Nari Kim looks back to me, a smile crinkling her eyes.
“Punch that bleach-head in the arm for me, Jones. And tell your sister thanks. Good hunting, legionnaire. Burn bright against the night.”
Zila looks into the projection, reaching out toward me.
My fingers touch hers, back across an ocean of time and tears.
“Farewell, my friend,” she smiles.
And the recording ends.
“Dammit … ,” Adams growls.
I look up at him, my eye blurred with tears, my mind reeling with everything I’ve learned. The impossibility, the enormity—it’s almost too much to wrap my head around. But the look in Adams’s eyes is enough to drag me back to reality, away from conspiracies centuries in the making, suffered heartache and hard-won joy. I sniff hard, wipe my sodden cheeks.
“What is it?”
Adams is staring at the holoplayer, his face a grim mask. The images of Zila and Nari Kim have disappeared, replaced by a scrolling stream of passcodes. “I’ll have to review the new data we’ve just unlocked. But from the way they were talking … I think it’s just as we’ve feared.”
“Look, I don’t know what the hells is happening here, but—”
“It’s like Founder Madran said, Tyler.” Adams speaks Zila’s name with something close to reverence. The way a minister speaks about the Maker.
They think of her as the Third Founder, I realize.
“She only knew for certain what happened up to the Battle of Terra,” Adams continues. “The point where she was stripped from this timeline. For all her genius, Zila Madran couldn’t actually see the future. She only remembered what she’d already seen. So she couldn’t have known.”
“About the plot on Aurora Station?”
He nods. “But not just that. All our contingencies, all the planning we have in place from this point forward to ensure the defeat of the Ra’haam, revolved around the Trigger and the Weapon.”
He drags one metal hand across his stubbled scalp.
“And they’re gone,” I breathe. “Vanished at the Battle of Terra.”
“The Weapon, the Trigger, Aurora O’Malley.” Adams turns to the viewport on the wall, stars splayed across the dark beyond. “Everything we’ve done was to ensure their presence here and now to strike the killing blow against the enemy before it blooms. And after all of that, after hundreds of years, messages and protocols passed down in secret from Founder to Commander to Successor across the centuries …” He looks down at his empty hands. “We have nothing.”
I look at the projector on my lap, my mind racing. “Founder Kim mentioned secure facilities on Epsilon Deck, Section Zero.” I swallow hard, not daring to hope. “She talked about my sister. Maybe …”
Adams slaps his Legion comm badge, speaking quick.
“Adams to de Stoy.”
“I read you, Seph,” comes the reply.
“I have more intel. Meet me in Epsilon. I’m bringing Jones.”
There’s a small pause, a tiny intake of breath. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Battle Leader de Stoy lose her chill once in the six years I’ve known her, but when she answers, she sounds positively jubilant.
“Understood,” she says. “I’ll meet you there.”
Adams nods, drops connection.
“Do you still pray, Tyler?” he asks softly. “I know when it gets dark, it can be hard to keep the f—”
“Every day, sir,” I reply. “Every day.”
“Good,” he nods. “Do it now.”
• • • • •
I’d wondered why the name Epsilon Deck sounded strange. As Adams pushes me on a grav-chair through the halls of the med facilities and into an officers’ elevator, I realize why. Looking at the hundreds of levels, subfloors, and sections of the station outlined in glowing light on the elevator controls, I understand there is no Epsilon Deck on Aurora Station.
At least, not one that exists on the schematics.
Adams reaches inside his tunic for a passkey of bio-coded platinum. He presses his thumb to the sensor, slips the key into a slot in the elevator control. A panel slides aside, a sensor sweeps his face, his irises, his handprint. When the controls buzz green, he leans back and speaks.
“Adams. One-one-seven-four-alpha-kilo-two-one-sevenbeta-indigo.”
Another beep. I feel us pivot, as if the elevator were shifting on its axis.
“Epsilon, Section Zero,” Adams commands. “Passcode: Vigilance.”
My stomach feels full of broken glass, and the right side of my face is aching—maybe I should’ve asked for another pain-blocker before we left. But though I can barely feel it, I know my heart is hammering at the thought I might see my sister again. I had no idea what happened to her after Saedii and I were captured by the GIA. The fear she might be dead was a constant weight, one I couldn’t bring myself to look at for long. The knowledge she was thrown back in time with Zila and Fin is almost incomprehensible.
But she could be alive.
Oh Maker, please let her be alive.
The elevator doors hiss apart, and I see a long, brightly lit corridor leading to a heavy door that looks strong enough to withstand atmospheric bombardment. Battle Leader de Stoy is down here in full Legion kit, ash-pale skin and snow-white hair bleached even whiter by the harsh light. She watches as Adams pushes me forward in my grav-chair, nods once as we approach, big black eyes regarding me somberly.
“Seems like you’ve been in the wars, Legionnaire Jones.”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle, ma’am.”
She smiles, thin and bloodless. Battle Leader de Stoy never smiles.
“A fine job, soldier. A fine job indeed.”
Adams has swiped his bio-key into a pad on the left of the door and nods now to de Stoy. “Ready?”
The battle leader swipes her own key and leans forward, hands splayed on the sensor glass. Scanners again roam Adams’s and de Stoy’s faces, retinas, and palms, a needle takes tissue and blood samples, and, finally, they speak a series of passkeys from Zila and Nari’s recording. The tech is old, but it’s as heavy as it could be, given that this station was built two centuries ago.
Whatever’s behind here, Zila wanted it well protected.
The door clunks, an alarm briefly flares, the lighting turns a cold deep blue. The hatchway lumbers aside, the gloom in the room beyond flickers dark to light as the overheads hum to life. And as Adams pushes me inside, I catch my breath, staring in awe at the structure before me.
Heavy conduits snake outward from banks of ancient computers, connected to a cylindrical tank of transparent plasteel in the room’s heart. And inside it, pulsing with light like a heartbeat, is …
“A probe,” I breathe. “An Eshvaren probe.”
Light begins to pulse through the chamber, coalescing within the teardrop crystal. I see it’s cracked, the point of the tear shattered and sheared away, the glow refracting from a million spiderweb scrawls in the stone.
“Maker’s breath,” Adams whispers.
An image flickers to life above the computer terminals, and my heart soars to see Zila again. She’s younger than she was a moment ago, maybe mid-forties, her back straight, her eyes keen.