Aura
Three days in transit, and the anomaly has swallowed every star.
I watch it from the observation deck, the viewscreen filled edge to edge with something that shouldn't exist. Colors my eyes refuse to name. Geometries that fold back on themselves, corners that lead to centers, edges that curve into depths. My brain keeps trying to make sense of it, keeps failing, keeps trying again. Like staring at an optical illusion that never resolves.
The ship hums beneath my feet, a low vibration that has changed pitch twice since we entered the approach corridor. The navigation systems are compensating for something they weren't built to understand. I can feel it in the subtle wrongness of the artificial gravity, a pull that seems to shift a fraction of a degree every few hours, as if the floor can't quite decide which direction down is anymore.
Ethan's hand finds the small of my back. Warm. Steady. The one fixed point in a universe that's starting to blur at the edges.
"You've been standing here for two hours," he says.
"It's getting bigger."
"We're getting closer. That's the point."
I lean into his touch without deciding to. My body has learned him the way it learned to breathe recycled air, without conscious thought, because the alternative is suffocation. "It doesn't look like a door," I say. "It looks like a wound."
He doesn't argue. He stands beside me and watches reality come apart at the seams, and his hand stays where it is.
The crew has settled into the rhythm of transit the way soldiers settle into the march before a battle. Quiet. Purposeful. Each of them handling the wait in their own language.
Zane and Talia have claimed the port-side lounge, a space barely big enough for the curved couch and the viewport that takes up most of one wall. I find them there on the second morning, tangled together, her back against his chest, both of them staring out at the shifting colors of the anomaly's outer edge. His arms are wrapped around her, chin resting on the crown of her head, and there's a possessiveness in the hold that hasn't softened since they came aboard. But their eyes are the same. Hungry. Fixed on whatever's out there, whatever's coming, with the kind of appetite that has nothing to do with each other and everything to do with what they'll become on the other side.
Talia catches me watching. Something passes between us. Not words. Not even a full thought. Just the recognition of two women who chose men the galaxy would call monsters, and who would make the same choice again with a blade to their throats.
She turns back to the stars. Zane's arms tighten.
I keep walking.
Elissa is in the cargo bay they've converted into a training space. I hear her before I see her, the rhythmic snap of strikes against the heavy bag, a tempo so even it could keep time. She's been at it for what looks like hours. Sweat darkens the fabricbetween her shoulder blades, and her knuckles are wrapped but starting to pink through the cloth.
The Ghost. That's what Ethan calls her when he thinks I'm not listening. Not with contempt. With the careful respect of a man who recognizes something lethal in its natural state.
She doesn't look up when I pause in the doorway. Doesn't acknowledge me. Her fists keep their rhythm, and her eyes are somewhere else entirely. Somewhere none of us can follow.
I think about Ky. My brother, the Half-Empri shadow who loved me in spite of every reason not to, who stayed behind on Veridian-7 because someone had to hold the Consortium's diplomatic interests together while I tore myself out of their framework like a dislocated joint. I think about the surveillance feeds in his quarters, the wall of screens he watches the way other men watch sunsets. I think about which feed his eyes linger on longest.
I think about Elissa's empty quarters on station, and the camera still recording nothing, and my brother watching that nothing like it might tell him something he needs to know.
Some stories haven't started yet. Some wounds are still looking for a place to land.
I leave Elissa to her ghosts and climb back toward the observation deck.
On the third night, I can't sleep.
The anomaly has entered my dreams when I manage them. Wrong angles and impossible depths, the sensation of falling in every direction at once. I wake up gasping, reaching for Ethan, finding him already awake, already watching me in the low blue glow of the cabin's emergency lighting.
"Bad?" he asks.
"Strange."
He pulls me closer. I press my face into his throat and breathe him in, the salt-warm scent of his skin, the faint trace of the weapon oil he can never quite wash off his hands. Underneath it, just him. The thing I've learned to need. The addiction I stopped fighting somewhere between the first time he touched me and the last time I tried to walk away.
"Tell me what you were dreaming," he says against my hair.
"Falling. But not down. In every direction."
His chest rises and falls. "The nav system's been recalibrating every forty minutes. Whatever that thing is out there, it doesn't play by the rules."
