It wants me… .
I trained as a cartographer for the Octavia mission for years. And walking here in the Echo every day with Kal, I couldn’t help learning the shape of this place. I draw that memory close, remembering what this place was.
The way it can be again.
But it’s so big, to hold it all inside my head… .
Hard as I try, I can’t… .
“I can’t,” I hiss, trembling hand outstretched.
You must.
I reach out both hands, face twisting as I try to hold it all.
“We’re running out of time, help me!”
But Esh only shakes its head.
“I can’t do this alone!”
Kal
We are failing.
The Ra’haam has pushed us back, Tyler’s crew falling one by one as we give ground. The crystalline floors are awash with blood, the stink of death hangs in the air, and the enemy simply keeps coming.
“Lae, fall back!” Tyler roars, blasting from behind cover.
She dances among those awful figures, null blade aglow, cutting down a flower-eyed monstrosity lunging for Dacca’s back.
“Back where?” she shouts.
She speaks truth—we can retreat no farther. Behind us is the entrance to the throne room. If the enemy reaches my father and Aurora, all hope will be—
A shot hits my legs, thick and viscous. It is like … glue, pinning my leg to the floor. Another strikes my belly, and I fall, covered in more of this sticky ooze. I realize I cannot move, stuck like an insect in amber, and horror unfurls as I understand the Ra’haam does not wish to kill us—it wishes to subdue us, drag us into its awful singularity.
“Kal,” Tyler roars, “look out!”
I slice at the hands grasping at me, scream a denial in my mind, reaching for Aurora, refusing to let it end like this. And I flinch as a burning arc of energy, deep red like dried blood, scythes through the oncoming Ra’haam.
Another blast hits them, a sphere of raw psychic power smearing their bodies upon the walls, leaving only broken corpses in its wake.
Tyler blinks in astonishment. Lae only snarls. But I realize who has saved us.
“Father …”
He stands above me with hands outstretched, clad in black steel. His eyes are bruised, lips and chin smudged with violet where he has wiped away the blood. I can see the cracks in his face run deeper, his fingers trembling—just the slightest signs of strain from his ordeal.
But his eye burns like a star. And much as I hate him, I feel the Enemy Within surge as he shatters my bonds with a wave of his hand.
“No child of Caersan dies on their knees, Kaliis. Fight.”
Aurora
I can’t do this alone.
As the battle rages on outside, I’m giving everything I have—as much as those outside are giving—to mend the tears in the Echo around me. But there’s so much of it. It’s too big.
I try to drag the images into focus, remember the way this place once was. Walking through rolling fields of flowers with Kal beside me, his hand in mine, and at the thought of him, a part of me reaches for him, across the ocean between us, and it’s then I realize.
It’s then I see.
I can’t do this alone.
But I’m not alone.
He’s with me. Always. And not just Kal, but Tyler, too. I can feel him out there, his crew beside him, all those people—survivors I never even got the chance to meet, children and warriors, fierce and frightened, standing with the last of their loved ones or alone, the last of their kind.
Every one of them is fighting and dying, the future of the galaxy in the balance, giving everything for the chance of a different yesterday.
“I’m not alone,” I whisper.
—I’m with a pilot named Simann, trying desperately to shake the Weeds on my tail, and I knew this moment was coming, but the fear is like ice in my gut, and I reach out to the holo of my husband on the dash and I know everything will be all right because I’ll see him again soon, and
—I’m in the Echo, and the clear water of the river has turned to blood, but I ignore what I see, and with a dip of my finger, I sketch it in the air from memory, from my thousand training sessions beside it, and
—I’m standing with Dacca as she fights against the swarm, and I’m thinking of my siblings, all of us sitting in the light of the hearthstone as our father tells us stories about the old heroes, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever grow up to be one and now realizing I am, I am, and
—I’m in the Echo, opening myself to the flood outside and throwing back my head as a million pieces of broken glass rise up from the ground and coalesce into a field of beautiful flowers, and
—I’m with Elin, the surly Betraskan from Tyler’s crew, and I’m fighting back to back with Toshh and I think about how stupid I was not to just ask her before now, to tell her how I feel, and our shoulders bump as we back toward each other and she catches my eye and smiles and suddenly I realize that she knows, she’s always known, and
—I’m building mountains in my mind, the grove where Kal and I slept, and every one of my warriors is helping me in some way, lending me some piece of themselves, some final touch or thought or memory that tells me I’m not alone, that all of us are together, their presence flowing through me like water. The Eshvaren tried to teach me to burn them all away, but love was always what I needed to fight for, but
—as I reach out toward them, the ones I know and need most and love best
—I can feel something wrong, I can feel
—Something is wrong… .
Kal
“Fall back!” Tyler roars.
One by one, Tyler’s people have been taken by the flood—the people on Sempiternity, those ships that saluted us farewell, and now Toshh and Elin and Dacca and the rest of the Vindicator’s crew.
A tiny piece of his heart has gone with each of them. But still, he fights. For what he has left.
Tyler, Lae, my father, and me.
Aurora, beyond the doors to the throne room.
And the one moment in our past that can change all of this.
The enemy are too many. My father cuts them down with wave after wave of power, and as I stand beside him, the part of me raised in his shadow is singing in adulation.
But the rest of me is mute with horror, that this will be not just our fate but the galaxy’s. More are coming, always more, not just humanoid now but other shapes—multi-armed behemoths from Manaria IV, stone-fisted hulks from the Tartallus Drift, moss-ridden and twisted and One.
I can see a glow pulsing through the crystal around us, warm and soothing. The cracks seem to be closing, and my heart surges as I think Aurora may be succeeding, but something is holding it back, stifling it, I …
I look to the tunnel behind us, the pulses of light from the throne room.
“Fall back!” Tyler shouts again.
My father grits his teeth, snarling, “Hold your ground, Terran!”
“We can bottleneck them!” Lae screams. “Buy a few more minutes!”
They appear out of the smoke, soaring through the Neridaa’s halls on wings encrusted in dull blue green. They were almost extinguished when my father destroyed Syldra. But still they come, three of them landing like thunder among the Ra’haam’s rotten legion. The impact sends Lae to her knees, Tyler and me stumbling as the cavern around us echoes with roars.