Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (88 page)

Another rush of dizziness. How long had she been unaware? It might have been seconds or days. She had no sense of the passage of time.

Alex glanced over from the counter to where Malcolm stood, one shoulder propped on the wall, perfectly groomed and perfectly handsome in his BDUs. “Malcolm, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

The loft, not so long ago. She yearned to take solace in the familiar setting, but unfortunately this scene was headed nowhere good. She’d figured out the rules of this voyage through memory hell now and resigned herself to watching helplessly.

A harsh sigh punctuated his reaction. He was frustrated with her—she could tell by the way his eyes creased at the edges and his mouth shrunk into a thin line. “Alex, it’s my only sister’s wedding and I’m giving her away, for Christ’s sake. You’re telling me you can’t put off your damn expedition for five lousy days, scrounge up a dress and be at my side?”

“Your sister isn’t going to care if I’m there or not.”

“I’ll care if you’re there. This is important—to me. Dammit! You want me to go stag to my sister’s wedding? You want me to take someone else? What?”

She frowned. “No, of course not.”

The thought of him taking someone else had triggered a pang of jealousy and an impulsive possessiveness. She remembered. It hadn’t been a strong enough compulsion to persuade her to change her mind, however.

She crossed the room to Malcolm and took his hands in hers while brandishing an apologetic expression. “It’s just…this is an extremely lucrative contract, and it has a time limit. If I don’t get out there soon I’ll miss out on the find and the proceeds. I really am sorry. I’m sure it will be a beautiful ceremony, and you will do a fabulous job of escorting your sister down the aisle. Give everyone my regrets?”

She kissed him on the corner of his mouth before backing away and heading upstairs. “I’m going to run through the shower, then we can go out if you want.”

Her perception remained as her body departed; it was as though she was being forced to witness the consequences which flowed inextricably from her actions. And she supposed she was.

Malcolm gritted his teeth as his posture faltered and his shoulders slumped in an act of defeat. “I don’t want to go out. I don’t….”

His eyes closed and his voice dropped low, no longer speaking to her. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

No justification existed to condone her actions this time. She had been a narcissistic bitch, no doubt about it. But it had worked out for the best for both of them in the end….

“Young lady, you will
not
leave this house. You march yourself back upstairs to your room this instant or you won’t be leaving again this year.”

Woah, she was young once more. Fourteen, she thought. Maybe fifteen. Long, scrawny legs and a hint of nascent curves.

Alex whipped around and got in her mother’s face. Already as tall as her, she met her mother’s glare with a sneer. “How are you going to stop me? Are you going to lock me up like a criminal? Maybe hit me? It’s what soldiers do, isn’t it?”

Miriam’s voice was ice, her features etched in granite. “You. Will. Go. Upstairs.
Now.
”

She didn’t want to see this. She tried squeezing her ‘eyes’ shut…it came as no surprise when it didn’t work. No way was she getting off that easy.

“I
won’t
.” Alex spun to the door to storm out, only to find it code-locked. In frustration and a touch of panic she pounded her fists on it, then resorted to trying to pry it open using her fingers.

Failing to make a centimeter of progress, she charged past her mother in search of another door through which to flee. But there was solely the patio door and it too was locked tight.

“I hate you! I wish you had been the one to die!”

This, she
had
meant.

Her mother’s throat bobbed shakily, but her glare didn’t waver. “I know you do. But we don’t always get what we want in life—a lesson you need to learn ASAP. Tonight is as good a night as any to start.”

“Ugh!” Her fourteen-year-old self vaulted up the stairs and flung herself violently into her room.

As before, her mind didn’t follow her body upstairs. Instead it remained in the foyer like a disembodied spirit haunting the past.

Her mother watched adolescent Alex disappear, then sank against the wall. A hand came to her mouth as a solitary tear escaped to trail down her cheek.

A hushed murmur fell from trembling lips. “David, help me, please….”

Guilt ripped into her like a rusty, serrated knife. It took up residence in her soul, settling in and getting comfortable so it could saw away jagged pieces of flesh and leave her to bleed.

She’d cried that night as well, in impotent rage and anguish still brutal more than a year after her father’s death…it may have been the last time she shed unabashed, free-flowing tears in fact. It now seemed a pitiful, self-serving excuse for her behavior.

But if her mother had been hurting, too, why had she acted so hard, so very
cold
? A kind word, a simple smile bestowed upon her daughter…would they have mattered? Would they have altered the course of history? Would she have accepted them, or insolently hurled them back for spite?

She had no answer. Instead she waited in silence for the darkness to return.

“Stupid, bloated, overwrought bureaucracy has lost the capacity for even rudimentary independent thought. Ugh!” With a visceral groan Alex threw herself onto the couch and dropped her head into her hands.

Her ship! Had this all been a nightmare?

Caleb appeared beside her on the couch. “Perhaps he didn’t actually review the report—I have to believe if he did his reaction would be a bit more alarmed.”

Caleb…please let him be okay, somewhere out there. She was utterly helpless to do anything to make it be true, but she
needed
him to be okay.

“Oh, I’d believe he reviewed it. But he’s a government lackey. What else is he expected to do? He has a checklist full of procedures and every fucking thing which crosses his fucking desk must be corralled through that fucking checklist. It’s the only thing which exists in his world—without it there would be chaos! And he’s probably got a fucking checklist for that, too….”

She groaned into her hands. “I swear, I should just let them all die.”

Ah. For a second she had dared to wonder what despicable character flaw this scene could somehow be intended to highlight. Silly her.

“Hey….” He reached over and gently pulled the closest hand away from her face, then lifted her chin so she was forced to look at him. “Possibly. But you won’t, because you’re a better person than they are.”

God, look at those eyes. He should have kissed her then. She should have kissed him then. She’d eagerly hand over her meager riches to be able to kiss him then, right now.

“I’m really not. I can count on one hand the number of people in the universe I truly like or even particularly care about….”

“Stop!”

The surroundings blurred but didn’t vanish entirely. PastAlex and PastCaleb continued on, oblivious to her ghostly presence. Emboldened, she continued.

“Stop! I get it, all right? I’m not perfect—color me shocked at this revelation. I can be selfish and callous and don’t care sufficiently about other people and have a tendency to hurt those close to me without realizing it. I
get
it.

“Yes, I’ve made mistakes. Big ones. I won’t proffer excuses or defend myself. I’ll even concede I’m a little bit broken…but I’ve done the best I can. And more often than not, my best happens to be damn good.”

She was yelling now—yelling at nothing as the scene faded into the distance. She didn’t care.
“You asked what gives me the right to stop you? What gives
you
the right judge
me
? You, who plan to ruthlessly slaughter billions. You sit wherever the hell you are and record my life and slice the worst moments out in 30-second snippets and throw them in my face as if you somehow grasp what it was like to live through them? Bullshit.

“What gives me the right to stop you? Whatever failings I may have, I’m the one who got here. Whatever mistakes I’ve made in the past, I’m the one who found you. Now let me out of this goddamn cage!”

But there was only darkness.

16

MESSIUM

E
ARTH
A
LLIANCE
C
OLONY

C
RIES.
O
F PAIN, OR HORROR?
A strangled, feral merging perhaps.

The cries were the first thing Kennedy was conscious of. Only after a searing wail cut through the air did she register the screams. More distant, like the staccato inflections of a drumbeat beneath a harmonic melody.

She tried to blink her eyes open—a mistake on her part. She frantically shuttered them against the acrid smoke of burning debris.

A deep breath then? Nope, another mistake. Coughs racked her body as the smoke flooded her lungs.

Way to be stupid, Ken. Get your act together or you are going to die right here under this wreckage.

She grasped at her chest for her shirt and brought it up to cover her mouth, then cautiously drew in air once more. Better.

Her mind clearing with the boost of oxygen, she focused on surveying the damage: most noticeable was a sharp pain in her left calf, though her shoulder also ached something fierce. This whole ‘breathing’ thing wasn’t entirely comfortable for her ribs either.

She inspected her surroundings as much as was possible while blinking away tears brought on by the pervasive smoke. She seemed to be trapped under a section of the array assembly, but she was able to see the sidewalk to her right. She tried to move; her left leg promptly shrieked in pain, as if it would be shorn from her body if she moved another centimeter.

After the stabbing pain subsided to throbbing pain she gingerly propped up on an elbow and peered down. Her leg was caught under a rectangular slab of metal several meters in width.

She sank back to the ground, stretched out her right arm until it extended beyond the wreckage and waved her hand around. “Help! Is anyone out there?”

People ran past, for she heard feet trampling the sidewalk. No one stopped to help. Frustrated, she filled her lungs with smoky air and yelled with all the force she could muster. “Hey you assholes! A little help here would be nice!”

A second later half a face and a shock of dirty blond hair appeared sideways in the opening. “Asshole reporting. Need something?”

She choked on another surge of smoke before getting out a response. “My leg’s trapped under the slab. If you can lift it up, maybe on the side over here, I can shimmy out.”

She caught half of a nod before the man vanished. “Hang on.” A few seconds later the frame shifted centimeters followed by a muffled, “Son of a bitch!”

Fragments of conversation drifted in and out above the roar of unseen chaos. “Help me a—” “Get your ass over—” “Don’t try to—” “Careful!”

The slab shifted, teetered, then went tumbling end-over-end into the street. She scrambled backwards out of the wreckage even as a gasp caught in her throat at the revelation of three mangled, crushed bodies where the chunk of metal had been.
Focus.

She reached down and gingerly probed her leg. A steady stream of blood—more than a trickle, less than a gush—oozed from a ten-centimeter-long gash on the side of her calf. She didn’t know whether those were bruises or soot stains decorating the skin around the gash. But it didn’t feel broken, which she took as an indication she was going to live through this.

“Are you all right? Can you walk?”

She shifted her attention to the man crouching beside her. The dirty blond hair falling across a stubbled cheek identified him as her rescuer. He looked oddly familiar—but she would not have forgotten meeting this man.