Soahm was inside.
She’d recognize the aura anywhere, like it had been a part of her all along.
Like sun-kissed skin and wind-blown waves, the salt that hung, ever present, in the Soreian air.
“Soahm,” Sonara breathed.
The aura was overwhelming.
The others called out to her, but she was already rushing forward, sprinting past waiting rows of Wanderer machines chained down in their loading spaces. The room wasmassive,easily half of what made up the entire ship.
Her footsteps echoed like the retorts of bullets as she ran past crates and metal boxes packed into shelves against the walls, so many strange auras pinging at her from all around. Guns sat in their locked casings, the rifles that had brought down her people, shot them in cold blood. She slowed as the aura grew stronger.
Left,her curse sang.
Sonara turned, walking past shelving full of Gazers like the ones she’d often chased on Duran. Everything together,allof it, was like piecing together the answers to the attack. And everything leading up to it. The elements that had enslaved Jaxon, and all her people.
But Sonara cared not, in this moment.
For Soahm’s aura, the memory of him, had never been so strong as it was here,now.
Twenty paces,her curse said.
Sonara slowed, searching for him. A tan and handsome face, pressed among the crates, or his body tied and broken from torture, or perhaps a jail cell, where he sat waiting…
The aura stopped at the entrance to a massive silver orb; the escape pod Karr had mentioned would be their way out.
The door was just barely ajar.
“Soahm,” Sonara called softly.
She tasted salt on her tongue, not from her curse, but from the wetness of tears spilling down her cheeks, landing on her lips.
He was just inside. Her brother was only a few paces away.
“Sonara!” Azariah called out. “Wait!”
Sonara scarcely heard the princess’ voice as she walked forward, closing the gap.
With trembling hands, she reached out to grasp the heavy side of the escape pod’s door. With a mighty heave… it opened.
Soahm’s aura rushed out in a wave.
Here.
“Soahm,” she said again, his name like a promise on her lips, a promise she’d kept for ten long years, every hour of every day since he went missing. She swore she would find him. Bring him home.
But the escape pod was empty.
“It can’t be,” Sonara said. “No.”
She crawled inside, scrambling over the first row of seats. They were worn and emptied of their stuffing. Ancient. Smelling of decay and dust. Another row of seats, and then a pilot’s chair, a dashboard with shoddy-looking tech. No spaces to hide, no spaces for Soahm to be waiting within.
“Where is he?” she growled.
She turned, abandoning the escape pod. She marched across the storage bay, striding past Markam’s unconscious figure, past Azariah who sat on a crate beside him, until she reached Karr. She grasped the collar of his shirt. “Where is he?”
“What?’Karr asked. “Sonara, I—”
