“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.