Because I understand how old this story is now. I understand the arrogance of thinking that in the 13.8 billion years the universe has been expanding, this place and this moment—now, in the Milky Way—is the first time life has been forced to fight this war.
I see the last time the Ra’haam woke.
When it last tried to swallow the galaxy.
Tried and failed.
It hid itself here afterward, I realize. Wounded. Almost dead. Because behind the flood, behind the noise of this impossible thing around me, deep inside myself in my tiny walls of stone, I can feel something else. The voice calling to me. The voice that’s been calling me this whole time.
Telling me who I am.
Who they were.
The ones who struggled. Who saw what the Ra’haam would become if left unchecked, and saw their individuality as something worth fighting for.
The Ancient Ones.
Eshvaren.
And though they’re gone now, dead for eons
they left behind
the weapon we’ll need
to beat it
again.
And the Trigger isn’t some ancient statue or some jewel hidden inside it. It’s not some star map made of gemstones stolen from some gangster’s lair.
The Trigger …
“Auri,” Cat gasps.
“The Trigger … is me.”
The leaves around us ripple, and I hear an engine roaring outside. The thrum of a slow descent, the crunch of landing gear touching earth. I know before he does that Tyler will speak.
“They’re here.”
Cat grits her teeth, and I know she’s trying to stop it, them, the thing that’s winding through her and making her a part of it, from knowing what she knows. The voice that comes from outside is smooth, amplified, genderless, and ageless.
“We are here for Aurora O’Malley.”
Princeps.
Fin’s voice drawls over our channel. “Someone want to tell His Highness it’s polite to say please?”
Scarlett leaves her brother by the window and hurries over to take my place, dropping to one knee. “Go,” she murmurs to me, and as I release Cat’s hand, the other girl takes it.
I make my way over to where Tyler’s watching by the window. The vines all around him have been burned away, but I can see one of the charred tendrils moving, questing along the window ledge, looking for a new purchase even as I crouch beside him. If I stay close to the wall, I can look down without giving the figures below a look at me in return.
A shuttlecraft has touched down on the blue-green scrub outside the reactor. It’s marked with the Bellerophon’s ident, and a landing ramp has extended from its belly. Princeps stands at the bottom in its pristine white suit, pollen falling all around it. At its shoulder is a second GIA agent in the usual charcoal gray and, ranged around the shuttle itself are dozens and dozens of other figures.
They’re not GIA agents. And there are so many of them.
There are a few chimpanzees in the throng, their fur coated in moss and tubers. But beneath the cloaks of silver vines, the flowers crawling through their hair and bursting from their eyes, I recognize the rest of them.
Humans.
Colonists.
“Ah, Aurora.” Despite the cover of the window’s edge, Princeps looks right at me. “There you are.”
I risk casting out a tendril of my midnight-blue, star-speckled mind into the green-silver-blue-gray morass of the plants and vines outside. I’m trying to find Princeps’s mind, to see more of it, but it’s like interference on the radio—there’s so much to sense, I can’t find my target in the middle of it.
It’s as expressionless as ever when it speaks again—I have no idea if it even sensed my effort. “We’ve been waiting for you so long, Aurora.”
“Wait a little longer,” I call back, making my voice firm. It doesn’t shake. “Try back in another two hundred years.”
“You were lost to our sight. We could not find you.”
“I was never yours to find!”
“You were hidden in the Fold, we see that now. The Eshvaren were cowards, to hide you there. Such was always their way. Their weakness. The same weakness we feel now in you. You should have let us simply burn you away in orbit. You were foolish to bring yourself to us.”
Behind me, Ty rests a hand on my shoulder, as if he’s afraid I’m going to show myself, to stand up in the window and argue. But I hold still and watch, because Princeps is lifting both its hands to its helmet, and with a flick of its thumbs, it releases the seal.
I’m frozen in place as slowly, so slowly, in a movement that takes