Only given.
It remembers that love offers a choice.
That love is a choice, one we make over and over again.
We want that choice, I tell it as the last parts of me merge with ecstatic joy. We are that choice.
And slowly, in a moment that takes an eternity, the lights twinkle back in answer. Each and every one of them, now a little closer to the person they were before they merged, before they became us. From one small light, then two, then millions, the answer comes back to me.
We … understand.
And because it is—no, they are—no, we are—so many, and have lived millions of lives, we know what we have to do.
Abruptly I’m back in my body, aboard the Neridaa. I’m lying on the floor, staring up at the crystal ceiling. But I’m also still with the Ra’haam, still a part of an extraordinary, unstoppable us that I will never leave, and it’s glorious.
This wasn’t just a price worth paying. This is the most beautiful experience of my life.
Kal is sitting by my side, and his head snaps up, eyes wet, cheeks streaked with tears.
“You have returned,” he gasps, lifting my fingers to his lips, hope dawning slowly.
“For a little,” I whisper, still smiling.
I can feel the Ra’haam fleet, I can sense the rest of me out there in the black, and I want to burst like a dandelion and let every part of me blow away, sinking into the us that awaits. Into the millions of lives and loves that are a part of me now. Together, forever.
“What does that mean?” Kal asks softly. “For a little?”
“It means we have to go, soon.” My own eyes are wet too, but my tears aren’t all sad. I love him so much. I ache at the thought of leaving him. But I will never be alone.
“Where will we go?” he asks.
“Not us,” I say, letting my mind twine with his one last time, midnight blue and silver, violet and gold. “Not you and me.”
And he sees.
The Ra’haam will go, and I am the Ra’haam, so I will go too.
“Please, do not leave me,” he whispers, voice cracking, grip on my fingers tightening.
“You could come with us,” I murmur.
He helps me silently to my feet, and together we watch as a single ship breaks away from the Ra’haam, and a single shuttle from the Legion fleet, each of them arcing its way through the others suspended mid-battle, homing in on the city-sized Weapon that was never going to be enough.
Together Kal and I walk down toward the docking bay, past the place where in the future our friends and family died defending us, our hands joined.
I’m going to miss him so very much.
They’re all waiting for us when we get there.
Fin and Scarlett, Tyler and Saedii, each of them wary, hopeful, ranging from smiling to scowling. The ones who carried me here. And next to them stands my father, who smiles slowly and holds out his arms.
I break into a run, and this feeling I thought would never be mine again is, and can be forever now, and as I rest my head on his shoulder and he holds me tight, I am so deeply contented that I want to live in this moment always.
And I can, I can.
But the others don’t need to, because love offers choice.
I … I remember I didn’t want to leave Kal.
But this was my choice, to join the Ra’haam, so I could help us understand why this battle had to end. And I cannot regret it.
It’s Scarlett who eventually breaks the silence.
“Aurora? What’s going on?”
“When you broke the threads, we thought you were …” Fin trails off, swallowing hard.
“She plans to go with them,” Kal says tightly, and I can feel the rainbow threads reaching for me once more as Tyler, Scarlett, and Finian each cry out in protest.
“It’s all right,” I promise. “It’s all right. You were together before I came, and you will be together after I’m gone. You’ll carry on, and you’ll all be safe. I need you to take Kal with you.”
“No.” His one word of reply is quiet, but hard as diamond.
“Kal, this is what I have to do,” I say, and all the Ra’haam shares my ache, because we love him so, so much, but I am a part of the Ra’haam now, and even if I wished it, there’s no way to untangle my mind from the whole.
“Is it what you have to do?” His voice rises in frustration. “Or what you want to do?”
His mind seizes on mine, tangling us together as tight as he knows how, and with the echo of those words, we’re back in the infirmary aboard Sempiternity, and I know what he’ll say next.
“To die in the fire of war is easy. To live in the light of peace, much harder.”
“I’m not sacrificing myself for no reason,” I say, desperate to make him see, giving up on fighting back my tears. “This isn’t just me deciding to die. I won’t die, I’ll live forever with them—this was the price, to help the Ra’haam see why we have to stop. I had to become a part of us, so we’d understand.”
“But it sees now!” His voice is rising to a shout. “It sees, and still you stay with it! Please, Aurora, stay with us. With me. Let me be enough for you.”
“It’s time, Jie-Lin,” my father says quietly.
And in the end, it’s very simple.
A father and daughter stand together in the docking bay of a crystal ship. They are joined not just by the bonds of family, but by ties that make them one and the same, two bodies of the same creature. And beyond them, in the black, are thousands more bodies of that same one being, and millions more minds.
Slowly at first, then more quickly, and then in a rushing torrent, they pour into her father’s body, and he becomes a vessel for all that the Ra’haam ever has been, and is, and ever will be.
The girl’s beloved catches her body as it falls, no longer needed, her mind a part of the whole now. He lifts it in his arms as he and his sister and his squad run back to the Longbow, the crystal city trembling around them.
An Aurora Legion squad waits for them, ushering them aboard as they stumble through the airlock, and the Longbow pulls back from the Neridaa as it shimmers and shakes, sections of crystal breaking away.
And all the Ra’haam gathers in one body as Aurora, the girl out of time, the Trigger, shares with the rest of them what she knows, what she can do, and together they see exactly how it must happen.
And aboard the Longbow, the Syldrathi boy cries out in alarm.
“She has stopped breathing!”
“Maker’s breath, where’s Zila when you need her?”
“Medic!”
“Get the stims!”
“It is not her body, you fools, can you not feel her mind is elsewhere?”
And it is those words from his scornful sister that have him lift his head, and look back toward the Weapon, no longer a weapon at all.
And as it shimmers once more and begins to fade
he
makes
a
leap
and his mind finds hers, and HOLDS TIGHT.
And with a cry, one by one, his squad and his cursing sister throw their minds after his, and they form a chain that keeps one small part of the girl bound in this time and this place… .
And all of them are with her as the crystal ship vanishes, and they watch as it appears so very, very far away, in the dark between galaxies, where there is no other life, where nobody’s home and heart will be taken.