Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle, #1)

by Amie Kaufman

“I didn’t know Syldrathi blushed with their ears,” Tyler muses. “I am not blushing.” “I mean, it kinda looks like you’re blushing.” “I am not blushing.” “Ooookay,” Tyler nods. “I sometimes have that effect on people, is all.” “Is your request not to punch you still in effect, sir?”

Finian’s an annoying little shithead for sure, but at least he doesn’t have shit for brains.

“Sounds complicated,” Tyler says. “Complicated doesn’t even begin to describe it. His office is going to be harder to get into than my date’s boxer shorts at last year’s Genesis Day Ball.” “Is there any way in at all?” Tyler asks. “I honestly don’t know,” Finian sighs. “I tried poetry, I tried flowers, I—” “I’m talking about the office, Fin. What about air vents?”

The beast is all razor teeth and lurid green eyes and rippling muscle. Its claws are broadswords and its hide is horned and armored, and it’s making a shrieking, metallic noise—like two chainsaws trying to have sex.

“No, I…” Little Miss Stowaway meets my stare. “I saw Cat.” “Well, well!” Finian grins. “I didn’t know your creshcake was syruped on that side, Zero.” “Shut up, Finian,” I growl.

“Hey, no judge here, kiddo….”

“Maker’s bits, Scarlett…Not that you don’t have an appreciative audience back here at base, but if you’re going to give us a view like that, maybe a little warning? Dariel just dropped a mug of hot caff all over me, I think he’s short-circuited something in my suit.” “Just doing my bit for morale,” Scarlett purrs, smug as can be. “I mean, normally I wouldn’t complain,” Fin adds. “I’ll give you something to complain about,” Cat mutters.

“Hey, Stowaway,” drawls Fin over the team channel as we move up to second in line for the door aliens. “I’m just reading up on the significance of red in Chinese culture, and—” “Wait a minute, you can read?” I ask. “Oh, now you’re throwing sass to cover up your feelings for me, too? Is every female on this team planning to fall in love with me?” “Can it,” Ty mutters. “We’re almost in.”

“Okay, corridor ahead will be clear in twelve seconds,” I say. “That uniform suits you, by the way, Kal. You look good.” Pixieboy adjusts the ridiculous little hat on his head. “I look like a fool. It is too tight. How am I supposed to fight in this?” “I dunno. Sexily?” “You are not much of a warrior, are you, Finian?”

“One meter,” Ty and Auri chorus together. “They can be taught!” Zila speaks up on comms. “Finian, is this appropriate positioning?” I flick my gaze across to my other screen. Crap, they’re at the grav-generators already. I gotta keep juggling, gotta keep all my balls in the air. Heh, balls in the air.

“Kal, did you brush your teeth this morning?” Tyler asks over comms. “Thankfully, I do not think it will come to that,” Kal replies. Tyler laughs in answer and I hear Auri ask him what’s so funny. I make a mental note to ask him myself. Later. For now, I’m busy.

In the distance, I hear a sound. It’s faint, tinny—about the quality you’d expect coming from a uniglass’s speakers. It sounds like two chainsaws trying to have sex.

“Kal?” I shout. “Zila, report!” More shouting, wet thuds, another scream. I hear Kal swearing in Syldrathi, and though his tone is ice-cold, I realize he’s far more creative at cursing than I thought. “Tiir’na si maat tellanai!” (Father of many ugly and stupid children!) “Kii’ne dō all’iavesh ishi!” (Stain on the undergarments of the universe!) “Aam’na delnii!” (Friend of livestock!)

The room dissolves into chaos: a couple of the Chellerians guffawing at the stupid hoo-maaans, the two GIA agents striding in to break us up, Auri crouching low and covering her ears as Bianchi raises his disruptor and fires into the ceiling.

But he perks up when he catches sight of us. Shamrock is sitting in his lap. Cat scowls at him as she slips into the pilot’s seat. “That’s my dragon,” she says. “I was just holding him for you,” Finian says, tossing the toy across. “What for?” she asks, snatching Shamrock from the air. “Figured we could use the luck.” Cat grins, kisses the dragon on his head, and starts punching commands into her console. “Shut up, Finian.”

I look around the bridge at my crew. Squad 312. This pack of losers and discipline cases and sociopaths, these misfits nobody in the whole of Aurora Academy wanted to get paired with. And I realize the magnitude of what we just pulled off.

But I must master it. There is no love in violence. There is. No love. In violence.

It is a primal sort of fear. The fear of the talaeni as the shadow of the drakkan’s wings falls over its back. The fear of prey.

“Heart rate is normal,” Zila reports, and I sigh with relief. “Respiration normal. Everything is normal.” “Um.” Scarlett raises her hand slowly. “I beg to differ.” “Seconded,” Fin replies, his eyes wide.

“You’re an asshole, Finian,” Scarlett sighs. “Yeah,” he replies. “But I’m your asshole.” He makes a face. “Wait, no, that didn’t come out right. Ew. Sorry. Terran as a second language and all…”

“You are not much of a warrior, are you, Finian?” “Well, you’re not much of a…” The Betraskan blinks those big black eyes as he comes up short. “Wait, wait, honestly, I had something really good for this yesterday….”

“You GIA shraakz sold me out, and nobody stabs Casseldon Bianchi in the back and lives to talk about it.” “Looks like someone wants his Trigger back,” Scarlett breathes. “Um.” Finian glances at Aurora. “Someone want to tell him we broke it?”

“You always could press my buttons,” I tell her, and I sound pretty damn close to myself. But she’s a brilliant Face, as good at her job as her brother is as an Alpha. Of course she was the one who noticed something was off with me. “Need a hand getting into your biohazard gear?” she asks. “What, now you’re trying to get me to put even more clothes on? I’m going backward here.”

“Cat,” Tyler says, flashing a pair of dimples that could explode ovaries at twenty paces. “I keep on telling you. You gotta have faith.”

“So,” I say carefully, “just let me understand this. You dirtchildren took these animals nearly as smart as you and shoved them in rockets and hurled them into space to see if it would melt their insides?” “It wasn’t us personally,” Cat points out, defensive, and there’s a fair amount of foot shuffling going on among Team Terran. “Wow,” I say, looking about the group. “Did we Betraskans know about all this choomp murder when we allied with you?” “Enough, Finian. Even if there were chimps here, that was two centuries ago, and…”

“Very funny, Zero. Anyway, are you sure you’re not making them up? They sound ridiculous. I mean, hairy dirtchildren who fly spaceships and have almost identical DNA to you lot?” I scoff. “I don’t think they exist.” And that’s when a snarling, furry pitch-black humanoid thing with jagged yellow teeth that would put an ultrasaur to shame comes screaming out of the undergrowth and straight for my face.

Terror surges through me as it brings both hands down against his faceplate once, twice, sending his head bouncing back against the earth. Kal already has his rifle trained on it, but as if it knows, the thing grabs at Fin’s shoulders and rolls the pair of them, throwing him around like a rag doll and using him as a shield. “Get this choomp off me!” Fin wails.

“Mothercustard,” I mutter. “I don’t know what that is,” Finian says. “It sounds awful.

Very gently, very carefully, I curl the hand on his chest into the fabric of his biosuit, tugging him ever so slowly toward me. My cheeks are streaked with dried tears, and I can see every shade of violet in his eyes, the line of blood across his cheek where a shard of the exploding Trigger cut it. And as our helmets touch, we’re so close I can count his eyelashes. And he holds still for me. “I don’t know what comes next,”

“I’m not a Syldrathi,” I murmur. “I can’t just fall in deep like you. But if you stopped…” “Being a jackass?” he supplies, with a faint smile.

“…I read you, Finian,” he replies, blinking as if he’s coming out from under a spell. “Okay, don’t all ask for my autograph at once, but I think I’ve worked out our answer.

It leaps at me, opening its mouth to scream. And as it does so, its head just keeps…opening. Lips peeling away from its face. Face peeling away from its skull. Skull peeling away from its torso until the entire top half of its body has opened up like some awful flower, ready to swallow me whole. I’m pinned in place by the horror of it, five meters away now, and I can’t help but screa— BAMF!

“When we leave this place”—and Kal leans on that word, when—“we will seek out word of your sister. Your mother. What became of them. Perhaps something of your blood remains. But you have no family here, be’shmai. Because that is not your father.”

But I don’t feel cold or frightened now. I feel warm. I feel welcome. Annihilate. Assimilate. And I’m lying there on the floor of the reactor in some forgotten colony in some nowhere sector and I’m losing everything I was and ever will be and somehow it’s okay because I know I know I KNOW it loves me.

And somehow it’s all right. “Goodbye, Tyler.” Because I know he

loves me