because of you, you son of a bitch! How is that fair? What if they took him back to Octavia, huh? Have you even thought about that? What if they did to him what they did to C … to Ca …”
I murmur as her voice fails.
“If I could trade places with him, I would, Scarlett. I am so sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry,” she snaps, raising her hand. “And fuck you, Kal.”
She swings. Full of rage. Clumsy. The Enemy Within me flares, the violence I was born to, the violence in my blood rushing in my veins like thunder. I move, instinct and muscle memory, seizing Scarlett’s wrist so hard she cries out in pain.
“Do not touch me,” I warn her.
“Hey!” Finian shouts, stepping forward. “Get off her!”
“Finian—” Zila begins.
“Let her go!” he shouts.
Our Gearhead plants both hands on my chest and shoves, his exosuit whirring. My whole body bristles, my every instinct aflame with threat.
Break him, Kaliis.
BREAK HIM.
I step aside, smooth as water. Scarlett twists in my grip and I let her go, momentum sending her crashing into Finian and both of them to the deck. Fin cries out, leg twisted, and as I raise my hands, I feel another shove to my chest—iron-hard, midnight-blue power crackling in the air around me.
I look up and see Aurora’s hand raised. Aimed at me. Her eye burns like a dying sun, hair whipping around her brow in the breeze of a long-lost world.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I would never …”
And I see it. What everyone who has learned the truth about me has always seen. I was born of a monster, a murderer of billions. And that is what they see when they look at me now. That shadow I will never step out from, no matter how hard I try.
Aurora looks at me, tears glittering like diamonds on her skin. I know what she will say before she says it.
“You need to go, Kal.”
“Aurora, no,” I plead. “No.”
She nods. “Go.”
I am torn. Desperate. Searching for anything that might sway her.
“You do not know him, be’shmai,” I say, glancing at the screen where the man who made me spoke. “You cannot begin to imagine what he is like. He was a monster even before Syldra’s fall. If he has somehow become as you are, imbued with the power of the Ancients …”
“Are you going to tell me I’ll have no chance when I face him?”
My eyes grow hard, my voice like steel. “You do not know him, Aurora.”
“I know one thing, Kal,” she says softly, wiping the tears from her cheek with the back of one hand. “I know I’m ready now. Truly ready, like the Eshvaren said. I am the Trigger. The Trigger is me. And when I strike at the Great Enemy, there’ll be nothing to hold me back anymore. No hurt. No rage. No fear.”
She shakes her head.
“No love.”
I hear the Eshvaren’s words in my head then. That fateful warning it spoke on our last day in the Echo.
Remember what is at stake here. This is more than you. More than us.
Burn.
Burn it all away.
Aurora lowers her hand and breaks my heart.
“Goodbye, Kal.”
30
FINIAN
About four hundred light-years from Trask, there’s a star called Meridia. The star’s core is a diamond the size of Trask’s moon, estimated to be about ten decillion carats. My people built a spaceport there—a massive transit hub that’s one of the busiest in the galaxy. You can get a ride anywhere in the ’Way out of Meridia. Says a lot about Betraskans that we built a bus station around the galaxy’s biggest diamond.
Anyway, that’s where we dump Kal.
We’re still wanted terrorists and all, so we don’t waste time on farewells. Zila brings the Zero into one of the tertiary docks, only stopping long enough to let Kal out. Nobody’s there to say goodbye. I watch him through the bay cams, stepping out onto the station deck with a rucksack on his back. He’s wearing civi clothes—long dark coat, those ridiculous PVC pants Scarlett bought him in Emerald City, pockets stuffed with his share of the credits Adams and de Stoy left for us in the vault.
I think he left his Legion uniform in his room.
Bristling with anger, he squares his shoulders and stalks away.
Nobody speaks for a while after we put Meridia behind us, tearing out of the system and back into the Fold. For my part, I just don’t know what to say. I’m scrounging for something—I know I’m meant to be the one who somehow breaks