a billion storms rings inside my head.
I stagger with the force of it, the people around me gasping, stumbling, the battle outside falling still. I see the medallion around Scar’s throat, glowing now with kaleidoscopic fire, cascading through the bridge, an echo, a roar, a birth cry ripped across the darkness and burning all into blinding white.
A shape smashes its way through the walls of time and space. Torn across the breadth of eternity, dragging itself through past and future and infinite possibility, screaming as it comes. The light burns so bright it’s blinding, splintering and fracturing now into all the colors of the spectrum, red to yellow to blue to indigo, no, not a spectrum but a rainbow
A RAINBOW
etched in the spear of broken crystal as big as a city, now floating there in the dark before my wondering eyes.
Unbelievable.
Impossible.
“Maker’s breath,” Finian gasps.
“The Weapon!” Scarlett cries.
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.