version as well, and I’m having trouble telling them apart.
That’s more a third- or fourth-date disclosure, right?
“I feel a little weak,” I say, sitting on the bed beside him. “Tired. I guess I was on the Hadfield so long, nobody really knows how I’m meant to be doing. I don’t know if it’s still dangerous, but back when we launched, we couldn’t spend a long time in the Fold. You’d start hallucinating, get paranoid …”
I trail off, because of course hallucinating is exactly what I’ve been doing.
Is paranoia next?
“It’s still dangerous.” Tyler nods. “Though it turns out Fold travel affects young minds far less. Our technology is a little different from your day, too. Back when the Hadfield launched, humans could only travel through naturally occurring gates. Weak spots in the Fold. Now, we can build our own entry and exit points, anywhere we like. There’s a big one right outside the station we’re on, matter of fact.”
“I saw …” I shake my head, remembering the sight of the station when I stormed out of my room. “So, if humans can go anywhere, where are we now?”
“That’s kinda funny, actually,” he says, nibbling his lip again.
“… What do you mean?”
“You heard of a star system called Aurora?”
I blink. “Are you messing with me?”
“We’re orbiting Gamma Aurorae, the third star in the cluster,” he says, spreading his arms to take in the station around us. “Aurora O’Malley, welcome to Aurora Academy, training facility for the Aurora Legion.”
“… I have a legion now?”
He shrugs and gives me one of those smiles, and I swear, I don’t know whether to be charmed, amazed, or completely freaked out right now.
“I went to sixteen different schools,” I say. “There was always another girl in my class called Aurora. Now I have to share my name with a star?”
“Space academy, too.”
I shake my head, find my thoughts drifting back to …
“My mom would have said it was fate.”
“The Maker had an eye on you,” Ty agrees.
I bite my lip. I have to keep looking for answers instead of more questions.
“So humans are on more than two planets now. And … we discovered aliens. I met one, last night. I think she said she’s in charge?”
“Yeah, that’s Battle Leader de Stoy,” he says. “She’s Betraskan. Their home world is Trask in the Belinari system. They live mostly underground, and they don’t process vitamin D like us, hence the lack of melanin and the contact lenses. Biologically, we’re pretty similar, though. They were the first species humanity ever made contact with. We were at war a couple of hundred years back, but they’ve been our strongest ally for generations.”
I think of the boy who appeared in my vision. The hot, angry-looking one with the pointed ears, the long, silver hair.
“Are there other, uh, species on the station? Maybe some with …” I can barely say it out loud, one finger lifting to touch the curve of my own ear. I’m going to sound like an idiot if I completely imagined him.
“Syldrathi.” He nods, his smile gone completely. “We were at war with them for a couple of decades, too. Terra only struck a peace accord two years ago.”
His hand lifts, fingers curling around the chain I can see around his neck. He tugs it free of his neckline—I don’t even think he’s doing it consciously—and I catch a glimpse of a ring before his fist swallows it up, squeezing tight.
He finds his smile again, though it’s weak.
“But that’s a history lesson you don’t need right now. Point is, yeah, we’ve discovered a lot of other species. Some we get along with, some we don’t.”
“So what do you do here?”
I mean, I’m assuming the dimples aren’t a full-time gig.
“I’m a Legionnaire,” he says. “There was a thing back in your day called the United Nations, right?”
I nod. “That’s you?”
“More or less,” he says. “We’re the Aurora Legion. We’re a coalition between Terrans—humans, you’d say—and Betraskans. Some Syldrathi joined us two years ago when our war ended. We’re an independent peacekeeper legion. We mediate border conflicts, police neutral zones of space. I’d say we’re humanitarian.” His mouth quirks to a proper smile. “Except a lot of us aren’t human.”
“And something happened yesterday, with the cadets? I heard the nurses talking about squads?”
And just like that, I’ve killed his beautiful smile stone dead.
Farewell, dimples. I miss you already.
“In our final year, we form squads,” he says. “Six Legionnaires, encompassing the six specialty streams here at the academy. Yesterday was this big,