I try a different way, leaning into Cat’s mind. Maybe I can start there and sweep out, burn her thoughts clear. As I look inside her, I’m hit with a welter of emotion. Her pain, her fear, her anger snakes through me, and I flinch for an instant, fight the urge to withdraw. And then I lean in harder, because nobody should be alone with feelings like these.
I’m here, I’m here.
I squeeze her hand, pushing past the sharp-edged outer defenses. And inside them, I find the real Cat, a whirl of life and love and energy, the reds and orange and golds of her mental signature spiraling into elaborate patterns that remind me of eddies of wind, that remind me of flight.
I find her love for Scarlett, her grief for her mother, her fierce joy in taking to the air. I find her love for Tyler, deep and strong, laced with frustration.
And in response, without my meaning to—but perfectly naturally, just as it should—my mind dances with hers.
We’re not in the reactor anymore. Nobody is around us.
We’re somewhere else, just the two of us, and nothing else matters.
My mind is midnight blue and a dust of silver, starlight, and nebulas to her fiery winds. To touch her I have to be open, my own loves and memories as free as hers. She sees my love for my sister, Callie, she catches the scent of the warm rock and crisp leaves at the top of my favorite hiking trail. My happy place. Through me, she tastes a quick bite of the chilies my father adds to his cooking. She’s with me through the pain of watching my mother after he left, and then instead of watching, she’s moving. Grabbing at that memory and shoving it away.
For a moment I’m bewildered. But without words, with a flurry of images, she’s conveying her purpose—she doesn’t want to know these things, because she doesn’t want to share them.
When it takes her.
We both focus on the door between us—she pulls, I push—and together we jam it closed, and sweat’s running down my back when my eyes snap open, my breath coming quickly.
Her gaze is waiting for me.
“You sh-shouldn’t … b-be here,” she whispers.
Voices ring out behind me. “Try now,” Fin’s yelling from upstairs.
“It is working,” Kal calls, tilting his head back to yell at the ceiling.
“I know,” I whisper to Cat. “Everything about this place is wrong. But the star map showed us this place, the Trigger …”
“Oh, Auri … d-don’t you s-see? The T-Trigger … is—”
Her eyes snap wide, and her gasp’s the only warning I have before her mind assaults mine—but now the reds are the crimson of blood, the yellows too bright, too gaudy. This is Cat’s mind, but Cat’s not at the wheel.
I throw up my defenses, try to force her back, mental walls as strong as I can make them. Imagining them made of stone, surrounding myself in a tiny fortress, my mind in the middle. But I can see my enemy all around me now, I can sense something of the consciousness trying to reach into my mind through hers.
A being.
A single, colossal, impossible being.
It comes from everywhere, a network spread across the planet—it’s every plant, every vine, every flower, every spore floating through the air. I can see the history of it, its purpose and potential. And as if time is nothing, I can see its future.
I’m a speck as I try to understand the timescale on which this journey has been measured. I’m reminded of the ceiling of Casseldon Bianchi’s ballroom, of the slow dance of galaxies as they made their way around it, moving through and around one another on a cosmic scale.
This … thing has been readying itself, first laying dormant, then slowly waking, until now it’s riding the crest of a wave that stretches back a million years. This planet, all the planets on that star map, will grow and swell, ripening until they burst like seedpods, throwing their spores, the infection into those natural, unclosable FoldGates. Into the Fold itself, and from there …
From there, everywhere.
This is the instant before a tsunami breaks.
This is the Ra’haam.
“You can stop it.” Cat’s gasp yanks me from my paralysis, and the attack on my fortress falls away, the reds and golds fading into her colors, then withdrawing. Blood is trickling from her nose, her chest rising and falling now, blue eyes fixed on my face. “They stopped it before. And you can